The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

366 Missions
(2) The second aspect of mission is the ‘orientation of the one sent to the
goal to which he is sent’. Here one comes up against a constitutive feature
which ranges across missions of every type, from the human to the divine:
when someone is sent on a mission, the mission is accomplished when the
envoy reaches his destination, that is, where we Wnd ‘a new way of being
present somewhere’. As with the Wrst aspect of mission, Thomas notes that
here too there is a diVerence between what mission is for human beings and
what it is for God. A human being takes himself oV to where he previously was
not, or even to where he has never been before, whereas a divine person is not
sent into a world from which he was previously absent, for God is never
absent from his creatures: the divine person is already there, either in the way
a cause is present in its eVect, that is, as the common presence of the Triune
Creator in all his creatures, or simply as grace. When a divine person is sent,
he ‘does not begin to be present where before he was not’, but rather, he has ‘a
new way of being present somewhere’, being here ‘in a way in which he was
not present before’.23 And, in the same context, the divine person is not
separated from the one who sends him. Thomas writes that, ‘even as the
divine person sent does not begin to be present where he before was not, so he
does not cease to be present where he was. Consequently, this kind of mission
involves no separation but only distinctness by origin’.24
By investigating the two constitutive sides of mission and authenticating
the applicability of both of them to a divine person, Thomas has shown that
we can really speak of mission here, in the proper senses of the term and of the
reality.25 And this in turn will impact on how he understands the formal
meaning of the word; he can now bring out what typiWes a divine mission by
comparing it to a human one. He thus puts forward a common notion of
mission, applying analogously to creatures and to God: as such, any mission
involves an orientation of the envoy to the one who sends (such as procession
or origin), and likewise an orientation to the goal (such as a new mode of
being for the one sent). The notion of mission peculiar to creatures will imply,
on the one side, distance, and, on the other, movement or change in the one
sent, whereas, the notion of mission which is peculiar to the divine person is
characterized by, on the one side, the person’s having an eternal origin, and,
on the other, a new mode of being for the person who is sent.
23 ST I, q. 43, a. 1, sol. and ad 2; a. 2, ad 2.
24 ST I, q. 43, a. 1, ad 2.
25 When applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, the word ‘mission’ has a proper sense if
its meaning is determined by features which Wt the divine persons (that is, the eternal origin and
the new mode of being present for the person sent). But if we retain the properties which can
only belong to creatures (movement, separation, and so on), this proper sense disappears. See
Bonaventure, De mysterio Trinitatis, q.6,a.1,ad7.