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

Missions 367
In this analysis, the characteristic features of a divine mission are the
absence of separation amongst the divine persons, the absence of change
from the divine person (the change or movement happens in the creature
receiving the divine person), and thus an eternal procession. The absence of
separation in the divine persons is a point of particular signiWcance to
Christology: the Son is not separated from the Father who sends him.26 It is
no less crucial in Pneumatology: the Spirit is never present without the Son or
without the Father. Moreover, the mission of a divine person is based on the
presence which that person already has through his creative and providential
action. The person who is sent does not begin to be where hitherto he was not,
but begins to be in a new way, and one which presupposes the presence which
is already given. The doctrine of mission assumes the Trinitarian doctrine of
creation.
A divine mission thus consists in a new mode of presence in the person sent,
his rendering himself present in an innovative way.27 Where English has ‘being
present’ or ‘rendering himself present’, Thomas writes, ‘being in’. The kind
of language used in speaking about mission is very like that for perichoresis.
The incarnation of the Son gives us the best illustration of this: ‘One says that
the Son has been sent into the world by the Father (cf. Jn 10.36) meaning that
he has begun to be visible through the Xesh he has assumed, even though he
was already in the world before that, as it says in Jn 1.10.’28 And just as the
divine emissary’s being is invested in the recipient in a new way, so that
person’s being is also ‘possessed’ (haberi) in a new way.29
At this juncture, Thomas does not elaborate on what the divine person’s
‘new presence’ or ‘new being’ in the world consists in. He will explicate it
further on, when he describes the divine persons’ visible and invisible missions.
The only speciWcation he gives of what it means is that the Son
‘proceeds temporally so as to be man by reason of his visible mission and so
as to be in man by reason of his invisible mission’.30 This is the goal of it all: in
the visible mission, the uniting of man to God in the very person of the
incarnate Son, or, in the invisible mission, the presence of the Son in the
human reception of a living faith. In neither instance does this new presence
or existence entail any alteration or novelty in what is divine in the person,
because the person’s divine nature is immutable. Everything that changes
26 This was particularly well illustrated by the theory of perichoresis, as above, Chapter 12.
27 This teaching is another one which Thomas could have found amongst his forerunners: see
for instance the Summa fratris Alexandri, Book I (ed. Quaracchi, vol. 1), no. 511, contra c and
response; Albert, I Sent. d. 14, a. 7; d. 15, a. 5.
28 ST I, q. 43, a. 1. The case in point is the Son’s ‘visible mission’.
29 ST I, q. 43, a. 2, sol. and ad 2.
30 ST I, q. 43. a. 2.