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

Missions 375
(b) The Seal of Son and Holy Spirit
The ‘Writing on the Sentences’ puts the divine missions in the light of the
Trinitarian processions as causes: in the same way that the person’s procession
is the cause and rationale of creation, it causes and explains the creature’s
return to God.63 But one and the same procession of persons is the cause of
creation and the cause of the return to God in diVerent capacities. In the Wrst
case, when we take it as the rationale of creation, the personal procession is
the source of the natural goods in which we subsist. In the second, considered
as causing the return to God, the processional causality can be seen in the gifts
which unite us to God, and that means not only the gifts in which God
presents himself as the principle of our existence, but also the gifts which
make us attach ourselves to God as our end. To be precise, these are the gifts of
sanctifying grace.
Thomas’ presentation begins with the mission of the Holy Spirit. When the
Holy Spirit is sent, within a sanctifying gift, he is really given to the person
who ‘possesses’ him. The person who receives the Holy Spirit’s mission
‘enjoys’ the divine person himself. A mission takes place where his recipient
can ‘enjoy’ not just created gifts, but the divine person himself.64 The words
which we are translating as ‘enjoyment’ or ‘fruition’ are the technical theological
words—frui, fruitio. ‘Enjoyment’ or ‘fruition’ touches on the highest
human act, in which we achieve our good, uniting ourselves with God. This
union is achieved through that knowledge of God which blossoms in love,
enabling us to enter upon God’s communion. ‘Fruition’ is the possession of
the one in whom human persons have their end, their fulWlment and genuine
happiness.65 Fruition is the purpose of the donation and indwelling of the
divine persons, of their mission. The divine persons can be given either within
a ‘perfect fruition’, which means the blessedness of the saints in heaven, or in
an ‘imperfection fruition’, which is how the saints possess the divine gift of
sanctifying grace on earth. To put it more precisely, the Son and Spirit are
given to us,
63 I Sent. d. 14, q. 2, a. 2; see above, in Chapter 14, ‘The ‘‘EYcacy’’ of the Trinitarian
Processions’.
64 Such enjoyment or ‘fruition’ is central to the interpretation of mission given by the Summa
fratris Alexandri (Book I, no. 511), and by Bonaventure (I Sent. d. 14, a. 2, q. 1; d. 15, p. 2, a. un.,
q. 1; d. 18, dubium 5; II Sent. d. 26, a. un., q. 2, ad 1). On this issue, Thomas’ teaching is an
extension of the Franciscans’.
65 Formally speaking, fruition is an act of the will and of love: the will’s adhesion to its Wnal
end, resting upon an act of the mind. Cf. I Sent. d.1;ST I–II, q. 11.