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

406 Missions
(indicia); similarly, it was congruent for the invisible missions of the divine persons to
be manifest through visible creatures.204
Although this looks like an easy move, the initial steps of this response call
for our attention. Divine providence follows a rule which entails important
consequences: ‘God’s provision for all things matches the mode of their
being.’ Thomas sees this as a perfection of providence and he dwells on it
with particular force when he discusses divine justice, human liberty, the
action of grace, the communication of virtue, and even when he reXects on
the mystery of evil.205 Providence uses the mode which it has inscribed within
human nature to guide human beings to the divine realities: it takes oV from
sensible experience. Thus, sensible experience is our entrance to the natural
knowledge of God,206 and, in his revelation too, God signals his own mystery
to us with bodily realities.207
And so God has shown the mystery of the eternal procession of the persons
by way of certain ‘indications’ (indicia). Thomas may be thinking as much of
the coming of the incarnate Son as of the signs of the sending of the Holy
Spirit: as he explains in his John commentary, ‘the mission shows the origin’.208
But he also Wnds that such ‘indications’ are present to the light of faith
in all the actions and eVects of God (the vestige of the Trinity and the divine
image tie in with this), and in the whole of Scripture, from the Wrst chapter of
Genesis onwards.209 And if God has providentially shown the eternal processions
of the persons through ‘visible creatures’, he has also shown that the
persons are sent to dwell in the hearts of the saints. The visible missions of the
Son and Spirit thus involve a dual disclosure: they manifest the procession of
the person,210 and they manifest the donation of this person in grace, in the
‘invisible mission’.211 And so the ‘visible mission’ contains three threads: (1)
the divine person’s eternal procession; (2) the divine person’s new presence;
204 ST I, q. 43, a. 7.
205 Cf. SCG III, ch. 71 (no. 2470); ch. 73 (no. 2489); ch. 79 (no. 2544); ch. 148 (nos. 3211–
3212); ch. 150 (no. 3231), and so on.
206 ST I, q. 12, aa. 12–13; cf. q. 2, aa. 2–3; q. 32, a. 1.
207 ST I, q. 12, a. 13 (this is where Thomas mentions the Holy Spirit’s invisible mission at
Christ’s baptism).
208 In Ioan. 5.23 (no. 769); see above, in Chapter 1, ‘The Revelation of the Trinity through its
Works’.
209 Cf. ST I, q. 74, a. 3, ad 3.
210 See for instance In Ioan. 20.22–23: Jesus’ ‘breathing’ on the disciples is a sign of the Holy
Spirit, showing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate
IV.XX.29.
211 ‘The visible mission of the Holy Spirit does not diVer in essence from his invisible
mission: it simply adds a visible sign to it’ (I Sent. d. 16, q. 1, a. 1). This teaching is a reWnement
on a doctrine which Thomas could have found in his precursors (see for instance the Summa
fratris Alexandri, Book I, no. 514).