The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas by Gilles Emery, O.P.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By GILLES EMERY, 0.P. Translated by FRANCESCA MURPHY and GILLES EMERY. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth), $45.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-19-920682-7 (cloth), 978-0-19-958221-1 (paper). This volume will doubtless prove a classic on Thomas's Trinitarian thought. It evinces speculative acumen and great historical erudition. Emery places Thomas's doctrine within medieval theology and demonstrates its relation to the patristic debates, which Thomas knew well. Emery's control of the medieval problematic, Albert, and Bonaventure is extraordinary. The book illumines the relevance of the questions and their ordering in Thomas's Summa Theologiae. Although Emery follows broadly the order ofthe Summa Theologiae, he employs all Thomas's major Trinitarian writings as well as his scriptural commentaries (esp. on the Gospel of John) to illuminate, expand, and complement that masterful summary. This expanded treatment helps to point out Thomas's development and to interpret the sometimes abbreviated text of the Summa Theologiae. Overall Emery seeks to link harmoniously the speculative doctrine of the Trinity in itself (immanent) to the Trinity's effectuation of man's salvation (economic). An initial chapter notes that, although the Summa Theologiae starts from the divine persons to explain our salvation, Thomas's exegetical commentaries argue to the immanent Trinity, the persons' divinity, from their workings in the economy: our re-creation and divinization occur because the Holy Spirit leads to the Son, who leads to Father. The second chapter stresses the mystery of the Trinity: it is known only through revelation. At best theologians defend it, showing that it is not contrary to reason, that personal distinctions are compatible with divine simplicity. A third chapter compares the structures of the commentary on the Sentences, the Compendium, De Potentia, and the two Summae in their presentations of the Trinity. Though each work has advantages, the Summa Theologiae represents the culmination ofThomas's thought. Treating Thomas's central argument, Emery dedicates separate chapters to the processions, the relations, and the persons (qq. 27-29). Against Arians and Sabellians, who linked God's actions to external natures, the origin of the persons was traced to actions giving rise to immanent processions, which must be consubstantial to the divinity since no accidents exist in God. After the first 143 144 BOOK REVIEWS procession of knowing (Logos) is recognized as an immanent act1v1ty, 1t 1s identified with generation (Son). The second procession raises difficulties since love carries the lover outside himself. After early hesitations both Summae interpret the good loved as dynamically immanent in the lover as volition's term and fruit. Although both processions involve intellect and love "concomitantly" (I Sent.), Thomas uses the modes of knowing and loving (De Pot.) to establish their order as relations of origin. The two processions constitute a "circle" since God, understanding himself, conceives the Word through which he loves himself. This immanent "circulation" excludes every other procession. Anticipating question 41, Emery introduces notional acts as actions of the persons in generation and spiration, since the Trinity can be envisaged from many different angles. These acts are produced by the divine nature as their principle, not the divine will, as Arius imagined, although God's will is concomitant with his nature. "The power through which the Father begets must be designated as the divine nature itself in the person of the Father" (76). The chapter on relation traces its development from the Arian crisis to Augustine and Boethius; all relied on the Father-Son relation to reject a difference of nature between them. Relation can be either real, if both terms belong to the same "order," or "logical" (elswhere called "rational"). God's relation to the world is logical insofar as he is not enriched by it; it implies no indifference. Since Father and Son are consubstantial, they belong to the same order; their relation is real. While Thomas rejects Gilbert de la Porree's "extrinsic relation," condemned at Reims, for impugning God's simplicity, he borrows Albert's insight that relation has a "minimal degree of being" since Aristotle's relation does not inhere in a subject but involves "an ec...