Scotus Academicus, Tomus tertius: De adorando divinae Trinitatis mysterio

A fourfold condition of men is shaken and wavers concerning the existence of the divine Trinity, namely, the Jews, the Gentiles, the heretics, and unlearned and ignorant Catholics. The Jews wholly reject that mystery, because they do not observe that it is written in Sacred Scripture; the Gentiles, in turn, denounce it, because they judge it to be repugnant to natural reason; very many heretics, moreover, attack it for this reason, that they neither wish nor are able to grasp it. Finally, some Catholics shrink from it, because they scarcely know what is to be believed and said concerning so great a mystery. Wherefore I have judged that the following four Questions must be discussed from the very outset, so that the light of divine truth may shine upon all these very men of darkness.

Note 1. The Catholic truth concerning the mystery of the Trinity is contained chiefly in three heads, namely in the unity of Essence, the distinction of the Persons, and their complete equality. The pagan Philosophers assailed the unity of Essence, for the reason that it seemed to be opposed to all the principles of natural discourse, and even to the very dictate of reason; the Jews for that reason rejected the diversity and real distinction of the persons, because it seemed to introduce a multiplication of the Godhead and to bring in several gods. Finally, various heretics time and again attacked the equality of the Persons, because they could not reconcile it with the procession of one from another. We shall attack the Philosophers and the heretics in what follows; now we must fight with the Jews.

Note 2. Three lights are wont to shine forth by which some truth can be discovered and established, namely Demonstration, Authority, and Persuasion. Demonstration generates knowledge, authority faith, and persuasion opinion and even credulity. Demonstration rests and is strengthened on principles evidently known; authority, on the dignity and probity of the speaker; and finally persuasion, on conjectures, arguments, and likenesses. Demonstration is wholly natural; authority is supernatural, especially in manifesting preternatural truths; and finally persuasion is partly natural: for convincing the Philosophers, persuasion for attracting and inducing them, by proving the mystery of the divine Trinity, is to be determined in what follows. In this Question, however, we must fight chiefly against the Jews and the heretics with the divine authority of the Scriptures.

Note 3. Divine truths are to be drawn chiefly from a twofold source, namely from Sacred Scripture and from the constant and firm tradition; for Scripture is the storehouse and museum in which divine truths are contained and even defended: whence St. Paul, 2. ad Timotheum 3.: all Scripture, divinely inspired, is useful for teaching, for reproving, for correcting, for instructing in justice, that the man of God may be perfect, equipped for every good work: this, however, is distributed into two Testaments, the Old and the New. From this twofold storehouse of divine truth, therefore, as well as from the constant tradition of the Doctors of the Synagogue and of the Church, the faith of the Trinity of persons in the unity of essence is to be established.

First conclusion. — The mystery of the divine Trinity is gathered and proved against the Jews, not obscurely, from the Old Testament. This is common among Catholic Doctors.

It is urged first from that celebrated oracle of Genesis, chap. 1, where God, the creator of all things, speaks thus: let us make man to our image and likeness: and a little after: therefore the Lord God formed man: and again: God created man to his own image and likeness; moreover: let us make him a helper like unto himself: where the verb "let us make" and the pronoun "our" introduce a multitude of Persons; while the words "Lord" and "God" designate the unity of essence.

They reply 1. The modern Doctors of the Jews reply that God spoke thus in the plural number, after the manner namely of Princes and Kings, to show his authority and power. — But that this is openly false is gathered from Scripture itself, which almost always, as Theodoret rightly notes, q. 19 on Genesis, uses the singular number, and scarcely ever speaks in the plural; whence it generally doubles and repeats the singular number in order to express the plural. There must therefore be some mystery in this unusual distinction: surely none other than the very signification of the three divine Persons, in whose invocation man, who was then being formed, was one day to be regenerated through Baptism.

They reply 2. That God addressed the Angels in the aforesaid words, so that they might lend their work to the creating of man, forming namely his body, while he himself created the soul and infused the spirit of life. — On the contrary: Sacred Scripture, in these earlier chapters of Genesis in which the formation of man is contained and explained, attributes it to God alone, constantly affirming that he himself formed, created, and made man: therefore the aforesaid speech is not directed to the Angels. Next, that plural speech "let us make" is directed to those to whose likeness man was formed: but man was not created to the image and likeness of the Angels, but to the image and likeness of God alone, as is evident both from chap. 1.: God created man to his own image and likeness; to the image of God he created him: and from chap. 5.: In the day on which God created man, to the likeness of God he made him. Therefore the aforesaid speech was not directed to the Angels, but only to the three divine Persons, whose likeness man's soul expresses and bears, as will appear below.

Finally they reply: That God, speaking with himself and stirring himself to act, said, "let us make." — But the reply is wholly inept:

For who, says St. Basil, Homil. 9. Hexaemeron, is there — a smith, or a copper-worker, or a carpenter, or certainly a leather-worker and cobbler — who, alone by himself, attended by no one else cooperating with him, and sitting among the instruments of his craft: who, I say, mutters to himself alone, saying: let us make a sword, or let us put together a plow, or let us make a shoe? and does he not rather, in silence, when it pleases him, perform the operation suited to his art? It is surely a remarkable thing that nowhere is anyone found who gives orders to himself.

Secondly, the plurality of the divine persons is gathered from that passage of Genesis 11.: Come, let us go down and there confound their language: from which the holy Fathers — Nyssenus, lib. De Trin., Basil, lib. 5. Contra Eunomium — infer the Trinity of Persons; but especially Chrysostom, Serm. De Trinit., where he weighs the aforesaid words thus:

by saying, "come," he calls them, exhorting them as equals in honor; for if he had commanded Angels, he ought not to have said, "come," but, commanding, "go." See, I beg you, how the voice of the Father calls the Son and the Holy Spirit; for if this had been said to one alone, he ought to have said, "come," and "let us go down"; but because he said, "come," it is the voice of one, and of two equal men.

Thirdly, the holy Fathers urge the same from that passage of Genesis 18., where it is said that the Lord appeared to Abraham; it is then added: three men appeared to him standing near him; whom when he had seen, he ran to meet them from the door of the tent, and adored prostrate on the ground, and said: Lord, if I have found grace in your eyes, do not pass by your servant, etc. By which words it is established that Abraham understood that God had appeared to him in those three; and in the singular number he directed his prayers to one only, as to God: whence St. Augustine, lib. 2. De Trin., cap. 12., says: That three men were seen, and no one among them is said to be greater than the rest in form, or age, or power: why should we not here accept the equality of the Trinity as visibly intimated through a visible creature, and in three Persons one and the same substance? The same is weighed by St. Cyril of Alexandria, lib. 1. Contra Iulianum, about the middle: They were three, he says, who appeared, subsisting in their own subsistences, each one comprehended into one by the word of consubstantiality, and thus deliberately mingling conversations among themselves.

Fourthly, it is proved from that passage of Deuteronomy 6.: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, one God is; in Hebrew, however, in place of that word "Lord" is placed the name Tetragrammaton, by which the unity of the divine Essence is designated; while the threefold repetition designates the Trinity of Persons. The same is confirmed from that Ps. 67.: May God bless us, by which the Father is signified: our God, by which the Son is denoted, who through the incarnation was given to us and made ours; May God bless us, by which the Holy Spirit is intimated: for the threefold repetition would seem vain if it did not involve some mystery, and surely none other than the adorable Trinity of Persons in the unity of essence.

Fifthly, it is proved from that Psalmi 32.: By the word of the Lord the heavens were established, and by the spirit of his mouth all their power: for by the name of the Lord the Father is designated, who operates through the Word: the second Person, namely the Son, is signified by the name of the Word, through whom all things were made: finally the third Person is called the Spirit of the mouth of God, or the Holy Spirit, to whom the power and perfection of the divine works is peculiarly appropriated; and since to the divine Persons themselves the same operation of the whole universe is assigned, the identity of power and of the divine nature is manifested, as not only nearly all the holy Fathers interpret, whom Ruiz recounts at length, Disp. 36. sessione 5., but also the wiser among the Rabbis, as our Galatinus proves, lib. 2. De Arcanis c. 4.

Sixthly, the Trinity of the divine Persons is proved from that Trisagion of the Seraphim, who, as Isaias reports, c. 6., cried out one to another: Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God of hosts: for, as St. Ambrose elegantly weighs, lib. 2. De Fide ad Gratianum cap. 4.:

What does the threefold repetition under the one name of holiness mean? If there is a threefold repetition, why one single praise? If there is one single praise, why a threefold repetition? Why the threefold repetition, unless because the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in holiness? He did not say it once, lest he should exclude the Son: not twice, lest he should pass over the Holy Spirit: not four times, lest he should join creatures; and to show that the Deity of the Trinity is one, when he had said, Holy, holy, holy, he added in the singular, Lord God of hosts.

The Jewish Doctors likewise interpreted this same text in the same way, but especially Rabbi Simeon, saying: Holy, this is the Father; Holy, this is the Son; Holy, this is the Holy Spirit, as our Galatinus reports in the cited place; and he adds that for this reason the ancient Talmudists decreed that the aforesaid Trisagion, thus explained, should be said by every one of the Jews at least twice a day, namely morning and evening: whence it also came about that both Churches, the Greek as well as the Latin, adopted it among the solemn prayers, as Antheon, Bishop of Assino, testifies, Epistola ad Petrum Antiochenum, which is placed in the Council of Constantinople under Felix III. in the cause of Peter Fullo, who on that account refutes the heresy of the same Peter, because he subjoined to the aforesaid Trisagion the name of the Crucified, saying: Holy God, Holy strong, Holy and immortal, the crucified one, by which he signified that the crucified one was the Holy Spirit, or some other fourth divine Person.

Finally, this same truth is deduced from that passage of Isaias 18.: From the time, before it came to be, I was there, and now the Lord has sent me, and his Spirit, which St. Jerome expounds thus:

when all things were being made by the Father, he himself, namely the Son, was with him, in whom he rejoiced, who even now said: I, who was always with the Father and in the Father and was never without the Father, even now I speak, and according to the weakness of the assumed flesh I say that the Lord God has sent me and his Spirit.

And in a brief verse the Sacrament of the Trinity is shown to us.

Hence it is evident how most truly Christ the Lord, addressing the Jews, Ioannis 5., said: search the Scriptures, for they bear testimony of me; by which he not only designates that he is the true Messiah, but also shows that he is the true Son of God. All these things could be confirmed from the ineffable name Tetragrammaton, which Scripture uses everywhere: for, as our Galatinus observes, l. 2. cap. 10., Rabbi Haccados, writing the mysteries of this name to Antonius, Consul of the city of Rome, affirms that it signifies God generating; and because there cannot be a generator without one generated, nor both without a proceeding love, for this reason the divine Trinity is comprehended in this name. Whence it is commonly called among the Hebrews the "explicit name," and is explained through twelve Hebrew letters, which joined together signify and produce in Latin, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: or it is called the name of forty-two letters, which the same Rabbi Haccados interprets thus: the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity. From which it is established what the opinion of the ancient Rabbis concerning the divine Trinity was, and how far the more recent Doctors of the Jews wander from their fathers, while they so greatly resist this most constant truth.

Second conclusion. — The same Trinity and distinction of the divine Persons, subsisting with the unity of nature, is gathered from the New Testament.

First, indeed, from that passage of Matthew, last chapter, where Christ, delegating his Apostles, says: go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: which Oracle so manifestly indicates the Trinity of Persons in the unity of Essence that the Arians could scarcely find anything to reply; for not only are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit named as distinct Persons, but also to them is attributed the unique name of Divinity, and a single power and authority is assigned, while baptism is commanded to be conferred in their name. Hence the followers of Arius, pressed by this Oracle, kept silence about "in the name" while baptizing, as St. Athanasius reports, lib. 7. Ad Theophilum, and said only: I baptize you in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, so as to signify three natures.

The second testimony is that of Ioannis 5., where it is said, there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one: in which words too the distinction of Persons with the unity of essence is manifestly expressed. This text we shall weigh more fully in q. 7.

The third is that which is related of the baptism of Christ the Lord, Matth. 3., Luc. 3. and Marc. 1.: the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and behold a voice from heaven saying: this is my beloved Son. Where the Fathers of the Church commonly recognize three Persons of the same authority, namely the Father speaking, the Son to whom he speaks, and the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ; for he would not descend upon him unless he were of the same authority as the Father and the Son.

The fourth is brought forward from Ioannis c. 10., where Christ speaks of himself, chiefly St. Augustine serm. 5. De verb. Dom.: What he says, "one," let the Arians hear; what he says, "we are," let the Sabellians hear; and let not the former be vain by denying the equal, nor the latter by denying the other. Whence in Tractate 36. in Ioannem he reasons so beautifully:

he does not say, "Father, I am," or "I and the Father is one"; but when he says, "I and the Father are one," hear both, both "one" and "we are," and from both Charybdis and Scylla you will be freed in these two words; what he said, "one," frees you from Arius; what he said, "we are," frees you from Sabellius. If one, therefore not diverse: if we are, therefore both the Father and the Son; for he would not say "we are" of one: but he would not say "one" of diverse things.

The fifth that can be brought forward is that of Ioannis 14., where likewise the three divine Persons are noted when it is said: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever; and below, verse 26.: but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name; and cap. 15. near the end: when the Paraclete comes, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father. For it is necessary that the Persons be really distinguished: the one who asks and the one who is asked, the one who sends and the one who is sent, the one who proceeds and the one from whom he proceeds. The equal authority, however, and consequently the same substance, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is noted, since each is said to be the Paraclete, and the Holy Spirit to succeed in the place of the Son, so as to teach all truth and abide with the Disciples forever. Likewise the same authority of the Son with the Father is designated, since each is said to send the Holy Spirit: likewise, that the Father sends the Spirit in the name of the Son.

Finally, that can be brought forward from 1. Ioannis 1.: of his Spirit he has given us, and we have seen and testify that the Father sent his Son, the Savior of the world: and also that ad Titum 3.: the kindness and humanity of our Savior God appeared, not from works of justice which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. By which the Trinity of the divine Persons is established and designated: one who poured out the Holy Spirit, another through whom he poured him out, and another, the Holy Spirit himself, who was poured out.

Here I do not relate the things which the heretics were wont to object against this truth; for in a more fitting order we shall satisfy them, when, unfolding this same truth, we shall prove one by one the Trinity of these Persons, as well as their Divinity and equality. These things, however, from the very threshold, suffice to intimate and to establish by the divine Oracles the august mystery of the Trinity. Whether natural reason can also establish it against the pagan Philosophers, the following Question will disclose.

Corollary. — From these things it is evident how most truly St. Augustine wrote, Serm. 38. De Tempore: all Scripture of the Old and New Testament, if understood catholicly, intimates this, that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is one God, of the same substance and of one essence, and an inseparable unity in the Divinity; this distinction, however, intervenes between the two Testaments, that the Old proposed the Trinity of Persons in the unity of the Divinity, wrapped in certain shadows, more obscurely: but the New, with the Sun of justice shining upon it and the light of the Gospel gleaming, drove away all these shadows, and brought this great mystery into the open light: whence Christ, Ioannis 16., addressing the Disciples, said: the hour comes when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs, but will announce to you plainly of my Father. Hence St. Cyprian, lib. De Cardinalibus operibus Christi in the Prologue De mysterio Trinitatis says: for this search into things so profound, unless the teaching of the incarnate Word had come to our aid, human intellects would have failed, and I know not whether even some would dare to rise to attempts at attempting these things. St. Gregory concurs, lib. 2. In Ezech. hom. 16.

The Hebrew people, he says, strove to keep the commandments of the Decalogue: but still was not instructed in the knowledge of the holy Trinity: and although the spiritual Fathers had known it perfectly, nevertheless the multitude of the Synagogue could neither find the mystery of the Trinity, nor knew how to seek it. But with grace supervening, every faithful people has known that one God is a Trinity.

The reason for this distinction is brought forward by Theodor. lib. 2. Ad Graecos, where he says of the Hebrews:

since they had remained in Egypt for a sufficiently long time, and had learned there the cult of many gods according to the Egyptian rite; the most wise God by no means delivered to them the mysteries of the Trinity in a manifest and wholly open manner; lest, thinking that a multitude of gods was set before them, they should have this occasion for declining into Egyptian impiety; the dogmas of the Trinity, however, he did not even then entirely conceal from those who would be secure in the future; for in the ancient Scriptures he scattered, as it were, certain seeds, the material of a more perfect Theology.

Note 1. The present difficulty is not raised about the inclination and native capacity of the intellect to know this mystery, from whatever source its knowledge is drawn, whether through revelation or through demonstration; for it is certain, says the Doctor, quaest. 1. Prol., that since the possible intellect is naturally perfected by any knowledge whatever, it is also naturally inclined to any knowledge whatever; for every passive potency is borne by a natural weight toward that which perfects it, and so the created intellect naturally inclines toward the knowledge of every truth, but above all toward the knowledge of the most excellent truth, such as is the unity of the divine essence and the Trinity and equality of the persons. Nor is the present question raised about the simple and imperfect active knowledge of these terms, God and Threefold: for it is established, says the Doctor, quaest. 1. quodlibetica art. 1., that any created intellect can, by its native light alone, know God as the first cause, and so can detect the unity of the essence: moreover, attending to the ternary number and to the meaning of the name person, it will also be able to perceive what the Trinity of persons signifies, when it has heard it proposed by someone. But the whole difficulty is whether some philosopher can, through the innate power of understanding and reasoning, detect the Trinity

of the persons in God, just as he can know by natural reasoning that there is one God.

Note 2. Indeed, several philosophers attained some knowledge of the mystery of the Trinity, as Justin the Martyr copiously proves in the Oratione ad Gentes, Clement of Alexandria in lib. 5. of the Stromata, Cyril in lib. 1. and 2. of the Contra Iulianum, and above all Eugubinus in lib. 1. and 2. of the De perenni Philosophia. For first, the divine Plato in various places posited the supreme God; then he asserts that from him was begotten a mind, through which he fashioned all other things: and thirdly, that which he calls the soul of the world. Whence Claudianus Mamertinus, in Eusebius, lib. 11. of the De Praeparatione Evangelica, says of Plato: How many ages before the childbearing of the Virgin, before the preaching of the supreme Trinity among the Gentiles, did he seek, find, and set forth, with praiseworthy daring, wonderful genius, and inimitable eloquence, the ineffable unity, one three Persons in the divinity. Likewise he reports that Mercury Trismegistus, that is, thrice greatest, aimed more closely at the Christian truth: for in the book entitled Pymander he says: That light, I, the mind, am God, before the moist nature which shone forth from the darkness: and further within: but the mind, God, existing as both-sexed, as the author of life and of light, brought forth by word another mind, the maker, whereby God is fire and Spirit. There can be added Zoroaster the Chaldean, who said: The Monad begot the dyad, and in the whole world the Triad shines; to which that well-known saying of Trismegistus corresponds: The Monad begot the monad, and reflected its love upon itself: hence St. Augustine lib. 7. Confessionum, c. 9. in the De Platonicorum libris says: I read there, not indeed in these words, but this very same thing altogether urged by many and manifold reasons, that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. From what source, however, these philosophers drew this knowledge is no slight controversy among the theologians, to be settled in this Question.

Note 3. Regarding the resolution of the present difficulty, there is a threefold opinion of the theologians. For some affirm that the mystery of the Trinity so exceeds the grasp of the human mind that it cannot be detected by any natural power: indeed, that the very reasoning toward obtaining knowledge of it is so opposed to all principles that if anyone is led by reason alone, he judges that mystery to be altogether impossible. Others, however, to whom Raymundus Lullius lent his favor, having taken up the completely opposite path, affirm that this mystery not only does not contradict natural reason, but can be evidently demonstrated by it. For Raymundus, in the book which he calls the Apostrophe, and in the books of the Sentences, contends that three things pertaining to this mystery can be demonstrated by natural light. First, that there are several Persons in God. Second, that there are neither more nor fewer than three. Third, that these three Persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He notes, however, that the demonstrations of these truths are not a priori, nor a posteriori, but of equiparance: and he calls demonstrations of equiparance those which are made neither through cause nor through effect, but from equals. Finally, the rest, embracing the middle opinion as the safer one, teach that the mystery of the Trinity neither contradicts natural reason, nor can be demonstrated or detected by it, setting aside divine revelation, with whom it is

First conclusion. — No created intellect, setting aside divine revelation, can obtain for itself certain and evident knowledge of the mystery of the Trinity. This seems to be of Faith, for Sacred Scripture urges it: for in Matthaei 11. No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal him. Which is read more expressly in Lucae 10. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal him: which contexts the Nicene Council brings forth in lib. 2. to prove that the mystery of the divine generation is impossible to penetrate: whence also the Antiochene Synod 1., celebrated in the time of Pope Dionysius, says in the profession of Faith: If we have any knowledge of God, however moderate, with his Son revealing, as he says: no one knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son has revealed him, we ought to be content. With which St. Epiphanius agrees, Haeresi 76., saying:

All things fly past and exceed, and they abandon every syllogistic cause to that doctrinal sentence taken from divine Scripture, namely, no one knows the Son except the Father, nor the Father except the Son, and the one to whom he has revealed him. He reveals, however, through the Holy Spirit, not to those who reason about him through syllogisms, but to those who believe in him lawfully and perfectly.

It is confirmed. — From the same Matth. c. 16. Flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father. By the name of flesh and blood, however, is comprehended and expressed not only all knowledge begged from the senses, but also that which is to be acquired by the powers of nature, as the holy Cyril of Alexandria understands in the Oratione de Verbi Incarnatione, which he delivered in the Ephesine Synod, saying: Do not inquire too curiously into the matter itself: for it is not perceived through the wisdom of the Greeks, or worldly sense, but is foreign to both; Blessed are you, Simon Bariona, says the Lord, because flesh and blood, etc., for the knowledge of the Son of God is a heavenly gift, and of divine inspiration. It can also be confirmed by all those places of Scripture by which we are forbidden to scrutinize the deeper mysteries of the Divinity, of which kind is that of Iob. 28. Where will you find the wisdom of God? for it lies hidden from the eyes of men, and is concealed in the birds of the sky.

Proof 2. By the authority of the holy Fathers, but above all of Dionysius in the book De divinis nominibus cap. 13., where he says: The Divinity, which surpasses all things, celebrated under the name of Unity and Trinity, is not Unity and Trinity known by us, or by any other of the things that are: and he subjoins the reason which we assigned in the preface. To him alludes the holy Nazianzen in the Oration De Theologia n. 67., where, speaking of the Triune God, he says: Let us follow faith rather than reason as our guide, if only you have learned the weakness of your mind in nearer things, and have recognized that it belongs to reason that you know those things which exceed the grasp of human reason to be one: lest otherwise you be altogether earthly, being ignorant even of your own ignorance. Whence the holy Jerome rightly said in the proem of lib. 18. in Isaiam: The right confession of the Trinity is the ignorance of knowledge; for, says the holy Hilary in lib. 1. De Trinit., a steadfast faith spurns captious and useless philosophical questions, and truth, not succumbing to the deceits of human follies, does not offer itself as a spoil to falsity. Whence, wisely and most learnedly pondering those words of Ioannis cap. 6. There are some among you who do not believe, the holy Augustine says that the Evangelist did not say: there are some among you who do not understand, but gave the cause why they do not understand: for there are some among you who do not believe, and therefore they do not understand, because they do not believe; for the Prophet says, unless you believe, you will not understand.

Thirdly, finally, this same truth is proved by reason: every certain and evident knowledge of a thing is born through demonstration: but there is no demonstration by which, setting aside revelation, one could instill certain and evident knowledge of the divine Trinity. Proof: every means of demonstration is either cause, or effect, or something equivalent; for every demonstration is either a priori, or a posteriori, or of equiparance: but in natural things no means shines forth to the intellect by whose guidance it could ascend to evident knowledge of the Trinity. For first, such a means cannot be a cause, since the divine Trinity of persons lacks every cause, and is altogether independent of any extrinsic maker. Nor is it an effect: for if any effect could lead to the knowledge of the Triune God, above all would the creatures which are known to have been established by God himself: but the knowledge of creatures cannot lead by the hand to the knowledge of the divine Trinity, because creatures do not flow from God inasmuch as he is a Trinity in persons, but inasmuch as he is one in essence: therefore from the knowledge of creatures we cannot know the Trinity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

He tries to prove the first, however, in this way: wherever there is concord and equality, there is plurality: but in God there is concord and equality of the agent and of the acted-upon in the act itself, or, as he himself speaks, of the good-making and the good-makable, in the act of making good: therefore there is in God a plurality of persons. He proves the minor: where there is an act, there is concord of the agent; but in God there is a good-making act: therefore there is concord and equality of the good-making and the good-makable; and so there are several persons in God.

But this argument is neither demonstrative, nor of any weight. It is not indeed demonstrative, because it supposes that which is in no way evident, and which is perceived by divine faith alone, namely that in God there is a productive act ad intra: for although natural reason might show that God operates through intellect and will, it would not disclose that this operation is productive of another person; indeed, unless faith persuaded the contrary, one would say that the act of understanding and willing in God is nothing other than his own infinite substance itself, which is conceived by us after the manner of an operation and an act. Nor likewise is that argument of any weight, since it supposes that every divine production is a making-good, and so is done only through the will, which truly is opposed to faith; for the divine Son is produced through the intellect, and only the Holy Spirit proceeds through the will.

Secondly: the same Author tries to prove that that plurality of persons is threefold, because that essence which is in the maximum of action, that is, which acts most perfectly, requires only one good-making action, one good-makable passion, and a single act of making good; that is, that essence is most perfect in acting in which only a single agent or producer, a single product, and a single act are found; for if there were several, one would limit another: but God is in the maximum of action: therefore in God there is a single producer, a single product, and a single act. He proves the same truth from the distinctive notion: that essence is in the maximum of distinction in which there is a single distinguisher, generator, or producer, likewise a single distinguishable and generable or producible, and a single distinguishing through spirating and loving: but goodness is in the maximum of distinction: whence he concludes that there is a single distinguisher and generator with respect to the Son, and this is the Father: and a single distinguishable, generable, and producible with respect to the Father, and this is the Son, and a single distinguishing through spirating and loving, and this is the Holy Spirit.

But these proofs wander far from the intended end; first because this Author supposes what would have to be proved, namely that that essence is in the maximum of action, in which there is only a single producer, a single product, and a single act: indeed natural reason suggests that that cause is the more perfect which has manifold power and produces more effects: then because it is inferred from this that in God there is a single act, namely to spirate, and so the act of the divine intellect, namely to understand, is excluded; but this is heretical and alien to reason: finally, because from these arguments several absurdities follow against the mystery of the Trinity. First indeed, that one person is distinguished through another; which is truly false, for the divine persons are distinguished from one another through their own proper characters. Then, since the three persons are really distinct from one another, there is not only a single distinguishable and a single distinguisher, but there are three distinguishable, namely the three persons, and three distinguishers, namely the three personal properties. Finally, it follows from that doctrine that there are more divine persons than three, for it is of faith that there are two acts of production in God, namely to generate and to spirate: and consequently in God there would be the generative, the generable, and to generate, and so there will be three persons: then the spirative, the spirable, and to spirate, and so another three will also be persons, and so there will be six.

Thirdly, finally: that Trinity of persons which Lullius thinks he has evidently demonstrated, he likewise tries to show by an evident argument to be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and he reasons thus: everything must be conceded in the divine goodness through which the good-making is in the maximum of action, and the good-makable in the maximum of passion; that is, that must be attributed to God which has the more perfect mode of producer and product: but this is done through paternity and filiation: therefore in God, by reason of producer and product, there are the Father and the Son. He proves the minor: because the most perfect mode of producing belongs to the Father with respect to the Son; for he generates the Son from his whole substance. That there must also be the Holy Spirit, he tries to prove thus: everything must be conceded in the divine goodness through which making good is in the maximum of act, that is, through which it is most perfectly the act of the good-maker and of the good-makable: but this is done through loving: therefore in the divine goodness loving is to be admitted, which we call the Holy Spirit. He proves the minor, because otherwise making good, or loving, would not be infinite, and so would not be most perfect, nor in the maximum of act.

But how weak this proof is, there is no one who does not see; for even if we conceded that in God there is a most perfect production and in the maximum of passion and of action, it would not follow from this that it is between the Father and the Son, even though it were from the whole substance of the producer: for the generation of the Son among humans is a true generation, and yet it is not from the whole substance, but from part of the substance of the begetter; how then can Lullius gather that the production from the whole substance, which is found only in divine things, must be called the generation of the Son, especially since the Holy Spirit is also from the whole substance, and yet is not the Son? Therefore truly, setting aside divine revelation, the divine mystery of the Trinity cannot be demonstrated.

You will say 1. The evident knowledge of an effect begets evident knowledge of the cause: but the creatures evidently known by us are effects of the divine Trinity; for the three divine persons, who have the same omnipotence and power of creating, concur per se to all created effects: therefore from the knowledge of creatures a man will be able to detect the divine Trinity. — I distinguish the major: if the necessary connection and dependence of the effect on the cause is known, I concede: otherwise, I deny. Likewise, with the minor distinguished, I deny the consequence; for a man will indeed be able to know the creature as it is an effect of God, and from this knowledge to infer that the productive divine power is necessarily in some supposit; for all actions are held to be of supposits; and so he will be able to know naturally that there is some divine person which is productive of creatures. From this knowledge, however, he cannot naturally gather the plurality of persons in God, because creatures have a necessary connection with the one God, as he is one; not, however, as he is threefold: for if per impossibile there were a single person in God, the infinite productive power would be no less in it, and so creatures would depend on it no less.

You will say 2. Once the image is known, its prototype can be known: but man is truly an image of the Most Holy Trinity: therefore from the knowledge of himself he will be able to rise to the knowledge of the divine Trinity. — I distinguish the major: if the formal notion of the image and that relation which it has to the Prototype are known, I concede: otherwise, I deny: for a relation cannot be known unless both extremes are known. To the minor I say that a man cannot know himself under the notion of image through the light of reason innate to him, as the holy Augustine most excellently explains in lib. 15. De Trinit. cap. 21., where, pondering that saying of the Apostle, 1. ad Corinth. 13.¹ Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, he says that the Apostle did not say, we see now the mirror, but through a mirror. Whence he concludes:

Those, therefore, who see their own mind, in the manner in which it can be seen, and in it that Trinity, and yet do not believe or understand it to be an image of God: they see indeed the mirror, but to such an extent they do not see through the mirror him who is now to be seen through the mirror, that they do not even know that the mirror itself, which they see, is a mirror, that is, an image.

You will say 3. Several philosophers obtained a sufficiently clear knowledge of the divine Trinity, as we observed in Note 2: but they did not acquire it from any other source than the very storehouse of philosophy and the innate power of reasoning: therefore the knowledge of the mystery of the Trinity can be obtained. — I deny the minor: for first, they could have received that knowledge from tradition itself, which was propagated by hereditary right from Adam to Noah, and from him to Abraham: and Abraham and Moses disseminated that same knowledge among the Egyptian philosophers, from whom all the Greek sages who ever existed, but especially Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, were instructed, as the holy Fathers Justin and Cyril, cited above, affirm. Clement of Alexandria adds, lib. 5. of the Stromata, that Plato and the other philosophers learned very many things from the Hebrews and Chaldeans, among whom the knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity, divinely revealed to the first patriarchs, had been derived and propagated. I add, moreover, that the philosophers could perhaps have received such knowledge from the Sibyls, whose distinction was virginity, and the reward of virginity, divination, says St. Jerome, lib. 1. Contra Iovinianum: whence it is the concordant opinion of Christians, as is clear from Lactantius, lib. 1. cap. 6., that the Sibyls by divine instinct prophesied many things about the Holy Trinity, but especially about the Son of God and the humanity to be assumed by Him: whence all this knowledge of the philosophers about the Trinity presupposes revelation. Finally, the philosophers could have attained some knowledge of the divine persons through the oracles of the demons, to whom this mystery had been revealed before their fall: for, as Eugubinus relates, lib. 2. De perenni Philosophia, last chapter, Apollo of Delphi, asked by a priest about the true religion, answered among other things:

Do not question me about the Holy and divine Father, and the dear Offspring of the great Sovereign, and the Breath, which holds the whole bound world together.

Vives relates something similar in the 10. lib. of De Civit. cap. 23. De Serapide, who, consulted by Thule, King of Egypt, as to which one might be the more blessed, is said to have answered:

In the beginning God is, then the Word, and to Him the Spirit is added; these are coeval and tend to the One.

Nor should it seem a wonder that the demons were the heralds of so great a mystery; for they could have been driven to this either by the good angels, or by God Himself, who sometimes commands the light of truth to shine forth from the darkness of falsehood. Add that the demons themselves could have been stirred to this, in order to undermine belief in the Divinity: for, instilling the knowledge of the three divine Persons, they the more easily persuaded that there are three Gods; hence also all that knowledge which the philosophers had about the Trinity was mixed with almost infinite errors: whence not undeservedly Plato himself is called the Forerunner of the Arians; for he posited three Gods, namely the supreme God, the Demiurge, and the Soul; but he asserted the two latter to be created, and far inferior to the supreme God, which was almost the invention of Arius: whence Tertullian with the best right called the philosophers, especially the Platonists, the Patriarchs of the heretics.

You will insist. St. Athanasius, in many places, but especially in the disputation against Arius, which is read in the Council of Nicaea, and in Oration 2. contra Arianos, affirms that the pagan philosophers were inexcusable, because they did not acknowledge the divinity of the Word from creatures; for in that second Oration he says: Paul rightly reproaches the Greeks, because, contemplating the mutual harmony of the parts and the order of the things of nature, they thought nothing of the reason of nature, that is, the Word. For things known show forth their Maker, that through them they may understand the true God. And by the same Paul eternal power and divinity were also added, to signify the Son: and in the third Oration he says: in the works there is impressed an image of wisdom, that the world might through it acknowledge its Maker, namely the reason, or the Word, and through the Word the Father, etc.

Therefore the philosophers could in truth have discovered the Trinity of Persons through the innate light of reason.

I answer. St. Athanasius, in these and similar words, understood the supernatural help of exciting grace, by which the philosophers, enlightened, contemplating created things, could attain at least an obscure knowledge of the divine Trinity; for the same Athanasius says, Orat. 1. Contra Arianos: The gifts of His grace conferred upon us are without doubt great and above man, and that which by its excellence transcends all those charisms of the Father, namely the knowledge of the Word Himself and the gift of the Holy Spirit; by which words he openly confesses that the knowledge of the Word and of the Holy Spirit is above man, and so transcends the natural powers of the human intellect.

You will ask 1. whether Raymond Lull really judged that an evident knowledge of the Trinity can be obtained without any supernatural illumination, or rather presupposed revelation? I answer. that it is more likely that he judged that the Trinity of divine Persons can be demonstrated evidently, independently of any supernatural illumination: both because he himself affirms in many places that all the articles of faith can be proved by necessary, demonstrative, and evident reasons: therefore he does not think that faith and revelation are prerequired for those demonstrations; and because Eymericus relates, in the Directorium Inquisitorum, part two, q. 9., that Lull professed that for such demonstrations faith is not necessary, for he used to say: faith is necessary for ignorant, rustic men, and for ministerial men, and for those not having an elevated intellect, who do not know how to know through reason, and love to know through faith; and men of dull wit, and the illiterate, and the ignorant love to know the articles of faith through faith, and not through reason, and are more easily drawn to the truth of Christians through faith than through reason: but a subtle man is more easily drawn through reason than through faith.

You will ask 2. whether at least by natural light the mystery of the Trinity can come into suspicion? I answer. that it seems more probable that the inquiry into and suspicion of so great a Mystery, divine revelation being set aside, can nowhere be excited in the created intellect: both because there is no natural object that could suggest such a doubt or inquiry; and because if perhaps it apprehended that three Persons are three Gods, it could not recall its thought from this apprehension, as now we recall it whenever it presents itself to our minds, on account of a firmer reason, namely on account of the supreme authority of God revealing and saying that there are three Persons in the unity of the Godhead.

Second conclusion. — Just as the divine existence of the Trinity cannot be proved by natural reason, so neither can its impossibility be demonstrated.

Proof. if any natural reason could persuade the impossibility of the divine Trinity, it would be chiefly because it is repugnant to the most universal and best known metaphysical principles: or because it runs against the most accepted principles of discourse and of the syllogistic art; or finally, because the Trinity of Persons in the unity of essence conflicts with the very inmost predicates of God: but neither can be said. Therefore, etc. The minor is proved as to the first part. the metaphysical principles, on which all truth whatsoever rests, are chiefly these: it is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time: that is, affirmation and negation of one and the same thing cannot be enunciated at once and together; which, however, the mystery of the Trinity seems to impugn: for the divine essence, which is really the same as the personality, is communicated, but the personality is not: therefore the same entity is really communicated and not really communicated. Similarly, the Father and the Divinity are a single thing, and yet the Father really generates; but the Divinity does not really generate: therefore the same indivisible thing generates and does not generate. Finally, the same singular thing is and is common, for the Deity is essentially this, and yet is common to several: therefore it is at once common and not common: and so the mystery of the Trinity seems to run against the most accepted principles of Metaphysics, and to involve open contradictions.

On the contrary. for a contradiction to be true and manifest, it does not suffice that affirmation and negation be made of the same thing according to its real entity, but it is also required that it be made according to one and the same formality: for it is true that man reasons insofar as he is rational, and does not reason insofar as he is sentient, nor does any contradiction follow from this; because to reason and not to reason are not enunciated of man in respect of the same principle and the same power; for the sentient power is formally diverse from the rational power: so, by parity of reasoning, no contradiction follows in God from the fact that the essence is communicated but the Personality is not; likewise that the Father generates but the essence does not; because although Paternity and Personality are really the same as the essence, they nonetheless differ from it formally, which suffices to save and resolve the contradiction, as we proved when treating of the formal distinction of the attributes, both from one another and from the divine Essence.

The minor is also proved as to the second part. namely that the mystery of the Trinity does not conflict with the syllogistic principles, which are chiefly three: The first is, things which are the same as one and the same third are the same among themselves: the second, being said of all: the third, being said of none, that is, whatever is affirmed or denied of some superior is also affirmed and denied of all things that are contained under it; whence the difficulty can be formed in this way: Paternity and Filiation are really the same as the divine Essence: therefore they must also be really the same among themselves, if indeed that principle is true: things which are the same as one and the same third are the same among themselves; and so there will be no real distinction of the persons. Then the essence is really the same thing as Paternity, and is really the same thing as Filiation: but Paternity and Filiation are two things: therefore the essence is also two things; otherwise the principle of being said of all will be false.

But these difficulties are easily resolved; for, omitting the various answers of others, the Doctor answers two things in 1. dist. 2. q. 7. n. 17. First, that from this principle one may only infer that the extremes have no other identity with one another than they have with the third: whence, since the personalities do not have formal identity with the divine essence, so neither can they have that formal identity with one another. But since someone could insist that, since the personalities have real identity with the essence, so they should also be really the same among themselves; because things which are the same as one and the same third are the same among themselves with that very identity by which they are the same with the third.

He answers 2. that that principle holds universally only when the extremes which agree in a third have it from their own principles and their formal notion that they also agree with one another in this way. When, however, things that are identified with a third cannot from their own formal notion be so identified, then it does not necessarily follow from their identity with the third that they are also really identified among themselves. But the divine personalities have it from their formal notion that they cannot be identified with one another, because they are the constituents of distinct persons.

Finally the third part of the minor is proved. if the plurality of persons were repugnant to God from His own predicates, chiefly because it seems to obstruct His Unity, Aseity, and Infinity: to unity indeed, because since God is the first being, He must be no less alone by reason of person than by reason of essence: to aseity truly, because God is a being a se: therefore, since the Son is produced by the Father, and the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son, they cannot have the notion of Divinity: finally to infinity, because if several persons are given, there will be several infinite things, which is repugnant.

But these are easily resolved. The first indeed, because the primacy of being denies a multitude of gods, but this is not asserted through the Trinity; since the three persons are only one God: the second likewise, because Aseity, as we said in the Disputation on the Attributes, denies only dependence, but not production; although the Son and the Holy Spirit are produced, their production is nonetheless wholly independent. Finally the third, because the Trinity of Persons does not import a plurality of infinite things, because, as will be proved below, the personalities import neither perfection nor imperfection. And consequently, from no ground can the impossibility of the divine Trinity be evinced.

Note 1. Revelation is the proposition of an object made through the testimony of some person speaking, whether it takes place in the intellect through God, or in the imaginative faculty through an Angel, or only externally through the teaching of men, or through voices and visions formed by Angels: hence there is a twofold revelation; one created and natural, which is made through the ministry of Angels or men; the other, however, supernatural and divine, which is customarily called the interior light supernaturally infused, efficaciously inclining the will and the intellect to give assent to revealed things; concerning which Matth. 16. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father. But concerning this revelation we ask in the present, whether through it the human intellect can be so enlightened and strengthened that it may be able to find urgent natural arguments by which it would evidently demonstrate the Trinity, or at least probably recommend it.

Note 2. It is certain that, with supernatural faith presupposed, the human intellect cannot by its innate power of reasoning efficaciously prove the impossibility of the mystery of the Trinity: both because all the natural principles which could suggest this impossibility are taken from finite and limited things, to which, since there is no proportion to divine and infinite things, so neither should there be any comparison, and hence natural reason itself teaches that there is in God something which the created intellect cannot attain by its own powers: and because all the arguments which can assail the Trinity, natural reason illustrated by faith probably solves and dissolves, as will be clear in the course of this Treatise: and finally because natural reason seeks out and supplies certain likenesses and congruities, by which the intellect is led by the hand to assent to this mystery, and the reasons which seemed to suggest its impossibility it so dissolves that they scarcely retain any force: there remains, therefore, only the difficulty concerning the possibility and existence of this mystery, namely whether through natural arguments it can be efficaciously persuaded by a Christian Philosopher to a pagan and an unbeliever.

Note 3. Concerning the resolution of the present Question there are two maximally opposed opinions of Theologians. Richard of St. Victor carried the torch of the first, asserting in lib. 5. De Trinitate cap. 8. that it is proved by manifest reason, indeed convicted by manifold demonstration, that just as the perfection of one person is the cause of another, so the perfection of the two is the cause of the third in the Trinity: whence, speaking of the reasons set down by himself for proving the Trinity of the divine Persons, in cap. 11. he adds: as we have shown above evidently, a manifold reason convinces of the plurality of persons: and in cap. 13.: behold that it stands clearer than light that we find three in three distinctions of properties. With these he contends that the mystery of the divine Trinity can be efficaciously and evidently proved, once the knowledge of it has shone upon us through revelation: for he speaks of the reasons which presuppose faith; for in lib. 1. cap. 1. he weighs that saying of Isaiah c. 7.: Unless you believe, you will not understand. And in cap. 4. he says: Those things which we believe, we can bring forward not only probable but even necessary reasons.

Some Theologians defend the second, entirely opposite opinion, asserting that the mystery of the divine Trinity is so proper to faith that no natural reason can prove it, indeed cannot recommend it in any way at all; with whom St. Thomas seems to agree in I. dist. 33. art. 1. ad. 2., where he says:

in no created thing is there found anything similar to divine simplicity, so that the having is the same as that which is had: for all the likenesses which could be adduced, whether from points or from differences existing in a genus, have more of dissimilitude than of similitude: and they altogether lead away from the truth rather than lead into a true understanding.

But that we may avoid these extremes, we embrace the middle opinion, and we here undertake two things to be resolved: First, that, even with faith and revelation presupposed, no convincing reasons can be brought forth which would evidently persuade one of the Trinity. Second, however, that at least some congruous reasons and likenesses can be brought forth, by which the difficulty of the unbelieving intellect may be softened and it may be disposed to the faith and assent of that mystery.

First conclusion. — The created intellect, however much it may be illustrated even by divine revelation, cannot evidently and certainly demonstrate the mystery of the divine Trinity.

Proof 1. By the authority of the holy Fathers, but especially of Justin in his exposition of the faith concerning the Trinity:

Although, he says, a pure mind is implanted in us, through which we often apprehend by reasoning things higher than ourselves; nevertheless, weighed down by the flesh, it grows dull for the evident perception of greater things. In no way, therefore, since we are men, can we penetrate to that first and blessed essence: what do I say, the divine essence? nay, not even to its mysteries; for nothing divine is manifest to men.

With him agrees St. Augustine lib. 1. De Trinitate, cap. 1.:

We bring forward, he says, at times a reason, not the one they seek when they inquire about God, because they themselves are not able to take it up, nor perhaps can we either apprehend or set it forth, but one by which it may be shown to them how incapable, and utterly unfit, they are for perceiving what they demand.

St. Hilary agrees, lib. 8. De Trinit., where, affirming that this mystery transcends natural reason, he says:

For this the Church understands by faith, this the Synagogue does not believe, this Philosophy does not know: one from one and the whole from the whole, God and the Son, neither having taken away from the Father by nativity that which He wholly is, nor by being born having failed to keep this same whole with Himself.

It is also proved by reason. Faith, or revelation, cannot bring it about that purely natural and sensible effects have a necessary connection with the Trinity of persons: therefore neither can it bring it about that through the evident knowledge of those effects the divine Trinity be evidently demonstrated. The consequence is clear: for a cause cannot be evidently known through an effect, unless the necessary connection which it has with that effect be likewise made known. Next, faith cannot bring it about that natural reason, leaning only on its own powers, be carried beyond its own sphere: but the mystery of the Trinity is outside the sphere of natural light: therefore it cannot be attained by natural reason itself. Finally, even with the light of faith presupposed, all natural reasonings remain within the sphere of natural light, which cannot show anything divine except by the ministry of creatures: but creatures of themselves lead rather into the assent of the impossibility of this mystery than into the assent of its existence: therefore in truth, although someone through revelation and faith has known the mystery of the Trinity, he nevertheless cannot devise natural reasons which would evidently persuade that mystery to another who does not believe.

Proof 2. From the weakening of all the reasons which could be brought forth for demonstrating this mystery. If any reasons could evidently prove the divine Trinity, the five following above all could: but none of them is demonstrative.

For the first reason could be formed thus from the Doctor in 1. dist. 2. q. 7. n. 3.: whoever has from himself and without imperfection a productive principle sufficient for producing, can produce: but some divine person has from itself and without imperfection a productive principle sufficient with respect to another divine person: therefore it can produce another divine person. The minor is proved. For first it is certain that there is one person, by the same reason by which it is certain that there is God, since Deity must be personated, that it may be able to act and produce: second, that divine person has a fecund memory, that is, an infinite intellect and an infinite object present and applied in the order of the intelligible: moreover it has this memory infinitely fecund from itself, because it is unproduced; and it has it without imperfection, for no imperfection is to be found in God: but that infinitely fecund memory is a productive principle of some infinite perfect thing; not indeed of another God, because the plurality of Gods is repugnant: therefore of another divine person. The minor is proved. A fecund memory from its formal notion is productive of generated knowledge: therefore the fecund memory of the unproduced divine person is productive of knowledge generated and proportioned to itself, and hence infinite: but that infinite knowledge is not an accident, because this would disgrace God: therefore it is something subsistent, and consequently something spiritual living an intellectual life, otherwise it would not be proportioned to the productive principle: and hence it is a divine person: therefore the fecund memory in God produces another divine person; and thus already there are two divine persons, one producing, the other produced.

But that the third can be known in like manner is clear; for that unproduced divine person has a will infinitely perfect from itself; but an infinitely perfect will is productive of an infinite love proportioned to itself: but that produced infinite love must be a divine person, otherwise it would not be proportioned to the producing principle: therefore by natural reason that divine Trinity of persons can be evidently proved.

But although this reason seems to some the most pressing of all, nevertheless a Pagan Philosopher could easily dissolve it. First by denying the minor, and affirming that God does not understand except through an intellection really identified with Himself, not truly distinct from Himself, and therefore His intellection is not a real production of a really distinct term, but only an operation. Second, he could reply that the intellect produces indeed something immanent, but inhering, not truly something subsistent, and hence from this it would not be lawful to infer that the Word produced by God is something subsistent. Third, finally, although he would concede that the divine intellect is productive of a subsistent Word really distinct from the producing principle, he would nevertheless not on that account be bound to admit three persons; indeed he would have a handle for asserting that there are infinite divine persons produced; for since the Word and the Holy Spirit have intellect and will, each of them could produce another Word and another Holy Spirit, and these again others, and so on to infinity.

The second reason can be formed thus; what is supremely and infinitely good is supremely and infinitely communicable: but God is naturally known to be the supreme and infinite good: therefore He must be communicated supremely and infinitely: but outside Himself He cannot be so infinitely and supremely communicated, because a supremely infinite creature cannot be produced: therefore it is necessary that He be infinitely communicated within Himself: but that communication cannot take place except through intellect and will: therefore it is necessary that God communicate Himself through the operation of intellect and will to another within Himself; not indeed to another according to essence, because there cannot be many Gods: therefore according to person; and hence there will be three divine persons, namely one which communicates itself, and two others with whom it is communicated; to one indeed through the intellect, to the other through the will.

But the Philosopher would answer, first, by denying the major, since actual communication brings no perfection into the communicating cause, but only into the produced effect; for actual illumination is not a perfection existing in the Sun, but in the bodies illuminated. He would answer, second, that infinite communication is repugnant to God, since it would seem that it could not take place without a division of the essence and the production of another God, which implies a contradiction. Third, finally, he could distinguish the major: that the infinitely good is infinitely communicable — syncategorematically, so that it can always be communicated more — he will concede: but categorematically, so that it could have at once a communication adequate to itself — he will deny.

The third reason: God is naturally known as most happy: but happiness cannot be that of one solitary being; for it requires companionship: therefore He must have a companion: but creatures, since they are dissimilar and have not existed from eternity, cannot give God true and perfect society: therefore it is necessary that God have a companion who is not a creature: but that one cannot be another God, because many Gods are repugnant; therefore He must have other divine persons. Whence Tertullian Contra Praxeam:

Before all things God was alone, Himself to Himself World and place and all things; alone, however, because there was nothing extrinsic besides Him: otherwise not even then alone: for He had within Himself His own reason, namely His Word, His Son and His Holy Spirit.

But the Philosopher would deny that for the happiness of an infinitely perfect being the companionship of another is required; for God fully suffices to Himself, inasmuch as He is the greatest of all goods and their center.

The fourth reason can be sought from the supreme Charity of God: where there is supreme goodness, there is perfect Charity, which is necessarily toward another, and there is no supreme Charity except toward another supremely good being: but in God there is supreme goodness: therefore there is supreme Charity, which is toward another supremely good being — not indeed toward creatures, which are not supremely good: nor toward another God, because many Gods are repugnant: therefore it must be toward another divine person; and hence several divine persons can be proved by natural reason.

But the Philosopher would deny the minor; for where there is supreme goodness, there perfect Charity, having the notion of friendship, need not necessarily be; for the infinite love which God has toward Himself suffices.

Finally, the fifth reason could be formed thus: we naturally know that no perfection is to be denied to God: but to produce one like oneself in nature is the supreme perfection: therefore it is known not to be denied to God.

But the Philosopher could refute it, first, by distinguishing the minor: namely, that to produce one like oneself is the supreme perfection in corruptible beings, namely that they may be able to preserve their species; but not in beings free from corruption, as is clear in the Angels, who do not procreate other Angels; and hence, since God is free from all corruption, to produce one like Himself would not be a perfection in Him. Second, he would answer that that production is repugnant to God; because in order truly to produce one like Himself He would have to produce another God, which implies a contradiction. Third, if to produce one like oneself is the supreme perfection, since the divine persons which would be produced would be infinitely perfect, they also would have to produce other divine persons; and thus there would have to be an infinite number of divine persons.

It is clear, therefore, that no natural reason can be brought forth which would so evidently persuade the mystery of the Trinity to an unbeliever that he could not deny it his assent. Therefore this mystery can only be probably recommended through those aforesaid reasons; as well as through certain likenesses of natural things, in which the vestige and image of the adorable Trinity is engraved, as will appear.

Second conclusion. — The mystery of the Trinity can be probably recommended and explained from natural things, in which in a certain way its vestiges and images appear and shine forth. This is the constant opinion of the holy Fathers. And they recommend it by various likenesses.

First indeed, in the Sun St. Athanasius q. 1. and Nazianzen Oratione 45. find an expressed image of the Trinity, for the reason that that one heavenly body is one in which nevertheless three distinct things are found, namely the solar orb, the ray and the light. For just as, says Athanasius, the sun consists of three subsistences, so also one God of three persons. For the type of the Father is the solar orb: the type of the Son is the ray: the type of the Holy Spirit is the light of the sun. Accordingly, just as in the Sun the orb, the ray and the light are not called three Suns, but one Sun: so likewise in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God and not three: whence the compendious exposition of the faith, which is attributed to Cyril of Alexandria, has: The Sun is the Father, the ray is the Son, the fiery splendor is the Holy Spirit.

Second, the holy Fathers draw the same image of the Trinity from the elements; first indeed from fire: for as the above-praised St. Athanasius says, there are three subsistences of one fire, namely the subject of the fire and the burning and the shining: and yet the nature of the fire is one. Thus the Father is the fire, the Son is the burning, the Holy Spirit is the illuminating power. But by subsistence he here calls individual things, although they are accidents. With him agrees Isidore lib. 2. De differentiis Spiritualibus cap. 2. Just as, he says, fire, brightness and heat are three words indeed, but one thing: so in the relation of the persons there is the Trinity, but in the substance of the nature one God.

Third, from the element of air, in which God painted the Rainbow, that in it, as on a triumphal chariot, the holy Trinity might be discerned: for just as in one Rainbow three colors so come together that sight cannot discern in which part one color is terminated and distinguished from another: so in the holy Trinity the divine persons so come together in the Deity that they are the one only God.

Fourth, from the element of Water; for a spring produces a river and a stream, as it were a threefold water and yet a single one: whence Nazianz. Oratione 37. calls the Father the eye of the spring, the Son the spring itself, and the Holy Spirit the river. Tertullian, however, in the book Contra Praxean chapter 8. assimilates the Father to the Spring, the Son to the River, the Holy Spirit to the Stream.

Fifth, from the element of Earth, because in it there are Root, Trunk and Branches, which all form a single tree, as the above-praised Tertullian weighs in the same place, as also St. Augustine lib. De fide et Symbolo cap. 9.

Sixth, St. Augustine collects the same thing from all creatures, 6. De Trinitate last chapter: It is fitting, he says, that we, contemplating with the intellect the Creator through the things which have been made, understand the Trinity, whose vestige appears in the creature in the way that is worthy. Explaining which vestige afterwards he adds: for in that Trinity there is the supreme origin of all things and the most perfect beauty and the most blessed delight. He collects this same thing also in book 4. super Genesim, from the fact that God is said in Sapientiae 11. to have made all things in number, weight and measure; measure, he says, fixes a mode to every thing: number gives to every thing its species, and weight draws it to rest and stability. The Subtle Doctor in 1. dist. 13. quaest. 6. num. 6. adds that the vestige of the Trinity which shines in the creature consists chiefly in their unity, species and order, and he collects this from St. Augustine 6. De Trinitate cap. 10. saying: All these things therefore, which have been made by divine art, show in themselves a certain unity and species and order. But the unity found in the creature represents the supreme unity of the first Principle, which is appropriated to the Father; and the species of the creature represents the supreme beauty, which is attributed to the Son; finally the order of the creature represents the most perfect operation of God, which is His blessedness, and is appropriated to the Holy Spirit.

Seventh, finally, the holy Trinity painted its own image in man, and deservedly said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: for, as the Doctor teaches in 1. distinct. 3. q. 9. num. 6., just as in the Trinity there is the same divine nature, and the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are three persons really distinct among themselves and identified in the same divine nature: so besides the soul there is found in us a fecund memory, which is the intellect with its object, or the species of it, and this corresponds to the Father. Then in us there is found the intellect informed with actual knowledge, which corresponds to the Son. And finally there is found the will informed by a volition, which corresponds to the Holy Spirit. Moreover, just as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are really distinguished among themselves, and yet are identified with the divine Essence; so the fecund memory and the intellect, as affected by intellection, and the will, as affected by volition, are really distinguished among themselves, and yet are really the same with the soul, inasmuch namely as the intellect and the will are considered in first act, and as they are faculties of the soul itself formally only distinguished from it.

Blessed Augustinus lucidly explains all these things lib. 15. De Trinitate, cap. 20. Whoever (he says) vividly perceives these three, namely memory, intelligence and will in his mind, naturally instituted by God, and how great a thing is in it, whence even the sempiternal and immutable nature can be recalled, beheld, embraced. He remembers through memory, beholds through intelligence, embraces through love: he truly finds the image of that supreme Trinity: to which supreme Trinity, to be remembered, to be seen, to be loved — that he may recall it, contemplate it, delight in it — he ought to refer the whole of that which he lives.

The error of those who deviate from the truth is not one but manifold: hence one can scarcely recount how many and what manner of dark spirits of heresies have gone astray concerning the greatest of all truths, namely the divine Trinity: yet it is fitting to distinguish them all into a threefold order. For some asserted more divine persons than three; some indeed dreamed of a single person in the Godhead distinct only by a threefold office or name; finally, others said that the three divine persons are not one God, but a threefold one; which errors, so that they may more easily appear and be refuted

Note 1. There were various heretics who attacked the Trinity of divine persons in manifold ways: for first of all the Emperor Anastasius decreed that not a Trinity, but a quaternity, was to be adored, and that for that reason he was struck by lightning from heaven, as Paul the Deacon and Pomponius Laetus report in Cellius, lib. 1. De Trinitate, art. 1. A certain Gallic cleric seems to have subscribed to this error, who, as St. Anselm reports in the book De Incarnatione Verbi, cap. 1. and 13., distinguished the three divine persons really from the divine Essence, and said:

If in God the three persons are only one thing, and are not three things, each one by itself separate, like three Angels, or three souls, yet in such a way that they are entirely the same in power and will: therefore the Father and the Holy Spirit were incarnate together with the Son.

Nor was Gilbert of Poitiers far off, for, as Matthew Paris reports in the Historia Anglicana, in the year 1119, his third assertion was: The properties of the persons are certain eternal relations, which are indeed not what the persons themselves are, but divided in number, and divided in substance, and have three unities, and so there are many eternal things, none of which is God. But far more monstrous was the multiplication of persons, which the first Council of Braga thus condemns in Can. 2., saying: If anyone introduces outside the holy Trinity other names of divinity, I know not what they be, saying that in the divinity itself there is a Trinity of Trinities, as the Gnostics and Priscillians said, let him be anathema.

Note 2. There were some heretics utterly opposed to the former, who from the wholly complete unity of the essence inferred the unity also of the divine person; so that what designates the distinction of persons in Scripture they referred not to the diversity of the persons themselves, but to the difference of the offices and actions of the same person, and said that the same person, inasmuch as it is unbegotten and productive of creatures, is named Father; inasmuch as it is incarnate, is called Son; inasmuch as it sanctifies the creature, is called Holy Spirit; as if one and the same person were distributed into different effects and distinct offices. Praxeas seems to have borne the torch to this error; he, as Tertullian says in the book which he wrote against him, in order to make a heresy of the One, said that the Father himself descended into the Virgin, that he himself was born of her, that he himself suffered: and he adds: Praxeas managed two businesses of the Devil at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy. He put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. Hence Optatus of Milevis, in lib. 5. Adversus Parmenianum, calls Praxeas a Patripassian, because he asserted that the divine Father had been crucified and had suffered. Noetus subscribed to him, who, as St. Epiphanius reports in Heresy 57., said that there is one God, the same Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who suffered and was born in the flesh. The disciples of Montanus also favored this, for although St. Epiphanius says in Heresy 48. that Montanus thinks about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit just as the holy Catholic Church does; nevertheless St. Jerome, in the Epistle to Marcella, qu. 54., says of the disciples of Montanus: They forced the Trinity into the narrows of a single person: whence Nicephorus, lib. 4. Historiae, c. 22.: Montanus, he says, taught the same things as we do about the divine Trinity and the creation of the world; nevertheless some of his followers afterwards thought that the three substances of the Divinity were one. But this error, almost buried in the netherworld, was stirred up anew by Sabellius the African of Pentapolis, who, as St. Anastasius reports in the Contra Gregales Sabellii, said: The Father is dilated into the Son by taking on flesh, and into the Holy Spirit by sanctifying men: whence he called the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit not three persons, but the same one under three names; hence his disciples were called Patripassians, because they asserted that the Father had been incarnate, had suffered, and had died. To this error afterwards adhered Paul of Samosata, then Photinus, Bishop of Sirmium, and also many more recent heretics, as has already been said.

Note 3. Other heretics, opposed to the aforesaid in the extreme, acknowledged indeed the distinction of persons in God; but denied the unity of the essence; these are distributed into two rivulets of error; for some denied the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Origen is said to have gone before them; nevertheless this error is attributed to Arius as its author, because it was so propagated and disseminated by him that it poured out its poison through the whole world. And when he was extinguished, and, in the manner of Judas, his entrails were poured out in a solitary place, the sect of the Semi-Arians arose, who, tempering the error of Arius as far as possible, asserted the Son to be like the Father and coeternal with him, yet not consubstantial and equal. Changing the word Homoousion, which means consubstantial, into Homoiousion, that is, like in substance, as if softening its rigor: so that by the very similarity and consonance of the word they deceived very many, as if using a catholic word. With them the Macedonians are wont to be numbered, who denied that the Holy Spirit is truly God, and some of them said that the Father is omnipotent, the Son semi-omnipotent, but the Holy Spirit nullipotent. But another error, opposed to them, grew up, that of the Tritheists, who asserted three natures and substances alike in all things, whose leader was Philoponus, as Nicephorus reports, lib. 18. cap. 49.; concerning whom Dionysius the Roman, in Athanasius, in the Epist. De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi, says: These men in a certain way constitute three Gods, while they divide the holy unity into three foreign substances. Hence it is worth the effort at present to resolve three things. 1. That there are only three divine Persons: 2. That they are really distinguished from one another: 3. That they are truly one God. In the following Question, moreover, we shall prove the consubstantiality of the Persons.

First conclusion. — Truly there are three divine persons really distinct from one another. That they are three is sufficiently and more than sufficiently established by the Oracles of both the Old and the New Testament reported above. But that they are really distinguished from one another is proved by the same sacred texts; and moreover the same thing is further confirmed from those various places in which Sacred Scripture commemorates Generation, Paternity, and Filiation in God, which cannot be verified without a real distinction of Persons: For, says St. Augustine, lib. 1. De Trinit., cap. 1., there is altogether no thing which begets itself, so that it may be: and Tertullian, Contra Praxean:

Everything which proceeds from something must of necessity be of the same kind as that from which it proceeds, yet it is not the same, but separate: but where the Second is, there are two, and where the Third is, there are three: for the Third is the Holy Spirit from God and the Son, just as the third from the root is the fruit from the shoot, and the third from the spring is the stream from the river, and the third from the sun is the beam from the ray.

Nor should you say with the Sabellians that these words Father and Son denote in God only a distinction of Persons, not entitatively and really, but according to the diverse offices which the single divine Person bears and executes, and that he is called Father by reason of creation, the Son by reason of incarnation, and the Holy Spirit by reason of justification: for, as Tertullian rightly replies against Praxeas, c. 10.:

It can in no way happen that the Father makes himself a Son to himself, and the Son makes himself a Father to himself: what God has instituted, he himself also guards; the Father must have a Son, that he may be Father, and the Son a Father, that he may be son; but it is one thing to have, another to be; v. g. that I may be a husband, I must have a wife; I shall not myself be a wife to myself; so also that I may be a Father, I have a Son; I shall not myself be a Son to myself; and that I may be a Son, I have a Father; I shall not myself be a Father to myself: for the things which make me, if I have them; then I shall be a Father, if I have a Son: I shall be a Son, if I have a Father: moreover, if I myself am one of these, I no longer have that which I myself am, neither a Father, because I myself am the Father, nor a Son, because I myself am the Son; but inasmuch as I must have one of these and be the other, if I shall be both, I shall not be the one, while I do not have the other: for if I myself am the Son, who am also the Father, I no longer have a Son, but I myself am the Son: but by not having a Son, while I myself am the Son, when shall I be the Father? I must have one Son, that I may be the Father, etc.

Moreover the same thing is established from those very words of Scripture, Ioan. 8., in which the Son affirms, I proceeded from God: and in the same place: I am not alone, but I and the Father who sent me. And c. 14. I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, that he may remain with you forever, the Spirit of truth. For the one proceeding must be really distinguished from the one from whom he proceeds, and the one sent from the one by whom he is sent, and the one asking from the one whom he asks: since the same one cannot proceed from himself, nor send himself, or ask himself, as Tertullian rightly urges in the same place, and likewise St. Athanasius in the Contra Gregales Sabellii.

Finally, Sacred Scripture expressly pronounces that the Son of God was begotten before the daystar, and that divine Wisdom came forth from the mouth of the Most High before every creature: and that the Word was in the beginning with God, and that through him all things were made: therefore truly within God himself a real distinction of Persons is to be admitted, and not only from a diverse connotation and respect to the effects to be produced in creatures. Add that this divine truth is strengthened by those very principles by which the Sabellians strive to overturn it; for

They object 1. Various places of Scripture in which the unity of God is predicated, whence they infer that there is a single Person: thus Deuteron. 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And c. 4. The Lord himself is God and there is no other besides him.

But so far is it from being the case that these words indicate the unity of Person, that rather they signify the Trinity and denote the distinction: for by a wonderful instinct of God it came about that Moses and the other writers of the Old Testament signified the very unity of God by a threefold repetition, namely that they might designate the three Persons in the unity of the Godhead, as the holy Fathers gather, especially Athanasius in the books De Trinit.

They object 2. That saying of Ioan. 14. I am in the Father and the Father is in me: whence they infer that the Father and the Son are a single Person distinguished by only two names. They confirm it from that saying of Isaiae 43. and 45. Only in you is God and there is no God besides you; truly you are a hidden God.

But from those texts the holy Fathers gather the distinction of Persons, especially Athanasius in Dialogue 3. De Trinit. and Hilary, lib. 4., who weighs those words of Isaiah thus: Isaiah, discerning the inhabitant from that in which he inhabits, does so only by distinction of Person, not of kind; for God is in him, and he in whom God is, is God; for God is not in a dwelling-place diverse and alien in nature from himself.

They object 3. That saying of Ioan., I and the Father are one.

But that context fights against them: for, as St. Augustine notes, tract. 36. in Ioan., If one, therefore not diverse: if we are, therefore both the Father and the Son are; for he would not say 'we are' of one, nor would he say 'one' of diverse ones: whence Nazianzen, lib. 1. De Fide: 'One,' he says, he refers to the unity of the Godhead: 'we are,' however, he assigns to the persons. In like manner Tertullian, lib. 1. Contra Marcionem, weighs that saying of 1. Ioan. c. 2. There are three who give testimony in Heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one; and he says: Those who are three, he says, are one thing, not one person, just as it was said, I and the Father are one? He answers that it refers to the unity of substance, not to the singularity of number.

They object 4. All things that the Father has, the Son equally obtains: therefore there is nothing by which the Son can be really distinguished from the Father. They prove the antecedent from Matth. 11. All things have been delivered to me by my Father: and Ioan. 16. All things that the Father has are mine: and c. 17. All my things are yours and your things are mine.

But from those very words the holy Fathers gather the distinction of persons; for there must be a real distinction between the giver and the receiver. Hence they commonly interpret the aforesaid texts as meaning that the Father gave all things to the Son, except being the Father. Hence the Council of Florence says in the letters of Union: All things that are the Father's, the Father himself gave to his only-begotten Son by begetting, except being the Father: to which that saying of Nazianzen, Orat. 44. in Sanctam Pentecostem, accords: All things whatsoever, he says, that the Father has, are the Son's, except that he is not unbegotten: all things whatsoever the Son has, are the Holy Spirit's, if you except generation. But that the aforesaid exception is implicitly contained in the very words of Christ, Athanasius teaches, Orat. 4. Contra Arianos, saying: But lest anyone, seeing the Son have all things whatsoever the Father has, deceived by the indiscriminate likeness of the things that are had, should think impiously in the Sabellian manner, and judge that the Son is also the Father: for that reason this Word was uttered: 'It was given to me and I received and it was delivered to me,' for no other reason than that he might show that he is not the Father, etc.

And a little further down, that saying of Ioan. 5. Just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to the Son to have life in himself. He weighs it thus: For from this word 'gave' he indicates that he himself is not the Father; while from the very saying he signifies the likeness and property of the Son with the Father.

They object 5. Sacred Scripture affirms that God is alone, Ps. 85. You are the only God; and 1. ad Timotheum 1. To the King of the ages, immortal and invisible, to the only God: therefore he is also solitary: but solitude does not stand with the fellowship of three Persons: therefore three Persons are not to be admitted in God.

The holy Fathers answer that the Scriptures also teach that the Father is not alone, but that the Son is with him; for Christ himself, Ioan. 8., expressly pronounces: I am not alone; but I and the Father who sent me. And in your Law it is written that the testimony of two men is true: I am the one who bears testimony about myself, and the Father who sent me bears testimony about me: which words St. Athanasius, in the Contra Gregales Sabellii, weighs thus: Behold two Persons for you; and unless you say that they are truly two, when he says this, you do not allow a true testimony to exist; for that testimony is confirmed only if it is borne not by one but by two. Therefore the Scriptures are so to be reconciled that the former do not exclude the Trinity of Persons, and the latter do not introduce a plurality of Gods.

They answer secondly that God is called alone by the exclusion of other gods, not by the exclusion of the divine Persons; and this exposition is strengthened by Sacred Scripture itself; for Ioan. 17. we read: This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God: and it is added: and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Moreover, of the Son it is said, Isaiae 45., There is no God besides you: truly you are a hidden God, the God of Israel, the Savior: and Baruch 3. This is our God and no other shall be reckoned against him: but it is added, After these things he was seen on earth, to signify that the former words are to be understood of the Son of God; nor yet does it follow from this that the Father is not truly God and Lord; and so the particle 'alone' is not exclusive of the Persons, but of vain gods.

I answer 3. With the Doctor, in 1. dist. 2. qu. unica, the word 'alone' can be taken in two ways, namely either categorematically or syncategorematically: taken categorematically it is the same as 'solitary,' and therefore it has no place in the divine realities: hence those propositions are false, God is alone, the Father is alone: that is, solitary. But syncategorematically it can be taken in four ways: for either it determines the essential subject with respect to an essential predicate, and so this proposition is true, You alone are God and the true God: or it determines the personal subject with respect to an essential predicate, and so the proposition only the Father is God would be false; hence when it is said of the Father, Ioan. 17., That they may know you, the only true God, the particle 'alone' does not hold on the part of the subject, namely the Father, but on the part of the predicate, namely the true God, so that the sense is this, That they may know you, Father, who are the only true God. Thirdly, 'alone' can be taken insofar as it determines the personal subject with respect to a personal predicate, and so the proposition is true, Only the Father generates, only the Son is generated. Fourthly and finally, it determines the personal subject with respect to a notional predicate common to several persons, and so it is not rightly joined to a subject importing only one person; but it must be joined to a subject importing both; for you would not rightly say, Only the Father spirates, but you should say, only the Father and the Son spirate.

They object 6. Some testimonies of the holy Fathers by which they seem to affirm that the divine Persons are distinct only by names and by the consideration of the intellect: thus St. Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 13., after he distinguished the three divine supposits by their proper characters, subjoins: Each one is God, if it is considered separately, the mind, of course, separating those things which cannot be separated: the same, Orat. 35.: That there is one essence and nature and appellation of God; although through certain distinct thoughts the names also are distinguished at the same time.

But St. Gregory of Nazianzus himself thrusts this wrong far away from himself, for in Orat. 49., showing that in his earlier little works he had professed the true real distinction of the Persons, he says: Since indeed I have condemned this sect, that is, the Sabellian, in the same little book, and I have written the distinction of persons according to the word; for no one can say 'they are one' for one person, nor assign the unity of kind except to the persons: whence, Orat. 35., It is, he says, an equal impiety either to connect the persons in the manner of Sabellius, or to distinguish and separate the natures after the fashion of Arius. Therefore, when he says that one person considered apart from another is distinguished by intellection, he is so to be understood that our intellect can scarcely really conceive and separate one person from another; for a parte rei every person has in itself the two other persons remaining through circumincession, and as to essence it is the same with them, and so it cannot be really separated from them.

They object 7. Things which are the same as one and the same third are the same among themselves: but the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same as the divine essence: therefore they are the same among themselves.

I distinguish the major. as I have already distinguished: in whatever identity they are the same as something, in an equal identity they are the same among themselves, I concede; hence since the divine Persons are not the same personally and suppositally, but only essentially in the third, so neither should they be the same among themselves personally, but only essentially.

They object 8. It is a contradiction for something unique to be at once one and manifold: but God, one and Trinity, is divided and manifold: therefore God is not the Trinity.

I distinguish the major. Under the same notion under which it is one, it cannot be divided and manifold, I concede; under another notion under which it is not one, I deny: thus, therefore, God is one in essence and manifold in persons; and so He is not one, and divided, and manifold under the same notion, but under diverse ones.

Finally they object. Nothing is to be admitted in God, with the removal of which God would remain infinitely perfect: but with the Trinity of persons set aside, God remains infinitely perfect, for to be infinite is of the essence of Deity itself: therefore, etc.

He denies the minor. The Doctor denies it in 1. dist. 2. quaest. 53.; for once one person is removed, another will not remain infinitely perfect, not because one person constitutes the perfection of the essence, or of another person, but because all the persons are really identified with the essence, and thus really and essentially are also identified with one another: but it is a contradiction that something really identified with another subsisting thing be removed, otherwise the same thing would really be both removed and not removed, which is a contradiction. Or I distinguish the minor. With the Trinity of persons removed, God would remain infinitely perfect, if that condition were possible, I concede: if it is impossible, as in truth it is, I deny.

You will insist. From the infinity of the divine nature we gather that the divinity is one and incapable of multiplication: but the divine person, as formally distinct from the essence, is no less infinite: therefore neither is it less one and incapable of multiplication.

I distinguish the major. From infinity simpliciter and absolutely, I concede: from infinity in a certain respect and in a certain definite and determinate genus, I deny.

I likewise distinguish the minor. The divine person is no less infinite simpliciter and absolutely, I deny: infinite according to its own proper formal notion, let it pass. Or otherwise, I deny the minor. For the person formally, as it is a person, is neither infinite nor finite, neither imperfect nor perfect, as we shall prove below.

Second conclusion. — In God there are only three divine persons, and there can be neither more nor fewer. This is of defined faith in several Councils, the doctrine of all of which the Lateran Council gathers together and proves again in the chapter Damnamus in these words:

We believe and confess that there is one supreme reality, which is truly the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, three persons together, and each one of them singly... Each of the three persons is that reality, namely substance, essence, or divine nature... And that reality is not generating, nor generated, nor proceeding, but it is the Father who generates, and the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds, so that the distinctions are in the persons, and unity in the nature. Although, therefore, the Father is another, the Son another, the Holy Spirit another, it is not however another thing, but that which is the Father is the Son and the Holy Spirit, the same entirely, so that according to the Orthodox and Catholic faith they are believed to be consubstantial.

This very thing St. Athanasius openly hands down in the Symbol: There is therefore one Father, not three Fathers, one Son, not three Sons, one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits. All the contexts of Sacred Scripture likewise prove it, by which in the previous Question we intimated the holy Trinity, that is, that there are three divine persons. Moreover, Sacred Scripture itself openly declares that the Father is unique, while God the Father is expressed by a singular name. But it also clearly sets forth that the Son is unique, and the Holy Spirit unique; for they call the Son the Only-begotten, thus Ioan. 1.: The Only-begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father. And below: glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father. And chap. 3.: So God loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son. Likewise of the Holy Spirit, 1. Corinth. 12.: There are divisions of graces, but the same Spirit. And below: But all these things one and the same Spirit works. And again: in one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body. But John speaks this very thing more evidently, Epist. 1. chap. 5., saying: There are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. Although, however, this proposition does not express the exclusion directly and explicitly, nonetheless it designates and imports it implicitly, according to the common interpretation of the holy Fathers.

The same truth is proved by reason: first indeed, if there were more than three divine persons, there would likewise be more Gods, and not one only God: but it is a contradiction that there be more Gods: therefore it is also a contradiction that there be more divine persons than three. Proof of the major. The reason why several persons make one only God, and do not have a distinct Divinity and essence, is that the Father communicates the same Divinity undividedly to the Son through generation; which moreover the Father and the Son communicate to the Holy Spirit through spiration. But such a communication of the same Divinity in God would be impossible, if there were several Fathers, several Sons, or several Holy Spirits. Therefore, etc. The holy Fathers prove the minor, who from that communication confess that God is one; first of all St. Ignatius in the Epistola ad Philippenses gathers: There is therefore one God the Father, and not two, or three, namely one who is, and there is no true one besides Him alone; for the Lord says, God is one... One Son also, God the Word. And with a few words interposed for the unity of the Holy Spirit he concludes: Again, therefore, there are neither three Fathers, nor three Sons, but neither three Paracletes. But one Father, and one Son, and one Paraclete. By which Ignatius observes that it pertains to the unity of God, that there be not several Fathers, nor several Sons, nor several Paracletes.

St. Basil agrees with him, lib. 3. Contra Eunomium: Thus, he says, the notion of unity will be preserved in the Trinity, if we profess one Father, one Son, one Holy Spirit. Epiphanius also subscribes, haeresi 64.: The Father, he says, and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God, a Trinity in truth and a Monad; for therefore there is one God, because there are neither two Fathers, nor two Sons, nor two Holy Spirits. Whence St. Fulgentius, in his response to the first objection of the Arians, concludes the whole matter: if both, he says, were called Fathers, they would surely be dissimilar in nature; for each would consist from himself and would not have a common substance with the other, nor would the Deity be one for those to whom one nature did not belong. The same, to objection 5., says of the Son: Two unbegotten ones, he says, cannot have one nature, where neither of the two finds in the other generation from himself, nor does either recognize in himself the substance of his nativity from the other, etc.

Proof 2. There are as many divine Persons, and no more, as there are unproduced and produced ones: but only one unproduced person exists and can exist, and two produced: therefore only three divine Persons can exist. The major is clear; the minor, however, is proved, as to its first part, by the Doctor in 1. dist. 2. qu. 7. num. 37.: If several unproduced persons could exist, they would necessarily be infinite; but it is a contradiction that there be infinite persons in God: therefore several unproduced persons likewise imply a contradiction. The minor is evident: for those infinite unproduced persons would either be of the same species and distinct in number alone, or diverse. Not the first, because it is a contradiction that there be several infinite things differing in number alone, as we proved in demonstrating the unity of God. Not diverse either, because thus none of them would be infinite, since it would not have the perfections of a person of another species, just as man does not have all the perfections of the brutes, nor do the brutes obtain the perfections of man; and so it would not be infinitely perfect, since it would not have all possible perfections.

He proves the minor. The Doctor: whatever can be in several supposits, and is not determined to a certain number of supposits by something distinct from itself, can by its own notion be in infinitely many, and if it is a necessary being, in fact it is in infinitely many; for as Aristotle speaks, 1. phys. text 32., In perpetual things, being able and being do not differ: but the unproduced divine Person, if it could be in several supposits, could not be determined by anything, so as to be in a certain and determinate number of supposits, because to be determined by another, in order to be in a supposit, is against the notion of an unproduced person: therefore from itself it could be in infinitely many, and thus in fact there would be infinite produced persons: but this is a contradiction: therefore also that from which it follows.

Proof 2. of the same part of the minor: plurality is never to be posited without necessity: but there is no necessity of admitting several unproduced persons; for neither would that regard the production of an unproduced person, nor would it help anything toward the perfection of the produced persons: therefore several cannot exist. Thirdly, because one essence actually existing cannot from itself have diverse modes of existing without productions. Whence, indeed, would that diversity of existing have to be derived? Therefore the unproduced person cannot be manifold.

The same minor is proved, as to its second part. namely that there are only two produced persons, by the same Doctor, ibidem, number 18.: there are as many produced persons, and no more, as there are adequate and sufficient productive principles of diverse notion in the unproduced person: but those principles are only two, namely the intellect and the will: therefore there are also only two produced persons. The minor will appear in the following Disputation, where we shall demonstrate that only two divine processions and productions are to be admitted, and so only two produced persons.

St. Bonaventure proves this very truth from a sufficient combination, which he presents as threefold in 1. dist. art. 1. qu. 4. The first indeed he forms thus: The first Person, who is innascible and inspirable, generates and spirates. The second Person, however, because inspirable but begotten, does not generate, but spirates. The third Person, because spirated and proceeding from the one generating, neither generates nor spirates. And therefore it is impossible that there be more persons than three. The second he forms thus, with Richard of St. Victor, lib. 3. De Trinit. and 20.: From a threefold love; for love is threefold, namely gratuitous, owed, and mixed from both: therefore there must be only three divine Persons: one which only gives, in which is gratuitous love; another which only receives, in which is owed love; and a middle one, which gives and receives, in which is love mixed from both. The third he gathers from origin, for, he says, it happens that one understands a person who is the principle of a person and is not principled, and again a person who is principled and not the principle of a person; and in a third way, a person who is principled and principle. But the fourth mode, that one be neither principle nor principled, is altogether impossible, nor intelligible.

You will say 1. In created things generation proceeds from the fecundity of nature: therefore likewise in God, besides the two processions, one of which is through the intellect and the other through the will, another one arising from the fecundity of nature is to be admitted, and consequently another proceeding person distinct from the Word and the Holy Spirit.

The Doctor answers. ibidem n. 21., distinguishing the consequent: that a production from the fecundity of nature is to be posited in God as from an adequate principle, he denies; from an inadequate and partial one, he concedes. For the adequate and total principle of the production of the Son includes the intellect and the divine essence, each of which concurs partially in that production. The same is to be said of the divine will with respect to the production of the Holy Spirit. Whence, although the divine essence concurs as the principle by which to the production of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it does not thereby have the notion of a distinct adequate principle productive per se of some divine Person, but only insofar as it concurs with the intellect and the will; and so, since there are only two adequate productive principles of the divine Persons, there are also only two produced divine Persons.

You will insist. One and the same adequate principle can have several productions and distinct terms: therefore, although in God there are only two productive principles, it does not follow from this that there are only two produced persons. Proof of the antecedent. The created intellect, e.g., is the adequate principle of the mental word; but it can produce several total and adequately distinct words: therefore, etc.

I distinguish the antecedent. If the produced terms are not adequate, both intensively and extensively, that is, if they do not equal the whole perfection of the producing principle, both in being and in operating, I concede: if they do, I deny. The created intellect, however, can for this reason produce several distinct mental words, because none of those words equals the perfection of the intellect in being. For this is a substance, whereas that is an accident; nor in operating, because the intellect, which concurs with one impressed species to the production of one word, can again concur with another species representative of a dissimilar object to the production of another word. But it is otherwise in divine things; for the divine Word equals the whole perfection of its productive principle, both in being, because it is consubstantial with the Father, and in operating, because it exhausts and equals all the fecundity of the divine intellect; and so the consequence is to be denied.

You will subsume. But the same productive principle can have distinct adequate terms, both in being and in operating: therefore, although in divine things there are only two adequately productive principles, no fewer produced persons can exist. Proof of the antecedent. Produced fire equals all the perfection of the producing fire; for it is of altogether the same nature and activity with it; but from the same fire two other fires can be produced, from two distinct matters applied in diverse ways: therefore, etc.

I distinguish the antecedent. If it does not conflict from elsewhere, namely if the adequate term is not infinite, I concede: if it is, I deny. Whence, since one finite productive principle can have various terms that are also finite, because several finite beings of the same notion do not conflict, since one need not involve the perfection of another; for that reason a finite potency, notwithstanding its limitation, can extend itself to two terms at once, which it could produce separately. But it happens otherwise when the produced term is infinite, because it conflicts for two infinite things of altogether the same notion to exist; for either one would involve the perfections of the other, or not: if so, then they would not be diverse, nor consequently two; if not, then neither would be infinitely perfect, since it would not have those perfections which the other infinite thing would comprise. And therefore the consequence is to be denied.

You will press. As finite potency is related to a finite effect and term, so also is infinite potency to an infinite one: but finite potency can have several finite adequate terms: therefore much more will infinite potency be able to have various infinite adequate terms. Proof of the antecedent. If some difference intervened, it would be chiefly either because the infinite effect exhausts the fecundity of the productive potency, or because it is incompossible with another infinite effect of the same notion: but this does not stand in the way. Not indeed the first, because no reason appears why an infinite adequate effect would exhaust the fecundity of an infinite potency more than a finite one exhausts the fecundity of a finite potency: but the latter does not so exhaust the fecundity of its potency that it cannot further produce another adequate term, as appears from the adduced example of fire: therefore neither does one infinite term so exhaust the fecundity of an infinite potency that it cannot produce a further term. Not the second either: both because, since the effect is posterior to the cause, it does not impede the fecundity of the cause; and because all the divine Attributes and the three divine Persons are several infinite things of the same notion in the notion of Attribute and of Person, although they differ from elsewhere: therefore several infinite terms of the divine Intellect will also be able to exist, although they have their own particular characters by which they are distinguished.

I distinguish the major. According to some proportion, I concede: according to a total one, I deny. It is indeed true that, just as finite potency requires a finite adequate term, so infinite potency must have something infinite as its adequate term; but it is false that, just as a finite faculty can have successively various finite adequate terms, so an infinite one will be able to have various infinite ones; whence the consequence is to be denied. To the proof I say that the variety of infinite terms of the same divine potency conflicts on both counts; namely first, because a single term exhausts and equals the fecundity of its faculty; for if that faculty could produce something further, it would no longer act infinitely in the production of the first term, since it would not bestow every perfection whatsoever on that first term, if it could produce another equally perfect and endowed with like excellences. The second conflicts, because it is a contradiction that there be two infinite things of the same notion, on account of such express contradictions. Nor do the adduced examples prove that; for the divine personalities formally considered are neither infinite nor finite, as will appear below. Likewise the attributes formally considered are neither finite nor infinite; for thus they are distinguished formally, both from formal infinity, which is a mode of the divine essence, and from radical infinity, which is the constitutive and distinctive difference of the divine essence itself. Whence they are not infinite formally, but only really, inasmuch as they are identified with the divine Essence itself; and so they are not several infinite things, but one only, because they do not have the notion of the infinite as they are distinct, but only as they are identified.

You will say 2. There are as many divine Persons as there are their constitutive principles: but these are four: therefore also those. The major is evident: the minor is proved: The constitutive principles of the divine Persons are the opposed relations: but here there are four, namely Paternity and Filiation, passive and active Spiration: therefore, etc.

I deny the minor. And to its proof I distinguish the major: A relation belonging to one Person only is the constitutive principle of that Person, I concede: one that belongs to several Persons, I deny. Active Spiration, however, belongs to the Father and the Son, who indivisibly spirate the Holy Spirit, and therefore it is not constitutive of any divine Person; indeed it presupposes the Father as already constituted through Paternity, and the Son through Filiation.

You will insist. As being generated and being spirated are related, so are generating and spirating; but being generated and being spirated, which are signified through the relations of Filiation and of passive Spiration, constitute distinct Persons: therefore likewise generating and spirating, which are explained through Paternity and active Spiration, ought to constitute two distinct Persons.

I deny the major. For being generated and being spirated are opposed at least mediately, and therefore constitute diverse persons, namely the Son and the Holy Spirit. But generating and spirating are not opposed in any way, and therefore ought not to constitute diverse Persons.

You will say 3. In a most necessary being, to be is the same as to be able: but the divine Son can produce another Son: therefore He really produces Him. The minor is proved from St. Augustine, lib. 3. Contra Maximinum, who asserted that the Son of God is not equal to the Father, and whom Augustine thus sharply refuted in cap. 7.:

The matter is wholly gathered to this point, that God the Father either could beget for Himself an equal Son, or would not. If He could not, He is found weak; if He would not, envious; but both of these are false. Therefore the true Son is equal to God the Father; finally in cap. 12. he concludes thus: But far be it that, as you think, the Father is therefore more powerful than the Son, because the Father begot a Creature, while the Son did not beget the Creator (that is, another Son,) for it was not that He could not, but that it was not fitting:

therefore St. Augustine really judges that the Son of God could have begotten another Son like to Himself, whom nevertheless He did not beget, lest there be several divine Sons.

It is confirmed. There St. Augustine is wholly intent on proving that if the divine Father could not beget for Himself an equal Son, He was impotent, and that conversely, if He is omnipotent, He ought to have begotten for Himself an equal Son: therefore by parity of reasoning, if the Son could not beget another Son, He would not be omnipotent, nor consequently God; and so, in the mind of St. Augustine, the divine Son really could beget another son.

The Doctor answers in 1. dist. 20. qu. unic. n. 12. by denying the minor. As for the consequence of St. Augustine, he says that it holds only through an extrinsic argument, so that if the Father did not beget for Himself an equal Son, He would really not be omnipotent, not that omnipotence is the principle and reason why the Father can produce another Son, otherwise, since the Son and the Holy Spirit are equally omnipotent, They would also have to beget Sons; but that if the Father could not produce for Himself an equal Son, that impotence would argue in Him some defect, which certainly could not be other than a defect of omnipotence, since there was nothing else in the Father that could impede the production of an equal Son. But the same reason does not hold for the Son, since the negation of the production of another son cannot be traced back to a defect of His omnipotence, but to another reason, namely, that two adequate and infinite terms of the same faculty wholly contradict each other. And consequently, the divine Son did not produce another son for this reason, because He could not, or because He is not omnipotent, but because it was not fitting, or because the production of two Sons contradicts itself.

I answer 2. That St. Augustine there argues ad hominem; for since Maximinus conceded at the same time that the Son of God is the natural Son and yet that He was made and is a creature, it followed from this that there was some factible Son of God, who would be equal to the Father: therefore the Father was not omnipotent, if He could not make this Son equal and factible. But that this was the mind of St. Augustine is gathered from the following words, for he adds:

The divine generation would be immoderate, if the begotten Son begot a Grandson for the Father, because the Grandson Himself, unless He begot a great-grandson for His Grandfather, would, according to your wonderful wisdom, be called impotent. Likewise also He, if He did not beget a Grandson

for His Grandfather, and a great-grandson for His Grandfather, would not by you be called omnipotent, nor would the series of generation be fulfilled, if one were always born from another, nor would anyone perfect it, if one omnipotent did not suffice. And so He begot an omnipotent Son, since whatever He Himself does, these things the Son also does in like manner.

Third conclusion. — The three divine Persons are one God in number.

This is de fide, determined in the Councils: in the Nicene, lib. 2., where the holy Trinity is proclaimed undivided and indivisible; in the Sixth of Toledo, e. 1., In the Trinity there is so great a unity of substance, that it lacks plurality and retains equality, nor does less remain in the single persons than in all, nor more in all than in the single persons; and in the Eleventh of Toledo, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit is spoken of in the singular. And below: Therefore each single person is affirmed and believed to be one God in the singular. All of which the Lateran Council embraces in the chapter Firmiter, saying:

that there is one only and true God... the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three indeed Persons, but one essence, substance, or nature wholly simple: the Father from no one, the Son from the Father alone, and the Holy Spirit in like manner from both. The Father generating, the Son being born, and the Holy Spirit proceeding.

This very thing the holy Fathers most steadfastly defend. First of all, Pope Damasus in his profession of Faith, where he anathematizes him who would divide God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, affirming that they are called Gods and not God, on account of the one Deity and power, which we believe to be the Father's and the Son's and the Holy Spirit's. Whence St. Epiphanius in the Ancoratus pointedly notes that the seraphim in Isaiah say: holy, holy, holy, not indeed holy ones, holy ones, holy ones, whereby they pronounce the celebrated singular, nor do they hide the number of the three, but thrice indeed they give sanctification, while uniformly and in the singular they utter the word, lest they name a multitude of gods.

This same truth the holy Fathers prove with very many arguments. First indeed from the Simplicity of God: for the Divine simplicity would not be most strict, if it were not a unique and indivisible essence, as is clear from the example of human nature, which in all men is not properly and truly simple, because it consists of many natures really and numerically distinct. This argument St. Dionysius touched upon, lib. De Divinis Nominibus cap. 1. In nearly all the sacred books, he says, we notice the Divinity to be holily proclaimed, namely as singular and unique, and the simplicity and unity of that excellent individual. With him St. Gregory of Nyssa agrees at the end of the book ad Ablabium:

Since therefore, he says, it distinguishes the hypostases of the holy Trinity by the reason of cause, requiring one indeed to be without cause, another truly to be from a cause, while the Divine nature is found to be free of variation and division in every consideration, for that reason there is properly one Deity and one God, and all the other names fitting God are uttered in the singular.

St. Athanasius confirms it in the first dialogue De Trinitate contra Anomeum. The essence, he says, has no property not common to the hypostases which are subject to the essence, nor does it admit the multiplication of number, since it is unique and singular.

Secondly they prove it from the infinity of the divine essence: for an infinite essence does not admit another as its consort, because it would lack the perfection of the other, which would be possible in the same species; wherefore each created essence is numerically circumscribed and finite, nor does it admit the perfection of another. But what is not circumscribed, says the praised Nyssenus, is not numbered; and what is not numbered cannot be considered in a multitude. Whence, since the divine Essence is not circumscribed nor finite, it cannot be manifold. From this the holy Fathers infer that the divine Essence has no more or less perfection in three persons than in one alone.

This St. Augustine admirably develops, lib. 7. De Trinit. cap. 1., 5. and 6., where, after proposing various reasons why three human persons are three men, while the three divine Persons are not three Gods, he finally concludes in cap. 6.:

One man is not as much as three men together, and some two men are more than one man; and in equal statues there is more gold in three together than in single statues, and there is less gold in one than in two; but in God it is not so, for the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit together are not a greater essence than the Father alone or the Son alone: but those three substances, or persons, if they are so to be called, together are equal to each one singly.

With him agrees St. Bernard, Epist. 190. to Innocent.

The whole, he says, is the Father, which the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are; the whole is the Son, which He Himself and the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are; the whole is the Holy Spirit, which He Himself and the Father and the Son are; and the whole one is the whole, neither superabounding in three nor diminished in each one, for they do not divide among themselves particularly the true and supreme good, which they are, since neither do they possess it participially, but this very thing they are essentially.

Thirdly, finally, the holy Fathers prove it from the supreme Unity and Uniformity of God. For, says St. Fulgentius, lib. De Fide ad Petrum cap. 1., the Trinity itself would not be one God, if, just as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinguished from one another by the property of persons, so They had also been separated by a diversity of natures. Whence he adds: For this reason therefore we rightly believe and say that the three are one God, because there is altogether one eternity, one immensity, and the divinity of the three Persons is one numerically.

This very thing St. Ambrose admirably develops, lib. 5. De Fide cap. 1., where, solving this objection of the Arians saying: If you confess the Father and the Son to be of one substance, you do not introduce one God but two Gods, because those who are of one substance appear not as one God but as two Gods, just as two men, etc., he answers:

We approve by the Lord's words, that where there are several, there is a difference either of natures or of wills and operations. Finally, that they may be refuted by their own testimonies, two men are so called, because although they are of one nature, nevertheless they differ by right of birth, and in time, and in thought, and in work, and in place; and therefore one man cannot be said in the signification and number of two, because there is no unity where there is diversity. But one God is said, and the glory and fullness of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is signified.

Here I will not weave again all those scholastic arguments, which I have sufficiently and more than sufficiently inculcated in proving that the plurality of gods is impossible, and hence that the unity of the divinity is numerical and singular; nevertheless here some holy Fathers are to be explained, who seem to assert that among the divine Persons there obtains only a unity of species.

You will say. Therefore the holy Fathers affirm that the divine Persons agree with one another in the unity of the Divinity, just as two men agree in the unity of humanity: but two men so agree in specific unity, and are really two men numerically distinct from one another: therefore in like manner the three divine Persons agree only specifically, and will be three Gods numerically distinct. The major is proved, for St. Gregory of Nyssa, lib. De Fide to Simplicius, says: In the divine dogmas, being begotten makes no difference of nature, but just as in Adam and Abel there is one humanity, or human nature, in their manner also in the Father and in the Son the Deity, or divine nature, is one. Likewise St. Justin in the Expositione fidei, just as Adam, he says, although not begotten in the same manner as his descendants, nevertheless has a common essence with them, so there is no reason why, on account of the name of the unbegotten, the essence common to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit should be torn apart. Similarly St. Athanasius Contra Macedonium, in the first Dialogue:

But Paul, Peter, and Timothy are three, he says; the heretics think that the Son is not consubstantial with the Father, because He is not the Father either: and on account of the difference of persons they introduce differences of substances; how then can Abel and Adam be called consubstantial, since neither can Abel be Adam, nor Adam Abel? But if the difference of persons does not destroy the identity of nature in men, how will it not be impious, for that reason, to think that the supernatural substance of God is diversified?

From which it is clear that the holy Fathers asserted that among the divine Persons there is found only a specific unity, not indeed a numerical one, and hence that They can be called three Gods numerically distinct.

I deny the minor. For that was not the opinion of the praised Fathers, that they should establish an absolute parity between the three divine Persons and three men: but since they were dealing against the heretics, who said that the Son is a substance of a different kind from the Father, and consequently unequal, just as a creature of a different kind is unequal to the Creator, the holy Fathers refuted them thus: if the Son is truly and properly a natural Son, He must necessarily be equal and of the same substance with the Father, just as a begetting man and a begotten man are of the same substance and essence: therefore since you admit that the Word is the Son of God, you must also necessarily confess that the divine Persons are of the same substance. But by a prudent counsel, the Fathers then pronounced nothing about the numerical and real unity of the divine nature, the mention of which would undoubtedly have given the Adversaries occasion for many sophisms, by which they might blunt the force of the arguments. The Fathers therefore judged it enough to bring the disputation to this point, that the Adversaries could not deny the specific identity and equality of substance among the divine Persons; which once admitted, it was easiest for them to prove the numerical identity by those arguments already adduced by us. But that this is really the opinion of the praised Fathers is gathered sufficiently and more than sufficiently, both from what has been said and from what will be said, in which it will appear that they assert that the three divine Persons are one God in number.

From the preceding Question it is clear that various heretics have shamefully erred concerning the equality of the three divine persons: but of all, Arius wandered from the truth most disastrously, who had many forerunners and followers of his error. That this may appear more evidently

Note 1. Tertullian above all carried the torch of the Arian error; for he judged that the Word of God was then begotten by the Father, and was made the Son, when He fashioned all created things out of nothing, and he used this very manner of speech. Thus he testifies in cap. 7. Contra Praxeam:

"This is," he says, "the perfect nativity of the Word (by which, to be sure, He brought forth the Word itself in its own species and adornment, when He said: let there be light), while it proceeds from God, being fashioned by Him first for His thought under the name Sophia: the Lord founded me at the beginning of His ways; then begotten unto effect; when He prepared the heaven, I was present with Him. Thence making him equal to Himself, of whom, by proceeding, the Son was made first-begotten, as begotten before all things and only-begotten, as alone properly begotten of God from the womb of His own heart.

He builds up things no less false, indeed even more absurd, against the eternity of the Son and His equality in lib. Contra Hermogenem cap. 3., where he asserts that God was indeed from eternity, and always God, yet was not always Father:

"The Father," he says, "God and Judge: He is God, yet not the same Father and Judge always, because He could always be God, but never Father before the Son, nor Judge before the offense; there was, moreover, a time when both the offense and the Son did not exist, which would make the Lord Judge and Father.

These words contain the same error which Arius afterwards disseminated, which St. Athanasius demonstrates from his book, which he entitled Thalia, in the book De Synodis:

"He who lacks a beginning," Arius used to say, "constituted the Son as the beginning of the things that were made, and brought him forth and adopted him for himself as his own Son; he has nothing of God according to the hypostasis of his property, for he is not equal, nor even consubstantial. The Father is alien to the Son according to substance, since He is without beginning. Understand that the Monad was at the beginning, namely the Father: but the Binary, namely the Son and the Holy Spirit, did not exist before it came to be; indeed, with the Son not existing, the Father is God; finally, when the Son was not, he came to be by the Father's will, etc.

Note 2. That Arius, born in Libya, namely that part which borders on Egypt, because he was a participant in the Meletian schism, was first cut off from communion by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, as Baronius proves from the acts of the same Peter the Martyr, at the year 301., but afterwards reconciled to the Church, was made a deacon by the same Peter. But when he had again returned to the schism, he was again deprived of communion. Nay more, Peter, arrested in the persecution of Maximinus, while he was in chains, learned from Christ that Arius was a desperate case; wherefore he warned Achillas and Alexander, whom he knew by divine revelation to be destined as his successors, never to receive Arius into communion anywhere. Nevertheless, when he had feigned repentance, under Bishop Alexander he was made a priest, and was appointed curate of a certain Church, or Parish, named Bauculis, in the city of Alexandria. But when that Alexander, disputing in a certain assembly of Clerics about the mystery of the Trinity, explained more subtly in what manner the Unity was in the Trinity, Arius began to contend against him and to impute the Sabellian error to him. Hence it came about that around the year 317., as Orosius notes in lib. 7. C. 28., he began to disseminate and defend his heresy. At first there adhered to him seven Priests, twelve Deacons, one Bishop, namely the second of Pentapolis, as well as seven hundred virgins, as Epiphanius teaches in Heresy 69., all of whom Alexander cast out of the Church. Thence he wrote encyclical Letters to each of the Bishops, seventy in number, upon receiving which, the Bishops, each according to his own talent and character, replied variously. Some approving the deed, and urging him to persevere in it; others, on the contrary, began openly to profess themselves patrons of Arius, and to admonish him to receive the ejected back into favor, especially Eusebius of Nicomedia, to whom at length Eusebius of Caesarea and Patrophilus of Scythopolis adhered, who, convening Synods, restored Arius in full, as Sozomenus narrates in lib. 1. cap. 15.

Hence it came to pass that the fire kindled in the East by the continual bellows of altercations and wranglings took on greater growth day by day, and already the Christian Religion itself and the most sacred mysteries of the faith had come into contempt and mockery among the Gentiles, and the same were publicly traduced through the stages and theatres, as Eusebius reports in lib. 2. De Vita Constantini.

To settle these dissensions, the Emperor Constantine, first by letters sent to Alexander and Arius through Hosius, Bishop of Corduba in the Spains, urged them to concord. When Hosius accomplished nothing by these, he convened a Synod at Alexandria, as he had in his instructions, against the new heretics springing up. But when no hope of recovering peace and concord seemed to remain, Constantine, sending letters to the Bishops everywhere, convened the first Ecumenical Synod at Nicaea in Bithynia in the year of Christ 325., at which 318 Bishops gathered, and in which Arius was condemned, his error proscribed, and a profession of faith was published, by which the Son is asserted to be Consubstantial with the Father.

Note 3. That the heresy condemned in the Synod of Nicaea, and recanted by Arius and his disciples, gradually gathering strength, was spread far and wide not only through the spaces of regions and in the number of men, but was also divided into various sects and factions, and above all into three factions: the first of which was that of the Anomoeans, who openly said that the Son was a creature, and in no way like the Father, much less equal and co-equal; which was the very heresy of Arius himself: the second, that of the Semiarians, who by no means asserted that the Son was consubstantial with the Father, but only like Him in substance: the third, finally, lying between the two, was that of some who held that the Son was neither consubstantial, nor like in substance, but only like, and who either denied that He was a creature from the order of the rest, or did not dare to profess it openly, as Epiphanius, Athanasius, Hilarius, etc. report. Or, as Rufinus writes in lib. 1. Historiae cap. 25., this triple division of the Arian sect was marked by a triple and diverse name: for some were Eunomians and Anomoeans, who made the Son like in nothing at all; others, Arians, who said He was like by the largesse of grace, not by property of nature; the rest, Macedonians, who asserted Him like in all things; these Macedonians were also called Pneumatomachi, that is, impugners of the Holy Spirit, because they denied His divinity, and asserted that He was a pure creature. Two things, therefore, must chiefly be established in this Question, namely, the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit must be proved, and their consubstantiality with the Father must be defended; therefore let it be

First conclusion. — The Son is truly consubstantial with the Father and true God.

This is of faith, determined in various Councils and expressed in all the Catholic professions of faith, and in the first place all the testimonies of the Old and New Testament set out in the preceding Question for proving the plurality of persons in God prove it.

It is proved, moreover, by manifest oracles of the New Testament, the first of which is that celebrated confession of Peter, Matth. 16. Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God; for by asserting Him to be the Son of the living God, he professed Him to be the natural Son of God.

Add. that that divine Son is also elsewhere called the Only-begotten, Ioannis 3., and the Proper, ad Rom. 8.: but if He were only the adopted Son of God, as the Arians replied, He would be called neither only-begotten nor proper; for many are the adopted sons: moreover, if Peter had pronounced Christ to be only the adopted Son of God, there would be no reason why his confession should be preferred to the others, and why he should be proclaimed blessed by Christ on account of it; for those who thought Him to be Elias, or one of the Prophets, also confessed the adopted Son of God; Peter, therefore, must have acknowledged Him to be truly the natural Son; but if Christ is the natural Son of God, He must necessarily be in the same nature, that is, of the same nature with His principle; for in any other nature He could be nothing but adopted.

It is confirmed. from the fact that Christ Himself testified on many occasions that He is the true and natural Son of God: whence in Ioannis 19. they accused Him of having made, or proclaimed, Himself the Son of God: They said: We have a law, and according to our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God. Whence Ioann. 5.: The Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He did not only break the Sabbath, but also said God was His Father, making Himself equal to God: but Christ nowhere excused Himself for having said He was God, or the Son of God: nay, in that very chapter He adds: Amen I say to you, the Son cannot do anything of Himself, but what He sees the Father doing: for whatsoever He does, these the Son also does in like manner. By which words He not only does not answer the Jews as slanderers, but rather again asserts Himself to be the Son of God, and to have the same operation and power with the Father.

The Arians reply: that Christ excused Himself before the Jews who wished to stone Him, because He had said He was the Son of God; for when the Jews had said, Ioann. 10.: For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God, He excuses Himself by that testimony of Scripture: I said: you are gods, whence He inferred: If He called them gods to whom the word of God was made, namely the Prophets and the Patriarchs, why with a stronger right is He not called the Son of God, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world? By which argument Christ names Himself the Son of God in the same way as the just and the Prophets; and so He proved Himself to be only the adopted Son.

But such was not Christ's reasoning, as Hilarius noted very well in 7. De Trinit.; rather He argued from the lesser to the greater in this way: if the Just and the Prophets can be called sons of God, how much more He whom the Father sanctified in a peculiar manner in the unity of the divine person, that is, through the humanity assumed by the Word? Chrysostom adds that Christ indeed first answered these things to the Jews, so that He might blunt their calumny verbally by saying: in vain you say that I have blasphemed by calling myself the Son of God, since the same name is given to those to whom the word of God was made, whom you nevertheless hold to be just and holy men: but once the calumny was repulsed, He afterwards showed by His works that He was not only the adopted Son, but also true God, in these words: *If I do not the works

of my Father, believe me not, that you may know that I am in the Father and the Father in me*.

Add. that the Jews always remained in the same opinion, that He had made Himself equal to God; for the Evangelist adds: They sought to apprehend Him, certainly for the same cause for which they earlier wanted to stone Him; and they would without doubt have laid aside that intention, if they had judged that He was only asserting Himself to be an adopted son, since this appellation is attributed by Scripture to any just man.

It is confirmed 2. The true Son is the same as the natural Son: but Christ is called the true Son of God in 1. Ioann. last, That we may be in his true Son, this is the true God: therefore He is the natural Son. Then Moses, as a just and holy man, was the adopted son of God; and yet Paul ad Hebraeos 8. calls him a servant in comparison to Christ, whom he names the Son: Moses indeed, he says, was faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ as the Son in his own house: therefore Christ was not the Son of God by reason of adoption and justification, but by reason of eternal and natural generation. Finally, the Angels, on account of their eminent holiness, are sometimes called sons of God in the old Testament: but Christ is called the Son for a different reason than the Angel: For to which of the Angels, says Paul ad Hebraeos 1., did he at any time say: Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? Which, however, was said to Christ. It is, therefore, a consequence that He is the true and natural Son, born by proper generation.

Proof 2. From that passage of Ioannis 10. I and the Father are one; for that word, One, in the neuter gender, without another substantive noun, signifies the same as one being; and of one being there is a single essence. Since, therefore, the Father and the Son are not one by accident, because God is incapable of accident, as also of change; nor are they one by relation — nay, they are distinguished personally and really by relations — St. Augustine rightly infers, in book De Trinitate chapter 2., that they are one in substance.

The Arians reply, both the old and the new, namely the Transylvanians, that the Father and the Son are indeed one, not in essence or substance, but by consent of minds and unanimous concord of wills. And they confirm it from Ioann. 17., where Christ prays that all the faithful may be one, as thou, Father, in me and I in thee; that they also may be one in us: and again: I have given them the glory which thou gavest me, that they may be one, as we also are one: but the faithful among themselves and with Christ the Lord are not one in substance and essence, but in consent of faith and concord of charity: therefore, from the aforesaid oracle, the Father and the Son are not proved to be one in essence, but in concord of wills.

Against this the holy Fathers reply, as many as have written on the divine Trinity: first, that in the sacred letters, whenever several things are said to be one in such a way that it is not added what kind of one they are, the same nature and essence is signified, because, as the cited St. Augustine notes in cap. 3., one and being are convertible. One being, moreover, is the same as a single essence, which is the abstract of being, the foundation of which signification he takes from 1. ad Corinth. 6.: He who cleaves to a harlot is made one body; he did not say one absolutely, but one body: and again: He who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit; he does not say one simpliciter, but one Spirit: nor will any place be found in which several things are said to be simpliciter one, without explaining what kind of one they are, unless they are one in substance and essence. Nor does it matter that in the same place it is said of the faithful that they may be one, without adding what kind of one, for it is sufficiently understood that that unity and identity is only through consent and mutual concord, both with one another and with God, when it is said: That they all may be one, and that they also may be one in us: for it is openly certain that the faithful cannot be one with one another by unity of essence, nor with God; whence this unity cannot be understood of the unity of essence, as the unity of Christ with the Father must be understood.

Add. that in that very context Christ wished to prove that He had the same power with the Father, and that therefore no one could snatch the sheep out of His hand, because He and the Father are one, and no one can snatch from the hand of the Father: whence it necessarily follows that they are of one and the same nature and will. Thus reason St. Chrysostom Ioann. 60., Hilarius lib. 7. De Trin., Ambrose lib. 3. De Spiritu Sancto, cap. 18., Augustinus Tract. 18. in Ioannem. And they confirm it from the fact that, if Christ the Lord had meant not one in power, but only one in concord, He could not have proved from that that no one could snatch the sheep out of His hand, unless the unity of essence constituted it.

Proof 3. From that passage of prima Ioannis 5.: There are three who give testimony in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one: and there are three who give testimony on earth: the spirit, the water and the Blood, and these three are one. By which words St. John signifies that there are three witnesses in heaven, not indeed Angels — for they are more than three — but divine witnesses, namely the Persons of the Trinity, who are one, that is, one Divinity, essence and substance, as all the holy Fathers interpret.

The Arians reply: First, that those words There are three who give testimony in heaven are read by St. Jerome alone.

But this is an open lie, for Pope Higinius in Epist. 1., and Cyprianus in lib. De Unitate Ecclesiae, etc. also read it so.

They reply 2. That in the same way the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are said to be one by St. John, as the Spirit, the Water and the Blood: but these three are not one in essence, but only in testimony, because they testify the same thing, namely, that Christ the Lord endured the torments not by natural and human, but by divine power: the Spirit indeed, because, crying out strongly after so many tortures, He expired; the Water likewise and the Blood, which flowed from His side when He was already dead; wherefore the Centurion, seeing and hearing these things, rightly exclaimed, Marci 15.: Indeed this man was the Son of God. Therefore also the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are only one by unity of testimony, and not one by unity of substance and essence.

I answer 1. That that phrase, and these three are one, when the discourse is about the Spirit, the Water and the Blood, is not read in some exemplars. Second, that in the Greek idiom it is not read simpliciter, and these three are one, but and these three are in one, namely in one testimony; but of the three heavenly witnesses it is read simpliciter, these three are one, by which it is signified that they are one by unity of essence and substance.

Proof 4. From all those texts of Sacred Scripture in which the divinity of the Son is expressly set forth, such as Ioannis 1.: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, whence St. Ambrose, lib. 1. De Fide Trinitatis: Our Fisherman excluded all heresies in these four or five words; for what was in the beginning is not included in time, is not preceded in the beginning: therefore let Arius hold his peace, who denies that the Son is coeternal with the Father. But what was with God is not confounded by commixture; rather it is distinguished by the solid perfection of the abiding God with the Father, so that Sabellius and Photinus, who acknowledged no distinction among the divine persons, may be struck silent. But if the Word was God of sempiternal divinity, in the Father and the Son there is inseparable unity and consubstantiality, so that Eudoxius and Eunomius blush: behold how within one text he rightly concluded all, so as to render them incapable of fraud, although they were useless against captiousness.

It is confirmed. from that text of Isaiah 45.: They shall adore thee, and shall make supplication to thee; only in thee is God, and there is no God besides thee; truly thou art a hidden God, the God of Israel, the Saviour: by which the divinity of Christ is openly signified. Secondly, from that text of Baruch 3.: This is our God, and no other shall be accounted of in comparison of him; he adds, however: After this he was seen upon earth, etc. who is over all things, God blessed for ever. We shall bring forth in passing many other contexts of Scripture hinting at the divinity of the Son in the course of this Work.

Since, however, the Arians shamelessly boasted that none of the Fathers had remembered the divinity and consubstantiality of the Son before the controversy arose, it is worthwhile to bring forward some Fathers of the nascent Church who professed the divinity and consubstantiality of the three divine Persons: these are chiefly Clemens Romanus, lib. 8. Constit. Apostol., Ignatius in the Epistola ad Antiochenos, ad Philadelphos, ad Philippenses, Dionysius Areopagita, lib. De mystica Theologia cap. 2. and lib. De divinis Nominibus cap. 1., Iustinus, lib. De Fide and in the Apologia ad Antonium and in the Dialogo cum Tryphone., Irenaeus, lib. 3. c. 8. 9. 16. 19. 20. and lib. 1. cap. 11., Clemens Alexandrinus, lib. 1. Paedag. cap. 6. and lib. ult. cap. ult., Tertullianus, lib. Contra Praxeum, Cyprianus, lib. 2. ad Quirinum cap. 6., and other orthodox writers of the earlier centuries before the Council of Nicaea: after whom so many Doctors wrote for this truth that it would be long and useless to enumerate them.

The Arians object first the various contexts of sacred Scripture in which the divine Son is said to be created and a creature: thus Proverbiorum 8. we read in Greek of Wisdom, The Lord created me in the beginning of his ways in his works; similarly, Colossians cap. 1. Christ is called the Image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, that is, the first and most excellent of all creatures, as the Arians interpret it; therefore he is not truly God, nor consubstantial with the eternal Father.

I deny the consequence. and to the first context I answer 1. that the Greek version in this place does not seem to agree with the Hebrew text, which in place of "He created" has "He possessed me", as our Vulgate expresses it: But between possession (says Jerome, Epist. 139., in which he treats the same place) and creation there is much difference; for possession signifies that the Son was always in the Father and the Father in the Son: but creation is the beginning of the condition of him who previously was not: hence Basil of Seleucia, Orat. 1. De Adamo in Paradisum translato, says: Man was made the possessor of those things of which he had already been the creator.

I answer secondly. that since in Christ there are two natures, namely the human and the divine, in a certain

Certain things are attributed to him according to one nature which do not belong to the other; and so according to the divine nature he is truly the uncreated Wisdom, but according to the human he can be called the created Wisdom, as very many holy Fathers interpret, especially Athanasius, Orat. 3., where, treating this passage, The Lord created me, he says: We must not so think that the whole Word is by its own nature a creature; but that he put on a body that is a creature, and that for our sake he was created by God.

Or, as Ambrose says, lib. 3. De Fide cap. 5.: The Arians, like Jewish tavern-keepers, mix water with wine, because they confound the divine and the human generation, referring to the divinity what was said of the flesh. For this reason St. Augustine lib. 1. De Trinitate, cap. 11. commends this rule for understanding the Scriptures concerning the Son of God, that we should distinguish what in them sounds according to the form of God, in which he is equal to the Father, and what according to the form of the servant, which he received from the Father.

Similarly I answer to the 2. context, that Christ, as incarnate Wisdom, is called the firstborn, because he was beforehand destined by God, for all things are on account of Christ; and his incarnation was, as it were, the motive for God to fashion man and the world.

They object 2. those texts of Scripture in which the Son is said to be inferior to and subject to the Father, such as Ioannis 14.: The Father is greater than I. And Matth. ultimo: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth: and ad Philippenses 1.: Made obedient unto death: therefore he was not truly equal to the Father in divinity, authority and power.

I answer 1. That here all these things are indeed true according to the assumed humanity, but not according to the divinity, or, as St. Athanasius speaks in the Creed, Equal to the Father according to Divinity, etc. For in putting on humanity he also put on servitude: whence after the Apostle had said, He did not think it robbery to be equal to God, he adds: He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, etc. And in this way it can be verified that he was subject to the Father and that authority in heaven and in earth was given to him, which he did not claim for himself by right of human nativity.

I answer 2. that the Son is also said by some Fathers to be less than the Father according to divinity, namely inasmuch as he has a principle from the Father, who is therefore called greater because he lacks a principle: thus St. Hilary, although he explains the aforementioned passage of the assumed human nature in 9. lib. De Trinit., nevertheless also interprets it of the divinity, saying: Therefore the Father is greater than the Son, and plainly greater, to whom he gives as much being as he himself is: or, as Sabadius more briefly has it, lib. Contra Arianos: The Father, he says, is greater than I, rightly greater, because he alone is here the author without an author. But St. Augustine explains the matter most clearly of all, lib. De Fide et Symbolo, saying that Christ said these things partly on account of the administration of the assumed man; partly because the Son owes to the Father what he is, owing this also to the Father, that he is equal or like to the same Father: but the Father owes to no one whatever he is.

You will object 3. True divinity does not suffer a defect of knowledge: but in the Son such a defect of knowledge and ignorance is found; as is evident from that text of Mark 15., where Christ, speaking of the day of judgment: But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the Angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.

I answer 1. That St. Ambrose, lib. 5. De Fide cap. T., believed that the codices of the Gospel had been falsified by the Arians, because that phrase, "nor the Son", is absent from the ancient copies; Jerome also, in the Commentario ad cap. 21. Matthaei, says that in certain Latin codices "nor the Son" was added, although it is not found in the Greek exemplars and especially in those of Adamantius and Pierius.

Secondly I say that this restriction of knowledge in the Son is to be understood of him according to the humanity specifically, not reduplicatively, that is, not denying that the humanity of Christ knew the aforesaid day, but that he did not know it with human knowledge; for he did not know it except through knowledge divinely infused, or through revelation: whence Athanasius, Orat. 3., where he at length weighs this oracle, says:

It is manifest that he knows the end of all these things, inasmuch as he is the Word; but inasmuch as he is man, he is ignorant, for it is proper to man to be ignorant, and especially of such things: but this is peculiar to the kindness of our Saviour: for after he was made man, he was not ashamed, on account of the flesh, to say, I do not know, so as to show that he, who as God knows, does not know carnally.

So likewise very many holy Fathers think, especially Hilary, Augustine, etc.

They object 1. the various opinions of the holy Fathers; first of all St. Ignatius' Epistola ad Magnesianos, where he says of Christ: He announced his one and only true God as his Father: therefore, they say, the Father alone is the true God, not so the Son. Secondly, the Epistola ad Tharsenses, where he likewise says of Christ: He is not that one who is God over all things, but his Son. Thirdly, the same author's Epistola ad Philippenses, where he proves that the Father is one God by that text of Deuteronomy 6.: The Lord thy God is one God, and about the middle he introduces Christ speaking with Satan at the time of the temptation in these words: I know him, namely God, I acknowledge one only, to whom I do not deny service, from whom thou, Apostate, wast made; I am not Antitheus, that is, contrary to God, I confess his eminence. From which the Arians gather that the Father alone is God, to whom service is due.

I answer. that by these and other similar words of Ignatius the other persons are not excluded by him from the fellowship of Divinity with the Father; nay, he himself openly affirms the Divinity of the Son in the cited Epistola ad Tharsenses; for he adds of Christ: How then is such a one a pure man, having at last from Mary the beginning of his existence, and not rather God the Word and the only-begotten Son, of whom it was said: in the beginning was the Word? Whence also in the earlier words Ignatius deliberately did not say: because he is not God over all things, but because he is not that one who is God over all things; so that the pronoun "that one" designated the person of the Son distinct from the Father, who is therefore especially called over all things, because he is doubtless the fount of all Divinity. We shall solve the other cavils and objections of the Arians in the course of this Treatise.

Second conclusion. — The Holy Spirit is true God, and therefore consubstantial with the Father and the Son.

This is inferred from the preceding conclusion, and is specially proved by those texts of Scripture, first those by which it is commanded that baptism be conferred, In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: Matth. ultimo, and Titus 3.: He saved us by the laver of regeneration and renovation of the Holy Spirit: from which St. Gregory of Nazianzus gathers: If the Holy Spirit is not God to be adored, how does he make me God through baptism? As if he would say: if I am sanctified through baptism and, by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, am made God by participation of divine holiness: therefore he is God to be adored, because no one can remit sins, nor sanctify, except God alone.

Secondly, Acts 5. Peter thus addresses Ananias: Why hath Satan tempted thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? soon after he declares to whom he had lied: Thou hast not lied to men, but to God, where Epiphanius, Heresy 74.: Therefore God is from God, and the Holy Spirit, he says, is God, to whom they lied who had embezzled from the price of the field.

Proof 2. To have a temple and to be the beatitude of a rational creature, and its ultimate end, belongs to God alone: but these things are attributed in Scripture to the Holy Spirit; for of the first it is said 1. ad Corinth. 6.: Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit? And of the other, 1. Peter 1.: the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, on whom the Angels desire to look. But he on whom the Angels desire to look is their Beatitude and ultimate end: therefore, etc.

Thirdly. He is truly God to whom the operations and properties of Divinity belong: but all those belong to the Holy Spirit: for first, it is a property of Divinity to be everywhere; but at Sapientiae primo: The Spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole world. Secondly, creation is the work of God alone: but to the Holy Spirit is attributed Psalm. 13.: Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created: Judith. 16.: Thou sentest thy Spirit and they were created, etc. Thirdly, to raise up and quicken the dead is an operation proper to God, as is evident from that text of Ioannis 5.: As the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth, so the Son quickeneth whom he will: but this power belongs to the Holy Spirit, for as St. Paulus speaks, Rom. 8.: He that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies, because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Finally, it belongs to God alone to foretell and announce future things through the Prophets: but from 2. Peter 1. cap.: Holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Spirit: therefore the Holy Spirit is true God, since indeed he has operations proper to God; not by ministry alone, as the Macedonians once said, but by authority; for Paul says, 1. ad Corinth. 10.: All these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to every one according as he will. Whence it must be inferred with St. Fulgentius, lib. 3. Ad Trasimundum cap. 25.:

Let it be said therefore, he says, if he who is not God could fix the power of the heavens: if he who is not God can sanctify in the regeneration of baptism: if he who is not God can bestow Charity: if he who is not God can dwell in believers: if he who is not God can give grace: if he who is not God can have the members of Christ as a temple; then the Holy Spirit will worthily be denied to be God... But if these things were never possible to a creature, and are found in the Holy Spirit, to whom, however, they belong to God alone, we must not say that he is naturally different from the Father and the Son, whom we cannot find different in the power of works, and so from the unity of the work the unity of power is to be acknowledged.

The Macedonians object: First, that text of John: All things were made by him, namely by the Word: therefore the Holy Spirit also was made by him. Secondly, that text of Rom. 8.: The Spirit asketh for us: but if he were God, he would not ask, but would give: therefore he is not true God. Thirdly, Ioann. 16.: Whatsoever he shall hear he shall speak, and he shall announce to you: but he who must hear and be instructed, so as to speak to others, is not God: therefore, etc.

I answer to the first. with Nazianzen, Orat. 5. on Theology, that not all things were made through the Word, but whatsoever things were made; and that the Holy Spirit is outside the order of those things which were made, for otherwise the Father also would have been made through the Word.

To the second I say with St. Augustine, Epistle 121., that Paul asserts that the Holy Spirit asketh for us, because he makes us ask, aiding our infirmity with his graces and helps, so that we may ask: whence Paul, Galatians 4.: God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father.

To the third I say with St. Basil, lib. 1. Contra Eunomium, that the Holy Spirit hears from the Father and the Son those things which he speaks and announces, not through instruction and a discipline begged from one wiser and more learned, but through the communication of that very essence and divine knowledge which he received from the Father and the Son through eternal procession.

AN UNITAS TRIUM DIVINARUM PERSONARUM CONSUBSTANTIALITATIS VOCABULO A SANCTIS PATRIBUS RECTE EXPLICATA FUERIT.

The word ὁμοούσιος, or Consubstantial, was used by the holy Fathers, above all in the Nicene Synod, to express the unity of essence and substance of the three persons; for this word condemns Sabellius as much as Arius: Sabellius indeed, because since the same thing is not consubstantial with itself, if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were one person, they would not be consubstantial; but Arius, because if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were distinct persons, they would not be ὁμοούσιοι, or consubstantial, but at most, according to Arius, they would be ὁμοιούσιοι, that is, of similar substance; and according to Sabellius, ὁμοούσιοι, that is, of one substance; whence Epiphanius, Haeresi 69.: As the serpent, he says, flees the smell of bitumen, as it flees the breath of the hind, or hyacinth stones, or the fumigation of storax; so Arius and Sabellius hold in abhorrence that constant truth, the profession of the consubstantial. Wherefore Marius Victorinus, in his little work on the word ὁμοούσιος, affirms that it was divinely discovered: and St. Athanasius, in the book De Synodo, divinely calls it a Column, or Pillar, in which the impiety of those, namely of the Arians, is proscribed, and as it were a trophy is set up over it, conquered and prostrated. Pope Liberius likewise agrees, Epist. 11. ad Orientales, about the middle, concerning the Nicene faith, where he speaks thus: What is comprised under the name consubstantial, like a firm and inexpugnable bulwark, beats back and represses all the onslaughts and engines of God. Not only, moreover, did Catholics use this word, but also heretics older than the Nicene Synod. For St. Athanasius relates, in the book De Synodis Ariminensi et Seleuciensi, that Paul of Samosata, who asserted that Christ was not begotten of God from eternity, but had His origin only in time, from Mary, used this argument, that unless it were so, it would follow that He was consubstantial with the Father; and so that there would be three substances, one primary and two derived from it. He interpreted consubstantiality, namely, in the way it is found in creatures and corporeal things, in which, that is, from one substance another, distinct and separate, is propagated. Whence the same St. Athanasius affirms, at the end of the same book, that the bishops, who to the number of seventy — or, as St. Hilary writes, eighty — gathered at Antioch against Paul

of Samosata decreed that the Son is not ὁμοούσιον, that is, consubstantial with the Father, namely in the sense in which Paul of Samosata had understood it: whence St. Hilary, in the book De Synodis, toward the end,

Samosatenus confessed ὁμοούσιον badly, he says; but did the Arians deny it any better? Eighty bishops once rejected it; but three hundred and eighteen recently received it. Those disapproved it against the heretic; and so, both in approving and in disapproving, both parties established one and the same thing. Why do we compare things well established?

Now that this was the cause of the sanctioning and using of the word by the Nicene Fathers, St. Athanasius relates in the book De Decretis Synodi Nicaenae that when the Catholic bishops in the Nicene Synod deliberated among themselves by what formula of words they might frame the true profession of faith, so as to extinguish the Arian treachery, first it came into their mind to say that the Son is God of God, only-begotten; but when Eusebius of Nicomedia, who defended and cherished the party of the Arians, had warned his followers that they had no reason to fear assenting to this determination, because all created things were likewise from God, the Fathers, noticing this, added that the Son is from the substance of the Father; but when this addition also pleased the Arians, they subjoined that the Son is the power and image of the Father, and like Him in all things and immutable; seeing, however, that the Arians would not decline to subscribe even to this, then, to shake and crush their heresy, they used the name ὁμοούσιον, affirming that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, so that He might be believed not only like Him, but altogether of the same nature and substance with Him.

Indeed, the occasion for using this word was furnished by Eusebius of Nicomedia himself, as St. Ambrose affirms, lib. 3. De Fide, cap. 7.: for one of his letters was brought to the Fathers, the one which he directed to his followers, in which he warned them not to confess the Son as true God, because this was to confess Him consubstantial with the Father, which he judged most contrary to his own opinion: For, says St. Ambrose, why would they be unwilling to call the Son ὁμοούσιον with the Father, unless because they are unwilling to confess Him the true Son of God? Just as their own author Eusebius of Nicomedia declared in his letter, saying: if we say that He is the true and uncreated Son of God, we begin to confess Him ὁμοούσιον with the Father. When this letter had been read in the Nicene Council, the Fathers placed this Word in the statement of the faith, because they saw that it was a terror to their adversaries, so that, as it were with a sword drawn by themselves, they might cut off the head of their nefarious Heresy. Whence St. Gregory of Nazianzus rightly notes, Orat. 49., that the Arians admitted all other words, by which they pretended to profess the Divinity of the Son, except ὁμοούσιον: They could, he says, have named ὁμοούσιον, like the rest, verbatim, if they had had a way to pervert it, according to their sense, to another meaning. But when they saw themselves caught in this word, they wanted no mention at all to be made of this matter: lest either by professing they should be believed, or by believing they should seem to profess, excusing themselves with a subtle device, that either it was not written, or that God ought not to be said to be in substance, lest He be believed corporeal, etc. Or, as St. Athanasius adds in the book De Synodo Ariminensi: The refined account of this word, he says, since it convicts the pretence of all of them, if indeed they say that He is from God, also shuts out their subtle arguments, by which they circumvent the simple. Certainly, since they can adulterate and change all things with sophistical calumnies at their pleasure, they dread this single expression alone, as the one which convicts their heresy; and this the Fathers set in writing and opposed as a bulwark and citadel against all their impious inventions.

Therefore the Arians employed all their engines and onslaughts to abolish that distinction; for they objected first that this word was a new invention, unknown to the ancient Fathers and Apostles, and not found in Sacred Scripture; and therefore to be rejected, since the Sage admonishes, Proverbiorum 22.: Do not transgress the ancient boundaries; and the Apostle, 1. ad Timoth. 6.: Keep the deposit, avoiding profane novelties of words: therefore, etc.

To which the holy Fathers answered 1. that this argument must be turned back against the Arians:

For if they think that all words not written in Scripture are to be wholly excluded, says St. Athanasius, lib. De Synodis, why did they not contradict Arius, who heaped up so great a mass of expressions which nowhere occur in the Scriptures, such as: from non-existent things; and the Son was not before He was begotten; and He was when He was not; and the Father is changeable, and is ineffable, and is invisible to His own Son; and the Son does not know even His own substance; and the rest, which Arius vomited forth in his ridiculous and impious commentary, from his own opinion?

Or as Hilary elegantly wrote in the book Contra Constantium Augustum, who was himself an Arian:

The Apostle commands that not novelties of words but profane ones be avoided; why do you exclude pious ones, especially since it was said by him: all Scripture divinely inspired is useful? Do you nowhere read 'unbegotten' written? Will this too have to be denied, because it is new? You decree that the Son is like the Father: the Gospels do not preach this. How is it that you do not shrink from this word? In one case novelty is chosen, in another it is set aside. Where an occasion of impiety lies open, novelty is admitted. But where the greatest and only safeguard of religion is concerned, it is excluded.

They answered 2. that in truth the name ὁμοούσιον and consubstantial is not new; since it had been used by the ancient Fathers, namely by Tertullian, lib. 4. Contra Marcionem; by Prochorus in the Vita S. Ioannis: by St. Martial, Epist. 1. ad Burdigalenses, cap. 10., etc. This the Arians themselves acknowledged; for St. Athanasius relates, in the Epistola ad Africanos Episcopos, that Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, although he had earlier favored the Arian Sect, nevertheless later subscribed to the decrees of the Nicene Council, and affirmed the same thing among his own people in his own letters; of which these are the words: We know that certain learned and renowned Prelates of old, and other writers, when they spoke of the Deity of the Father and the Son, used the word consubstantial; a copy of this letter, moreover, is found in Theodoret, lib. 1. Historiae Ecclesiasticae, cap. 12. Add that this name is inserted even in the sacred Scriptures, inasmuch as the sacred Scriptures expressly affirm that the Father and the Son are one; and that the Son is begotten from the womb of the Father, and equal, etc. Whence St. Augustine, lib. 3. Contra Maximinum, cap. 14.: What is ὁμοούσιον, except I and the Father are one?

They answered 3. that as new diseases arise, new remedies must be applied, and that against new dogmas new formulas of faith must also be written down; for, as the holy Athanasius rightly replied in the disputation held at Laodicea before Probus: It is always the custom of ecclesiastical discipline that, whenever a new doctrine of heretics arises, against the insolent novelties of questions, while things remain immutably the same, the words of names be changed, and the natures of things be expressed more significantly — words which nevertheless show that their existence corresponds to the powers of the causes, and that they were the same in antiquity rather than new.

They objected 2. that the most pious Emperor Constantine reproved the word ὁμοούσιον as new and useless, in the letter which he wrote through Hosius of Corduba to Alexander and Arius, in which he says: It is a very trifling matter, and by no means worthy of so great contention: and after a few words: You will make inquiry about a certain empty particle of a question: and a little below: Concerning matters of this kind, neither ask at all, nor answer when asked: for such questions as no law or Ecclesiastical Canon prescribes of necessity, but an empty contest of dissolute idleness proposes.

The holy Fathers answered that an excessive zeal for composing the tumults excited in the Churches impelled the pious Emperor to believe readily the deceivers who affirmed that the dissension of the Arians from the Catholics was about a single word; but, as we read written in lib. 2. Concilii Nicaeni, a little before the subscriptions, in a fragment, once he had been informed of the definition of the Nicene Council, he praised God when he had heard these divine dogmas, and rejoicing at the concord of our bishops, he exulted in spirit: for he strove that no one, neither great nor small, should dissent from this confession; whence he wrote orthodox letters against Arius, which are related in book 4. Concilii Nicaeni.

Finally they object that the word ὁμοούσιον and consubstantial was proscribed and condemned by the Councils of Ariminum and Sirmium.

But I answer that although very many reject the authority of the Synod of Ariminum, as one favoring the Arian heresy, nevertheless in the Synod of Ariminum, insofar as it had the character of a Synod, not only was nothing decreed against the name or the reality of the consubstantial, but rather the Catholic truth on this matter was defined anew, and Valens and Ursacius, the supporters of the Arians, with their fifty or eighty followers who were present at the Synod, were condemned by three hundred and more Fathers, and in this way the Synod was dissolved: but when its definition had been sent to the Emperor Constantius, devoted to the Arians, he forced and compelled some of those Fathers to subscribe to the confession fabricated by the Arians; wherefore the Synod of Ariminum is condemned by some: although only that subscription should be condemned, which was made after the Synod by the Fathers lingering at Ariminum and awaiting the response of the Emperor. As for the Council of Sirmium, it is certain that nothing at all was done in it freely and rightly; but only under compulsion and by force; as the Arian Emperor Constantius was present and pressing; nor does it matter that Liberius and Hosius subscribed to it, for they did this out of weariness of exile, as we will show at greater length in the Tractatu de Conciliis.