Scotus Academicus, Tomus tertius: De adorando divinae Trinitatis mysterio

The sacred Text of Exodus 19. and 20. narrates that when Moses, urged by the divine command, had prepared himself for two whole days for the sight and companionship of God, at length on the third day, ascending the summit of Mount Sinai, he drew near to the darkness in which God was. From the two Disputations now completed it is clear that we have fulfilled, as it were, two mystical days, so that we might go round the mountain and height of the divine Trinity, inasmuch as, once its existence and principles have been examined, our soul would be more ready and more vigorous for the intimate contemplation of those divine Persons. Now, therefore, it is permitted to approach the sight and throne of each divine Person, and to inspect their proper and singular characters, and to disclose them one by one; which indeed we shall accomplish in the three following Articles.

The first Person among the divine Persons is set forth by three most excellent titles of glory, according to a threefold consideration of him; for he can be regarded either according to his primacy, and insofar as he draws his origin from no other, and is called the Innascible, or the Unbegotten; or by respect to the Son, whom he alone produces, and is named the Father; or finally by his relation to the two Persons produced together, to whom he communicates the Deity from his infinite fecundity, and is called their principle; of which certain things are to be touched upon in the three following Questions.

Note 1. The name of Father, attributed to God in the sacred Letters, is taken three ways: first indeed generally, for the productive principle of creatures, according to that text of Deuteronomy 32. Is He not your Father who possessed you, and made, and created you? In which way the name of Father is common to the three divine Persons, no less than the power of creating and its exercise. Second, more specially, for God justifying and adopting to Himself the rational creature as a Son by the benefit of sanctifying grace, of which Paul to the Romans 8.: You have received the Spirit of adoption of sons, in which we cry, Abba, Father, etc. And in this way also it is common to the three Persons, just as the will and the power of creating and justifying are; it is however appropriated to the Holy Spirit, because this sanctifying grace is conferred, and justification is made through love; but the Holy Spirit is love by virtue of His procession. Third, finally, it is taken notionally, for the generative principle of the consubstantial Son, of the same nature with His principle; in which way the name of Father is said to belong properly to the first Person alone, to the other divine Persons, however, only analogically.

Note 2. The adverb properly is wont to be employed in three ways at most: first indeed, to signify the same thing as truly, and not fictitiously, in which way Christ, Ioan. 15., says: I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman. Second, to designate a proper, and not metaphorical, mode of speech, in which way Christ is called Savior, etc. Third, finally, insofar as that is called proper which is not common to several, but belongs to one alone; thus Paternity is said to be proper to the first Person, Filiation to the second, and passive Spiration to the third. It is in this last way, however, that we employ the word properly in the present Question.

Note 3. That although in this mortal life we cannot attribute to God any name so proper that it signifies and makes known to us what He is in Himself; nevertheless it is permitted to borrow some names from created things, by which we may signify divine realities according to a certain likeness and proportion which they have with those creatures, for signifying which these words were first imposed; For the infinity of our intelligence, says Hilary, lib. 1. De Trinit., compels us to seek certain forms from lower things as indices of higher ones, so that, admonished by the familiarity of well-known things, we might be led from the consciousness of our sense to the apprehension of an unfamiliar meaning. Whence it comes about that the mode of signifying of those words, insofar as they are attributed to God, is always improper, unless we have first cut away from words of this sort all the passions of the senses and the remaining imperfections which accompany the entity or the operation of creatures signified through those words. These things having been premised, two things remain to be established: first, that the reality signified by the name of Father properly belongs to the first divine Person alone; second, that this august name befits Him far more excellently than any creature.

First conclusion. — The first Person among the divine Persons is properly called Father. This is of faith, and is gathered from the innumerable texts of Sacred Scripture in which the incarnate Word calls the Person, from whom He draws His eternal origin, and receives life and divine being, His Father, as has been intimated above at greater length, especially from that text of Matth. 28.: Baptizing them in the name of the Father, etc. Whence St. Cyril, in the dialogue De Trinitate, cap. 2.: He commanded to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, namely because He gathered together, and set forth to us, in place of others, the most distinct names constituting the proper existence of each thing signified. It is likewise established from those things which we said in proving that the divine Persons are constituted through true relations of origin: but these are none other than Paternity, Filiation, and passive Spiration; therefore the relation of Paternity truly and properly belongs to God; and so the first Person is truly called Father.

It is proved moreover: the name of Father truly and properly befits the first Person, if that which is signified through this name truly and properly belongs to it: but it is so. It is proved: that which is properly signified by the name of Father is that the Person to whom it is attributed produces another through a true generation, by which it is the origin of a living being from a living being in likeness of nature: but the first divine Person produces the second in this way, as has been proved: therefore, etc. It is confirmed from the fact that Christ Himself professes that He had it among His commands and commissions to make known to men the proper name of His principle; for thus, near the end of His life, He addresses the Father, Ioann. 17.: I have manifested Your name to men, etc.; namely the name of Father, as the holy Fathers Augustine, tract. 106. on John, Chrysostom, Homil. 80., understand. And deservedly indeed, for earlier Christ, Ioann. 16., had said: The hour comes when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs, but I will announce to you plainly of My Father: whence Cyril, book 10. Thesauri cap. 6.: I have manifested Your name to men, because namely You are the true Father, and You have a true Son. John also says, 1. cap. 5.: That we may be in His true Son.

He proves, secondly, by St. Athanasius, Orat. 2., that the name of Father belongs to God primarily, and that from Him its property has passed into the human race; and so it is to be attributed to God more properly than to men, in that no man is simpliciter to be called Father, because there is no one who is not the son of another parent, and none who cannot lack a son, and so his own paternity:

But, he says, in the Divinity it does not happen thus; for neither is the Father from another Father, nor is the Son from an effluxion of the Father, or begotten of the unbegotten Father: whence he concludes that in the Divinity alone the Father is properly Father, and the Son properly Son; and in these alone does this consist, that the Father is always Father, and the Son is always Son.

With him agrees Faustinus, lib. 2. Contra Arianos: He alone, he says, is properly the true Father, who is Father without beginning and end; for He did not at some time begin to be Father; but He is always Father, always having a Son begotten of Himself.

You will say. The holy Fathers deny that the name of Father and Son belongs to God: therefore no Conclusion. The antecedent is proved: first indeed from St. Dionysius, who in the book De Theologia mystica, cap. 5., about the middle, says that God is neither spirit, as we know it, nor is there a notion of Son or of Father, nor any of those things which are known to us or to any nature. Likewise St. Basil, in the Tractate De vera, et pia fide, about the middle, says: The word Father, if we take it in God with its full signification, as it is in use among us, we act impiously; therefore, etc.

I deny the antecedent. And to its proof I say that it is not the opinion of the praised Fathers that the name and notion of Father should be judged to be removed from God, but only that they do not belong to God in the way in which it is attributed to creatures: that this may appear more evidently, to the aforesaid authorities I respond singly: St. Dionysius denies that God is Father in the way in which he had earlier said in the same place that He is not Knowledge, nor Truth, nor Kingdom, nor Wisdom; nor One, nor Unity, nor Divinity, nor Goodness; namely in the way in which the weak and infirm feebleness of our mind is wont to conceive these things; but that He possesses all these in a certain supereminent way; since indeed he says at the end of the chapter: And may that perfect and singular cause of all things surpass every affirmation, and may the excellence of Him, who is wholly set apart from all things, and greatly exceeds all things, be superior to every negation. To St. Basil similarly I say that he does not exclude the notion of Father from God; since indeed in lib. 5. Contra Eunomium he affirms that God truly generates, and truly brings forth the Word: and in lib. 2. he had said, speaking of the words Generation, Father, and Son, that he who dares to neglect these words destroys at the same time the whole power of the Gospel: and so he wills only that the signification of passion be cut away, which is found in created generations; and that only the production of a similar being in nature be retained, where the discourse is of divine generation: whence after the words cited in the objection he adds: Since necessarily together with it there are at the same time the affection, and the effluxion of genitive seed, and ignorance, and weakness, and such things as are set forth in creatures in the very name of Father.

Second conclusion. — The name and notion of Father belongs to God far more excellently than to creatures.

This is most certain among the holy Fathers, and they confirm it by various reasons. First indeed, from the fact that every paternity of creatures draws its origin from the divine Paternity: whence Cyril of Alexandria, lib. 1. in Ioannem c. 8., writes thus: God does not have the name of Paternity from us; but we rather seem to have received it from Him; for faithful is the word of Paul crying to the Ephesians 3.: From Him every Paternity in the heavens and on earth is named. St. Jerome subscribes to him, saying on the same words of the Apostle:

Just as God imparts to others the name of His essence and substance, so that they also are so called, etc., so also He has bestowed on all the name of Paternity from Himself; as therefore He alone, being good, makes others good, and He alone, being immortal, bestows immortality, and He alone, being true, imparts the name of truth; so the Father alone, who is the Creator of all, and the cause of all things, grants to the other substances that they be called fathers.

Second, they deduce the excellence of the divine Paternity above the created from the fact that the divine Father acknowledges no other Father, nor begets another Son as a Son; thus St. Athanasius Epist. ad Serapionem:

He alone, he says, alone and one Father is the Father of the alone and one Son, and it is in the Deity alone that this being Father and being Son is constituted, and it always is: for among men, if anyone is called Father, he was the son of another: and if anyone is the Son of this one, he in turn is called the Father of another, so much so that among men the appellation of Father and Son is not properly preserved.

Third, that Paternity belongs to God quidditatively and substantially, not however only accidentally, as to creatures; wherefore St. Cyril, lib. 12. Thesauri cap. 5., professes that the Son proceeds from the Father essentially.

Fourth and finally, they infer this pre-eminence from the fact that the eternal Father regards the most perfect Son, produced by the most excellent generation, and most perfectly assimilated to Himself: whence St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. 23., thus briefly touches all these and other pre-eminences of the divine Paternity:

Let us believe Him to be Father, Father much more truly than those who among us hold that name; then because He is Father in a proper and singular way: then because He alone is Father, for not with the conjunction and congress of a woman: then because He is the Father of the sole one, namely of the Only-begotten; then because He is Father alone, for He Himself was not a Son before He was Father; then because He is Father in whole, and of the whole, > which certainly cannot be affirmed of us; then because He is Father from the beginning, for neither did He begin to be Father later.

Gather from these things. God is far more excellently said to be the Father of His Son, than He is said to be the Father of creatures. First, because God is called the Father of creatures not naturally and necessarily, but contingently and freely. Second, not through a conjoined principle, and an immanent and generative action ad intra, but through a factive and creative action ad extra. Third, not from eternity, but in time. Fourth, Paternity in God is nothing real, but a mere extrinsic denomination. Fifth and finally, He does not infuse into creatures a likeness in nature, nor does He assimilate them perfectly to Himself in substance, but only either in a likeness of vestige, which belongs to irrational things, with respect to which He is sometimes called Father; thus Job 38.: Who is the Father of rain? or in a likeness of image, which is found in every rational creature, according to which all men can say: Our Father, who art in the heavens; or finally in a likeness of grace, by which reason the appellation of Father is frequent, both in the Old and in the New Testament. Nor does it matter that St. Basil, lib. 2. Contra Eunomium, about the middle, says: God is our Father, not by abuse or transference, but properly, primarily, and truly so called; with these words Basil wished to indicate nothing other than that God is our principle in a more excellent way than the parents from whom we take our origin: both because He alone creates the soul, and forms the parts and organs of the body: and because He supplies to us all things necessary for life: and finally because by His sweet providence He disposes, protects, and preserves all things: whence Christ justly, Matth. 23., warned the disciples: Call no one your father on earth, for one is your Father, who is in the heavens.

Note 1. The word Ingenitus was first devised by Aetius, the master of Eunomius, as Saint Athanasius reports in Dialogo 2. De Trinit. The Arians made use of this very word, that they might the more easily impugn the consubstantiality of the divine Word, and attack the Catholics, by asking whether there are several unbegotten, or only one; so that if they answered that there is a single unbegotten one, the Arians would forthwith infer that the Son is not the Unbegotten, but the Father alone; and thereupon they would count the Son among things made and created: but if the Catholics replied that there are two or three unbegotten, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Arians would thence gather that three Gods are affirmed by the Catholics: for the Arians held it as certain that the nature of God consists in this, that He is unbegotten. Hence Saint Epiphanius observes, in haeresi 76., that more than forty arguments drawn from the name Ingenitus were hurled by Aetius himself against the Catholics. For this reason Gregory Nazianzen, in Oratione 37., calls the word Ingenitus a battering-ram, and the wall of refuge of those heretics: Nyssenus, however, in lib. 1. Contra Eunomium, calls it the bulwark from which Eunomius made his assault upon the Catholic Dogma. Hence some holy Fathers held the name Ingenitus in abhorrence, and thought that it should be rejected from theological disputations; thus Saint Athanasius in Oratione 2. Contra

Arianos, about the middle, says: The introduction of this word is vain, since it contains nothing else in itself but mere prestidigitation.

Note 2. This same word Ingenitus has several significations, but chiefly four, as Saint Athanasius observes in Oratione 2. Contra Arianos. First, insofar as it is applied to the unmade, that is, to what does not exist, but can exist: thus, he says, that is called Ingenitus which has not yet been made, as wood which has not yet gone into the form of a boat. Second, for that which is applied to a thing which neither exists nor can exist: thus, he says, a triangle can in no way become a quadrangle. Third, insofar as it is applied to the unproduced, and thus that is said to be Ingenitus which already is, but was not born from anyone, nor has a Father by any reason of its origin: and in this acceptation it marks that the one and only Father is Ingenitus. Fourth and finally, that is called Ingenitus which was not made, but is everlasting and incorruptible: and thus both the Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as the Father, can be called Ingeniti; indeed, in this acceptation Maximus of Turin, in his homily on the Creed, pronounces the Deity unbegotten and innascible, saying: In God the nature of the Innascible is shown, in the Father the truth of the Only-begotten, in the Almighty the fullness of power; for He is Almighty through the unbegotten Deity, and Father through His omnipotence. Here, however, we use the word Ingenitus in the third acceptation, which acceptation, that it may appear more evidently,

Note 3. The name Ingenitus, insofar as it is attributed to the eternal Father, must be taken privatively, insofar namely as it denies all production, and signifies the same as unproduced and unproducible. For if by this word only generation, or nativity properly taken, were denied, the Holy Spirit would equally be called Ingenitus, as well as the Father; since both are incapable of nativity and generation: but if any production whatsoever were denied, yet only negatively, not however privatively, that is, by signifying a pure negation of producibility, the notion of Ingenitus would equally belong to the Deity, as to the Father; for the Deity is altogether incapable of real production; wherefore, in order that being unbegotten, or unproducible, be proper to the eternal Father alone, the name Ingenitus must be taken privatively: not indeed insofar as privation says the lack of some positive thing which can, or ought to, be in the Father, but insofar as ingenitus denies the production which is not repugnant to belong to Him, not insofar as He is the Father, but insofar as He is a divine Person: so that this privation may be said to be like that which is called by the philosophers privation according to genus, not according to species; by which reasoning the mole is said to be deprived of sight, because insofar as it is an animal, seeing is not repugnant to it, although it is repugnant to it as it is a mole: thus, if it be lawful thus to argue from baser things to divine ones for the sake of explanation, since the divine Father is a divine Person, and since in the genus of divine Persons it is not repugnant to be produced, because in fact the Son and the Holy Spirit are produced, hence it comes about that production is not repugnant to the Father insofar as He is a divine Person, but only insofar as He is the Father; and so the notion of ingenitus must be taken privatively in Him. Whether, however, this notion is to be attributed to Him as a Personal property, will be disclosed

The single conclusion. — The name and notion of Ingenitus, insofar as it excludes all production privatively, is truly a property of the divine Father.

It is proved first from the Council of Antioch 1., in the Profession of Faith, where it is decreed that there is one unbegotten God without principle, where the name of God supposits for the person of the Father, according to the usage of Sacred Scripture. Moreover, the Nicene Fathers in lib. 2. set before the Disputator these things to be believed, and not to be scrutinized: One unbegotten God and Father: one begotten of Him, the only-begotten Son, God the Word. Just as there is not another unbegotten God with God and the Father, so neither is the Son co-begotten, nor prior, nor posterior: whence Saint Athanasius in the Epist. ad Serapionem, as Saint Thomas reports in Opusculo primo, Contra errores Graecorum, cap. 8., says: The Catholic Church gathered at Nicaea faithfully attributed being without principle and being unbegotten to God the Father alone, and commanded under anathema that it be believed thus by the whole world.

The holy Fathers prove this very thing; for first, Athanasius in the Quaestionibus de Natura Dei q. 5. says, It is the property of the Father to be unbegotten, of the Son indeed to be begotten, of the Holy Spirit to proceed: Nazianzen inculcates this very thing many times, but especially in Orat. 23., where he says: This is the property of the Father, that He is unbegotten: likewise Gregory of Nyssa, in lib. De Differentia essentiae, et hypostasis, says: It is an excellent mark, and a sign of the Father alone, that He subsists from no cause: Augustine also agrees, lib. 15. De Trinit. cap. 2., where he says: The Father alone is not from another, therefore He alone is called unbegotten; not indeed in the Scriptures, but in the custom of disputants: the rest of the Fathers, as many as wrote about the adorable Trinity, bring forward the same.

This same truth is proved by theological reason: the divine Father has this not only as proper and singular, that through generative fecundity He is the principle of the Son, and through spiration, together with the Son, is the principle of the Holy Spirit, but also that among the divine Persons He alone exists without another principle from which He is really produced, in the manner in which the other two Persons are produced: but this notion of non-production is called by the name Ingenitus: therefore it truly belongs to the eternal Father as a property. Then, in the divine Trinity there is one unproduced Person only, namely the Father: therefore the notion of the unproduced is proper to Him alone. The antecedent is clear from what was said in the third Question of the first Disputation; where we proved that it is impossible for several divine Persons to be unbegotten, or unproduced.

You will say 1. The holy Fathers judged that the word ingenitus should be proscribed, because it is not expressed in the Sacred Scriptures, and offers heretics an occasion of deceiving and blaspheming: moreover, because the word Father sufficiently signifies whatever the name ingenitus can express: therefore this name is not to be ascribed to the eternal Father as a singular property. The antecedent is proved, as to all its parts, from Saint Basil, lib. 1. Contra Eunomium: I, he says, would rightly judge that the appellation of unbegotten, or innascible, although it supremely agrees with our thoughts, yet since I find it nowhere in the Scriptures, and since it is the first element of the blasphemy of those men, ought to be consigned to silence: especially since the word Father itself can signify what the word unbegotten can.

I answer. Indeed, the word ingenitus was exploded by some holy Fathers for these reasons; nevertheless, rightly interpreted and accepted, they used it to signify the distinction of the eternal Father from the two other divine Persons, as Saint Basil himself also uses it in lib. 2. Contra Eunomium, where he teaches that the Begotten and the Unbegotten are certain specific properties of the Son and of the divine Father: nor does it matter that this word is not expressed in the divine letters, for in them the word Trinity is also not read; and yet the divine Trinity of Persons is not therefore to be denied: whence Sixtus I., in Decretal Epist. 1., after the middle, says: That the Father is properly set down as unbegotten in the divine letters, they can neither read nor prove; but because Christian faith itself demands this very thing, He is believed unbegotten without any doubt; with whom Fulgentius agrees, in reply to the seventh objection of the Arians: The Father, he says, is nowhere read as unbegotten in the Canonical Scriptures, and yet, according to the truth of the faith, He is preached as unbegotten.

You will say 2. Ingenitus, according to the genuine signification of the word, signifies the same as uncreated: but not only the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit are truly uncreated: therefore they are also unbegotten.

I answer. To the major, Saint Cyril, lib. 11. Thesauri, cap. unico:

That ingenitus, written in Greek with a single N, signifies not made, nor created, and is predicated of God universally, that is, of each of the divine persons; written, however, with a double NN, it signifies not born, nor being from another, and is accommodated to the Father; namely, that the principle belongs to the Father alone.

With whom Hugo Eterianus agrees, lib. 2. Contra Graecos, cap. 5.:

Ingenitus, he says, since it is written among the Greeks with a single N, insofar as this name signifies uncreated, belongs not only to the divine nature, if it be so said, but truly to the three Persons; for the nature is equally uncreated together with the Persons; when, however, it is written with two NN, ἀγέννητον, it belongs properly to the Father alone, not to the Son, not to the Spirit, nor to any creature.

Note 1. The name principle can be used in a threefold way in divine matters, namely essentially, notionally, and principally. In the first way it signifies the fecundity of the Divinity ad extra, belonging to the three Persons, by which through Omnipotence they produce all creatures. In the second way it designates the fecundity of the same Divinity ad intra, by which the Father produces the Son, and the Father together with the Son produces the Holy Spirit: in the third way it signifies that dignity by which the first Person in divine matters, produced by none, produces the rest. Principle taken essentially belongs to the three Persons undividedly, for the works of the divine Trinity ad extra are undivided; because those divine Persons produce creatures through one will, and one power: principle taken notionally is common to the Father, and the Son, since the Father, and the Son are one principle of the Holy Spirit: whence Saint Augustine in the book Contra Maximinum chapter 17.: The Father, he says, is a principle not from a principle, the Son a principle from a principle, but both together, not two, but one principle: finally, principle used principally is said to be proper to the Father alone.

Note 2. That although Aristotle, in 5. Metaph. text 1., after enumerating all the modes in which Principle is said, affirms that cause is likewise said in as many modes, as if he wished cause to be the same as principle; nevertheless, as Asclepius notes in his Commentary on that passage, the Philosopher does not say this from the truth of the matter, nor from his own opinion, but from the common understanding of the people. For, he says, the signification of principle is broader than that of cause: therefore he mentioned principle in the prior place, and before cause: for whatever is a cause, that very thing is also a principle, yet not conversely must whatever is a principle be a cause. This, however, is the greatest difference between cause and principle, that a principle is that from which another thing, or another, proceeds; but a cause is that which imparts being to another not previously existing: hence cause signifies a greater superiority, and perfection in the one producing, than in the thing produced; and so it denotes in the effect a certain dependence, contingency, and imperfection. For, says Saint Dionysius in De Divinis Nominibus cap. 2., the likeness between effects and causes is not perfect, but effects indeed bear the images which they can of the causes; the causes, however, are hidden from the effects, and are superior by reason of their principle. Hence cause properly taken differs greatly from principle.

Note 3. The name Author sometimes among the Latins signifies the same thing as principle; I said among the Latins, for the Greeks either have none that corresponds to it; or if they have accommodated one properly to it, they by no means use it in divine matters, as Saint Thomas observes in his opuscule cap. 1.; wherefore indeed the Latin Fathers alone transfer this appellation from creatures to divine things. In using it, however, some caution is needed; since an Author is sometimes said to be one in whose power another is, or one who precedes in right, and dignity; thus Tertullian in the book De Fuga cap. 1. calls the foremost, and the teachers of the Church, Authors, witnesses, leaders, and standard-bearers, to whom others are inferior. But when, he says, the Authors themselves, that is, the Deacons, Presbyters, and Bishops themselves flee, how will the layman be able to understand in what sense it was said, Flee from city to city? Therefore when the leaders flee, who among the rank-and-file soldiers will stand fast, sweating to hold their post in the battle line? Therefore the name of Author is to be attributed to any divine Person with respect to another in no other way than to signify the same thing as principle.

First conclusion. — It is proper to the divine Father, that He is principally the principle, and the source of the Divinity communicated to the two divine Persons produced.

This Conclusion comprises two parts, of which the first is proved by the authority of the holy Fathers, who proclaim the divine Father to be a principle without principle. Thus Gregory Nazianzen Orat. 32.: Moreover the name of him who lacks a principle is Father, of the principle Son, of him who is with the principle, the Holy Spirit: thus Phoebadius in the book Contra Arianos: This is, he says of the Father, the principle without principle: thus Cyril of Alexandria in lib. 2. Thesauri cap. 1.: Other, he says, is the Father, other the Son, and other is the principle, other that which is from the principle: thus Augustine De Trinit. cap. 14.: If the begetter, he says, is a principle with respect to that which is begotten, the Father is a principle with respect to the Son, because He begets Him: whence the Master of the Sentences rightly says in 1. dist. 29. cap. 1.: The Father is a principle without principle, the Son a principle from a principle, the Holy Spirit a principle from both. With him Saint Thomas agrees, Opusc. 1. Contra errores Graecorum cap. 32.: It is necessary, he says, to believe the Holy Trinity, namely the Father without principle, the Son indeed a principle from the Father as principle: and the Holy Spirit with the Son as principle, one God.

The second part is proved. First indeed from the Sixth Council of Toledo cap. 1.: We confess, he says, the Father unbegotten, uncreated, the source, and origin of the whole Divinity. The Council of Worms repeats the same in the Profession of Faith.

It is confirmed. By the testimony of the holy Fathers, especially of Dionysius in the book De Divinis Nominibus cap. 2.: In the divine Scriptures we have received, he says, that the Father is, so to speak, the fountain of the Divinity; Jesus however, and the Spirit, if it is lawful so to speak, the buds, or shoots of the fecund Divinity. Athanasius agrees in Contra Gregales Sabellii, where he says of the Father: He alone is the source of the Deity; and near the end: The Father is the root, and source of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Augustine also subscribes, in the fourth book De Trinit. cap. 20., where he thus explains Ioann. 15.: The Spirit of truth, whom I will send to you from the Father; namely, he says, showing that the Father is the principle of the whole Divinity, or, if it is better said, of the Deity. Eugene the Fourth also kept this manner of speaking in the Letters of Union, saying: The Father is the source, and principle of the whole Deity.

You will say 1. Not only the Father, but also the Son, indeed even the Holy Spirit are said to be without principle: therefore the name, and notion of principle principally does not belong to the eternal Father. The antecedent is proved from Zacharias of Mitylene in the book De Mundi opificio: The Father, he says, is without principle, and unbegotten: the Son begotten without principle; the Spirit of God proceeding without principle from the Father: similarly Athanasius in the Quaestionibus qu. 19. asserts, that the three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are at once lacking principle, and without principle. And Hippolytus the martyr, Homil. de consummatione mundi, thus addresses the Son: You together with the Father lack a principle. Athanasius also attributes to Him the same appellation of one lacking principle, in his letter to Liberius.

I answer. The holy Fathers are to be understood in such a way, that they wish the divine Persons to be without principle of duration, of creation, and of making: but not without the principle of the emanation of one from another, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa lucidly explains, lib. Contra Eunomium:

When, he says, in the word ἀνάρχου (that is, of one without principle,) nothing else is understood, except that which has from no principle at all that it subsists; this very thing we confess to be proper to the Father alone. When, however, inquiry is made concerning the other significations of principle; since it is the principle also of creation, and of time, and of order; even in these we judge the only-begotten Son to be superior to every principle, so that we believe Him to be above every principle of creation, and the motion of time, and the sequence of order, through whom all things were made; and so Him whom we think not to lack a principle by reason of subsistence, we confess to lack a principle in all the rest: and the Father indeed we call lacking principle, and unbegotten, but the Son lacking principle indeed in the way we have said, yet we do not call Him unbegotten.

Than which nothing is more to the point.

You will say 2. A principle is that from which something proceeds, or is produced: but the Deity does not proceed, nor is produced from the Father: therefore the Father is neither its source, nor its principle.

I distinguish the minor. The Deity in the abstract, and insofar as it prescinds from the Persons, does not proceed from the Father, nor is the Father its principle, I concede; the Deity in the concrete, and taken for the divine Persons, which take their origin from the Father, and are produced, I deny: whence I said pointedly in the conclusion, that the Father is the principle of the communicated Divinity, that is, the principle from which the Divinity is communicated to the two produced Persons. But if the Divinity is also communicated through the Son to the Holy Spirit, the Son nevertheless cannot for that reason be called the principle of the whole communicated Divinity, as it is communicated through production, because He is not the reason for communicating the divine nature to Himself, but receives it from the Father.

Second conclusion. — The Father is truly called the Cause, and Author of the Son, but not in the proper signification of either name.

The first part is proved. By the authority of the Greek Fathers, especially of Basil in lib. 1. Contra Eunomium: The very word Father, he says, what else does it signify, except this, that He is the cause, and principle of him who was begotten from Him? Thus also Gregory of Nyssa in the book Ad Ablabium: For, he says, we do not deny the difference which is considered about cause, and caused, by which alone we find the one to be distinguished from the other; namely, from the fact that we believe one indeed to be the cause, the other to be from the cause. Likewise Chrysostom in cap. 1. Epist. ad Hebraeos homil. 2.: For if, he says, the Father is the cause of the Son, much more is He the cause of those things which are declared to have been made through the Son: the Damascene also subscribes in lib. 1. De Fide cap. 11.: One, he says, is the Father without principle, that is, without cause; for He is not from something. One is the Son, and He who is the Son is not without principle, that is, without cause, for He is from the Father. — The same thing is gathered from the Latin Fathers; for Hilary in lib. 12. De Trinit.: Of him who is, he says, the Father is the cause of that which he is. Likewise Augustine in lib. 7. De Trinit. says: The cause He has for being wise is the very cause He has for being: hence, if the Wisdom which He begot is also His cause for being, that Wisdom is itself the cause of His being.

The same thing is proved concerning the name of Author; for Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 29., affirms that the Father is the cause, and author of the Divinity, which is considered in the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Likewise Saint Athanasius, in Dialogue 2. Contra Anomoeum, after he had said that the Father is the cause, and author of the Son, adds: God is the source of the Holy Spirit, and the author of the same, not receiving Him from without, but letting Him well forth from Himself. — The Latin Fathers affirm the same thing, especially Augustine, lib. 3. Contra Maximinum cap. 11., where he thus reproves him:

But the Son of God has, you say, the Father as author: if for this reason you call God the Father the author of God the Son, because the one begot, the other was begotten, because the latter is of the former, not the former of the latter, I confess, and concede it; if however through the name of Author you wish to make the Son lesser, and the Father greater, and the Son not of the same substance as the Father, I will detest, and reject it.

With him Saint Hilary agrees, 9. De Trinitate: For since, he says, the unbegotten God is the author to the only-begotten God of the perfect nativity of divine beatitude, to be the author of the nativity is the paternal mystery.

That this appellation of Author, and Cause is altogether improper, insofar as it is attributed to the divine Persons producing, is sufficiently clear both from the very notion of Cause, and Author, which implies something inferior in the product, and from Saint Augustine just now cited; whence Saint Cyril, lib. 2. Dialogorum de Trinitate, says: Cause, and caused, it is not lawful even to name; it befits us likewise to say of God rather Father, and begotten Son: which Bessarion lucidly explains in the Oration which he delivered in the Council of Florence: It is to be noted, he says, that the holy Eastern Doctors use the name of cause, and caused even in divine matters in a broad way; not indeed. insofar as it imports limitation, and dependence, but insofar as it signifies the production, and emanation, from a principle, of that which is from the principle. Therefore a divine Person producing is called the cause of the one produced only insofar as it is solely its principle.

Just as theologians, says St. Dionysius 1. De Divinis Nominibus, praise the Deity invoked under many names, as when they again present Her as saying, I am who is, life, light, God, truth: so, when the same theologians praise the cause and author of all things with many names drawn from all their effects, as good, as beautiful, as wise, as intelligent, as God of Gods, as Lord of Lords, as Holy of Holies, etc., thus says St. Thomas 1. p. q. 15. art. 2. ad 3.: To express the diverse perfections of the Son of God, diverse names are attributed to Him: for, that He may be shown connatural to the Father, He is called Son; that He may be shown coeternal, He is called brightness; that He may be shown wholly similar, He is called Image; that He may be shown immaterially begotten, He is called Word, etc.

All the names, however, which Sacred Scripture attributes to the Son of God, St. Ambrose embraces in a twelvefold enumeration, lib. 2. De Trinit.:

For He is called Son of God, Word, Image, Idea, Principle, Wisdom, Light, Brightness of eternal light, Figure of Substance, Character, Mirror, Truth. These are (says Ambrose in the same place) those precious stones, sardius, iaspis, smaragdus, chrysolitus, and others, with which the vestment of holy Aaron, who bore the figure of Christ, is woven: this is the true vesture of the Priest, this the wedding garment, this the precious breastplate... He is called Son of God because He is born of God the Father: Word, because He comes forth from the mouth of the Most High with perfect knowledge of Him: Image, brightness of glory, and mirror, because nothing is lacking to Him whereby He might perfectly express the Father: Vapor of the power of God, because He is of the same nature as the Father: Brightness of eternal light, because He is coeternal with Him: Character, because He is distinguished from the Father by personal difference, not by essential perfection.

But of all these names, some are common to the three Persons and are only appropriated to the Son, such as Light, Power, Idea, etc. Others, however, are notional and proper, such as Son, Word, Image, Character, Figure of Substance. That the name Son is proper to the second divine Person is sufficiently clear from what was said in Quaest. 5. of the first Disputation and Quaest. 3. of the second. It remains, therefore, that we examine the other names, proper and appropriated to the three, in the following Questions.

Note 1. Many heretics have been deceived concerning the Word of God. For first, Valentinus dreamed that the Word was not the Son of God, nor had it proceeded immediately from God, but that a mind had been brought forth by the ineffable union of the Father, as it were, and of silence, as it were, as Mother, which together with the only-begotten Son brought forth truth; and that afterwards, after many ages, the Word proceeded from mind together with truth, as Irenaeus relates, lib. 1. cap. 1. Secondly, Paul of Samosata asserted that the divine Word is not subsistent, but prolate and transitory, as Epiphanius narrates, heresy 65. He says: Some of the disciples of the Samosatan, says Athanasius, Orat. 5. Contra Arianos, dividing the Word from the Son, say that the Son indeed is Christ, but the Word is another. Their reasoning we shall set forth and solve below. Thirdly, the Alogians, that is, those without the Word, rejected the appellation of Word, because, they said, the Son of God is pronounced neither by mouth nor by mind; wherefore they rejected all the writings of St. John, because in them mention was made of the divine Word. So Augustine, heresy 30. Arius and Eunomius seem to have asserted this very thing, thinking that every word is a prolation of the voice, as St. Athanasius narrates in the book De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi. But certain Arian disciples, not agreeing further, said that the Word always was, but the Son had not always been: some wanted the man assumed by the Word to be the Son; the rest, along with Arius varying his opinion, distinguished two Words: one existing in God, which is His Wisdom, undistinguished from the very Person of the Father; another foreign to the substance of the Father, about which, said Arius, St. John spoke when he said: in the beginning was the Word. Finally Michael Servetus, in the year 1540, calling up from the underworld the errors that had long since been buried, asserted that the Word of God is nothing other than a disposition by which it pleased Him to reveal to us the secret of His will. All of which errors, that we may thrust back into the underworld whence they emerged

Note 2. From St. Augustine, book De Fide, et symbolo cap. 3.: the Son of God is said to be the Word of the Father for this reason, because through Him the Father becomes known.

Just as, therefore, we do this with our words when we speak the truth, so that our mind becomes known to the hearer, and whatever secret we carry in our heart is brought forth through signs of this kind to the knowledge of another: so Wisdom, which God the Father begot, since through it the most hidden mind of the Father becomes known, is most fittingly named His Word.

Hence Richard of St. Victor, book 6. De Trinit., cap. 12., gathers that only the Son is the Word, and not in like manner the Holy Spirit: Because, he says, the Word is born of the heart alone, and by it the intention of the one uttering is made known: rightly, therefore, is the sole offspring of the sole Father named the Word, through which He Himself, who is the principal Wisdom, is manifested. He adds nevertheless another, and indeed genuine, reason why the Son is called the Word, namely that He is produced by utterance; for, as he observes in the same place, the Word is the same thing that is conceived in the heart and that is brought forth by the voice: For what, he says, is the voice, except the vehicle of the word, or, if it pleases better, the garment of the word? Is there one man when clothed, and another when stripped? Whence he infers, that if someone had an ear for the intention of the heart, just as he has for the intention of the mouth, he would have no need at all for exterior speech to be made to him. It is therefore ratified, and established that the Son of God is rightly called the Word, either because He represents and manifests the Father, or because He is produced by utterance.

Note 3. That although St. Athanasius, Orat. 3. Contra Arianos, said that the Word of God is not to be sought as being of such a kind as ours is, because God is not such as we are, nevertheless the uncreated Word, and the created word agree most of all in three things. For first, both are spiritual, and a permanent, not transitory, offspring of the mind: for, as whoever is the Author of the book De cognitione verae vitae speaks, in Augustine, tom. 9.: The supreme Father begot His Word by thinking Himself, which subsists at once coessential in the essence of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit. Secondly, both are immanent within the very one who utters them: for the divine Word so goes forth from the Father that it never goes out beyond His bosom: It proceeded from the Father, says St. Peter Chrysologus, but from the Father it did not wholly depart; or, as Tertullian says in the book Contra Praxeam, God brought forth His speech just as the root brings forth the shoot, the fountain the stream, and the Sun the ray... Nor yet is the shoot discerned from the root, nor the stream from the fountain, nor the ray from the sun, for, as John says, the Word was with God. Whence Zeno of Verona, serm. 3. De aeterna Verbi generat., calls the Son of God the noble inhabitant of the Father's heart. Thirdly, both represent, and express the object at the intuition of which they are formed: For whatever thing, says Anselm in Monol. cap. 31., the mind, whether through the imagination of the body or through reason, desires veraciously to think, its likeness, as much as it is able, it strives to express in its very thought.

The created word, and the uncreated Word likewise differ most of all in three things: 1. because the former is an accident; the latter a substance: 2. the former is a form constituting the one understanding in second act, whence it is produced from the need of the one understanding, namely that he may become one who understands; the latter, however, is produced from fecundity, not from any need, because the Father is essentially understanding before He utters the Word: 3. the former is not of the same nature with the one uttering; the latter, however, is entirely of the same nature with the Father, by whom it is uttered and produced.

The single conclusion. — The notion, and appellation of Word properly belongs to the divine Son alone.

This is the opinion of nearly all theologians against Durandus, in 1. dist. 27. q. 2., where he teaches that the Word, properly taken, is an essential predicate, and common to the three Persons. It is proved first from all the texts of Sacred Scripture in which the Son is signally called the Word, most of all from the 1. cap. of John, where the name of Word is expressed many times: That this name, says Cyril, lib. 7. Thesauri cap. 1., seems to have been chosen as something proper to the Son, in the beginning, he says, was the Word, and the Word was, etc. You see how this name signifies the very being of the Son according to nature; and below: In vain do we marvel at the Evangelist, and, as if he had thundered something great and proper, call him the Son of thunder, unless he had proclaimed the Word as something proper, marvelous, and unheard of.

The other Fathers prove this same truth by their testimonies; above all St. Augustine, book 7. De Trinit., cap. 2.:

Therefore, he says, the Father and the Son are together one essence, and one magnitude, and one truth, and one wisdom; but the Father and the Son are not together both one Word, because they are not together both one Son: for just as the Son is referred to the Father, and is not said with reference to Himself, so too the Word is referred to Him whose Word it is, when it is called Word. For by that same thing He is the Son by which He is the Word, and the Word by which He is the Son.

Therefore the notion of Word is not a distinct property, but formally the same as Filiation; whence he concludes: Since therefore the Father, and the Son are not together one Son, it follows that the Father, and the Son are not together both one Word. But the notion of Word, insofar as it is proper to the Son, is distinguished from Wisdom, which is only appropriated; whence he adds:

And therefore He is not the Word by that by which He is Wisdom, because the Word is not said with reference to itself, but only relatively to him whose Word it is, just as the Son is referred to the Father; but He is Wisdom by that by which He is Essence, and therefore because there is one Essence, there is one Wisdom. Since moreover the Word is also Wisdom, but He is not the Word by that by which He is Wisdom: for the Word is understood relatively, Wisdom however essentially; let us take that which is said when He is called Word to be said as if born wisdom were spoken, so that He is the Son, and the image.

Proof 3. By theological reason: That appellation ought to be judged proper to the Son of God which Sacred Scripture ordinarily uses to designate the second Person in the Deity: but Scripture employs the name of Word for this purpose, as is evident both from what has been said, and from the first epistle of John, cap. 5.: There are three who give testimony in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: for by that word three, the number, and distinction of the Persons is signified; wherefore it was fitting to give to each a proper name by which each person is distinguished from another: therefore, just as the name of Father is not metaphorical, but proper, so too must the name of Word be such. — Then, the formal notion of Word consists in this, that it is a term produced by utterance representing the object: but the Son of God, as has been proved in disp. 2., is a term produced by utterance, and represents His object most perfectly: therefore only the Son is properly, and truly the Word.

You will say 1. Where the Vulgate at Ioan. 1. renders Word, many of the holy Fathers, especially Cyprian, Jerome, etc. read Speech, and Reason: but speech, and reason is not a property of the divine Son: therefore neither is Word.

St. Augustine answers in lib. 83. Quaestionum q. 63.:

That which in Greek is called λόγος signifies in Latin both reason, and word; but in this place of Ioannis 1. we interpret it better as Word, so that not only the respect to the Father is signified, but also those things which were made through the Word by operative power. Reason, however, even if nothing is made through it, is rightly called reason; for although the Son would be the Word from eternity, even if nothing were to be made in time, nevertheless that power, and quidditative property, that whatever things are to be made are made through the Word, is more aptly signified by the name of Word, than by the name of Reason, or of Speech.

You will say 2. The Word in divine things is common to the three Persons: therefore it is not a property of the Son alone. The antecedent is proved: first indeed from St. Irenaeus, lib. 2. cap. 48.: God, he says, existing wholly as mind, and wholly existing as λόγος, that is, Word; similarly St. Ambrose, in the single book De Filii divinitate cap. 5.: Whether, he says, you say light of light, or Word of Word, or Spirit of Spirit, or Lord of Lord, whatever you will have said of Him, you will nevertheless believe the Father, and the Son to be of one essence. Moreover St. Athanasius, Adversus eos, qui dicunt passus est Deus, sermo carne, says: he who calls God λόγον signifies the simple essence. St. Dionysius professes this very thing in the book De Divinis Nominibus cap. 1., where, recounting the names suitable to God, he commemorates among them these, namely that He be called Giver of life, Wisdom, Mind, Word, etc. Therefore in truth he judges the name of Word to be a predicate not notional, but essential.

I deny the antecedent. For that was not the mind of the holy Fathers; for first, Irenaeus in the same place affirms that the Word is emitted from thought, and sense; and so he judges that only that is to be called Word which is produced by utterance, whether internal, or external: but only the Son, as is evident, is produced in this way, and consequently He alone is to be called Word. But if he says that the whole God is λόγον, he means to signify nothing other than that the Word is not a part of God, but is moreover the whole God. To Ambrose I say that he does not there assert from his own mind that the Son is Word of Word; and if anyone said these things, he would not on that account detract from the faith of consubstantiality. To Athanasius I reply that he does not there deny that a Person is signified by Speech, or Word, but he denies that two natures are signified in one Person, just as they are signified by the name of Christ: whence he adds: But he who says Christ, he declares the conjunction of two natures. Finally, to St. Dionysius I say that he there embraces together all the names, whether personal, or essential, which are attributed to God by theologians, and so he lists the name of Word along with the other personal names.

You will say 3. The name of Word is attributed to God only metaphorically: therefore it does not designate a peculiar property of the Son. The antecedent is proved from Theophylact on that text of Ioannis 1.: This was in the beginning with God, where he says: Nor will anyone have found any other proper name worthy of God: the Word itself is not substantially and properly the name of the Only-begotten, but only manifests, without affection, the Son born of the Father, etc. Similarly Chrysostom, Homil. 1. on John, says: The principal reason why John called the Son Word, was that He was about to announce the Father to us; for all things, he says, whatsoever I have heard from the Father, I have made known to you.

I answer. That the aforementioned Fathers mean nothing other than that no proper name can be devised by us that is worthy of God, and truly significative, and expressive of Him: whence Chrysostom a little above had said: No one can either say, or understand God according to His greatness, and since it cannot be said how great the substance of God is, He manifests it to us from His works: whence the name of Word is attributed to God to signify that He proceeds from the divine intellect as the expressive term of His object, for which no more apt name is in use by us to express the same thing.

You will say 4. The name, and notion of Word also belongs to the Holy Spirit: therefore it is not a peculiar property of the divine Son. The antecedent is proved from St. Basil, lib. 5. Contra Eunomium cap. 11., saying: The Word of God indeed is the Son: but the Word of the Son is the Spirit, which he proves from that text of Hebrews 1.: Carrying all things by the word of His power; he adds, and since the Word of the Son is through God, the same Apostle says, Ephes. 6.: The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God: therefore, etc.

I distinguish the antecedent. That it is attributed properly, and from the nature of the thing, I deny; figuratively, and metaphorically, I concede: the metaphor, however, consists in this, that just as it is proper to the Word to proceed from some Person, and to be emitted to express His sense, and will, for which reason Christ proves that He is the Word of the eternal Father, saying: My doctrine is not mine, but His who sent me, the Father: so the Holy Spirit can be called the Word of the Son, because He is emitted by the Son, to intimate His senses, and will to the faithful, according to that text of Ioan. 16.: He will glorify me, because He will receive of mine, and will announce it to you. Add that He can also be called the Word of the Son from the effect which He works in the hearts of those evangelizing the truths proclaimed by Christ: For you are not, says Christ addressing the Apostles, Matth. 10., the ones who speak, but the Spirit of your Father, who speaks in you. To St. Paul I say first that the divine Son carries all things by the word of His power: that is, He conserves all things by His most powerful command with the same ease with which He produces them, according to that text of Psalmi 148.: He Himself said, and they were made, etc. So St. Chrysostom explains it, Homil. 2. Or that He contains, and preserves all things by Himself, who is the omnipotent Word, just as in Ioan. 12. He says: The word which I have spoken, that one will judge him; that is, I myself, who am the word of the Father, as St. Augustine interprets it, lib. 1. De Trinit. cap. 12. To the second I reply, that by the Sword of the Spirit is to be understood not the Holy Spirit as being the Word of the Son, but the spiritual sword, which is the divine doctrine itself, with which we must fight everywhere against all the adversaries of salvation, both visible and invisible.

You will say 5. The divine Word is distinguished from the Son of God: therefore the notion of Word is not a property of the divine Son. The Samosatians used to prove the antecedent from that text of Act. 10.: God sent the Word to the children of Israel, announcing peace through Jesus Christ, etc.

I deny the antecedent. And to its proof I say, first, that there the Word is not taken for the divine Person, but for the message, which is spoken outside God, and announced to men. Second, I say that by these words the divine Son can also be understood, whom God the Father sent into the world, to preach the gospel of peace in the assumed humanity; nor indeed is it new in the Scriptures for the same Person to be repeated in the same sentence, without His name or a relative pronoun being employed, as is evident from that text of 1. ad Corinth. 1.: Waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you even to the end without crime in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. So St. Athanasius answers, in oration 5. Contra Arianos, near the end.

You will say lastly. Of one, and the same Person there are not two hypostatic properties, but a single one: but the notion of Word is distinguished from Filiation: therefore it is not a property of the divine Son.

I answer 1. By denying the major: for in the Father, and the Son there is active Spiration formally distinct from Paternity, and Filiation, from which their real distinction from the Person of the Holy Spirit is also argued; and so to one, and the same Person two formalities, or relations, or hypostatic properties are not repugnant.

I answer 2. That the notion of Word is not formally distinct from the notion of Son, nor are there two relations, but a single one conceived in different ways; as is evident both from St. Augustine cited above, and from St. Athanasius, Oration 2. Contra Arianos, saying: By that very thing by which the Word of His Father is the Son, He is the Word of the Father, etc. The Nazianzen agrees with him, Orat. 35. near the end: The Son, he says, seems to me to be so called, who is the same in essence with the Father, and also because He is from Him. The Word moreover, because it is related to the Father as speech to the mind, etc. Whence the notion of Word, and of Son is one, and the same, but only considered in different ways; and so the minor is to be denied.

Note 1. Image is a likeness of something proceeding from it, so that two things necessarily concur to the notion of an image, namely, likeness, and Procession. Likeness, I say, either in species, that is, in the specific nature, or at least in a sign of the species, that is, in something specially representative of the specific nature, just as a painted image stands with respect to its prototype; for, as St. Augustine speaks in De Genesi ad litteram c. 16.: Every image is like that of which it is the image. Second, for the proper notion of an image there is required its procession from him of whom it is called an image: For, says St. Augustine, an image is such when it is expressed from something. By the lack of this procession the Father is not an image of the Son, although perfectly like to him, nor is a painting deemed an image of the object of which the painter did not make use as an exemplar, although otherwise the painting is like to that object; nor finally among men, although two are most like to each other, if however one does not proceed from the other, he is not called his image. Those two things, therefore, are necessary for an image, namely, Likeness, and Procession.

Note 2. That just as a threefold likeness expressed from another can be found — namely, either in an artificial thing, or in an intentional one, or in a natural one — so a threefold image can be given, namely, the Artificial, as a statue, or a tablet formed for the expression of someone; the Intentional, as the species impressed, and expressed by the object; and the Natural, as the Son with respect to the Father, whose specific likeness he bears. Hence it follows that an image is so much the more perfect, the greater is the likeness of that which proceeds from another: hence the artificial image is the most imperfect of all, because it only bears a likeness in a quality, namely, in the figure of that thing which the image represents: the intentional image is more perfect, because it imports a likeness not only in a sign of the species, but also in the species itself, or nature, under a mode of being, not indeed natural, but intelligible, or intentional: but the most excellent of all is the natural image, because it imports a likeness in the species, or nature, under a natural, and entitative mode of being.

Note 3. From St. Augustine, lib. 83. quaest. 74., that image, equality, and likeness are mutually distinguished:

Because, he says, where there is an image there is at once a likeness, not at once an equality: where there is an equality there is at once a likeness, not at once an image: where there is a likeness there is not at once an image, nor at once an equality: as in a mirror there is an image of a man, because it was expressed from him: there is also necessarily a likeness, yet not an equality, because many things are lacking to the image, which nevertheless are in that thing from which it was expressed. Where there is an equality there is at once a likeness, not at once an image, as in two equal eggs, because there is an equality in them, there is a likeness — for whatever things are present in one, are present also in the other — an image, however, there is not, because neither was expressed from the other. Where there is a likeness there is not at once an image, nor at once an equality: for indeed every egg is like to every egg, inasmuch as it is an egg; but the egg of a partridge, although inasmuch as it is an egg it is like to the egg of a hen, is yet neither its image, because it was not expressed from it, nor equal, because it is smaller, and of another kind of living creatures. Where, therefore, in something representing another there is not only a likeness, but also a perfect equality of the representing to the represented, then in like manner in it the notion of an image exists most perfectly.

These things being premised, two points are to be resolved: First, whether the true and perfect notion of an image belongs to the Son. Second, whether it befits him alone. Which two, that they may be defined together, let there be

The single conclusion. — The notion of an image belongs perfectly, and properly to the Son alone in divine things.

The truth of this Conclusion is evident from what has been said concerning the generation of the Son, and

it is gathered moreover from various texts of Sacred Scripture, by which the divine Son is called the Image of the Father; thus ad Colos. 1.: Who is the image of the invisible God: ad Hebraeos 1.: Who, being the Splendor of glory, and the Figure of his substance, or as St. Chrysostom renders it in the same place, homil. 3.: the Character of his substance, inasmuch as, he says, Just as the Father himself subsists in himself, needing nothing, so also the Son.

It is proved also by the holy Fathers: for first, Athanasius in the Epistola de decretis Nicaenae Synodi says: But if you call him an image, by that very fact you will have indicated that he is the Son; for what is like to God, except his own offspring? Nazianz. subscribes, Orat. 4. De Theologia: Brief, and compendious, and easy is the declaration of the Paternal nature, the Son: for everything that is begotten defines its begetter by a certain silent voice. Gregory of Nyssa agrees, in the book De Differentia essentiae, et hypostaseos: The hypostasis of the Son, he says, is as it were the form, and face by which the Father is known, and the hypostasis of the Father is known in the form of the Son, while that property which is considered in these remains for the distinction of the Persons.

It is proved moreover by theological reason: To the divine Son alone belong the two aforesaid conditions desired for the notion of an image, namely, likeness, and procession from him whose likeness he bears: therefore the Son alone is the image. The antecedent is evident from those things which we said to establish that the procession of the Word is a true generation, because it proceeds as like to the producing principle.

It is confirmed. Moreover, from the holy Fathers, who from this twofold condition gather that the Son is the image of the Father; thus St. Cyril of Alexandria, lib. 3. Thesauri cap. 1.: On this account, he says, the Son is the Word, and Image of God, because he was truly, and properly begotten from the Father himself. And Athanasius, Orat. 4. Contra Arianos:

Although, he says, he alone is the true image, and genuine offspring of his Father, no obstacle thence arises from the fact that we too are recounted as having been created to the image of God, and that we have been named the glory, and image of God; since that comes to pass not from our own nature, but on account of the image of God, and his true glory dwelling in us, which indeed is itself the reason, or Word of God, which afterwards for our sake was made flesh.

It is confirmed again. That the Son is the true image of the Father, from the other names, which differ from image only in the mode of signifying, but in the thing signified express altogether the same thing as image; the first of which is the name face, which is sometimes used by Sacred Scripture to signify the divine Son; thus Ps. 138.: Whither shall I go from thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy Face? For, says the praised Gregory of Nyssa: The hypostasis of the Son is as it were the form, and face by which the Father is known: whence the ancient Patriarchs, beseeching the incarnation of the divine Word, said, Ps. 79.: Show us thy Face, and we shall be saved. To which name the appellation Countenance also befits. Whence Cyril, lib. 3. in Ioan. cap. 29.: In this way, he says, we understand even that: the light of thy Countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: for he calls the Son the Countenance of God the Father, that is, the Character of the Father. — The second name is Form: whence Christ himself, Ioan. 5.: The Father bears testimony of Me, and you have never heard his voice, nor seen his Form, and you do not have his Word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent: which Athanasius weighing, in the praised Oration 4., says: Beautifully did he thus join the Word to the form, so as to make plain that he is the Word of God, and the Image, Character, and Form of his Father. Hence it is said in Danielis cap. 3. that the Form of the fourth was like to the Son of God: from which the same St. Athanasius in the sermon Contra omnes haereses infers, that the Arians are worse than Nabuchodonosor, because they will that the Son be neither like, nor consubstantial to God. — Thirdly, he is called Seal, and Character: and it is gathered from the words of Ioan. 6.: Him hath God the Father sealed. Which words Basil so weighs, in his single book De Spiritu sancto cap. 6., saying: Christ is the splendor of glory: him hath God the Father sealed, and expressed his whole self in him. With which the above-praised Gregory Nazianzen agrees, where he teaches that the Son is called the Character, as the pure, and by no means lying seal of the Father: of which St. Ambrose gives this reason in the book In Prooemio lib. 2. De fide: The Son of God, he says, is called image, and splendor, and character, because these have revealed the incomprehensible, and unsearchable majesty of the Paternal Divinity in the Son, and his expressed likeness. The other appellations of this kind you will be able to read in Ruiz, disp. 64. sect. 8.

You will say 1. Man is said to have been made to the image, and likeness of the divine Trinity, according to that of Genes. 1.: Let us make man to our image, and likeness: whence Chrysostom in the sermon De Trinitate: Signifying, he says, that Scripture is one image of the Holy Trinity, it said: and God made man, to the image of God he made him: and Hilary, lib. 5. De Trinitate: To the image, he says, of the Father and of the Son man is formed; the name does not differ, the nature does not differ, for one is the species of the image to which man was created: and Fulgentius in the book De Fide ad Petrum: One is, he says, the Divinity, and image of the holy Trinity, to which man was made: therefore the notion of an image does not belong to the divine Word personally, but also to the Divinity itself, nay even to the Trinity.

I answer. The name of Image is taken in two ways, namely, either for the exemplar, and prototype to whose likeness something is formed, or for the likeness produced to the imitation of another. In the former way the name of image is taken both by Sacred Scripture, and by the Fathers cited in the objection; for the Divinity is indeed the exemplar, to the imitation of which man was made, not, however, the image properly so called.

You will say 2. The Holy Spirit is in reality also called an image: therefore this notion does not belong to the Son alone. The antecedent is proved from that ad Romanos 8.: Whom he foreknew, and predestined to be made conformable to the image of his Son: whence Cyril in the Dialogue De Trinit. lib. 7.: But that the Spirit is the likeness of the Father, he says, he hears the blessed Paul writing, because those whom he foreknew, these he predefined conformable to the image of his Son: whence Damascene, lib. 1. De Fide cap. 18., says: The image of the Father is the Son, and of the Son the Holy Spirit, through whom Christ dwelling in man gives him, according to what he is, the image: therefore, etc.

I answer. With our De Bassoli, in 1. dist. 27. q. 3. art. 3., the aforesaid Fathers used the name of image improperly, and extended it with so great a latitude, as to comprehend any perfect likeness in nature of the proceeding Person with the principle from which he proceeds; although he does not proceed from it as from an exemplar; nor consequently proceeds as like formally by force of the procession: which they did for this reason, that they might more evidently prove the Holy Spirit to be consubstantial with the Father no less, than the Son; since the Holy Spirit in reality is not less like, and equal to the Father, nor can less lead into the knowledge of the Father, than the Son himself.

You will insist. The Holy Spirit is infinitely more like to the Father, and the Son, than creatures are to God: but spiritual creatures, namely men, and Angels, are truly perfect images of God: therefore much more is the Holy Spirit a perfect image of the Father, and of the Son.

I answer first. By denying the minor: for creatures are not images of God except very imperfect ones, because they do not have the same species, or the numerically same nature, nor any perfect sign of the divine nature; although they have some imperfect likeness with it, namely, according to the spirituality of the substance, and the operation of the intellect, and of the will.

I answer second. That although those creatures are imperfect images of God, nevertheless the notion of the divine image belongs more properly to them, than to the Holy Spirit, because they have that imperfect likeness with God formally by force of their production: since they are formed by him as artifacts by the artisan; and thus, just as the artisan forms the work to the likeness of the idea which he preconceived in his mind, so God founded creatures by looking to himself, as to their exemplar: but the Holy Spirit has not a likeness with the producing principle formally by force of his procession; but only identically, and by reason of infinity; and therefore the notion of image does not equally properly belong to him, as to creatures¹.

Gather from these. That the divine Son is the image of the Father in two ways: first, the Natural, inasmuch as he proceeds from him really into an all-round likeness of the divine nature. Second, the Intentional, inasmuch as by force of his production he proceeds as Word, and knowledge; and so proceeds as intentionally expressing the Father: and thus he is his image, not only inasmuch as he is of the same nature, and substance with him; but also inasmuch as he is the produced knowledge of the Father himself; which latter notion of image is most proper to the divine Son; for he alone proceeds as Word, and as knowledge perfectly expressing his principle.

The third genus of names by which the Son of God is designated in the sacred Scriptures is Wisdom. For this word is for the most part used to stand for the Person of the Word, as will be established below. Wherefore three things especially are to be resolved here. 1. Whether the name of Wisdom truly so befits the Word that it can stand for His Person. 2. In what manner this appellation squares with the divine Word, namely whether properly, or appropriately. 3. Whether the divine Father is wise with that wisdom which is the Word. Wherefore

Note 1. That there is this distinction among essential, proper, and appropriated things in the divine: that the essential are those predicates — whether quidditative, or modificative, or attributive — common to the three divine Persons, such as are the divine nature, immensity, goodness, etc. But the proper are those properties, or relative formalities, by which each Person is constituted, and distinguished from another. But the appropriated are those essential and absolute predicates which, though truly common to the three Persons, are nevertheless accommodated to one Person rather than to another on account of some singular reason and affinity: thus, to extinguish the heresy of those who would say that the divine Father is powerless on account of old age, Omnipotence is attributed to Him, which nevertheless belongs to the three divine Persons inseparably: so likewise, because the divine Word proceeds through the intellect, whose office it is to know and to be wise, and because the Holy Spirit proceeds through the will, which is the sanctuary of love, goodness, and holiness, therefore knowledge, wisdom, etc. are appropriated to the Son, while holiness, goodness, and love are specially attributed to the Spirit.

Note 2. That it was fitting that some essential attributes, and some operations ad extra, should be specially appropriated to one Person or another, although these were truly common to the three divine Persons; the truth of this assertion is gathered not only from Sacred Scripture, in which we behold many such appropriations, but also from the holy Fathers, who accommodated various appropriated perfections to one divine Person rather than to another; so that through the property of the word, or of the work, the truth of the Trinity is suggested to us, and let not the intellect divide what the hearing distinguishes, says St. Leo, serm. 2. De Pentecoste cap. 2. For never, as he adds, is the Trinity understood, if it were always said inseparably. Reason also favors this, for it was fitting that darker and more difficult things be manifested through those which are more easily perceived: but the attributes and operations of God ad extra are understood by us more clearly than the properties and distinctions; since by evident demonstration from known creatures we can rise to the knowledge of the divine attributes; not so to the cognition of the personal properties; and therefore it was fitting to accommodate to one divine Person some special attribute naturally known, by which the distinction of that Person from another might more easily become known. Whence Richard of St. Victor, in the little work De tribus appropriatis cap. 2., speaking of the divine Power, Wisdom and Goodness, says: In these three the form and image of the supreme Trinity is expressed, so that the invisible things of God may be seen, being understood through the things that are made. Those things, therefore, which are in that Trinity are three to three, like to like, proper to proper, etc.

Note 3. That two things are required for a perfect appropriation: First, that there be a knowledge, and a certain affinity of the attribute with the property of the Person, as was just said, since the Son proceeds through intellection, Wisdom is appropriated to Him, so that, hearing this name, the hearers may be moved to apprehend something peculiar in the second Person, which is not common to the rest, namely the notion of the Word, of the Image, etc. Second, that through the appropriated perfection there be removed the imperfection which the less instructed could suspect in a divine Person; thus Alensis says, 1. p. qu. 67. membro 3. art. 1., Power is attributed to the Father, lest He be believed weaker on account of old age; Wisdom to the Son, lest He be thought more feeble on account of youth; and Goodness to the Spirit, lest He be heard of as cruel: whence it comes about that St. Thomas calls appropriation the Way of likeness, and of unlikeness: Albert, 1. p. qu. 48., the Approach, and withdrawal: Henry, 2. p. art. 72. q. 1., the Correspondence according to likeness: but the above-cited Alexander of Hales explains both these conditions of appropriation best of all from the end, namely, That truth may be taught, and error be met. These things being thus premised, it remains to prove the three things already mentioned, and so let it be

First conclusion. — Wisdom is truly attributed to the Son, and sometimes stands for His name.

It is proved from Sacred Scripture. First indeed, because Wisdom is for the most part called begotten: but no essential attribute, as such, can be said to be begotten: therefore then the name of wisdom stands for the Person of the Word. The minor is evident: because the essence neither generates, nor is generated. The major is proved, for in Proverb. 8. that divine Wisdom says: The abysses were not yet, and I was already conceived: and again: Before all the hills I was brought forth: and Eccl. 24.: I came forth out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before every creature. Hence St. Paul, 1. ad Corinth. 1., calls Christ the Lord the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Whence St. Basil, lib. 1. Contra Eunomium, rightly gathers that, If Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God, these, however, are uncreated and coeternal with God (for He was not at some time without wisdom, or without power), then Christ is uncreated and coeternal with God.

It is confirmed from the holy Fathers, who in a similar way prove that the Son of God is eternal, and therefore coeval with, and consubstantial to, the Father: thus St. Ambrose, in the book De symbolo cap. 11., refutes the Arians saying: There was a time when He was not; and before He was born He was not; in this way: Could there have been a time when the Father was without life, without Wisdom, without Virtue, without the Word, which Christ is? St. Augustine agrees with him, in the Oration Contra haeres. cap. 6.: You see therefore, that He always was, of whom you dare to say that He was not. Or if you say that God was at some time without the Word, or without reason, you will be an adversary not only of the Son, but also of the Father. Whence in lib. 7. De Trinit. cap. 1. he says: It is impious to say that God is not the Father of His Wisdom. Hence Theophylact on 1. Ioannis: It is impossible, he says, for God to be without speech, and wisdom, and virtue: therefore, because the Son exists as the Word, Wisdom, and Virtue of the Father, we believe that He is always with God, that is, with the Father.

That Eusebius, whoever he is, the Author of the first homily de Symbolo, explains all these things lucidly:

As, he says, the sun cannot exist without splendor, nor fire without heat, nor immortality without eternity, nor eternity without immortality, nor power without strength; as, I say, reason cannot exist without wisdom, nor truth without justice, nor goodness without mercy; so the Father could never exist without the Son: for all powers are contained in the Son.

From all of which it is evident that Wisdom truly stands for the Son, not only in Sacred Scripture, but also among the holy Fathers.

Second conclusion. — Wisdom is attributed to the divine Son not properly, but appropriately.

This is the common teaching, and St. Augustine proves it, lib. 7. De Trinit. cap. 1., where, having said: Because in that simplicity to be wise is nothing other than to be, there wisdom is the same as essence; he concludes: The Father therefore, and the Son are together one essence, and one magnitude, and one truth, and one wisdom; but the Father and the Son are not together both one Word, because they are not together both one Son: the reason for which he gives in the same place, that the Son, as Image and Word, is said not with reference to Himself, but to the Father, and relatively. From this he infers that the Son is not the Word in the respect in which He is Wisdom, because He is Wisdom in the respect in which He is essence: Therefore, he says, He is not the Word in the respect in which He is wisdom, because the Word is not said with reference to itself, but only relatively with respect to him whose Word it is, just as the Son with reference to the Father; but Wisdom in the respect in which He is essence: and therefore, because there is one Essence, there is one Wisdom. From which it clearly appears that Wisdom is an essential attribute, and therefore common to the three divine Persons, not however proper to the Son alone. Hence St. Augustine in the same place infers, that when the name of Wisdom stands for the Person of the Son, it should not be called Wisdom simpliciter, but Wisdom born, or begotten:

Since, however, he says, the Word is also Wisdom, but it is not the Word in the respect in which it is Wisdom: for the Word is understood relatively, but Wisdom essentially: let this be understood when the Word is said, so that born Wisdom is not said, so that He may be the Son, and the Image: and when these two are said, that is, born Wisdom, in one of them, because it was born, both the Word, and the Image, and the Son are understood, and in all these names essence is not understood, because they are said relatively.

From these things it clearly appears that the name of Wisdom is not simpliciter proper to the Son, but only with an addition, namely when born, or begotten Wisdom is said; for in this way it befits the Son alone not only appropriately, but also properly, and expresses nothing other than what the name of Word and of Son expresses.

Third conclusion. — The divine Father is not wise with the begotten Wisdom.

This is the common teaching, and the Doctor proves it thus in 1. dist. 32. q. 1. n. 9.: If the divine Father were wise with the begotten Wisdom, then either the begotten Wisdom would be the form by which the Father would be made formally wise, just as He is Father by Paternity: or the begotten Wisdom would be the principle of the Wisdom which is in the Father, in which sense the Master of the Sentences concedes that the Son is wise with the unbegotten Wisdom principiatively, namely because the unbegotten Wisdom of the Father is the principle of the begotten Wisdom, which is the Son: or finally the sense would be, that the Son would be the sub-authoritative principle with respect to the act of being wise, which is in the Father, just as the Word is the sub-authoritative principle with respect to the act of creating; for the Father is said to create by the Word: but neither of these can be said licitly, and truly. Not indeed the first, nor the second, otherwise the divine Father would receive Wisdom from the Son, which is absurd:

For if, says St. Augustine, lib. 15. De Trinit. cap. 7., the Son alone understood for Himself, so that the understanding might be for Himself, and for the Father, and for the Holy Spirit, we return to that absurdity, that the Father is not wise from Himself, but from the Son, nor did Wisdom beget Wisdom, but the Father is said to be wise by that Wisdom which He begot... And if for God to be is the same as to be wise, and that is His essence by which He is Wisdom, then not the Son from the Father, which is true; but rather the Father has essence from the Son, which is most absurd, and most false.

Nor even the third, because a sub-authoritative principle has a true action with respect to that of which it is said to be such a principle; for the Son, e.g., truly influences the creatures which the Father produces through Him, and with Him: but the begotten Wisdom has no influence with respect to the act of being wise in the Father. Whence St. Augustine concludes in the same place: God the Father is therefore wise with that Wisdom by which He Himself is His own Wisdom, and the Son is the wisdom of the Father from the wisdom which is the Father, from whom the Son was begotten. Whence he rightly revoked, in the first book of Retractationum cap. 26., what he had taught in lib. 83. Quaestionum q. 23., that God is said to be wise, because He Himself begot that Wisdom by which He is said to be wise. Which opinion he certainly retracted, and in the same place asserts that he examined it more carefully in the books De Trinit.

You will say 1. The divine Father speaks by the Word, according to St. Augustine, 7. De Trinit. cap. 1.: but from St. Anselm in Monologio, cap. 63. To speak is nothing other for the supreme Spirit than to behold, as it were, by thinking*: therefore the Father beholds by the Word, and hence also is wise by the Word.

He distinguishes the minor. The Doctor, n. 10.: If to speak is taken essentially, inasmuch as it signifies the same as to understand, as St. Anselm takes it, he concedes: if it is taken notionally, and inasmuch as it imports the same as to produce the Word, he denies the minor, and likewise the consequence, since in this way speech is distinguished from essential intellection. And so the Father speaks by the Word only in so far as He is the principle of the Word, which by its own notion is formally declarative, and expressive of everything declarable, and manifestable; and thus the Father is only the active cause, not indeed the formal cause, of that representation, and expression: not otherwise than if Peter were to make a mirror, in which all the species, and images of things would be received; that mirror would indeed be the formal cause of that representation, but Peter only the efficient cause. Hence it is, that although the Father speaks by the Word in this way, He cannot nevertheless be said to be wise by the Word, because to be wise is taken essentially, not indeed notionally.

You will say 2. The Doctor admits in the same place, q. 1. n. 7., that the divine Father is rightly said to love Himself by the Holy Spirit: therefore by parity it is also not incongruously said, that He is wise with the begotten Wisdom. The consequence is proved: the Father is said to love Himself by the Holy Spirit because He produces the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father by appropriation: but He also produces the Word, which is appropriately called the Wisdom of the Father: therefore etc.

I deny the consequence, and to its proof I say that there is this distinction between loving, and being wise in the divine: that to love can be taken notionally, inasmuch as it signifies the production of the Holy Spirit, who is called produced love, by which reasoning to love is nothing other than to breathe forth the produced love: but to be wise is not ordered to signifying the production of Wisdom, but only the attainment, and perception of the object, whence it comes about, that it is taken only essentially for the whole intellection, not however notionally for the productive speech of the divine Word; and therefore between the two there is no parity.

That the third Person in the divine Trinity is called the Holy Spirit by a peculiar name is well known to all the faithful without further proof; For although, says St. Ambrose in the Symbolum cap. 1., the Father is spirit, and the Son is spirit, and the Father is holy, and the Son is holy, yet only the third Person is called the Holy Spirit. St. Jerome gathers the propriety of this appellation in the 4. cap. ad Galatas from Ps. 50., where the Royal Psalmist, calling the three divine Persons Spirit, designates them by three peculiar titles; for that holy Doctor says:

He calls the Father the principal Spirit, because the Son is from the Father, and not the Father from the Son; but by the right Spirit of truth and justice he signifies Christ the Lord, because the Father has given all judgment to the Son, as David says: God, give Thy judgment to the King. Moreover, he calls the Holy Spirit by its open name.

But the New Testament declares this appellation, proper to the third divine Person, more clearly, in which as often as explicit mention is made of the divine Persons, so often the third is called the Holy Spirit: thus in the last chapter of Matthew, Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; 1. Ioan.

5. There are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: whence St. Chrysostom, hom. 3. De Spiritu sancto, says: He is called spirit; for this is the first and proper appellation; and, as having a more evident meaning, it manifests the nature of the Holy Spirit.

Furthermore, the Theologians hold that this appellation of Spirit is derived rather from respiration, or spirative breath, than from spirituality and immortality: and indeed fittingly, on account of the singular analogy and likeness which its procession has with breath and the emission of vital spirit; for just as (to omit the rest) the breath itself takes its origin from the heart and the mouth, so, says St. Cyril, lib. 13. Thesauri cap. 3., the Holy Spirit comes forth from the very substance of God, just as the breath which comes forth from the human mouth: this Job openly teaches, saying cap. 33.: The Spirit of the Lord has made me, and the breath of the Almighty has given me life. Therefore Christ the Lord, Ioan. 20., breathed upon the disciples and said: Receive the Holy Spirit: which the same Cyril weighs thus, lib. 9. cap. 14.: Therefore Christ breathed corporally, showing by this sign that just as the human spirit proceeds corporally from the human mouth, so from the divine substance, in a manner befitting the Deity, the spirit which is from it is poured forth.

But this deduction and appropriation of the name spirit, although it be proper, nevertheless does not agree with breath by an altogether complete, but by a very imperfect analogy; for, as St. Basil wisely observes in his single book De Spiritu sancto cap. 16.: Neither is the Word a significant stroke of air, brought forth through the instruments of the voice; nor is the Spirit a breath of the mouth flowing out from the respiratory parts; but the Spirit of the mouth of God is the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father.

Concerning which three things especially remain to be resolved here: 1. Whether He truly proceeds from the Father and the Son; 2. Whether, on the hypothesis that He did not proceed from the Son, He would be really distinguished from Him; 3. What are His properties and peculiar endowments.

That the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father is acknowledged by all who confess His divinity: for Eunomius, who asserted that He draws His origin from the Son alone, dreamed that He was not God, but a creature of the Word, just as the Word itself was a creature of the Father, as St. Basil relates and refutes in book 2, Contra Eunomium, saying: If anyone is raised from creatures to the comprehension of the substance, he understands that the Son is a creature of the Unbegotten (that is, of the Father); and the Paraclete, of the Only-begotten.

But a celebrated controversy still remains between the Greeks and the Latins concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit Himself from the Son; and in order that this contention may be resolved more evidently, first its origin must be uncovered. Therefore

Note 1. It is not yet ascertained who first asserted that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, as the deviating Greeks contend. For that some think the first assertor of this error was Macedonius, the impugner of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, scarcely has the appearance of truth; nor does that Epistle of Justinian, Bishop of Sicily, to Peter, Bishop of Antioch, which is found in the fifth General Council, lend anything to this assertion, in which it is read: Macedonius breathes the Holy Spirit from the Father alone; for certain most learned men think that in place of the word "breathes" one should read "separates," and this agrees very well with the heresy and opinion of Macedonius, who, since he denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, likewise denied His consubstantiality with the Father; and so tore Him away from the Father and separated Him.

Nevertheless, by the more common reckoning of the ecclesiastical historians, Theodoret is believed to be the first assertor of this error while he was still a Nestorian; for, writing on behalf of the Nestorians against the Anathematisms of Cyril of Alexandria, by which the errors of Nestorius were condemned, and attacking the ninth anathematism, by which Cyril had said that the Holy Spirit is proper to the Son, Theodoret replies thus: that the Spirit is proper to the Son if indeed, as Cyril said, He proceeds from the Father as being of the same nature, we likewise confess at the same time; but if he says that He has His existence and essence as from the Son, or through the Son, we say that this is blasphemous and impious. This certainly futile and interjected erroneous opinion of Theodoret, Cyril deliberately omitted in his response, so as to pursue the disputation he had undertaken, namely by showing that the Holy Spirit is proper to the Son, that is, not adventitious and bestowed upon Him by accident; the contrary of which Theodoret taught along with the Nestorians, for which reason he was anathematized by the Council of Ephesus: but shortly after, coming to his senses and abjuring his former opinion, he was received and proclaimed a Catholic with the greatest applause of all in the Council of Chalcedon. Wherefore this error concerning the procession of the Son from the Father alone seems at this very time to have been expunged and lulled to sleep.

Note 2. This error was renewed again around the year 766; for around this time our Annals relate that the Council of Gentilly was celebrated, near Paris, in which, besides the question of the cult to be shown to the sacred Images, this also was agitated: whether the Holy Spirit, just as He proceeds from the Father, so also proceeds from the Son, as Ado of Vienne hands down in the Chronicle: the cause of convoking this Synod was this, namely that when the Emperor Constantine Copronymus the Iconoclast had sent legates to Pippin, King of France, to obtain his confederation, it happened that while the Franks reproached the Greeks for their contempt of their images, the Greeks, on the contrary, reproached the Franks and the Latin Church for having added the word Filioque to the Creed; wherefore, lest these sown tares of impiety creep further, the Council decreed both: that the sacred Images are to be venerated, and that the Holy Spirit truly proceeds from the Father and the Son. But these seeds of error could not be so extirpated that they did not soon sprout again: for Ado himself relates that under the year 809 a Synod was celebrated at Aachen by the mandate of Charlemagne, in which there was action on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. This question a certain John, a monk, first stirred up at Jerusalem; for the settling of which, Barnharic, Bishop of Worms, and Jesse, Bishop of Amiens, and Adelhard, Abbot of the Monastery of Corbie, were sent to Rome to Pope Leo, etc., as the Annals of the Franks relate under the year 809. Moreover, John Pithoeus suspects that this John, the renewer of that error, was that most holy and most learned monk Damascene, who lived at Jerusalem around the year 730. Nor without reason: for he indeed seems to pronounce that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son in book 1, De Fide, chap. 11, where, after having several times said that He proceeds from the Father, toward the end of the chapter he adds: *But

we do not say that the Holy Spirit is from the Son, but we name Him the Spirit of the Son*: but how easily Damascene may be excused will appear below.

Nevertheless, it is to be noted in passing that in the Synod of Aachen there seems to have been action not so much on the procession itself from the Son, as on that addition of the four syllables Filioque to the Creed, as is gathered from the conference of Pope Leo with the legates of this Synod, as we shall say below.

Note 3. This error at length burst forth into open heresy with Photius as its author: for after St. Ignatius, Patriarch of Constantinople, had been cast out, he was thrust into his see and place in the year 858; and being condemned for this cause by Nicholas I, the Supreme Pontiff, thenceforth raging against the Roman Church, he devised various calumnies against her, and cast up to her many heads of heresies, above all that the Latins asserted that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. For this man, says Hugh Eterianus, book 2, Against the Greeks, chap. 15, who after Theodoret, digging a well in the watery sand, burying not seeds but poisons, became the cause of the very enfeebled faith of Christians. For from that time almost all the Greeks conspired in that erroneous opinion, and held it as a kind of public token, by which they would tear the seamless tunic of Christ, withdrawing from the Latin Church, the firmest pillar of Catholic truth, by a nefarious schism, and even by various heresies. Thence it was attempted several times to recall them to the faith and unity of the Church: but, says Cardinal Hosius in the book De Communione sub utraque specie, So often were they led away from the faith by various and foreign doctrines, that as often as fourteen times they returned to the bosom of the Church, so often they abjured it. Wherefore we must strive to discuss this question most exactly, so that it may become more clearly known how senseless and how foul is the insanity of the Greeks. Therefore let it be

The single conclusion. — Truly the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

This is of faith, determined in various Councils, and defended by the holy Fathers of both the Eastern and the Western Church, to be set forth below.

It is gathered and proved 1. from Sacred Scripture. — First indeed from Ioan. cap. 16. v. 14., where Christ, promising the Apostles that He would send them the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, who would teach them all truth, says: He will glorify me, because he will receive of mine and will announce it to you. St. Ignatius weighs this text thus in the Epistola ad Ephesios, where he relates that the Son said to the Father: I have glorified you on earth; I have finished the work which you gave me to do; concerning the Holy Spirit he says: he will glorify me on earth, because he will receive of mine and will announce it to you: therefore each of the two glorifies Him from whom he also receives what he would do.

By these words Ignatius infers that, just as the Son glorified the Father because He receives from the Father by proceeding from Him, so the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son because He receives from Him by proceeding; for the word "will receive" signifies nothing other than procession: since in the Gospel it is never said that one divine Person gives to another, and that this one receives from that one, unless this one proceeds from that one; wherefore we nowhere read that the divine Father receives anything from the Son or from the Holy Spirit, nor the Son from the Holy Spirit, because neither does the Son proceed from the Holy Spirit, nor the Father from Him and the Son.

This St. Epiphanius clearly proves in the Ancoratus, where, after he had said at the beginning: The Holy Spirit is in the midst of the Father and the Son, from the Father and the Son, toward the middle he says:

But if Christ is believed, from the Father, to be God from God, and the Spirit from Christ, or from both, just as Christ says, who proceeds from the Father, and this one will receive of mine, etc. — It is confirmed from the following words in verse 15: All things which the Father has are mine; therefore I said that he will receive of mine: therefore the Son has from the Father not only the essence, but also the power of breathing, or the fecundity of producing the Holy Spirit. For all the substantial perfections of the Father are common to the Son Himself, with this one exception, that the Son is not the Father. Moreover, Christ therefore says that the Holy Spirit will receive from Him, because He Himself has all things which the Father has; for the particle "therefore" refers the cause why He said "he will receive of mine," namely because all things which He has etc. Whence St. Augustine: from whom the Son has it that He is God, from Him He has it of course that the Holy Spirit also proceeds from Him. And in book 3, De Fide, chap. 11: He who begot such a Son gave it by begetting, that the Holy Spirit should also proceed from Him. All of which Eugene IV lucidly explains in the Letters of Union: Since, he says, all things which are the Father's, the Father Himself gave to His only-begotten Son by begetting, except to be the Father; this very thing, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, the Son Himself has eternally, from Him from whom He was also eternally begotten. — To these things St. Damascene himself subscribes, whom the Greeks cast up to us for defending their error; for in book 1, De Fide, cap. 9 he says: All things which the Father has are the Son's, with this one exception, that He is not unbegotten. And chap. 11: In short, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are altogether one, except that the Father is not begotten, the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit has proceeded. But if the Holy Spirit did not proceed from the Son, nor did this One breathe Him, He would be distinguished from the Father not only by generation, but also by the power of breathing: therefore, since St. Damascene affirms that the Father and the Son have all things in common except Paternity and Filiation, he undoubtedly thinks that they have the power of breathing in common, and so that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both.

Secondly, it is proved from those texts of Sacred Scripture in which the divine Son promises the Apostles that He will send them the Holy Spirit. Thus in the same chap. 16. v. 7.: If I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go away, I will send him to you. And earlier He had said in chap. 15.: When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send to you from the Father: but the mission of one Person from another cannot be understood, unless He substantially proceeds from Him by whom He is sent, especially when the Persons are of the same nature and substance, as the Greeks themselves affirm of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: therefore the Holy Spirit truly proceeds from the Son, since He is sent by Him. Whence Gregory the Great, Hom. 26. on the Gospels: The mission of the Holy Spirit, he says, is the procession itself, because He proceeds from the Father and the Son. With this Athanasius agrees in the Epist. to Serapion, where he says: The Son came in the name of the Father; but the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, since the Spirit has such an order and nature toward the Son as the Son has toward the Father, etc. As if he would say: because the Son proceeds from the Father, He is also sent by the Father; so also the Holy Spirit is sent by the Son, because He proceeds from Him.

The Greeks reply, that the Son Himself is sent by the Holy Spirit, from whom He nevertheless does not proceed: therefore from the fact that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Son it does not follow that He proceeds from Him. The antecedent is proved from that passage of Isaiah 48.: And now the Lord and His Spirit have sent me: and of Luke 4.: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me, and has sent me to evangelize the poor.

But I answer. Christ the Lord is indeed sent by the Holy Spirit insofar as, by reason of the humanity He assumed, He is inferior to the Holy Spirit, and so He can be sent by Him with an authoritative mission; and although the denomination of this mission can be attributed to the Word through the communication of idioms, in truth, however, Christ is not immediately and precisely sent by the Holy Spirit insofar as He is the uncreated Word; and so from this nothing is evinced against the present assertion.

Thirdly, it is proved from all those texts in which the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Christ and of the Son; thus Romans 8.: If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his. And Galatians 4.: God sent the Spirit of His Son into your hearts; but He could in no way be called the Spirit of the Son, unless He were referred to the Son; nor be referred to Him, unless He proceeded from Him: for if either the identity of nature and power, or another cause, sufficed for Him to be called the Spirit of the Son, by the same reason the Son could be called the Son of the Holy Spirit. It is confirmed: for just as the Son quidditatively regards the Father begetting, so also the Spirit regards the one breathing; whence, just as the Word cannot be called the Son of a Person who is not the Father, so the Holy Spirit could not have been called the Spirit of a Person who were not a spirator.

Proof 2. from the definitions and doctrine of the Councils. — First indeed this truth was defined in the Epistle which Cyril sent with the Council of Alexandria to Nestorius, and which was received and approved by the whole Council of Ephesus, which is the third General Council; and it is the tenth among the Epistles of Cyril, where it is said: The Spirit of truth is named, and Christ is the truth, and He is poured out from Him just as from God the Father; or as it was had in the ancient compilation of the Councils: He proceeds from Him as from the Father. And in general all the synodal Epistles of Cyril were approved by the Council of Chalcedon, which is the fourth General Council, in the fifth action, and by the sixth Synod, which is the third Constantinopolitan, in the seventeenth action; and the seventh General Council, namely Nicaea 2., in action 7., referring to and approving the Nicene Creed written in the first General Council, adds: Who proceeds from the Father and the Son: although that Council was for the most part of Greek Fathers. — Nor does it matter that in the Council of Florence, sess. 6. and 7., the later Greeks said that in their codices of this Council the particle Filioque is not read; for Andrew, the theologian of the Latin Church, replied learnedly and most aptly, and in that sess. 7. testified that he had a most ancient manuscript codex, in which that particle was contained. Moreover, an ancient historian was cited there as a witness of the same particle. — Nor likewise does it matter that St. Damascene, who flourished at the time of the aforesaid seventh Council, wrote, We do not say that the Holy Spirit is from the Son, as was related in the third Note. For it is probable either that he died before the celebration of the aforesaid Council, or that he wrote that book Ex Filio Spiritum sanctum non dicimus before it; the indication of which is that in his works he cites the Councils only up to the sixth. — This truth likewise has been defined in several Latin Councils; for first, Pope Agatho in Epist. 2., which is also of the Roman Synod, and is contained in the sixth General Synod, says: He proceeds from the Father and the Son; a passage which Cardinal Julian complained had been corrupted by the Greeks in that Disputation which he held against them in the Council of Florence. Nor is it a wonder that this Pontiff with his Roman Council so decreed, since Leo the Great, older than he by many years, in the Epistle to Turribius, Bishop of Astorga, chap. 1., says: He proceeded from both. — Moreover, under Pope Anastasius, in the year of Christ 400., the first Council of Toledo was celebrated, in which this truth is likewise defined in these words: We believe that the Spirit is also the Paraclete, who is neither the Father Himself nor the Son, but proceeding from the Father and the Son: and also in the third of Toledo under Pelagius II., in the year 589., where in the confession of faith set forth by 150 Fathers, Can. 3., it is said: Whoever does not believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, let him be anathema. The same is defined in the fourth Council of Toledo, chap. 1., and in the 8th, around the times of Martin I., and in the 11th under Adeodatus the Supreme Pontiff; all of which Councils were celebrated before the sixth General Synod. — We read the same truth also in the Council of Gotfeld, in the year 650., in Bede, book 4. of the English History, chap. 17., where the Fathers openly profess the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. Finally, the Council of Gentilly was celebrated in the year 766., that of Aachen around the year 809., that of Worms under the year 860., and around the year 1090., in the time of Urban II., a Council was celebrated at Bari of Greeks and Latins, as St. Anselm is the authority, who himself was present at it, and the writer of the life of the same St. Anselm, book 1., narrates the whole matter more fully as an eyewitness. — Likewise the General Councils defined this same truth: the Lateran under Innocent III., chap. 1., with the Greeks also present and consenting to the same, as is clear from chap. 4. of the same; the Council of Lyons under Gregory X., in which, with the Greeks present and consenting, this truth was defined, and the Nicene Creed was sung three times in Greek and in Latin with that explanation, He proceeds from the Father and the Son: finally the Council of Florence, in the year 1438., after long and exact disputations on this matter between the Greek and Latin Fathers, at length it was defined that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as is clear in the Letters of Union, to which the Fathers, both Latin and Greek, subscribed. — But, as the minds of the Greeks are light and fickle, they did not remain long in faith and concord; but soon after relapsed into their former schism and their errors, and swallowed back their own vomit, by which they are still defiled. Nor is it a wonder, since in the very first-fruits of the Church there was a murmur of the Greeks against the Hebrews, of whom alone the Church then consisted; so that from this there would be a fatal presage that the Greeks, prone to division and contention, would divide the Church, the seamless tunic of Christ, by their lamentable schism.

Proof 3. from the Greek Fathers. — First indeed from the Symbol of St. Athanasius, in which we read: The Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

The Greeks reply 1. that this Symbol is not of Athanasius.

But on the contrary, first, Gregory Nazianzen, in the Oration on the Praises of St. Athanasius, testifies that he published a perfect confession of faith, which he offered to the Emperor, and which the whole East and West venerates: He offers to the Emperor, he says, a truly royal and magnificent gift, namely a written confession against the new dogma (namely of the Arians); and after a few words: Moved, as it seems to me, by the authority of this confession, both the Westerners and whatever is vital in the East, etc. Then St. Augustine, in Psalm 120., recites the preceding verse under the name of Athanasius: Concerning this sun, he says, Father Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, spoke thus beautifully: The Son is from the Father alone, etc. He also makes mention of the same Symbol in other places, but with the name of Athanasius suppressed, as in 5. De Trinit., chap. 8., and in the Enchiridion, chap. 35., etc. By which it is established that in the time of St. Augustine it was doubtful to no one that this Symbol was published by St. Athanasius. Finally, Genebrardus, in book 3. De Trinit., and Nauclerus, in the Chronology, affirm that there exists a most ancient codex in the Monastery of St. Germain of Paris, in which it is asserted that Athanasius published the aforesaid Symbol at Trier, while, because of the pressing persecutions of the Arians, he lay hidden in a certain well.

They reply 2. that the particle "and from the Son" was added by the Latins.

But on the contrary 1. this phrase is read also in the Greek text of the Athanasian Symbol. Then in the Fourth Council of Toledo, celebrated in the year 633, and consequently before the schism of the Greeks, the same Symbol of Athanasius is reported with that phrase, and the Son: what reason would there have been then for making this addition, when as yet no public dispute was moved between the two Churches? Finally, which is the chief point, Athanasius himself teaches this same truth in many places, especially in Oration 1. Contra Arianos: For we do not, he says, introduce three principles or three Fathers, as the Marcionists do: since we do not bring three Suns into comparison; but one only Sun, and its splendor, and one only light from both. With which he compares the Father to the Sun, the Son to the splendor, and the Holy Spirit to the light, arising not only from the Sun, but from the Splendor.

And in the Epistle to Serapion ad Serapionem he speaks thus:

The Apostle commands us to avoid a heretical man after one or another correction, even if you should see some flying through the air with Elias, and with Peter and Moses treading the seas with dry foot, unless they profess the Holy Spirit to be God existing essentially from God the Son, just as we profess the Son to be God naturally begotten, existing essentially from God the Father; do not receive them.

Secondly, St. Basil, book 3. Contra Eunomium, says:

Why is it necessary that, if the Spirit is third in dignity and order, He should also be third in nature? For the rule of piety hands down that He is second after the Son in dignity, since He has His being from Him and depends entirely upon that cause; but that He is third in nature we have neither learned from the sacred Scriptures, nor is it possible to gather from the things said before.

Likewise Epiphanius, in Heresy 62.: From the same essence, he says, from the same truth, from the Father and the Son, with the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit is always in substance: and in Heresy 69.: By which, he says, Christ the Lord showed the Father to be light, and the Son light, and the Holy Spirit light, and a fountain from a fountain, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Only-begotten, for rivers shall flow from His womb. Cyril of Alexandria also subscribes, not only in the ninth anathematism, but also in many places, especially in the book De recta fide ad Reginam, where toward the end he concludes: From the Father proceeds the Son, in all things equal and like unto Him. But the life-giving Spirit also proceeds through both. And book 11. on John cap. 27.: Coming forth, he says, from the very substance of God the Father (the Holy Spirit), but poured out upon the saints through the consubstantial Word, from whom He has, according to the emission, to be and to subsist. Which he declares more clearly in book 13. of the Treasury, cap. 1., saying: It is altogether necessary to confess that the Holy Spirit is from the substance of the Father and of the Son: and cap. 2.: But we believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son naturally and essentially, just as from the Father. Nazianzen explains this same truth admirably in Oration 37., where he compares the divine Trinity to three persons of the human race: namely, the Father to Adam, because the Father derived His origin from no Person, as Adam from no man; the Son to Eve, because Eve proceeded from the substance of Adam alone, as the Son from the Father alone; the Spirit to Seth, because he was born of Adam and Eve, as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. I pass over the opinions of the other Greek Fathers, which you will be able to read abundantly in the Council of Florence, as also in St. Thomas, Opusculum 1. Contra Graecorum errores, cap. 32., Hugh Eterianus, Petavius, and innumerable others, both more recent and more ancient, who have shown that the Greek Fathers assent to this truth.

It is proved fourthly. from the Latin Fathers. — First indeed St. Martial, Epist. 1. To the Burdigalenses cap. 10., says: The Holy Spirit, glorious in divine equality, proceeded ineffably from Him who begot, and from Him who was begotten: and so the Spirit, the Lord of the Lord, is proceeding from the Father and the Word. Tertullian favors this, book De Symbolo cap. 8.: The Spirit, he says, is third from God and the Son, just as the fruit is third from the root, coming from the shoot, and the river and the stream third from the fountain, and the apex of the ray third from the Sun. — Likewise Hilary, book 8. De Trinit., asserts that for the Spirit to receive from the Son is the same as to proceed from the Son, just as the Son receives and proceeds from the Father. Ambrose subscribes, book De Symbolo cap. 3.: But the Holy Spirit, he says, is truly a spirit, proceeding indeed from the Father and the Son, but He is not the Son Himself, because He is not begotten, nor the Father, because He proceeds from both: not begotten, not unbegotten, not made. But best and most subtly of all, St. Augustine taught this truth in many places, especially in book 4. De Trinit.: Nor can we say, he says, that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son, for not in vain is the same Spirit called the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son. And in book 15., cap. 26., he inculcates this truth more often: But concerning the splendor from both, he says, it is thus taught, because the Son Himself said: He proceeds from the Father: and when He had risen from the dead and appeared to His disciples, He breathed upon them and said: receive the Holy Spirit, so that He might show that He also proceeds from Himself. It would be futile to summon other holy Latin Fathers to bear witness to this truth, for they are innumerable, and all to a man conspire to the same dogma.

Wherefore all the Greeks are to be blamed most of all, because they give no credence to so many and such most faithful witnesses of the divine truth, whom nevertheless the Fathers of the Fifth General Synod proclaim are to be heard above all others, professing so openly: We follow in all things the holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory, Augustine, Theophilus, John of Constantinople, Cyril, Leo, Probus, and we receive all things which they have written concerning the right faith and the condemnation of heretics.

All these things were proved by the lamentable loss of the Eastern Church, by which God Himself seems to have cast His vote for the Latins: for from the time when the Greeks withdrew themselves from their communion because of these quarrels about the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the Greeks have always fallen into worse state; and that nation, once conspicuous in doctrine to the point of envy, celebrated in holiness to the point of miracle, mistress of the nations by empire, today mourns under the dire captivity of the Turks, and without King, without Prince, without Academies and Schools, bears the barbarous yoke of the Saracens; and, what is a wonder, Constantinople was stormed and the Greek Empire overthrown in the year 1452, on the 28th day of May, according to the more celebrated authors, on which day had fallen the Feast of Pentecost, sacred to the Holy Spirit, so that that might be verified which Christ said, Matth. 12.: Whoever shall have spoken blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come.

It is proved by theological reason. from the Subtle Doctor in 1. dist. 11. q. 1.:

He who has a perfect productive principle, before he is understood to have a product, can produce by that principle, namely when the principle is so perfect that it does not depend on a passive subject, nor can it be impeded by anything: but the Son has the will, by which He is the productive principle of adequate love, and He also has it as prior to the produced act of the will: therefore He can produce by it: therefore He produces it.

He proves the minor:

Generation and Spiration have a certain order between themselves, so that in some way generation is prior to spiration, and in that prior moment every divine perfection is communicated to the one begotten, insofar as it is not repugnant to him, and so too the will: therefore he then has the will as prior to the act of the will, because as yet no production is understood to have been made through the mode or act of the will.

It is confirmed. from the fact that if one had to doubt about the influence of the Father and of the Son in the production of the Holy Spirit, it would rather seem that one should doubt about the Father than about the Son, since the Father, in the production of His Son, already has an action adequate to Himself, if you consider natural reason; for His productive action of the Son is infinite, and consequently adequate to the principle; therefore it seems that He cannot have any other action at least adequate along with it; for that reason it seems that He cannot further be occupied, by a new infinite action, for a new production of another Person: but the Son has no productive action antecedent to the production of the Holy Spirit, nor can He have any other ad intra than spiration alone; and so if natural reason is considered, this spirative action would seem to be conceded to Him rather than to the Father, if it were to be attributed to one divine Person only.

The Greeks object first indeed the sacred Scripture, which as often as it commemorates the procession of the Holy Spirit, so often makes mention of the Father alone; thus Ioan. 15.: When the Paraclete shall have come, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father. Therefore they deem that He proceeds from the Father alone.

I deny the consequence: for as St. Augustine notes, book 3. De Trinit., by these words the Son is not excluded, but the Father is expressed as the principal author, because indeed He is the principle without principle, to whom He refers everything that He Himself has. In this manner He said in Ioannis 7.: My doctrine is not mine, but His who sent me, the Father's; which Augustine weighs thus in tractate 29. on John: Because, he says, the Word cannot be the word of no one, but of someone, and He calls His own doctrine Himself, and not His own, because the Word is the Father's. For what is so much yours as yourself, and what is not so much yours as yourself, if you are someone's, what you are? And so the divine Son refers everything that He is back to the Father, and therefore attributes to Him that productive fecundity of the Holy Spirit which He received from the Father. Which St. Augustine, book 15. De Trinit. cap. 17., explains admirably, saying: Not in vain, he says, is it not said in this Trinity from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds, except God the Father; but I added principally for this reason, because the Holy Spirit is also found to proceed from the Son, but the Father gave this also to Him.

He answers 2. St. Anselm, in the book De Processione Spiritus sancti, maintains that in asserting the Father to be productive of the Holy Spirit, the Son is not on that account excluded, because the affirmation of one is not the negation of the other: indeed, he says, even if it were said openly: No one produces the Holy Spirit, except the Father; that expression would not on that account exclude the Son, since exclusive expressions added to one divine Person do not exclude the other Persons, unless the predicate be opposed to them relatively, as is clear from these words of Matth. 11.: No one knows the Son, except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father, except the Son: by which, however, the Son is not excluded from knowledge of Himself, nor the Holy Spirit from knowledge of both.

They object 2. In the Council of Ephesus the Symbol of the Nestorians was read before the Fathers, in which it was expressly contained that the Holy Spirit did not proceed from the Son; and yet none of the Fathers protested, and so they all seem to have consented to this proposition.

I answer 1. An argument from negative authority, which nowhere avails much, concludes nothing here, since the silence of the judges was engaged with something other than that proposition; for the Council then did not wish to dispute ex professo about this question of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, because it had convened on account of another matter, namely about the one Person of Christ the Lord, and about His Divinity, whom the Virgin Mary brought forth. For the rest, the Council signified its opinion quite openly enough when it approved the doctrine of Cyril and condemned the contrary doctrine of the Nestorians and of Theodoret.

They object 3. Various authorities of the holy Fathers; first indeed of St. Dionysius, book De Divinis nominibus cap. 2., where he says: The Father alone is the supersubstantial fountain of the Deity. Secondly of Nazianzen, Orat. 21., where he says: All things which the Father has, the Son also has, except the cause: or as others translate, Except the causality: therefore the Son does not have from the Father that He should be the cause, or principle, of the Holy Spirit. Thirdly of Basil, Epist. 43. to Gregory of Nyssa, where he says: The Son has no communion with the Father according to His proper notion: but if the Son spirated, He would have active spiration as a notion common with the Father: therefore etc. Finally they bring forward Damascene, book 1. De Fide cap. 7. and 8., where he says: The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and rests in the Son: and a little below: We say the Holy Spirit is from the Father; we do not say from the Son: and again: The Holy Spirit is indeed from the Father, but not from the Son: therefore in reality the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son.

I deny the consequence, and to St. Dionysius I say that he therefore calls the Father the supersubstantial fountain, because He alone is the principle without principle; but the Son is like a river flowing from that very fountain, from whom, as also from the fountain, the pool is derived, namely the Holy Spirit. In which sense Epiphanius also, in Heresy 69., calls the Son a fountain from a fountain. To Nazianzen I say that he speaks of the causality by which the Father and the Son are mutually related, not of that by which they regard the Holy Spirit. To Basil I answer that he there speaks not of every notion of these two Persons, but of the proper notion of each, namely of Paternity and Filiation, according to which they have no communion at all; for Paternity and Innascibility belong to the Father alone, just as Filiation is proper to the Son alone. Finally, to Damascene I say that although St. Thomas, 1. p. q. 36. art. 2. ad 3., answers that *many of the Greeks followed in this

the Nestorian Theodoret, among whom was also Damascene*, nevertheless he can be interpreted benignly, as Bessarion expounded, Orat. pro unione cap. 6., namely that Damascene did not absolutely deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, but only dissented from the Catholics in his manner of speaking, thinking it safer to say through the Son than from the Son; for the preposition from seemed to him to denote the first cause not proceeding from another cause, the contrary of which the preposition through denoted, which without doubt has causal force.

FILIOQUE TO THE NICENE SYMBOL.**

It is more than certain that the addition of the particle Filioque to the Nicene Symbol was that which divided the two seas — not to say the hemispheres of the earth — and likewise both Churches, the Eastern and the Western, and furnished the Greeks with an occasion for withdrawing themselves from union with and obedience to the Roman Church.

For thus Marcus of Ephesus, the Greek spokesman, in the Council of Florence, when he had professed that the addition made to the Symbol was neither true nor suitable, added: Which assuredly is known to have been the principal cause of our schism and dissension; and below: The Roman Church had devised a dogma of its own, and on that account it is beyond doubt that it was the cause of dissolving our friendship and the beginning of our quarrels; whence Photius, who is held to have begun the Schism, in his Encyclical Letter to the patriarchal sees of the East, put forward this as the principal cause of his withdrawal from the Roman Church:

This, he says, is the sum and apex of evils: the sacred Symbol itself, which has irrefragable force and authority from all the synodical and ecumenical decrees, they did not hesitate (the Latins) to adulterate with certain spurious and false disputations... teaching anew that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father alone, but from the Son.

This tragedy arose because in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon the Fathers decreed that no one might be allowed to hand down a faith other than the Nicene, and those daring the contrary seem to be struck with anathema; but in the Nicene Symbol this particle Filioque is not found, nor anything equivalent; and so the Latins already seemed to have incurred the censure hurled by the Council of Ephesus. Wherefore two things especially are to be established in this Appendix, namely that that addition was legitimate, and the time at which it was first made is to be inquired into.

The first, the Fathers affirm — Greek as well as Latin — in the Council of Florence; for all subscribed to the Letters of Union published in the name of all by Eugene the Fourth, in which among other things these words are read: We define that the explanation of those words, Filioque, was lawfully and reasonably added to the Symbol for the sake of declaring the truth, and because of the necessity then impending. Hence no room for doubting this truth now remains. But for fuller persuasion, I urge thus: the addition would be illicit, either because it asserts something false, or because it was made to the Nicene Symbol contrary to the laws sanctioned by the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon; or finally because it was published without the consent of both Churches, the Eastern and the Western: but none of these stands in the way. — Not the first, indeed, for from what has been said it is clear that the Holy Spirit truly proceeds from the Father and from the Son; and so the particle asserting this truth savors of no falsehood. — Nor the second; otherwise the very Greeks themselves would first of all be to blame, who so often changed their Symbols after the Nicene had been published; for Mark of Ephesus, who defended the Greek cause most obstinately of all in the Council of Florence, confesses toward its end that no little time, to be sure, had intervened between the first Council, from which that divine Nicene Symbol had been published, and the second, in which interval of time almost thirty other Symbols had been produced by particular and private Councils. Then the Fathers of the Councils of Ephesus, Constantinople, and Chalcedon would have to be condemned and struck by their own thunderbolt; for if, as the Greeks will, it is not lawful to add even a Word to the Nicene Symbol, why then did they themselves add more? For, as was objected to the Greeks in the Council of Florence, the particles 'of heaven and earth' are found in the Constantinopolitan Symbol, which are not read in the Ephesine and the Nicene: similarly 'of the substance' is found in the Nicene, but is not found in the Ephesine and the Constantinopolitan: likewise 'of the Virgin Mary' is in the Constantinopolitan, but not in the Ephesine and the Nicene: moreover it is certain that in the Nicene Symbol no more was pronounced about the Holy Spirit than this, 'and in the Holy Spirit'; but afterwards those words, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, were added by the Fathers of the Council of Constantinople; yet of these the Greeks do not complain: therefore they also complain unjustly about the addition of the particle Filioque. Finally, an equal has no command over an equal, nor can anyone bind the hands of his successor; and so the Council of Ephesus and of Chalcedon could not forbid future Councils, when opportunity was given and necessity urged, to hand down a new explanation and addition of the Symbol; for it is free for successors, as being equals, to explain the faith in another way and in other words, provided they are willing to add or take away nothing against the right faith. — Not finally the third: since, as the Latins demonstrated in the Council of Florence, that addition of the Filioque was approved by the Greeks before it was approved universally by the Roman Church, namely in the 7th general Synod, which was almost wholly of Greek Fathers. Add, that just as the Greeks themselves, when opportunities were given, celebrated many Councils with no Father of the Latin Church present, in which they determined several things concerning the faith, proscribed heresies, and framed Symbols; why could not the Latin Fathers in like manner add this addition of the Filioque to the Symbol, namely for the sake of explaining the faith? Moreover, the Roman Church is by no means bound to convoke the others, especially since in old times many Synods were celebrated with a diverse number of Fathers and approved, sometimes with the Latin Fathers absent.

The second doubt, namely at what time this addition was made, has not yet been sufficiently explored; for some will that the addition was made by the Roman Council under Damasus, which Stanislaus Socolovius infers in this way in cap. 1. of the annotation Censurae Orientalis Ecclesiae factae per Hieremiam Patriarcham Constantinopolitanum, where he says that when Damasus had summoned to Rome the Fathers of the Eastern Church gathered at Constantinople, that they might there celebrate a universal Council with the Latins, and since on account of various inconveniences it was not permitted to proceed thither, they sent their faith to the Roman Council, which Damasus approved together with the Roman Council, only that particle Filioque having been added

to the Symbol of faith published in that Council for the fuller explanation of the Nicene Symbol; which the Constantinopolitan Fathers again confirmed. This, however, he proves from the Letter of the Council to Damasus, and from the Symbol of Damasus, which is found in Jerome, where the aforesaid particle is added. But this opinion rests on little: both because in the aforesaid Letter of the Constantinopolitan Council there is not even a word about the addition of the particle Filioque; and because among the decrees of that Roman Council, which are contained in the 9th book of the Tripartitae historiae, cap. 16., nothing is decreed about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, but by Canon 16. only he is condemned who has denied that the Holy Spirit is from the Father. What, however, is brought forward from the Symbol of Damasus helps little: both because it is not certain whether that Symbol is truly Damasus's; moreover it is far different from the Nicene and the Constantinopolitan: but here the question is not raised where this truth was first defined, but where the particle Filioque was first added to the Nicene Symbol, which is sung in the Church.

One might suspect, not without foundation, that this addition was made by the Fathers of the first Council of Toledo, celebrated in the year of Christ 400.; for in the Confession of faith, which Idatius of Limoges indicates was published in this Synod, we read: that the Spirit is also the Paraclete, who is neither the Father Himself nor the Son, but proceeds from the Father and from the Son. Which again is constantly affirmed in the third Toledan Synod. But since that Confession of faith is far different from the Nicene Symbol, which is sung in the Church, one cannot conclude from that that this particle Filioque was added from that time to the Symbol about which the Greeks complained.

Wherefore I judge it better to say that this addition was made by certain particular Churches about the year of Christ 620., and from there was adopted by others, the Supreme Pontiff approving: which I gather first from the words of Andrew the Theologian, speaking in the name of the Latins in the Council of Florence, session 7.: With a very great Schism impending in Gaul and in the Spains, when the Filioque was already celebrated everywhere, it was necessary for the Roman Pontiff, amid the concourse of many Westerners of ample dignity and the great concord of a Council of Fathers, the Ex Filioque having been added, to illustrate the Symbol more fully. Then in the 8th Council of Toledo, in the year 653., the same Nicene Symbol is recited with this addition: We believe also in the Holy Spirit, the life-giver, proceeding from the Father and from the Son, to be adored and glorified with the Father and with the Son. Finally, an indication of this truth is that in the Synod of Gentilly the question of the present controversy was debated between the Greeks and the Latins, and, which is the chief point, in the 7th general Synod, action 7., the Symbol is recited with this addition; and so it is likely that this addition was made earlier.

You will say: The Master of the Sentences, lib. 1. dist. 11. cap. 2., asserts that Leo the Third, who sat about the year 796., gave a refusal to the orators of Charlemagne, who sought in his name, and also in that of the Council of Aachen, the addition and the celebration of the particle Filioque in the Mass: therefore this is a sign that this addition had not yet been approved by the Roman Church; for why should Leo be loath to concede this, if it had been approved and conceded so many years before by his predecessors? He refused, nevertheless, for, as Baronius relates, tom. 9., for the year 809., he answered the aforesaid orators: If I had been asked before it was sung in that way, it would not have been introduced; I would surely have answered: and immediately, confirming his counsel and his judgment, he adds:

Is it more salutary to believe, or perilous not to believe, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, as from the Father — Him who is known to be the Son, Wisdom, God, begotten of Wisdom, God, Truth, God, of Truth, God — and yet that both are one wisdom, one truth, essentially God; since nevertheless it is certain that this was not added to that same Symbol by the holy Fathers?

Moreover, the same Master of the Sentences affirms that the Pontiff, immediately upon the departure of the aforesaid orators, had the Constantinopolitan Symbol written out on two silver tablets, on the one indeed in Latin, on the other in Greek, in both cases without that addition Filioque: therefore it follows that at that very time this addition had not yet been legitimately made, nor approved by the Roman Church.

I answer, that Leo the Third indeed rightly did these things, because perhaps at that very time this addition was not yet read by the Roman Church in the sacrifice of the Mass, although in some particular Churches the custom had grown strong of reciting this particle Filioque, long since added to the Constantinopolitan Symbol, amid the solemnities of the Masses: he did not, however, on that account condemn the addition, but he did not approve that it be sung in the Mass without the prior ordinance of the Roman Church. Nor does it matter that he had the Symbol written out in that way without the aforesaid particle: for he did this in order that the memory of the whole Constantinopolitan Symbol might be preserved, which could have been obliterated by the new explanation of the Symbol; and in order that it might be clear that nothing contrary to antiquity was taught, but that the whole ancient faith was retained, with only explanations newly added.