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Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of ‘Relation’ and ‘Participation’ and Contemporary Trinitarian Theology1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Najeeb Awad
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Abstract

This paper is an attempt at proposing Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics of ‘relationship’ and ‘participation’ as a corrector of a contemporary theological trend that conflates ‘person’ with ‘relation’ in its understanding of the trinity, turning God, eventually, from a self-existing, particular personal Being into an idealist expression of a network of relational movements reflective of what the human personhood means. Thomas Aquinas’ theology of relation and participation invites contemporary theology to retrieve a theology that keeps ‘transcendence’ characteristic of God's personal being in order not to turn the participation of God in the finite's realm of existence into a panentheist or one-sidedly, human-centered relationality.

Keywords

AquinasRelationparticipationTrinityMetaphysics
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 93 , Issue 1048 , November 2012 , pp. 652 - 670
Copyright
© 2012 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2012 The Dominican Council. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2012, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA

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Footnotes

1

This essay is a brief study is taken from a broader book I am working on writing at the moment as a Visiting-Fellow in Yale Divinity School, the tentative title of which is “Beyond Heirarchism: Trinitarian Theology, Postmodernity and the Notions of ‘Self’ and ‘Personhood’.”

References

2 Griffin, David Ray, “A Naturalistic Trinity,” in Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, Bracken, Joseph A. S.J and Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt (eds.), (New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 23–40, p. 24Google Scholar.

3 Griffin, David, “Panentheism: A Postmodern Revelation,” in Clayon, Philip and Peacocke, Arthur (eds), In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Precense in a Scientific World, (Grand Rapids, Mich/ Cambridg, UK: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), pp. 36–47, pp. 42–43Google Scholar.

4 Ford, Lewis, “Contingent Trinitarianism,” in Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, Bracken, Joseph A. S.J and Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt (eds.), (New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 41–68, pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

5 Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J., “Introduction: Do We Need to Transcend Transcendence?” in Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, Caputo, J.D. and Scanlon, M.J. (eds.), (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 1–16, p. 3Google Scholar.

6 Scanlon, Michael J., “Trinity and Transcendence,”Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, Caputo, J.D. and Scanlon, M.J. (eds.), (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 77Google Scholar. Scanlon refers here to Joachim of Fiore's belief that the progress of history unfolds no else than the history progress in God's self.

7 Ibid. p. 76.

8 R. Jenson, for example, defines the persons of the trinity as ‘threefold identity’ that expresses God's progressive interaction with the human in time: Robert, Jenson. The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Jenson, , Systematic Theology, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. John Zizioulas follows a similar track and defines ‘persons’ in God as ‘communion’. He, then, speaks about the Father, Son and Spirit as three unique relational being-ness as communion: D., Zizioulas, John Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993Google Scholar; “On Being a Person: Toward an Ontology of Personhood”, in Persons, Divine and Human, Schwöbel, C. and Gunton, C. (eds.), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999, pp. 33–46Google Scholar. Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedicts XVI) defines ‘person’ as ‘total relationality’ and considers the person totally and completely constituted by one's relations, possessing nothing of one's own: Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph, Dogma and Preaching, (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1989), p. 213Google Scholar. He even states that standing in relation is not expressive of real personhood (p. 221). For a perceptive analysis and critic of Ratzinger's and Zizioulas’ understanding of personhood, see: Volf, Miroslav, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, (Grand Rapids, Mich/ Cambridge, UK: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 29–126Google Scholar.

9 For a brief look at some of the central ideas Aristotle offers on the notion of ‘relation’, which were borrowed from him by Thomas Aquinas, see the study of Turcescu, Lucian, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Persons, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 30–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Turcescu quotes from Aristotle's ‘Categories’ and ‘Dr Interpretatione’, Ackrill, J.L. (trans.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Cat. 6a36-4CrossRefGoogle Scholar0. He also relies on the discussion of the same issue in Fabio Morales’“Relational Attributes in Aristotle,” in Phronesis, 39(3), 1994, pp. 55–274, and to a lesser extent on Khan's, Charles H. “Questions and Categories: Aristotle's Doctrine of Categories in the Light of Modern research,” in Questions, Hiz, Henry (trans.), (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), pp. 227–278Google Scholar.

10 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Group of editors, 2nd ed. (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press/ Gale and Thomson Learning, 2003), Vol. 12, ‘Relation’, pp. 40–44, p. 40Google Scholar.

11 New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Relation”, pp. 41–42.

12 See, Gasché, Rodolphe, of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Gasché, of Minimal Things, p. 2.

14 Hanninger, Mark G. SJ., Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 1ffGoogle Scholar.

15 Meyer, Hans, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Eckhoff, Fredric (trans.), (St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book, Co. 1954), p. 114Google Scholar.

16 Meyer, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 115.

17 Meyer, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 118.

18 See on this, Young, William W. III, “From Describing to Naming God: Correlating the Five Ways with Aquinas’ Doctrine of the Trinity”, in New BlackFriars, Vol. 85. 999 (2004), pp. 527–541, p. 529CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Young shows that because of its deficiency, Aquinas restricts the knowledge boundaries by means of this effect-cause form of relation to God's existence in relation to the world, not to God's triune essence.

19 Meyer, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, pp. 90ff.

20 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, Laurance Shapcote (trans.), in Great Books of the Western World, Adler, Mortimer J. (ed.), (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1990), Vol. 1, Pt. 1, Q. 3, art. 3Google Scholar. All my following quotations of Aquinas are taken from this version.

21 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 3, art. 4.

22 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 11, art. 1.

23 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 11, art. 2.

24 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 11, art. 3–4.

25 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 27, art. 1.

26 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 27, art. 2.

27 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 28, art. 1.

28 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 28, art. 2.

29 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 28, art. 3.

30 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 29, art. 1.

31 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 29, art. 3–4.

32 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 29, art. 4.

33 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 29, art. 4.

34 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 29, art. 4; Q. 30, art. 3.

35 Thus believes, Richards, Robert L. S.J., The Problem of an Apologetical Perspective in the Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Analecta Gregoriana, Vol. 131, Sec. B. N. 43, (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1963), pp. 110–112Google Scholar. According to Richards, the apologetic purpose appears in that “Aquinas has relied on the metaphysics of relation to give systematic structure to the plurality of persons subsisting in the unity of the divine essence” (p. 111).

36 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Relations, Trinitarian”, Vol. 12, pp. 45–46, p. 46.

37 Young, “From Describing to Naming God: Correlating the Five Ways with Aquinas’ Doctrine of the Trinity”, p. 539, and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 40, art. 1.

38 Smith, Timothy L., Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology: A Study in Theological Method, (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), pp. 48–60Google Scholar.

39 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, “Relation”, p. 43. Mattingly refers to Aquinas’Commentary on the Metaphysics, and De Potentia, Q. 7–8, to show that the last derives from this Aristotelian distinction his conviction that the study of relatives is prior to that of their relations: the ‘what’ I prior to the ‘how’.

40 New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 12, “Relations, Trinitarian”, p. 45.

41 Gasché, On Minimal Things, p. 2.

42 Gasché, On Minimal Things, p. 7. A similar inquiry may also underlies the shift in modernity from the attention to ‘what is a relation’ to an attention to its knowability, which is associated with an emphasis on the knowledge of relation by means of participation in and as part of it.

43 Gasché, On Minimal Things, p. 8.

44 Gasché, On Minimal Things, p. 9.

45 Gasché, On Minimal Things, p. 10.

46 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 50, art. 2., as quoted by Peter Hick, One or Two? A Historical Survey of an Aspect of Personhood”, p. 41. Hick correctly realizes that Aquinas’ focus on man's relation with God is not identical in conception with the contemporary stress on the constitutive significance of relationship for human identity.

47 See: Velde, Rudi A. Te, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 11–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Weinberg, Julius R., A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 184–185Google Scholar. Weinberg refers to Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II.50–54.

49 Norbert W. Metga, Analogy and Theological Language in the Summa Contra Gentiles: A Textual Survey of the Concept of Analogy and its Theological Application by St. Thomas Aquinas, (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1984), p. 62. Metga calls this understanding of participation in terms of imitation or likeness ‘analogy of proportionality’ and sets double sense of ‘proportion’ in Aquinas’ thought (pp. 64–66). For another analysis of Aquinas’ notions of proportion and proportionality see: Hemming, Laurence Paul, “Analogia non Entis Sed Entitatis: The Ontological Consequences of the Doctrine of Analogy”, in International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol. 6.2, 2004, pp. 118–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 See: Mondin, Battista S.X., St Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy: In the Commentary of the Sentences, (The Hage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 87–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Mondin, St Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy, pp. 95–99.

52 Mondin, St Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy, p. 100.

53 Mondin, St Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy, pp. 103–119. Miroslav Volf recently sides with the analogically shaped relation between God's being and Man in relation to the link between the doctrine of the trinity and ecclesiology, arguing that “‘person’ and ‘communion’ in ecclesiology cannot be identical with ‘person’ and ‘communion’ in the doctrine of the trinity; they can only be understood as analogous to them”: Volf, After our Likeness, p. 199. Volf correctly states that the absence of this analogical mediation of the relation between God and His community would either deifies the church or denies God His divine being.

54 Mondin, St Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy, p. 111. ‘Therefore, it seems proper to conclude that for St. Thomas the essential constitutive of analogy in general are two: 1) it is a principle of unification, 2) this unifying principle is a perfection (quality, property, etc.) that is realized in several beings (or is predicated of several subjects according to different degrees)”.

55 Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), p. 49. For a good argument that Aquinas is not following this reductionist approach, see Kilby, Karen, “Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding,” in International Journal of Systematic Theology, 7(4), 2005, pp. 414–427CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding,” p. 427.

57 Weinberg, Julius R., A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 187–188Google Scholar.

58 Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 188.

59 Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 198. “in order that God be imitated as completely as possible in His creation, there must be some creatures that act as much like God as is possible for something which is not absolutely perfect”.

60 Hanninger, Relations, p. 21. According to Hanninger, this is the meaning of Aquinas’ saying that “something changes only if there is a change in it” in his Commentary on the Sentences (Scriptura Super Libros Sententiarum), I.d. 26, Q. 2, art. 1. ad. 3; d. 30, Q. 1, art. 1.

61 Hanninger, Relations, p. 23.

62 Hanninger, Relations, p. 34, and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 28, art. 1.

63 See Knight, Gordon, “The Theological Significance of Subjectivity”, in The Heythrop Journal, 46(1), 2005, pp. 1–10, p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.