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In this article St. Thomas explains in opposition to
Praepositivus of Cremona that it is necessary to express
the relations in the abstract, and that the relations in
the abstract are called personal properties or notions.
Thus paternity is said to be a notion or the objective
reason denoting the person of the Father, and filiation
likewise is the notion or the proper reason denoting the
person of the Son, and similarly procession is the notion
denoting the third person.
The reason for having recourse to the abstract notions of
paternity, filiation, etc., is that our intellect
apprehends God not as He is in Himself as a most simple
being, but in the mirror of sensible things, that is,
according to our method of knowing sensible things. The
simple forms of sensible things are signified by abstract
terms, for example, animality, humanity, whereas the
suppositum is signified by concrete terms, such as this
animal, and this man.
As St. Thomas says,[369] because of their
simplicity we designate divine things by abstract terms,
and by concrete terms because of their subsistence. Thus
we speak of God and, the Deity, of wisdom and a wise
man, of paternity and the Father. But we add that God
is His own Deity and the Father is His own paternity.
Otherwise we would not be able to reply to the heretics
who ask how the three persons are one God and how they are
three. For the person of the Father there is a special
reason since the person of the Father is actively referred
to the two other persons by the two relations of paternity
and active spiration. These two relations cannot be
reduced to one, otherwise filiation and passive spiration
would be identified and thus there would be only two
persons. Thus we must admit two notions for the Father,
namely, paternity and active spiration, and the latter is
common to Him and to the Son.
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