THIRD ARTICLE: WHETHER THE TERM PERSON CAN BE APPLIED TO GOD

The reply is in the affirmative as pertaining to faith as is clear from the Athanasian Creed: "For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost."[306]

The body of the article gives the theological argument, which may be presented as follows. Every perfection is to be attributed to God. But "person" signifies what is most perfect in all of nature, namely, a free and intelligent subject, or a subsisting being with a rational nature. Therefore it is proper to speak of God as a person, and this in the most excellent manner. God is subsisting being itself with an intellectual nature and, therefore, whatever pertains to the person belongs to Him formally and eminently. For this reason theistic philosophers speak of a personal God in opposition to the pantheists, who say that God is immanent in the universe in which He operates not freely but necessarily.

In his reply, St. Thomas states that God is the highest and most intelligent being per se. To the second difficulty he replies that the term "person" in its formal being most properly belongs to God since the dignity of the divine nature exceeds every dignity. His third reply shows he understood the difficulty that arose between the Greeks and the Latins. In his reply to the fourth objection, he says: "Individual being cannot belong to God so far as matter is the principle of individuation but only so far as individual being denotes incommunicability." This was also noted by Richard of St. Victor. Thus the person of the Father is incommunicable to the Son; thus also it is explained that the humanity of Christ, which is individuated by matter, is not a person because it is communicated to the suppositum of the divine Word, in which it exists.

From this, however, a problem arises. If the person denotes incommunicability in the divine nature, how can the Father communicate His nature to the Son? This problem will be solved in the following articles.