COROLLARIES

1. Personality excludes a threefold communicability. 1. It formally excludes the communicability of nature to another suppositum because the nature already exists in a suppositum. 2. By presupposition and materially it excludes the communicability of the universal to the individual because the person is an individual itself and has an individuated nature. This incommunicability properly pertains to the individuation of nature which takes place in us and in corporeal beings by matter determined by quantity inasmuch as a specific form as received in this matter is no longer communicable.[298] 3. Personality excludes the communicability of the part to the whole because the person is a complete substance.[299] Thus a separated soul is not a person but a principal part of a person. Thus we do not say, "Peter is now in heaven," but "the soul of Peter." On the other hand we say, "After the Ascension, Jesus is in heaven; and after the Assumption, the Blessed Virgin is in heaven and not only her soul." The humanity of Christ is not a person for, while it is individuated and singular, it is not a suppositum or a subject, but it pertains to the suppositum of the incarnate Word.

2. In this way we explain that there is but one person in Christ, that is, one intelligent and free subject, although He has two intellects and two wills. So also we see how in God there are three persons and one nature and one being. We say this because there are three free and intelligent subjects although they have the same nature, the same essential intellect, the same liberty, and the same essential love. Contradiction is avoided by the fact that the three divine persons are relative and that they are opposed to each other, as we shall see below.

3. Personality is quite different from that individuation whose principle is matter determined by quantity. Individuation properly excludes the communicability of the universal to the inferior and it takes place through something lower than the universal, that is, by the matter in which the form is received so that the received form is no longer subject to participation.[300]

On the other hand, personality properly and formally excludes the communicability of nature to another subject or suppositum because the nature is terminated and possessed by one subject existing separately per se, for example, by Peter, and now Peter's human nature cannot be attributed to Paul. St. Thomas says: "Person signifies that which is most perfect in all nature, namely, something subsistent (existing separately per se) in rational nature," whereas our individuation derives from something lower than ourselves, namely, matter.[301]

In Christ, although individuation as in us is derived from matter, the personality is uncreated and differs infinitely from matter. The term "individual" designates that which is inferior in man, that which is subordinate to the species, to society, and to the country; person designates that which is superior in man, that by reason of which man is ordered directly to God Himself above society. Thus society, to which the individual is subordinate, is itself ordered to the full perfection of the human person, as against statism, which denies the higher rights of the human person. We thus arrive not only at a concept which is definite and distinct but at a vital concept of the person immediately subject to God loved above all things. Such is the definition of person. For a simple understanding of the dogma it is sufficient to say that the person is a free and intelligent subject and is predicated analogically of man, the angels, and the three divine persons, for each of these is a free and intelligent subject.[302]