SIXTH ARTICLE: WHETHER A NOTIONAL ACT CAN TERMINATE IN SEVERAL PERSONS

In other words, it is asked whether several persons can be generated or spirated in God, as one man can beget several sons.

Reply. The reply is in the negative.

1. In God being and possibility are not different. Therefore if it were possible to have several sons of God, there would actually be several sons of God; and this conclusion would be heresy.

2. Such plurality of sons could arise only from matter, which does not exist in God. It would also presuppose several numerically distinct generations. This is impossible because generation and spiration are acts naturally determined to one terminus and the terminus is, as it were, an adequate fruit (result). Thus the Son is the perfect Son, in whom the entire filiation and the entire divine nature is contained without multiplication. We should note what St. Thomas says in this sixth article (as everywhere else): "The forms of one species are not multiplied except according to matter, " and therefore a form that is not received in matter cannot be anything but one.

Recently some Thomists have said that God could miraculously make several angels in the same species, that is, many Michaels multiplied without matter. According to St. Thomas this is impossible because we are dealing here with a metaphysical principle in which there is no place for a miracle.[571] It is not merely a natural law but a metaphysical principle that an act that is not limited in itself is not limited or multiplied except by the potency or real capacity in which it is received. Therefore a form is not multiplied except by matter, or by an order to matter, and it is this order to matter that remains in the separated soul. In this metaphysical principle, if it is really metaphysical, that is, absolutely and not only hypothetically necessary, there is no exception by way of a miracle.