RECAPITULATION OF QUESTION TWENTY-NINE

Article 1. A person is a free and intelligent subject or an individual substance with a rational nature.

Article 2. Person is the same as the "hypostasis" of an intellectual nature.

Article 3. Since person signifies that which is most perfect in all nature, namely, a subsistence with a rational or intellectual nature, it is proper that this term be used with reference to God analogically and in the most excellent manner. Thus in Sacred Scripture the Father and the Son, as is clear, are personal nouns and so also is the Holy Ghost, who is mentioned with them.

Article 4. The divine persons, distinct from one another, are constituted by the three divine subsisting relations opposed to one another, namely, paternity, filiation, and passive spiration.

The reason for this is that "there is no distinction in God except by the relations of origin opposed to one another." Since these relations are not accidents but subsisting, we find in them two requisites for a person: subsistence and incommunicability, or distinction. Thus the three divine persons are three intelligent and free subjects, although they understand by the same essential intellection, love themselves necessarily by the same essential love, and freely love creatures by the same free act of love.

Therefore the paternity in God is personality, although it is relative, as are also filiation and passive spiration. The divine paternity on its part renders the divine nature incommunicable, although the divine nature is still communicable to the other two persons, just as the top angle of the triangle on its part renders its surface incommunicable, although this surface can still be communicated to the other two angles. And as God is His own deity, so the Father is His own paternity, the Son is His own filiation, and the Holy Ghost is His own (quasi-) passive spiration.