Nova et vetera

The number of extended theological studies on the person of God the Father is meager, to say the least. Thankfully, Fr. Ku’s recent exposition of St. Thomas’s theology of the Father not only serves to redress that paucity, but does so with remarkable comprehension and skill. Ku’s text unfolds in three movements: the first provides the scriptural basis for Thomas’s theology of the Father (chapter 1); the second explores the Father in relation to the intra-Trinitarian life (chapters 2–5); and the third covers the Father’s role vis-à-vis creation (chapter 6).

One of the greatest strengths of Ku’s text, concentrated most thoroughly in his opening chapter, is its demonstration of Thomas’s unwavering dependence on divine revelation in whatever theological speculation may have followed thereafter. Working primarily through Thomas’s scriptural commentaries, Ku provides overwhelming textual evidence in showing just how scripturally saturated Thomas’s theology of the Father truly is. Ku also makes a convincing case in showing how Thomas’s theology of the Father is grounded solely in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ by way of the Holy Spirit. The unfortunate prejudice that St. Thomas is insufficiently biblical or Christologically deficient will have difficulty in explaining away the textual data that Fr. Ku so skillfully displays.

The necessity in Thomas’s theology of God’s self-revelation in Christ for the formation of any competent theology of the Father is underscored in Ku’s second chapter, wherein he shows why Thomas holds paternity—not innascibility (being “utterly without origin”)—is best taken to be foundational for identifying what constitutes the person of the Father precisely as such. Over against St. Bonaventure’s claim that innascibility includes the idea of fontal plentitude as a positive principle, Ku shows how Thomas’s treatment of innascibility as a pure negation exhibits its dependence on the prior notion of paternity, rendering it a non-privative property of the Father’s person, and yet not a personal property. That is, Ku demonstrates that, while innascibility is certainly to be taken as a notion that makes the Father known and distinguishes him from the Son and Spirit, it cannot rightly be thought to constitute the person of the Father qua person, for all negations depend upon an affirmative in order to function, and innascibility is a pure negation. It is therefore the subsisting relations that are the Son’s begottenness and the Spirit’s common spiration that provide the necessary affirmative [End Page 367] element that, according to our way of knowing, must be thought to constitute the person of the Father precisely as such. “’Paternity’” describes the relation of the Father to the Son, while ‘unbegotten’ (like ‘innascibility’) designates the Father’s absence of relation to any origin” (84). The Father is the “principle not from a principle.”

With his third chapter, Ku further examines what it means when Thomas claims the Father is the “principle” of the Godhead, particularly as Thomas strives to eliminate any hints of Trinitarian subordinationism. Ku nicely displays Thomas’s distinction between being a principle (“that from which something proceeds” but which need not be “outside the essence of the principled”) and being a cause (which implies “a diversity of substance and the dependence of one on another”). “Although the Father is indeed the principle of the Son’s personal being by giving him the divine essence, he is not the cause of the essence which the Son receives” (144). Ku here provides a helpful account of Thomas’s use of “author” and “authority” among the Trinitarian persons, the former being restricted to the Father alone as a principle not from a principle, with application to the Father’s relation to the Son. “Authority,” however, is a term Thomas will allow to find application not only with the Son and the Holy Spirit, but with creatures as well. Thus, taking the Father as the “principle” of the Godhead in no way implies that the Son and Spirit are subordinate to the Father as “author” of the Son. For, the Father is not the cause of the essence the Son receives from him, and all of the Trinitarian person share equal authority. Recognition of order within the Trinity, Ku argues (via Thomas), need not (indeed, should not) imply priority.

Particularly, though by no means exclusively, in this chapter, Ku demonstrates Thomas’s theological distinctiveness with respect to Bonaventure. Focusing on their respective usages of the concept “principle,” Ku shows that, for Bonaventure, it is possible to abstract paternity from the hypostasis of the Father such that a pre-relational person can be thought to exist prior to its being manifested in a paternal relation. “For Aquinas, the relative personal property (a subsisting relation) constitutes the divine hypostasis, and the definition of ‘person’ is an intellectual hypostasis. For Bonaventure, origin constitutes the hypostasis, and the relative personal property (not a subsisting relation) manifests the distinct person but does not constitute his hypostasis” (172). Here Ku highlights Thomas’s use of the words “relation” and “origin” over against Bonaventure’s use of the same to show the greater coherence of the former. Thomas maintains that “notional acts differ from the relations of the persons only according to our mode of signification; [End Page 368] in the real order they are altogether the same” (174). Though the Father’s act of generation makes his paternal relation known to us, it as the acting person of the Father who performs the generative act. To posit a pre-relational hypostasis of the Father, constituted by his mode of origin (innascibility) and simply manifested by the paternal relation that stems from his generative act vis-à-vis the Son, is to risk making Trinitarian faith unintelligible. The Son either becomes subordinate to the Father in the direction of Arianism, lacking the innascible essence that the Father has as himself, the divine essence, or the Son becomes conflated with the Father in the direction of Sabellianism, sharing in the innascible essence but lacking anything to distinguish him constitutively from that by which the person of the Father is established.

Ku shifts to explore the name “Father” in his fourth chapter, showing why Thomas holds it to be the most proper term for distinguishing the subsisting relation that the Father is. Here he shows why Thomas takes the analogous terms of “father” and “paternity” to be most fitting according to the res significata: the Father’s generation of the Son is more perfect and complete than the imperfect mode of paternal generation found among creatures. And since a name is that by which a thing is identified, and given that the Father simply is his act of paternity, it is most fitting to identify him as Father. By way of the divine essence that he simply is, then, the Father communicates all that he has to the Son. Here Ku shows how and why Thomas favors Augustine’s analogy of the generation of the Son in terms of the procession of an internal word. The Father speaks his Word in perfect self-knowledge that, just as that which is spoken is really distinct from the one who speaks, distinguishes between the Father and the Word. Ku likewise maintains that Thomas finds fecundity in the analogy and power of generation itself (especially when the power to beget is viewed more in terms of a “principle of action” than as “productive capacity”) in that it neatly manifests both that the Father “concomitantly desires the Son’s generation” and that the Son “possesses the power of generation as the one receiving” (232).

With Ku’s fifth chapter, the Father’s relation to the Holy Spirit takes center stage, just as the Father’s relation to the Son took pride of place in his third and fourth chapters. Here Ku adroitly shows why Thomas holds that, if one does not hold that the Spirit is spirated from the Father and the Son, it becomes so exceedingly difficult to identify clearly that which distinguishes the Son from the Spirit. Moreover, Ku exhibits how the principal role of the Father in the procession of the Spirit is manifest in the Father’s generation of the Son as one precisely with the [End Page 369] same power sufficient to breathe forth the Spirit, such that they are not “two Spirators but two persons spirating as one single principle” (280). Carefully navigating the debate between Anselm and Richard of St. Victor, Ku then provides an account of Thomas’s understanding of the Holy Spirit as the procession of the love of God for himself and as the bond of mutual love shared between the Father and the Son. And while Thomas gives preference to the former analogy (i.e., the Holy Spirit as God’s love for himself), Ku nevertheless evidences the importance of the latter analogy (i.e., the Holy Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son) to Thomas’s scripturally reasoned pneumatology.

With his final chapter, Ku focuses on Thomas’s understanding of the Father as it relates to creatures and the divine economy. Distinguishing between the united Trinity as the ostensive Father of all creatures and the person of the Father as the unoriginate principle of creation, Ku displays Thomas’s case for how the latter serves as both the origin and last end of the created economy. For, while the Trinity is the principle by which all creation comes into being, the unique relations of the Trinitarian persons are reflected in creation by way of the temporal missions of each person. Thus, Ku provides evidence that, for Thomas, as the person of the Father communicates the divine essence to the Son and Spirit by way of generation and common spiration, so too the Father can be seen in the temporal missions of the Son and Spirit to be the unoriginate principle and ultimate end of all creation. Through divine grace, the Spirit and Son reveal the Father as the invisible beginning and redemptive end of all things.

There is a great deal to be celebrated in Ku’s thorough and carefully researched text. First, Ku’s juxtaposition of various texts in the vast Thomistic corpus is a boon for the theological (and especially Thomist) community, showing the ways in which the Angelic Doctor’s thinking developed over time in response to his surrounding circumstances and bringing texts into the conversation that might not otherwise be easily available to some readers. Second, Fr. Ku does a laudable job manifesting and expanding on the divergences between Thomas and Bonaventure in a manner that is clarifying and equally charitable to the positions of both. Third, while Ku provides his own translations of Thomas’s text for the reader unfamiliar with Latin, he thankfully supplies the original language for all quotations in the endnotes. Fourth, Ku does an excellent job reminding the reader frequently that the vocation of the theologian, as modeled in exemplary fashion by St. Thomas, is to distinguish according to the mode of signification. He provides careful grammatical analyses of the relevant terms and [End Page 370] arguments in a way that maintains the distinction between second and first order discourse. Fifth, Ku leaves no room for doubt that Thomas’s theology of the Father is a scripturally saturated enterprise through and through, repeatedly drawing the reader’s attention to the biblical bases for Thomas’s arguments.

It should be said that Fr. Ku’s book does suffer from certain small stylistic deficiencies. However, he demonstrates awareness of these and perhaps rightly suggests that, given the amount and type of material with which he is engaged, certain aesthetic shortcomings were all but inevitable. That he was able to keep the text to 300 pages is quite an achievement in itself, after all. But because of his continuing use of outline in structuring the book and its argument, at times the volume reads as if it simply were an outline, albeit one with a bit more filling out. And the recurrence of the outline’s numeric and alphabetic signposts in the body of the text, signaled with brackets and parentheses, is often more distracting than enlightening. One might also have hoped for footnotes rather than endnotes. And those readers who are not already somewhat familiar with St. Thomas’s theology and/or the technical intricacies of early scholastic theology will find Ku’s work difficult to inhabit. Nonetheless, these considerations detract in no way from the significance of the theological gem Fr. Ku has provided us. Whatever its weaknesses, its great strengths are its demonstration of Thomas scriptural genealogy, its display of Thomas’s thought and development across multiple texts, and its illuminating engagement with St. Bonaventure’s (and others’) contrasting theological positions.