What does love know? St Thomas on the Trinity

Extract

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.