Trinity in Aquinas by Gilles Emery, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Trinity in Aquinas. By GILLES EMERY, 0.P. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Sapientia Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 361. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-9706106-9-6. According to its author, Gilles Emery-Swiss Dominican priest and professor of theology at the University of Fribourg-Trinity in Aquinas does not supply a comprehensive treatment of Aquinas's Trinitarian doctrine but seeks to present some of its major themes. The book comprises seven chapters, six of which were written previously as independent studies, and together they provide a trusty guide into the heart ofThomas's often difficult Trinitarian theology, situating it in its medieval milieu and illumining its central themes and insights from various perspectives. The book is a combination of historical and speculative theology, offering us a colorful palette ofThomas's doctrinal sources and contemporary interlocutors while hewing closely to the framework and terminology of the master's own thinking about the Trinity. Emery displays expert knowledge of the medieval environment in which Thomas's thought finds its home, and his understanding of Aquinas's Trinitarian themes is nuanced and correct; the reader may feel secure under the guidance of one who knows every contour of the land he has chosen to survey. Topically, the book distills itself into four main areas of inquiry: it begins with an overview of the threeness and oneness of God in medieval Scholasticism; chapters 2-4 and 7 discuss and compare Thomas's Trinitarian doctrine in the commentary on the Sentences, the Summa contra Gentiles, the Summa Theologiae, and the commentary on St. John's gospel; chapter 6 shows why Aquinas deems it necessary to hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father; and chapter 5 concerns itself with the contemporary debate about whether Aquinas's treatise on God is essentialist or personalist. Latin Scholasticism's investigation of plurality within God takes place in an ambience of strict monotheism, and its treatment of the relationship between God's threeness and oneness coalesces into two discussions. The first gauges the epistemological connection between our knowledge of God's oneness and our awareness of God's threeness. Anselm had transmitted to the medieval Scholastics the expectation of finding certain "necessary reasons" which would discover the threeness in the oneness: for Richard ofSt. Victor and Bonaventure, God's charity and God's goodness, respectively, are those facets of God's 313 314 BOOK REVIEWS oneness that necessarily plurify into threeness. Aquinas takes a more modest, "apologetic" tack: although no necessary reasons can conclusively affirm the Trinity, reason under the guidance of faith can disprove any arguments advanced against belief in the Trinity. The second discussion explores the notions of relation and person as the best ways to articulate the divine plurality and also synthesize that plurality with the divine oneness. Trinitarian plurality exercises a creative causality and, antithetical as it may be to certain monist strains of Greek philosophy, even bestows upon created plurality the exalted status of a transcendental. Thomas's three great theological syntheses hold that natural reason cannot conclusively know the Trinity, but only God's unity of being. There can be no "necessary theological reasons" allowing one to deduce the Trinity from the fecundity of the divine being, although human understanding can help to make the Trinity "reasonably thinkable." These syntheses also ground God's plurality in a theory of relation, though the Trinitarian theology of the Summa contra Gentiles does not investigate the meaning of the word person (nor does the commentary on John) or use hypostasi$ at all. The Summa Theologiae is clearest and most insightful about Thomas's relational understanding of the divine persons: the inner divine processions of understanding and loving are the foundations of the mutual divine relations, and these relations, as subsisting, are the three divine persons, who are endowed with the three defining marks of personhood: individuality, subsistence, and understanding. On the one hand, Thomas protects a strict Trinitarian monotheism by proving that the divine essence, relations, and persons are all identical in reality; on the other hand, he upholds faith in the Trinity by showing that the divine relations are really distinct vis-a-vis one another. According to...