- St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per
Throughout his work, St. Thomas Aquinas is ever attentive to the ways of speech, for the ways of speech naturally express the intricacies of created reality. Created reality itself stands in relation to uncreated reality. So it is, that in expressing created reality, speech in turn can be used to speak analogically of uncreated reality. But, of course, caution is in order. In this essay, I will consider St. Thomas’s analysis of how the preposition per (‘through’) works in Latin. What does it express in the natural created order? This question matters for St. Thomas because of its use in theological authorities. In the opening verses of the Gospel according to St. John, the Latin theologian reads that “through him [the Word] all things were made.” How is one to understand the implicitly causal import of “through him [per eum]” with regard to creation? Again in the Latin tradition, St. Hilary writes that in the divine trinitarian processions, the Holy Spirit proceeds “through the Son.” How is one to understand the implicitly causal import of “through the Son [per Filium]” with regard to the divine processions themselves? How is the causal use of per as found in ordinary Latin speech related to these two instances of divine activity: creation and procession? These are not questions that theologians universally felt any compulsion to answer; however, St. Thomas did. For him, these questions provided an opportunity, through the use of the preposition itself, to see and to articulate a causal sequence in the natural order and to consider how it could be applied analogically to the more difficult realities of creation and procession. As is often the case with St. Thomas, clarity in the natural order brings insight to the supernatural order.
St. Thomas’s first substantive consideration of the preposition is in his Lectura romana of 1265–66 on Book One of Peter Lombard’s Liber sententiarum. Here he considers all three degrees of the analogy: causality in the natural order, in the divine act of creation, and in the Trinitarian processions. In the prima pars of the Summa theologiae (ca. 1268), St. Thomas revisits the per Filium of the divine processions. In his commentary on the Gospel according to St. John (ca. 1270–72), St. Thomas revisits the per Verbum of the divine act of creation. We shall first consider St. Thomas’s analysis in the Lectura romana as the first and most comprehensive treatment of the question. We [End Page 90] shall then turn to the significant refinements of the Summa theologiae and the commentary on the Gospel according to St. John.
The occasion for the analysis in the Lectura romana is a quotation from St. Hilary of Poitier’s De Trinitate found in distinction 12 of Peter Lombard’s Liber sententiarum in which St. Hilary speaks of the Holy Spirit proceeding through the Son. In his Lectura Romana, St. Thomas asks directly whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.1 St. Hilary provides the authority in the sed contra. The question provides St. Thomas with the occasion to consider at some length the preposition per; indeed, this is at the heart of his response, in which he first considers the natural causality signified by the preposition and then turns to its specifically theological use in both the divine act of creation and the procession of the Holy Spirit.
St. Thomas begins with the use of per in the causal context in which we say someone does something through something else (operari per aliud). When we say someone does something, there is a causal sequence of the doer, the thing done, and, in between the two, the doing (operatio) itself. When we say someone does something through something else, ‘through’ (per) always designates a cause of the doing, of the operation, that stands between the doer and the thing done. Given its middle position in the causal sequence, such a cause of the doing can be considered in two ways looking either to its relation to the one doing or to the thing done. In the first way, one considers the...