The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters

"Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror quocumque feror."¹

Augustine

"Contemplatio spiritualis pulchritudinis vel bonitatis est principium amoris spiritualis."²

Thomas Aquinas

THE HOLY SPIRIT, according to Thomas Aquinas's teaching in the Summa theologiae, proceeds from the Father and the Son in the mode of will (per modum voluntatis), as proceeding love (amor procedens), as the beloved in the lover (amatum in amante), as an inclination to and impression of the beloved (inclinatio, impressio).³ Both the Scholastic commentary tradition and more recent scholarship attest to a problem of interpretation regarding these assertions. Interpreters do not agree about (1) whether the will emanates an operatum, parallel in some way to the procession of the inner word within the intellect; (2) what is meant by the beloved in the lover; (3) what, exactly, Aquinas's analogue for the procession of the Spirit is; and (4) how Aquinas uses the one name, "love," to denote (a) an essential attribute of God, (b) a personal property of the Spirit, and (c) a notional act of the Father and the Son.

The chief question regards the operatum in, or from, the will. One line of interpretation, classically represented by John of St. Thomas (Poinsot) and lately promoted by Gilles Emery, takes the beloved in the lover to be a product or term in the will emanating from the act of love, as the inner word is a reality in the intellect emanating from the act of understanding. On this interpretation, there are two acts called love, one emanated from the other: a basic act of love, and a derivative act described as love's fruit, impress, or impulse, but also called love. It is this derivation of one act of love from another, according to the majority of interpreters, that provides Aquinas's analogue for spiration in God. A minority report, however, urged most explicitly by Bernard Lonergan and others under his influence, but possibly found also in Cajetan, takes the beloved in the lover to be the act of love itself, emanating into the will from the inner word in the intellect. This reading denies that the impress or impulse of love is anything other than the act of love itself; affective momentum is not something love produces, but is just what love is (as Augustine suggests in the remark quoted in epigraph).

The problem has psychological, theological, and exegetical aspects. Fundamentally, the question lies in the field of rational psychology. Either the psychological facts can be determined clearly and exactly, or they cannot. But insofar as the matter at hand is an interpretation of Aquinas, our concern shall be to determine as best we can how he understood the psychological facts, leaving to the side an evaluation of his views.

To this question of psychological fact is annexed a theological issue. We develop an imperfect but fruitful understanding of the mysteries by analogy with realities more familiar to us. But if the more familiar realities are themselves shrouded in mystery, we are moving per ignotum ad ignotius. The more familiar reality Aquinas takes for his Trinitarian analogue purports to be a structure of acts within our rational consciousness, but he has been accused of rigging the system.⁴ In the measure that accusation is sustained, his achievement is not theoretical illumination but at best a coherent restatement of the truths of faith. Verbal coherence is not nothing, of course, but neither is it the imperfect but fruitful understanding that is the aim of systematic theology. If, then, we ourselves wish analogically to conceive how (and not merely coherently to assert that) divine understanding utters an inner word spirating love, we must first grasp as clearly as possible how our own understanding utters an inner word spirating love. In the measure that these psychological facts are obscure to us, the illuminating substance of theory is exchanged for a merely verbal coherence; we are left with a model that is unverified, opaque, or contrived, and a set of syntactical rules for applying it to the Trinity.

Finally, there is the direct locus...