seigneur wrote:

Jason wrote:

Is’nt loving someone more than yourself a higher form of love than self love? The point is that if God is self loving that would not be highest form of love...

True, presupposing that God's love is bound to function like human love. But is this a necessary presupposition?

God by definition is the greatest conceivable being and giving yourself to someone else is a higher form of love then self love which is why I think God's love should take this as a necessary presupposition.

seigneur wrote:

Jason wrote:

...and hence He would need to have the Son to love for it to be the highest form of love, even if the Son and the Father are one (and before the creation of any other being). The love between the Father and the Son then becomes the Holy Spirit.

And why would we have to say specifically Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three persons of the Trinity instead of, for instance, three hypostases, aspects, characteristics, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva etc?

Well why Christians call the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit just boils down to revelation. It also helps to show God being a personal God and not some distant entity. Yes you can call it whatever you want as long as it it one God and as far as I know Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva are three different gods who incarnate into one avatar.

John, I will study up on the dependence issue before I reply back to you. Thanks for your responses, appreciate it.
 

Jason wrote:

Just like the universal goodness is instantiated by God as Goodness itself so is the case with the personal property of “Father”. Now Goodness in God can be defended by philosophy but same cannot be said of Father, Son and Holy Spirit since those are based on revelation.

Right. Whether as universals or tropes, properties are typically construed as non-substances. The classic statement of why is in Boethius (talking about kinds):

But if any genus is one in number, it cannot possibly be common to many. For a single thing, if it is common, is common by parts, and then it is not common as a whole, but the parts of it are proper to individual things, or else it passes at different times into the use of those having it, so that it is common as a servant or horse is; or else it is made common to all at one time, not however that it constitutes the substance of those to which it is common, but like some theatre or spectacle, which is common to all who look on. But genus can be common to species according to none of these modes; for it must be common in such a fashion that it is in the individuals wholly and at one time, and that it is able to constitute and form the substances of those things to which it is common.[1]

Here, Boethius tries to show that the property of being human cannot be one and the same thing shared by many human beings. He assumes that there are only three ways in which one thing can be common to many things. Firstly, a thing may have parts and many things may each have one of these parts. Think of the property of being human as a pizza pie. Now, many people can share in this one pizza by each one having a slice of it. But this cannot be the manner in which the property of being human belongs to many different people. For this property must be present as a whole in every person, since every person is a whole human being. Or else, secondly, the pizza may be shared by different people in the sense that it at first belongs to one person, then to another, then to still another, and so on. In short, it may as a whole belong to different people at different times. But again, this cannot be the way in which different people share in the property of being human. For many people have this property at the same time. Finally, assume that several people share the pizza in the sense that they merely look at it at the same time. They are then related to it in a most tenuous fashion. But the (essential) property of being human cannot be related to individual people in this superficial way. Humanity is truly and wholly a part of every human being, and not something that lies completely outside of people. In short, being the essence of persons, the property of being a human being is part of every person.

What is noteworthy about Boethius's argument is that he treats the property of being human as if it were a primary substance. This is clear from the three relationships which he considers, for these are obviously relationships which a thing, in the sense of a primary substance, may have to other things. This is the reason why our illustration in terms of the pizza pie is so appropriate. As a result of Boethius' implicit assumption, what he proves, if he proves anything, is not that the property of being human cannot be one thing, but rather that it is not a primary substance.[2]

Aquinas, however, argues that God cannot instantiate non-substantial properties (accidents). So, he says God's properties must be substantial.

Jason wrote:

The subsistent relation is not something that we see in our everyday relations. The terms property, person, relation and concrete universals all point to the same reality but different aspects of it.

Well, the reason Aquinas uses relation and property interchangeably is that respectives are how the medievals accounted for relations, and they're (monadic, intentionality-having) properties. (Though, for what it's worth, we use “property” to refer to non-respective relations too. We just call them polyadic properties, instead of monadic properties.)

Jason wrote:

Why do you think it cannot be repeated?

You may be underestimating the strength of “constitute” and “identify”. For Aquinas, the paternity respective is the Father[3]. So, since only the Divine Essence can instantiate the Father, the substantial paternity respective is unrepeatable.

But don't worry too much about whether the paternity respective is a particularized property. It's no problem if it is.[4]


[1]McKeon, R. (ed. and trans.) (1929) Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
[2]Grossmann, R. (1992) The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology, Routledge, London.
[3]See Chapter 60 of the Compendium Theologiae. (There are also statements of it in the Summa Theologica. But I can't remember exactly where, and I don't have time to look right now.)

But suppose Aquinas doesn't identify the persons of the Trinity with their respectives. Then unless we presuppose the persons we're trying use respectives to account for in our account, there is still just the Divine Essence with a bunch of respectives. So Aquinas is right to identify each person of the Trinity with one of their respectives.
[4]In fact, most realist scholastics probably had tropes in their ontologies, and it's more of a debate whether some had universals in their ontologies. (Ed's theory of universals may be more robustly realist than Aquinas's was.) See Vallicella's interpretation of Aquinas, and the summary under “moderate realism” here. (Grossmann says Coplestone interprets Aquinas this way in A History of Philosophy, but his page reference is either from an earlier edition than mine or wrong. I've been unable to verify.)

Last edited by John West (7/01/2016 5:21 pm)

Wanted to ask, does Armstrong's principle of instantial invariance account for how the scholastics viewed subsistent relations? And If the principle doesn't hold, does the objection to the relations argument fall apart or are there further issues in the "relations" explanation of the Trinity and Divine Simplicity?

Jason wrote:

God by definition is the greatest conceivable being and giving yourself to someone else is a higher form of love then self love which is why I think God's love should take this as a necessary presupposition.

Again, where does your presupposition come from? How do you know it's a higher form of love to give oneself for someone else? Or, even if it were so, why should it apply to omnipresent omnibenevolent God? Is it reasonable to ask for more than omnibenevolence?

Jason wrote:

Well why Christians call the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit just boils down to revelation.

And when revelation and classical theism appear in conflict, which one do you pick? Or how do you reconcile them? This is the main problem in this thread.

Jason wrote:

It also helps to show God being a personal God and not some distant entity.

But there is no respect of persons with God. (Romans 2:11 KJV) Sounds familiar? Maybe it's so that where God is there is neither personality or impersonality. And if omnipresence, then God is not distant.

Jason wrote:

Yes you can call it whatever you want as long as it it one God and as far as I know Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva are three different gods who incarnate into one avatar.

Hindu gods are manifestations of the Absolute. Indeed, everything in this world is a manifestation of the Absolute, but gods are higher manifestations than demons, animals, and humans. But only the Absolute is the true God.

The Stanford entry has too many takes on what the Trinity has been thought to be.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/

If 'personhood' is a metaphysical category, I don't think I understand this category well enough.