Aquinas on what kind of opposites the Son and Spirit are

In the last post, I talked about Aquinas's claim that all distinct spirits are opposites. He wants to use this to show that the Son and Spirit are distinct by opposites too. To do so, he goes through Aristotle's four kinds of opposites (see my earlier posts on that), and he argues that of Aristotle’s four kinds of opposites, only the first (viz., correlatives) applies to the Son and Spirit. To see this, let’s start with contradictions and work our way backwards.

(d) First then, are contradictions. Aquinas claims that the Son and Spirit are not opposites by contradiction. That is, the Son and Spirit are not opposites in the way that ‘Socrates is sitting’ and ‘Socrates is not sitting’ are. Why not? One obvious reason is this: the Son and Spirit are not sentences, and contradictions only apply to sentences. But that’s not what Aquinas says. Instead, he says that a contradiction distinguishes ‘beings’ from ‘non-beings’.

By ‘beings’ and ‘non-beings’, Aquinas has in mind the beings that affirmative and negative statements describe. An affirmative statement asserts that some state of affairs exists. A negative statement, by contrast, asserts that some state of affairs does not exist. Thus, affirmative statements describe ‘being(s)’, and negative statements describe ‘non-being(s)’.

Okay, so affirmative and negative statements describe states of affairs that do and do not exist. But why should that mean the Son and Spirit can’t be distinguished by contradiction? Unfortunately, Aquinas says no more than what I’ve already said, namely that the Son and Spirit aren’t distinguished by contradiction because contradiction distinguishes ‘beings’ and ‘non-beings’. Apparently, he thinks the conclusion is obvious, but it takes some explaining (it does for me, anyways).

Consider the following. Can’t I say that ‘the Son is begotten by the Father’ and ‘the Spirit is not begotten by the Father’? Wouldn’t that be enough to distinguish them? Similarly, if I said ‘George Bush Jr. is the President of the United States’ and ‘I am not the President of the United States’, wouldn’t that be enough to distinguish myself from the President?

Well, the problem here is that these are faux contradictions. Both pairs of statements are true, so they don’t count as contradictions, strictly speaking. As I explained in my previous post, contradictions are such that one of the sentences must be true and the other false. If two sentences are true, then there’s really no contradiction there.

Indeed, Bush Jr. really is the President, and I’m really not the President, and there’s nothing contradictory about that. Likewise, the Son really is begotten by the Father, and the Spirit really isn’t (he’s spirated, not begotten), and there’s nothing contradictory about that either.

A genuine contradiction would be this: ‘the Son is begotten by the Father’ and ‘the Son is not begotten by the Father’. Those two sentences are opposites by contradiction, not ‘the Son is begotten by the Father’ and ‘the Spirit is not begotten by the Father’. But the genuine contradiction can’t apply to the Son, for the false sentence is simply false. The Son is begotten, and that’s all we can say. But the Son being begotten says nothing about the Spirit. So genuine contradictions don’t really help us distinguish two things.

(c) Second, Aquinas says that the Son and Spirit are not distinguished by possession and deprivation. The reason is that possession and deprivation distinguish the perfect from the imperfect. Again, Aquinas says no more than this, for he assumes that the conclusion is obvious. And for me anyways, this time it is a little more obvious.

In this context, ‘perfection’ refers to fully realized potential, so something is ‘perfect’ only when it fully realizes its potential, and it’s ‘imperfect’ until its potential is fully realized. Possession and deprivation imply this sort of perfection and imperfection. A blind animal can’t realize its capacity to see, so it’s ‘imperfect’ with respect to sight. A seeing animal, on the other hand, is fully realizing its capacity for sight, so it’s ‘perfect’ with respect to sight.

In the Godhead, of course, nothing can be imperfect. There is no unrealized potential in God, so every divine person has everything it has the capacity for. Thus, there simply is no ‘deprivation’ in God, and therefore, there can’t be opposition between ‘possession’ and ‘deprivation’ in the Trinity. This kind of opposition is simply not possible in the divine case, so it can’t distinguish the Son and Spirit.

(b) Third, Aquinas says the Son and Spirit are not distinguished by contraries. As I explained above, contaries are non-relational features like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ or ‘white’ and ‘black’. For Aquinas (and for Aristotle), these sorts of features are forms. Something is hot, for example, because it has the form of ‘heat’, and that form is what makes it hot.

Consequently, a difference between contraries amounts to a difference between forms. A hot thing and a cold thing differ with respect to hot and cold because one of them has the form of ‘heat’, and the other has the contrary form of ‘cold’.

For Aquinas though, there is just one form in God, and that’s the divine essence. The three persons all share that one divine-essence-form. Thus, the persons cannot differ by having different forms, and so the Son and Spirit cannot be opposites by having contrary forms.

(a) That leaves only correlatives. The Son and Spirit must, then, differ by having correlative features. As I explained above, correlatives are relational features that are reciprocal, like ‘double’ and ‘half’. So the Son and Spirit must each have a relational feature that is reciprocal with respect to the other’s relational feature.

However, there are lots of different kinds of correlatives, and so Aquinas still needs to show which kind of correlative the Son and Spirit differ by.