Friday, November 25, 2022

Divine Persons: What is a "person"?

 Augustine famously said that when we ask what a divine person is, "human language labours altogether under great poverty of speech." We speak of "three persons, not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken." (On The Trinity 5.9).

Boethius said a person is "an individual substance of a rational nature." (Contra Eutychen 3).

Here's D. Glenn Butner Jr.'s attempt:

"A divine person is a unique subsistence of the singular and rational divine nature that is distinguishable from yet inseparably united with the other divine persons by the divine relations. The divine persons do not posses different natures, bodies, or material forms from one another, nor are they distinct centers of consciousness, willing, or knowledge. Rather, the fullness of the divine nature is hypostatized in its entirety in each person, indivisibly without splitting the divine nature into parts and irreducibly in a threefold relation.

Divine revelation refers to the fact that each divine person is a unique subsistence that is determined entirely by how that person eternally is ordered toward the other persons by the divine processions. Traditionally, the Father is distinguished by the relations of paternity to the Son and active spiration to the Spirit, the Son by filiation to the Father, and the Spirit by passive spiration to the Father." (Trinitarian Dogmatics, p127)

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