A Poetic Christ by Olivier-Thomas Venard;

Author:Olivier-Thomas Venard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780567684721
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 9

A Thomist Response: The Metaphysics of the Word

In his famous essay on the origin of language, Louis de Bonald writes, ‘The whole question of language is perhaps reducible to this carefully considered proposition: “that a person thinks their speech before speaking their thought”, or otherwise said, “a person cannot speak their thought without thinking their speech.”’1 We will return to the Vicomte’s reflections on the origin of language in the subsequent chapter and for now examine how for St. Thomas the primary issue at stake in reflection on the mental word was not philosophical but theological. We will begin by discussing Thomas’s understanding of the mental word as it forms the necessary context for understanding the development of his thought on the word.

The Theological Occasion of the Discovery of the Mental Word

In the general epistemology of sacra doctrina, theology is never far from Thomas’s ‘philosophical’ considerations, such as those which deal with the cognitive sciences under discussion here or with metaphysics itself. Thomas commented on Holy Scripture each morning and so he was provided with ample theological opportunities for philosophical reflection. More particularly, Paissac notes that ‘in order to show the reality of relations in God, Thomas will undertake an examination of the mental word’.2 Since the noun ‘word’ in revelation designates a divine Person, especially in the Gospel of John from its very first verse, it should first of all designate a created reality which possesses two relative characteristics.

God is triune. In the eternal subsistence of his unique nature, he is, in the consubstantiality of the persons, the eternal and necessary communication of the divine nature of the Father to the Son by the procession of generation, and from the Father and the Son to the Holy Spirit by the procession of spiration. These inner-Trinitarian processions cannot be of a transitive order of local movement or exercised efficiency – as happens in the physical world – but must be conceived according to the immanent mode of intelligible emanation. Immanent action as actio perfecti, which involves procession by way of intelligible emanation, is alone capable of offering an account of the distinction of persons which can only be conceived by a relative opposition of origin. Hence the relations which find their basis in the immanent action proper to a spiritual nature, in the measure to which the spiritual realities are the only ones which allow a role for analogy, are the relations proper to intellection and willing. Thus there can only be two divine processions ad intra, that of the Word and that of Love. While in his commentary on the Sentences Saint Thomas held to the idea of ‘Son’ by reason of its essential relativity as ‘word’ was not yet being clearly distinguished by species and recognized in its relative being, in the Summa theologiae he no longer hesitates to claim: ‘In God, the appellation of word properly said is understood in a personal sense; it is the proper name of the person of the Son.’3

There can only

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