II. Scotus’ own Response

15. My response to the question [n.1] is that by taking the definition of person that Richard [of St. Victor] posits in On the Trinity IV ch.21, that it is ‘the incommunicable existence of intellectual nature’, by which definition is expounded or corrected the definition of Boethius when he says that person is ‘an individual substance of rational nature’ (because thus it would follow that the soul is a person, which is discordant, and that deity is a persona), I say that there is nothing in this definition of Richard’s that signifies a second intention, because from the nature of the thing - without the work of the intellect - there is in the Father intellectual nature and incommunicable entity.

a [Interpolation] and also it would not properly belong to God, because there is no individual save where is something divisible, which does not belong to God; likewise the name of person would belong properly only to man, who alone is properly said to be rational.

16. But this incommunicability is double (which can be understood from what was said in distinction 2 [nn. 379-380]), because ‘communicable to many’ is said in two ways: in one way that is said to be ‘communicable to many’ which is the same as each of them, such that, whatever it is, it is said to be communicable as a universal is to the things under it; in another way something is communicated as a form by which something is but which is not it, as the soul is communicated to the body. And in both ways deity is communicable, and in neither way is person communicable, and so the incommunicability that pertains to the idea of person is double; for which reason the separated soul, although it has the first incommunicability, is yet not a person because it does not have the second, - and each incommunicability is required for the per se idea of person, and each is in the thing from the nature of the thing, and so nothing of the idea of person states a second intention.