1. Exposition of the Opinion

11. [To the first question] - To the first question it is said that the word is actual intellection, and not any intellection but a declarative one.

12. To understand this the position is set down as follows:

The intellect receives first a simple impression (or intellection) from the object, by which received impression the intellect - as it is active - converts itself to itself and to its own act and object, by understanding that it understands; third, there follows an impression of declarative knowledge in the bare converted intellect, and this from the intellect informed with simple knowledge, such that the intellect informed by such knowledge is the reason for impressing declarative knowledge, - and the converted bare intellect is something properly receptive. And between these two intellections, namely the first, which is the reason for the impressing, and the second, which is the one impressed, there is a middle disposition that is an action in the genus of action, and it is marked by that which ‘to say’ is; for this ‘to say’ is to express or impress a declarative knowledge of simple knowledge, - and so this ‘declarative knowledge’, impressed on the converted bare intellect and being the term of the act of saying, is the word.

13. Not any actual intellection, then, is the word, but the one that is declarative, that presupposes simple actual intellection and actual conversion to it, and is born in the act of saying, whose active principle is simple knowledge and whose receptive one is the converted bare intellect.

14. [To the second question] - In agreement with this, an answer is given to the second question [n.5], that the intellect of the Father is first informed with quasi simple knowledge of the essence, to which it was quasi merely in passive potency, and, when brought into this act of ‘simple knowledge’ as bare, it is converted to itself as thus informed; and on it when converted, as if on a passive disposed thing, there is impressed declarative knowledge by virtue of simple actual knowledge, which declarative knowledge and term of the act of saying is the word. And according to this, it is plain that the word is the term of generation as also of the Son, and so it will be proper to the second person.

This opinion was stated above in distinction 2 nn.273-277, 280, in the question ‘On the two productions’.