II. The Objections of Others

8. But an objection is raised that person signifies secondary substance (that is, quiddity), because of what Augustine says in On the Trinity VII ch.6 n.11, that through the phrase ‘three persons’ response is made to the question whereby it is asked ‘what three?’; but ‘what’ is asking for the essence.

9. Further, Augustine says [ibid.] that “to be God and to be person are not different things;” therefore person is purely essential, and so it signifies a secondary substance, that is, quiddity.

10. To the first of these [n.8] I say that ‘what’ sometimes is asking for the definition and sometimes is asking for that about which something is said. The first is plain from the Topics 5.101b39: “Definition is a statement indicating the ‘what is’ of something.” The second is plain from the Philosopher in Metaphysics 10.2.1053b27-28: “the whole question is what is ‘one’, how it is being and what being it is, because to say that this very thing is its nature is not enough” (he means to say that it is not enough to say that the ‘one’ is principle, the way the old philosophers said the ‘one’ was principle, like the Platonists, but something must be asserted that is what the ‘one’ is said about). And accordingly the question ‘what is the element’ has a double response; one is to give the essence of the element, and the other is to give that about which element is said, as ‘fire is an element’. Now when Catholics were confessing the ‘three’ (according to the canonical epistle of John ch.5), the heretics asked ‘what three?’, not questioning what the definition of the word was, but asking what the substantive was that was determined by the adjective ‘three’ (or, what thing ‘three’ was being said of) - and to this question response was well made by the remark ‘person’. When therefore it is assumed that ‘what’ asks about the essence, this is not generally true, nor is it true in particular of the issue at hand [n.9].

11. As to the second, from Augustine [n.9], the answer will be plain in the following distinction, that person is referred to itself (both in itself and in its specific subordinates), although it is not referred to itself as essence is referred to itself, and this provided the position is laid down that the persons are constituted in personal existence by certain absolutes; but if this position is not laid down, then expounding Blessed Augustine’s authority seems difficult; but there will be discussion of this in the next distinction [d.26 n.52].a

a [Note of Duns Scotus] Henry of Ghent says [a.43 q.2]: “A specific relation under its genus is not distinguished save by what it is founded on, and so there is no universal nature truly in it save for the fact it is founded on a universal” (he gives an example about likeness and whiteness); “but every divine relation is founded on the essence, which cannot in any way have the idea of a universal,” because a universal nature is “that nature alone which is nature only by reason of quiddity” (Avicenna, Metaphysics V), “without reference to the idea of universal or of particular, but of a nature in itself to receive the idea of each of them; a singular by determinate existence in a supposit, - a universal by the fact it is of a nature to fall under consideration by the intellect, taken as one in its idea, applicable by predication to the many particulars it is multiplied over,” that is, “of itself it is a certain singularity;” “although therefore relation is predicated univocally of paternity and filiation, yet it is not a universal.”