III. To the Principal Arguments

49. To the authority from Boethius [n.24] I concede that ‘relation multiplies the Trinity’, and yet it distinguishes not only from the opposite relation but also from any disparate relation with which it is formally not the same; because, just as in the genus of quality whiteness is distinguished not only from the other opposite quality [sc. blackness] but also from every other disparate one, because whiteness is not formally sweetness nor smell (and if any disparate quality were incompossible with another disparate one in the same supposit, not only would the nature be distinguished from the nature but there would also be required a distinction of supposits), so any disparate relation is distinguished from any other disparate relation, without any other incompossibility. There is a confirmation: active generation is distinguished from inspiriting as it exists in the Father, because the Son does not have an inspiriting more distinct from active generation than the inspiriting of the Father is distinct from it, because the Son’s inspiriting is the same as the Father’s. However some relations have not only a distinction but also an incompossible idea (or an incompossibility) in the same supposit, of which sort are the disparate relations of receiving the nature, because a person that received the nature in disparate ways would not have the nature in a single way.

50. To Augustine on The City of God I say that any person is that which he has, except that the relative has the correlative and is not it itself. But once the hypothesis in question is in place [n.24], the Holy Spirit would not have the Son as correlative and as inspiriter, and so it does not follow that the Holy Spirit would be the Son because he would not have the Son either as intrinsic or as correlative originator. But Augustine makes an exception when he says that that which is had does not have when it is had as a correlative; so Augustine does not take things otherwise than that what is had is had either in the way in which the Son is said to have deity, or in the way in which he is said to have a Father; one way is to have it formally or essentially, the other way is to have it correlatively or originally.