III. To the Principal Arguments

45. To the principal arguments.

First to Richard [n.2]: it is plain that he concludes to the third article of the position [nn.41-43].

46. To the second [n.3], it was stated in a like case, 1 d.12 n.49-52, how Father and Son are one principle of the Holy Spirit - and better, as to the issue in hand, in 1 d.4 nn.11-13, where there was discussion about the truth of the proposition, ‘God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit’; and it was also touched on 1 d.20 nn.24-27, about how power is the same in the three persons.

47. To the third [n.4] I say that although something essential is the principle of producing something externally, yet it is only a principle immediately applicable to work or to act as it is understood in the three persons, because - as was said in 1 d.12 nn.38-40 - what is a principle of ordered acts is only understood to be in proximate potency to remote act as it is under prior act (just as the soul is never understood to be in proximate power to an act of willing save as it is actually understanding, because when it is in proximate potency for willing something it does actually will it, and nothing is willed unless it is understood); and thus although any essential [sc. in God] - in respect of itself - precedes the notional [sc. in God] in some way, yet not every essential needs to be in every outward respect able to precede something notional.

48. To the first argument for the opposite [sc. the second argument from the Lectura, note to n.4 above] I say that the divine persons necessarily come together in every operation outwardly, and more so than substance and virtue - because the divine persons have one operation, by which they are one operator simply; and yet if per impossibile the virtue were in one person, nothing of perfection would be lacking to him to prevent him being perfectly able to produce everything producible.

49. To the second argument [note to n.4] I say that it proceeds about the fact, that production presupposes production - not however as ‘formally cause’ or under the idea by which it is production, but as immediate principle as it were.