‘The More we Wonder’: Union with God,Distance from God,and the Vexing Question of ‘Necessary Reasons’ in Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology

Abstract

Scholars have long noted that there is a tension between the strength of Thomas’s arguments for the Trinity and the limits he places on natural reason. Very few, however, have noted a curious pattern: it is often within the same passage that Thomas both seems to prove the Trinity and rules out the possibility of any such proof. This paper begins by drawing out this pattern. It then proposes that this tension in Thomas’s thought might be a reflection of, and an education into, a deeper tension: the tension between union with God and distance from God that structures the beatific vision into which Thomas’s Trinitarian theology hopes to initiate us.