Theologies of the Word

My article, 'Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus: On the Theology of the Father's Intellectual Generation of the Word', is now available in Recherches de Theologie et Philosophie Medievales 77(1) 2010.

Correction to CLT

Correction: It is possibly misleading to say that the CLT (= Constitutional Latin Trinitarianism) position affirms that (1)-(3) are predications. It might be better to go with what Brower and Rea have called "sameness without identity". Instead of 'God', I'll use "the divine essence". So, recasted in this way we get:

(1*) The Father is the same as but not identical with the Divine Essence.
(2*) The Son is the same as but not identical with the Divine Essence.
(3*) The Holy Spirit is the same as but not identical with the Divine Essence.

In this way, when we ask, "what does the Father communicate to the Son?" We can say the Father communicates something that is not identical to the Father. The Father communicates the divine essence to the Son. Hence, the Father doesn't generate another Father, but the Father communicates the divine essence to the Son. If the Father communicates what is identical to the Father, to the Son, then the Son would be identical to the Father. Hence, the Son would be the Father. But that's not right. There's only one Father, one Son, and one Holy Spirit.

Leuven: Later Medieval Cognitive Theories

I am off to Leuven, Belgium next week for a conference on Later Medieval Cognitive Theories. I will be giving a paper on Henry of Ghent's (seeming) account of a person's being aware of her first-order thoughts, and that she's the subject of these first-order thoughts. It is a complicated mess, textually. In any case, I've done my best to make sense of various and sundry claims. The conference paper comes from material from a chapter of my D.Phil. thesis on the Father's intellectual generation of the Son/Word.

The more I learn about later medieval phil. of mind - the more I am surprised at the diversity of views. Our scholastic friends were kind of like jazz musicians-- give me a riff, and I'll show you a 101 ways to play off of it.