WorkBoethius

The Trinity

Can the categories that count and sort ordinary things be applied to a God who is three and one? Boethius tests the Trinity against Aristotle's logic.

by Boethius15 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: De Trinitate
First published: 520(aged 43)
Original language: Latin

Report a rights issue

Overview

The hardest claim in Christian doctrine — that God is three and yet one — Boethius took up as a problem in Aristotle's logic: which of the categories we use to count and sort ordinary things can survive being applied to God, and which break. His answer is that most of them break. The words that divide the world into separate substances do not carry over, and the threeness of the Trinity, he argues, must be understood through relation, a category that can distinguish Father, Son and Spirit without multiplying the divine substance into three gods. Written probably in the years after 519, when a delegation of monks had reopened the underlying controversy, the tractate is the most closely reasoned of Boethius's theological pieces and the one that best shows his lifelong project at work: bringing the technical apparatus of Greek philosophy, which he was translating into Latin, to bear on the doctrines of the Latin church. Of the tractates it was the one medieval masters returned to most, precisely because it treated a mystery as something a logician could hold steady enough to examine.

Key concepts

What question does On the Trinity address?

How God can be three and yet one without becoming three gods. Boethius treats it as a logical problem: which of the categories we use to describe and count ordinary things can be applied to God, and which cannot. His central answer is that the divine threeness must be understood through relation rather than through the categories that would divide God into separate substances.

What are Aristotle's categories, and why do they matter here?

The categories are Aristotle's basic kinds of predication, the different ways anything can be said of a subject: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time and the rest. Boethius runs the doctrine of the Trinity through them to test which survive being said of God. Most, he finds, break, because they presuppose the parts and distinctions a wholly simple God does not have.

Why does relation solve the problem for Boethius?

Because relation, unlike substance or quality, can distinguish without dividing. To be Father is to stand in relation to the Son, and to be Son in relation to the Father, yet these relations do not add anything to or split up the divine substance. So the three can be genuinely distinct as relations while remaining one in substance, which is how Boethius avoids both confusing the persons and multiplying the gods.

What is divine simplicity in this tractate?

The claim that God has no parts and no composition of any kind, so that in God there is no difference between essence and existence, or between God and God's attributes. God simply is what God has. This is why so many categories fail when applied to God: they assume the very distinctions and divisions that a simple being lacks, which is the crux of Boethius's whole analysis.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Testing the Trinity against logic

Which of the words we use to count and sort ordinary things can survive being said of God? Boethius takes the hardest Christian claim, three and yet one, as a problem in Aristotle's categories.

God is three yet one: Boethius asks which of Aristotle's ten categories, the basic ways we predicate anything, carry over to God and which break. Most break. The words that divide the world into separate substances do not apply, since God is utterly simple, with no parts and no inner distinction. The threeness, he argues, must be understood through relation, the one category that can distinguish Father, Son and Spirit without multiplying the divine substance into three gods. It is the most closely reasoned of his theological pieces, and the one medieval masters returned to most, for holding a mystery steady enough to examine.

metaphysics
categories
logic
relation
divine simplicity
predication
substance
essence
trinity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 15
distinct concepts: 32
by passages held, corpus-wide: #276

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: categories with logic.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 25 shared passages in all. 3 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
categories	logic	3
categories	metaphysics	3
metaphysics	relation	3
metaphysics	theology	3
relation	trinity	3
categories	relation	2
divine simplicity	metaphysics	2
logic	metaphysics	2
logic	relation	2
metaphysics	trinity	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

512 A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius (Contra Eutychen et Nestorium)
Aimed at two opposite Christological heresies, this short tractate is remembered less for the quarrel that occasioned it than for a definition of person that medieval thought adopted as standard.
LAEN
520 How Substances Can Be Good In Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods (Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona)
Argued from stated axioms rather than scripture, this is the most purely philosophical of Boethius's theological tractates, and important enough that Aquinas later wrote a commentary on it.
LAEN
520 On the Catholic Faith (De Fide Catholica)
Doubted for centuries and restored to the set on the strength of its manuscript transmission and style, this is a plain confession of faith rather than one of the logical tractates.
LAEN
520 The Trinity (De Trinitate) you are here LAEN
524 The Consolation of Philosophy (De Consolatione Philosophiae)
Written in prison as Boethius awaited execution, this dialogue of alternating prose and verse became the most widely read book of the Latin Middle Ages after the Bible, translated by kings and poets for a thousand years.
LAEN

— or open another of their works