Our Notions of the Divine Persons as Operating

Our concepts or ideas of the divine operations of generating and spirating (that is our “notional acts”) ascribe these operations to the divine Persons. Only by thus ascribing”notional acts” to the proper Persons can we grasp and designate the distinction of Persons in the Trinity.

The divine operations are not in God by free choice but by the necessity of the divine nature itself. Just as God is necessary being, in the sense that he cannot be nonexistent, not by reason of any outside force, but by reason of his infinite excellence, so generating and spirating are in God by the necessity involved in the supreme excellence of the divine nature itself.

The divine operations do not proceed from nothing, asis the case in the external action of creating. The Son is generated, not from nothing, but from the Father.

The divine operations of generating and spirating are from God’s almighty power, not, indeed from that power as creative, for the operations and relations are eternal anduncreated; they are from God’s power as the principle of divine proceeding.

God’s power to beget and his will to beget are one with his eternal essence. Hence the power of God means essence and not relation.

There is only one eternal generating in God and onespirating. There is only one Father, only one Son, only one Holy Ghost.