“And the best thing is, we can take these blocks apart!”
In the last post, I introduced the ‘generic view’ of the trinity, namely the claim that Divinity (that which makes the divine persons God/divine) is shared equally by all three persons and so does not belong to any one divine person more than another. In this post, I would like to highlight some of the issues faced by a generic view.
My point of departure is modern day criticism of the generic view such as that of Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas (to name just a few). These authors are not, in my opinion, the most philosophically astute critics, but nevertheless, they do highlight some of the issues relevant for the generic view.
Before I launch into this, I need to make one point clear. In the last post, I described the Cappadocians as representatives of the generic view, but Gunton and Zizioulas (probably inaccurately) think the Cappadocians hold a derivation view, not a generic view. Gunton and Zizioulas thus direct their criticisms against Augustine, not the Cappadocians. But nevertheless, I will treat their criticisms as applying to the generic view in general.
With that out of the way, let’s begin by restating the key tenet for the generic view:
(GV) Divinity belongs equally to each divine person.
Theologians like Gunton and Zizioulas seem convinced that GV entails that Divinity is ‘prior’ or ‘ontologically primary’ to the divine persons. It’s hard to know just what they mean by that, but I take it that the idea goes something like this: Divinity is like a building block for the persons in the way that a brick is for a wall. Divinity can exist apart from the persons (but not vice versa), just like how a brick can exist apart from its wall (but not vice versa). Gunton and Zizioulas move very hastily to that conclusion, so I would like to unpack some of the assumptions that (seem to) get them there.
First then, Gunton and Zizioulas assume GV entails that Divinity is a fourth entity, different from the three persons. That is:
(T4) For any divine person x, Divinity is not identical to x.
That much seems fair enough. Certain things (like being shareable) apply to Divinity but not to a divine person, so it’s at least plausible to think that Divinity is not strictly identical to any divine person.
Second, Gunton and Zizioulas seem to assume further that if Divinity is a fourth entity, distinct from the persons, then it’s a concrete individual in its own right:
(T5) Divinity is a concrete individual.
T5 may or may not follow from T4, depending on whether one links the conditions for non-identity with the conditions for individuality.
Still, suppose we granted T5. In itself, T5 isn’t necessarily a problem. Most scholastic theologians, for example, maintained T5, and many patristic authors probably did too (like Tertullian, the Cappadocians, Augustine, etc.).
Third, Gunton and Zizioulas assume T5 entails that Divinity is capable of existing independently of the divine persons:
(T6) For any divine person x, Divinity could exist if x did not.
Again, T6 may or may not follow from T5, depending on whether one thinks the conditions for individuality correspond to the conditions for (the capability of) separate existence.
Nevertheless, it is from T6 that Gunton and Zizioulas infer their conclusion: if Divinity can exist on its own, then it must be a kind of fundamental building block for the divine persons in the way a brick is for a wall. That seems to be the sense of saying Divinity is ‘prior’ or ‘ontologically primary’ to the persons.
Now, why exactly is this such a problem? It seems to me that Gunton and Zizioulas have at least two worries relevant to our discussion. First, all the really good stuff about being God (e.g., the divine attributes) belongs to Divinity, and so if Divinity is a concrete individual which can exist on its own apart from the divine persons, then the persons turn out to be superfluous. The persons end up being secondary to Divinity.
Second, for Gunton and Zizioulas, God is fundamentally ‘personal’. That means, I take it, that some x and y can only be divine/God if they stand in a mutual loving relationship. But if Divinity can exist on its own, apart from the persons, then Divinity would be divine/God in virtue of its intrinsic properties only, without a need for any mutual loving relationships at all.
Consequently, Gunton and Zizioulas deny T6. As they see it, Divinity cannot exist on its own, apart from the persons. It is the persons who are divine/God, not some entity called Divinity (which is not itself a person). And with that, Gunton and Zizioulas reject the generic view altogether, opting instead for a derivation view. For them, Divinity just is the Father, so there is no ‘Divinity’ that is not a person.
Unfortunately, Gunton and Zizioulas seem to me mistaken about T6. The major advocates of the generic view are theologians like the Cappadocians, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, etc. For all these people, T6 is a metaphysical impossibility. Divinity simply cannot exist apart from the divine persons.
Take Gregory of Nyssa as an example. Although there is debate about his theory of universals, one plausible interpretation is that Gregory thinks Divinity is an immanent universal, and so Divinity, like any other immanent universal, simply cannot exist apart from the things/persons that exemplify it. Similar points could be made about Augustine, Aquinas, and so forth. GV does not necessarily entail T6.
It seems to me that a more powerful objection to the generic view is this: if divine properties belong (strictly speaking) to Divinity, then divine properties will not belong to the persons unless we can tell a metaphysical story that successfully explains how the persons ‘inherit’ Divinity’s properties. And that’s a difficult metaphysical story to tell. (The derivation view faces the same problem, but only for the Son and Spirit since the Father is identical to Divinity.)
What I am suggesting is that universals are mind independent, but not absolutely independent entities. So, for instance, the universal of “chairness” exists independently of minds, but not independently of any particular chairs. Yet, it does not exist in any particular chair like Aristotle’s universal. Rather it has a separate existence from them and the particular chair exemplifies it. In this way, the universal of Godness would exist as a separate entity from God, yet it would not exist independently of him. In fact, its existence would depend on his existence
Sounds like an odd proposal to me; unless you are saying something like universals ’emerge in the act of thinking’ or something related to and dependent upon mental activity. In short, is it a natural-kind universal, or an artificial-kind universal?
I wonder if there is an emergentist view of universals, i.e., that universal exist as separate somethings than the things that exemplify them; however, their existence is dependent upon and emerges from those very same things. And, if so, how might this impact the conversation about God’s aseity and universals.
Recently I have been reading some Orthodox theologians and some of them are explaining the unity of the Trinity in terms of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sharing the same (numerically) life. They don’t really explain exactly what they mean by life, but I think I understand them on an intuitive level. Do any church fathers talk in this way? Do any medievals?
Oh right. There’s (b). I myself am also puzzled about what Gregory himself thinks. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a debate over Gregory’s theory of universals. Some say he thinks universals are ‘immanent’ and some say he holds a ‘collection theory’.
On the ‘immanent view’ an immanent universal would be some kind of constituent that is numerically the same in, and wholly present (undivided) in, each individual that exemplifies it.
A ‘collection theory’ holds that, say, ‘humanity’ is a mere collection of individual humans/Gods/etc. (Or, to put it as the neoplatonic commentators did: the universal ‘humanity’ is divided into its instances in the sense that each individual human form/nature is a numerically distinct ‘part’ of the whole humanity — what’s ‘universal’ here is the collection, not the individuals.)
I go back and forth on this debate, but if Gregory thinks Divinity is an immanent universal in the way I’ve just defined an immanent universal, then it seems to me that the best he can say is the following. The three divine persons are ‘one’ in this way: person a, b, and c share the (numerically) same constituent x.
That, in turn, can be interpreted in (at least) two ways:
(1) The three persons are really just different parts of one bigger lump of parts (or constituents, as I think the same point can probably be made whether we go with parts or constituents). Many cylinders in a car engine are part of an engine because they all share the same drive shaft. Similarly, the three divine persons are all part of ‘God’, ‘the whole Trinity’, or whatever-you-want-to-call-the-whole, because they all share the same Divinity-constituent.
(2) The three divine persons are no more ‘one’ than three humans are ‘one’.
At the moment (but I can easily be persuaded otherwise), if you asked me how Gregory establishes the unity of the divine persons, I wouldn’t point solely to his claims about universals. I would point to all of his arguments for divine unity (he also, for example, argues that the three divine persons are one God because they perform numerically the same actions). I don’t think his arguments for divine unity are necessarily successful, but I think it’s fairly clear that he tries to argue for that conclusion.
Hmm….
Hi Kenny —
Excellent point. I think it’s helpful to distinguish this point with respect to (a) what it means for one’s view of the Trinity in general, and (b) how Gregory understands it.
As for (a), there are plenty of issues here, one of which is what you’ve pointed out: if Divinity is an abstract entity like any other property (assuming that’s one’s view on properties), then how are the Father, Son, and Spirit any more ‘one God’ than Peter, Mary, and Jerry are ‘one human’?
Another issue pertains to aseity: if Divinity is an abstract property instantiated by the divine persons, then do the persons ‘depend’ (in some way) on Divinity? Would the Father, for example, depend for being divine on Divinity?
One other issue to mention is tritheism or social trinitarianism: if the three divine persons instantiate Divinity in the way that three humans instantiate humanity, would this entail that there are three Gods, or three centers of consciousness?
An issue that has been sort of, but not really, addressed in the comments so far: why accept claim T5? Wouldn’t a lot of our problems be solved if divinity was an abstract individual? Then we could say, to use Zalta’s terminology that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all instantiate, e.g., omniscience, whereas divinity merely encodes omniscience. Like the immanent universals, this gets rid of the concern about divinity as a sort of “fourth person.” It also gets rid of the concern about being personal being an essential attribute of God – divinity can also “encode” personhood.
This might, however, cause problems for whatever view Gregory uses to make the three persons one in a stronger sense than three humans (sharing the same essence of humanity) are “one”. I don’t really understand that part of the theory yet.
Aurelius,
You raise a very interesting issue. Is there any genuine sense in saying the Father eternally ‘begets’ the Son? What’s the force of ‘begets’?
In order to answer this question we’ve got to get straight the metaphysics of actor F generating actor S. Medievals have several different accounts of what this would be for the case of God. The issue is often discussed in terms of how to construe the divine essence, whether as some sort of infinite substrate (akin to matter as the substrate of a form), or as an infinite foundation (akin to a form being the foundation for a relation, e.g. white entity & being similar to another white entity), or as an infinite form per se one with divine personal properties; and on….
One thing that I wonder is whether Bulgakov is suggesting that there are three divine persons, and person 1 initiates a relationship with person 2, and it is on the basis of initiating this relation that person 1 is the Father, and person 2 is the Son. One might wonder whether person 2 existed before person 1 initiated the relationship? In other words, could person 2 be a divine person logically prior to being related to person 1? I think many medievals would reject this take b/c it suggests that e.g. the Son is a constituted person logically prior to being related to the Father, and has a relationship to the Father consequent to being a constituted person.
I just read a passage by Sergius Bulgakov in his work _The Lamb of God_ that states:
“The Father is the cause (aitia) of the Son not in the sense of His origination but only of eternal interrelation.”
I am not exactly sure what he means by this, but I think it may be something such as this:
The Father and Son as distinct persons have always co-existed in such a way that neither is the ontological cause of the other. Moreover, they have also always existed as two persons in an interpersonal or perichoretic relationship with one another; however, the Father is the one who initiated the relationship. As such, the Father is the cause of the Son in the sense that the Father is the cause of the Son’s personal identity, i.e., the one to whom the Father perfectly and transparently reveals himself.
I am not sure exactly what comments I am looking for by posting this. But, I guess I am curious if there are parallels to this type of thinking in medieval thought and whether this idea is common. I suppose I have always considered the Father to somehow be the ontological cause of the Son.
Anyway . . . any comment here would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Aurelius
Daniel – thank you – excellent point. I’ll try to enforce that policy as editor.
Guys – when we post the next in the series, we need to go back and Edit the previous post, so that at the end is the a link to the next installment. (I usually end a series post with Next time: blah blah blah. – that whole like can be a link).
Carl,
Congrats – you’ve written the first comment here which is about absolutely nothing! 😛
Seriously, I’m not sure I follow the point of your comment. Most of us philosophers think it is a mistake to “reify” (consider as a thing) nothing. That is, “nothing” doesn’t name or refer to something – not even a very unusual sort of thing. Compare: no one in my circle of friends watches Friends. Surely this doesn’t mean that in my circle of friends, there’s a really odd fellow called “No one” (I guess “one” is his last name) who watches a certain TV show.” Rather, I’m saying that the number of people in my circle of friends who watch Friends is zero.
“I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” “in” in both English and Greek is highly ambiguous. It could mean a lot of things – you’re right about that. But as we exegete that passage, won’t we narrow those down, at least somewhat?
Scott – ‘spose you could hunt down that quote, and write up a short post on it?
subject: Quote: Augustine on the ambiguity of “Father” (Scott)
🙂
Didn’t Augustine interpret the Lord’s prayer as being directed at all three divine persons? In which case, there are diverse uses of the name ‘Father’?
2-ness vs. being 2-y is also the problem with Parmenides. Parmenides’ thinking was something like this:
A thing is what it is. A is A. Red is red. Etc.
So, nothing is nothing.
Which can be rephrased as “no thing is nothing,” or “nothingness does not exist,” hence “everything is.”
Pure logic, right?
Well, it would be if it weren’t conflating nothing the noun with nothing the predicate.
Nothingness is not nothing. Nothingness is the reification of non-being. So, it does exist. It exists as a reification in our minds of an absence. When we say “A is A” we need to remember that “A is A” is only true if the two sides of the proposition are meant in the same sense. So, yes, “The reification of absence is the reification of absence,” but no “the reification of absence is not nothing.”
* * * *
I’m still relatively new to theology, and I’ve mostly read Eastern Orthodox, so that’s probably why I sound like Zizioulas. I don’t know if he is sloppy or not from firsthand reading, but given that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” aren’t we sort of committed to a high degree of sloppiness in the sense that the Father contains the Son and the Son contains the Father — a pair of relationships not ordinary possible?
Hi JT,
I’ve enjoyed reading the series thus far.
One comment I would make, of an entirely technical nature, is that my life would have been much easier if you’d included links to the next article in the series at the end of each article. It also makes submission to sites such as reddit much easier, as people can follow through the entire thing with just a single link.
Cheers,
Dan
Hi Dale —
1. Yep, for every theologian I can think of, T6 is a counterpossible.
2. As for saying God is fundamentally ‘personal’, yeah, I probably do mean God is in a personal relationship. Zizioulas has a weird view about this: ‘being related to the divine persons’ is ontologically prior to ‘being a thing’. Humans become ‘things’ only when they enter into relationship with the divine persons. He extends this to all living organisms too. (Presumably, then, stones can never be ‘things’.) He also tries to say something similar about the divine persons: ‘being related to the Father’ is ontologically prior to ‘being God’, or something like that. I don’t think I need to explain all that I find bizarre about Zizioulas’ view, but the point is just that although I really don’t know how to describe it, Divinity does not satisfy Zizioulas’ criteria for being God/thing/personal.
3. Yes, for Gunton and Zizioulas, Father = Divinity. It’s strict identity, as far as I can tell. And yes, that would lead into contradictions as you’ve mentioned. But then again, Gunton and Zizioulas are not very good examples of careful, rigorous theologians. They’re pretty much the opposite of that.
4. As for the thing about Gregory, Augustine, Aquinas, etc., I’m trying to say something very similar to what you’ve said here, but only about the divine essence, not universals in general. These cats have different views on universals (Gregory = immanent universals? Augustine = separate universals? Aquinas = nominalist). But when it comes to the divine essence, they all think the divine essence exists necessarily in the three divine persons, it is not divided, and it does not depend on something else that might exist ‘above’ it in some other realm of the Forms or properties. That might make it sound as if they think the divine essence is more or less an immanent universal in the Aristotelian sense. And this is probably fairly accurate (especially for Gregory and Scotus). However, these theologians usually make a tiny qualification: although the divine essence exists necessarily in the persons, it does not depend on them, while immanent universals do depend on the particulars that exemplify them. The divine essence has a ‘weak priority’, as it were. I like to call it a trope, but others like to call it an Aristotelian immanent universal. I think both are accurate enough. So long as we don’t think these cats think of the divine essence as a property or Form that depends on something else, we’re doing justice to their views on the trinity.
5. Interesting comment about the Biblical ascription of divinity to the Father. Given that the Bible always talks about divinity as the Father, what do you think might motivate a Christian like Gregory of Nyssa or someone today to adopt a generic view instead of a derivation view?
Hi JT,
Good, meaty post.
The move from T5 to T6 looks like a non sequitur to me.
Further, T6 is an odd claim. How many possible worlds are there in which, say, the Father doesn’t exist? Most of us would say: none. Therefore, there is no possible world in which divinity but not the Father exists (whether or not this “divinity” thing exists in all or only some possible worlds). Thus, T6 (at least in the Father’s case) involves what logicians call a counterpossible – an if-then statement where the antecedent can’t possibly be true. Many are inclined to count all such claims as trivially true (because they’re not false), and others think some are true but others are false, while I’m inclined to say that they are neither true nor false.
“for Gunton and Zizioulas, God is fundamentally ‘personal’” – JT, I think you mean: for them, God (or: any divine being) is necessarily in a personal relationship. This is different than saying that God is “personal”. The latter is uncontroversial, on the most straightforward kids of the theism, while the former is controversial.
“For them, Divinity just is the Father” – Does this mean =? Doesn’t this position of theirs degenerate into inconsistency, as they hold some things are true of D which are not true of F?
“Gregory thinks Divinity is an immanent universal, and so Divinity, like any other immanent universal, simply cannot exist apart from the things/persons that exemplify it. Similar points could be made about Augustine, Aquinas, and so forth.” Are you saying that all these folk pretty cleary take an Aristotelian stance about universals generally, so that they are not (as the Platonist would have it) prior to, more real than, or in a different realm than what imitates them (instantiates them), but rather these properties in some sense depend on the individuals which have them? (e.g. if there were no individual dogs, there would be no caninity)
One final comment: on what you call the more powerful objection to GV – that is a difficulty for the position. But I’d say a more powerful objection to it is that that what in divine in primary sense, on that theory, is not the Father (aka the God of the Jews, Yahweh). In the Bible, he’s in some sense the one true God, and this “divinity” thing (which is divine more properly speaking, and somehow because of which the Father is divine, arguably makes no appearance there, nor is it required to explain anything which is said therein. There are references to “the divine nature”, but I don’t see it playing the role that “divinity” plays on these Trinity theories. (e.g. divinity is something we can partake of or share in)
Right– my bad. The ‘homoiousion’ position was rejected consequent to Nicea.
Careful there Scott. The notion of a ‘homoiousion’ position only appeared after Nicea, and it’s not at all obvious that Nicea was even thinking about a distinction between ‘homoi’ and ‘homo’. For all we know, they were thinking of ‘homoi’.
Carl — the view you’re suggesting, if I’m understanding you correctly, sounds very similar to Zizioulas’s version of the derivation view. Have you read Zizioulas? If so, I’d love to hear your take on it.
Also, could you say more about the two-ness and two-y thing? That sounds interesting.
Hi Carl,
Thanks for your comments.
Although the distinction btwn. noun/adjective has in the past been used by some scholastic theologians–though this distinction can be used by the derivationist as well as the generici-ist. So, your take is the derivation one?
One problem: the view you articulate sounds a lot like homoiousianism. Namely, that the Son and Holy Spirit are similar (or even maximally similar) to the Father’s divinity. And, this sort of view was rejected at Nicea. So, the cards are stacked against the view you’ve proposed.
I happen to think the generic view is the way to go… but I won’t go into that right here and now.
Can’t we split the difference between the views by saying that “God the Father is both Divinity (noun) and Divine (adjective). God the Son and Holy Spirit are Divine (adjective), but not Divinity.”* Or does this run into some other heresy?
* To explain the noun/adjective distinction a little more: How many instances of the number two are there? There are different ways to answer that question, but I think the answers would tend to be zero (“two” is an abstraction and not real), one (there is one thing called being “two”), nearly infinity (all the ways things are paired in the world), or some transfinite number (all the possible ways of thinking about pairs). The answer “two” seems unlikely as a good answer. Therefore, “two” is not two. Or to put it more plainly, two-ness (noun) is not two-y (adjective).
A similar argument can be made that redness is not red. Redness is an idea, and ideas are not visual, and only visual things are a certain color. The ancient Chinese liked to say that “a white horse is not whiteness” and so forth. An interesting question is whether goodness is good. (Probably, but hmm.)
So, to be Divine is to have a certain kind of relationship with Divinity. The Father is the personification of Divinity. The Father, Son and Spirit all have that certain kind of relationship with the Father, hence all are Divine but only the Father is Divinity in the sense of numerical identity.
In some sense ‘ingenerate’ would be a relative property in either case; that is, if we take it to mean ‘not from another agent’. If this is right, then it is a relation to a non-existent agent. In which case, would this not be an empty term?
To my mind, the key point is whether ‘paternity’ presupposes ‘ingenerate’ or the other way around. If we say paternity is logically prior, then we can get the generic view; if we say ingenerate is logically prior, then we can get the derivation view. If we go with the former, then we can say that ingenerate qualifies paternity, such that the Father does not cause himself to be constituted by the divine essence by means of communicated the divine essence to the Son; rather, the Father is constituted by the divine essence iff the Father’s being constituted by the divine essence entails communicating the divine essence to the Son (and to the Holy Spirit).
Interesting point Scott. If the Father’s property of being ingenerate is an intrinsic (and non-relational) property, then one might be able to get a derivation view. But if the Father has the property of being ingenerate only in virtue of generating the Son (i.e., if ingenerate is a relational property), then one may end up with a generic view.
“True that, double true”.
Two tacts we might take:
1. Focus on what it means to be a divine person; namely, the old relative person constitution vs. absolute person constitution debate.
or,
2. Focus on strategies that take away any implication that the divine essence is ‘more proper to the Father than the Son or Holy Spirit’, and by implication (hopefully) that the divine essence is not more proper to any one divine person as compared to others.
I’ve been soaked a bit too much with Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus– so these are the two kinds of tacts that I can think of at present.
1 would lead us into a discussion about e.g. paternity+divine essence; and 2 would lead us into a discussion about e.g. innascibility+divine essence.
If we look at 2 for a moment, then we are asking what is it for the Father to be ‘innascible’. If we say it is in se a positive property, then we may construe the Father as ‘fully constituted’ logically prior to the generated Son; in which case the divine essence is proper to the Father whether or not per impossibile the Father communicates the divine essence to the Son. But if we deny that innascibility is in se a positive property, then we may be in a position to deny that there is logical space to consider the 1st divine person as (logically) not yet having communicated the divine essence to the Son.
The basic point is this: if we can say that the divine essence constitutes the Father, whether or not per impossibile the Father has generated the Son, then we can say that the divine essence is ‘more proper’ to the Father than to any other divine person. But if we can say that the divine essence constitutes the Father iff the Father has communicated the divine essence to the Son, then we might be in a position to show how the divine essence is not ‘more proper’ to the Father than other divine persons. Of course, in this latter option, an important point is that the Father does not gain being constituted by the divine essence on the basis of having generated the Son, but that the Father’s being constituted by the divine essence entails his having communicated the divine essence to the Son. (A similar argument can be made for the Holy Spirit too.)
I think a post on absolute vs. relative person constitution should be typed up by somebody eventually….
Hi Scott,
Good thoughts. I agree that the communication should be one act by which F gives Divinity to S, not a series of acts by which F gives each property to S. F causes S to ‘inherit’ the whole D.
But that’s where my question comes in: once the S ‘has’ D, then still, how does S ‘have’ D’s properties?
Suppose you gave me your heart. I would then ‘have’ your heart, but I wouldn’t inherit the properties of the heart. Heart properties would belong, strictly speaking, to the heart, not to me. It’d be true that ‘the heart beats and pumps blood throughout JT’s body’, but it wouldn’t be true that ‘JT beats and pumps blood throughout JT’s body’.
The point is: just giving something to another doesn’t explain much. We would still need to tell a story about how the recipient acquires the properties of what’s been given.
In the last paragraph you write, ‘if divine properties belong to Divinity…’, what is the distinction here?
I’m inclined to think that the generic view is about ‘divinity’ being inherited, rather than ‘divine properties’. If we said that f gives divine property X to s, does that make s divine? I’d think that this way of parsing it out suggestions that e.g. for any s that has X, s has divinity. But suppose s just ‘inherits’ certain divine properties, but not all of them, would that make s somehow less divine? My guess is that talk about ‘inheriting’ divine properties should presuppose ‘inheriting’ divinity as such. [Option 1] If we say f gives divinity to s; and divinity entails an infinity of properties, then s’s having divinity entails that s has all divine properties. But [Option 2] if we say f gives divine property X to s, then of all divine properties s (only) has X, but nothing more?
If we take Option 1, then there would seem to be one communication, namely f ‘giving divinity’ to s. But if we go with Option 2, then we’d say for each X that f gives to s, there is a distinct communicative act (e.g. f gives X to s; f gives Y to s; f gives Z to s, ad infinitum).
But this option1 / option2 stuff is just prolegomenon to the metaphysical story that needs to be told. Nonetheless, I’d think a metaphysical story that narrates one communicative act for each person ‘inheriting’ divinity works well (one for the Son, and on for the Holy Spirit), rather than saying there is a communicative act for each divine property communicated from f to s (and from f to hs; or from f & s to hs). Option 1 would amount to a well-groomed Ockham in preparation for his metaphysical narrative night on the town.
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