The Armchair Thomist

     My friend over at The Aspiring Jesuit blog ( https://theaspiringjesuit.blogspot.com ) has recently uploaded a short post about a model of the Divine Trinity that seems plausible to him, and so I figured I would do the same by trying to explicate my understanding of St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophical model of the Trinity which is a model that naturally flows from the basic framework that Aquinas works within.     For most Christian classical theists,  God is analogically said to be a pure act of intellect, but for Aquinas, "the intellect in act is the intelligible in act," so for the intellect to be in act means that it has some intelligible species by which it is in act, and of course due to divine simplicity, this intelligible species is just the divine essence itself. Furthermore, if God's intellect was put in act through an intelligible species that is from something extrinsic to Him (as what happens with us when we cognize the world), then that woul...

    A s the integrated substances that humans are (an example of this integrity is between our intellects which can move our bodies to certain ends and our bodies which can influence what objects we conceptualize, where this mind-body interaction would be expected in an integrated and unified substance), the intellect and body share certain qualities as being apart of that same substance. Here is one quality that they share: just as one can condition their body to be physically healthy, to form new reflexes, to get used to a poison through repetition, or to get used to a certain kind of food such that the bodily appetites are directed toward that food and opposed to others, the same can be said of the intellect, that it can be conditioned in a similar way to be habitually inclined toward certain objects as opposed to others. Now, the intellect's proper and principle object is intelligible being as such , which entails that the passive intellect stands in potency to the re...