ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I introduced Scotus’s claim that the divine persons are exemplifications (my word) of the divine essence: the divine essence is numerically one and the same thing in each divine person, shared by them. One obvious way of spelling this out would be to hold that the divine essence is a universal. On the whole, the Eastern tradition after Gregory of Nyssa is very happy to make just this claim. But the Western tradition, generally, does not. The reasons here are complex, to do with particular historical understandings of universals variously prevalent in the Eastern and Western traditions. In general, it seems to me, Western theologians after Augustine – following the philosophical (Aristotelian and Neoplatonic) tradition – tend to think of the relation between universal and particular in terms of division: a universal is somehow divided into the particulars that instantiate it. The relation of division can be understood in a variety of ways. For example, a nominalist might well hold that any extramental universal is just a collection of particulars, and that the division relation is just a matter of partitioning a collection into its various components. In this sense, there is no way in which a particular is the whole universal: the particular is simply a part of a collection, and the collection is the universal. Realists on the question of universals who want to persevere with the notion of division in this context tend to suppose that there is a sense of ‘division’ according to which the whole universal is somehow in the particulars, but in such a way as not to be numerically identical in each particular. Medieval writers refer to such particulars as ‘subjective parts’ of the nature. The view that universals are divisible in one or other of the ways I have begun to outline here predominated in the West. This makes it immediately clear why Western theologians on the whole reject the view that the divine essence could be a universal. The divine essence is supposed to be numerically one thing, really the same in each divine person. And neither sense of ‘division’ allows for numerical identity in more than one thing. The divine essence, then, is not divided into the persons considered as particulars.
