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Caterina Tarlazzi, The Logic of the Trinity: Augustine to Ockham, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 258, January 2015, Pages 134–137, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu062
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Extract
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a fascinating topic for historians of medieval logic. (i) It is interesting philosophically, as some crucial concepts in ontology and semantics are investigated in the course of discussing it. Trinitarian doctrines claim God's unicity and simplicity, as well as the real distinction between the three Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each of which is God. This means that four apparently incompossible propositions need to be shown to be compatible: “1. that there is one and only one God; 2. that God is utterly simple; 3. that the Persons of the Trinity are really distinct from one another; 4. that each of the Persons of the Trinity is substantially God” (pp. 24 and 25). Attempts to explain how these propositions are compossible involve sophisticated analysis of (among other things) sameness and difference, simplicity and composition, relation, and essential and accidental predication. (ii) The topic is also interesting historically, as a story of both inheritance and treason. The key elements of medieval trinitarian theory are derived from Aristotle's Categories . For instance, the relationships used for analysing the Trinity: the de -relationship (being said of something), the in -relationship (being present in something), the ab -relationship (of a concrete with respect to its abstract) and the ad -relationship (of a relative with respect to its correlative) (p. 13). However, Aristotle's system does not straightforwardly apply to the Trinity. It needs to be subject to major alterations (what medievals called a translatio ) in order to be applied to the divine.
