Christians have faith in God not chiefly as a first cause or unmoved mover, nor primarily as the ground of being in whom we move and who “moves” in us; while it is valid to name God as Goodness Itself, Beauty Itself, Truth Itself, and Being Itself, the Christian above all knows Him as Personality or Personhood Itself. He is a personal God not simply because he has a knowledge of individuals; that is, we call Him personal not merely as a means of contra-distinguishing Him from the mechanical Deist god of general rather than particular laws. But rather, because what He reveals about himself above all is His reality as the archetype, as it were, of Personality; as Three Persons in One Nature, the Trinity speaks to us of the intimacy of love, the philia between persons, as the fundamental principle of things. Love in this sense precedes being, and a person is one who loves another with a precision, complexity, and totality the full description of which it is beyond my ambitions here to provide. Our self-knowledge as persons is preceded by and modeled on the Persons of the Trinity; it is in this participation in the Divine Persons that our human dignity resides. While modern discourse often uses the terms “personal” and “subjective” to relegate something to the private sphere, to neutralize its authority or attenuate its reality, the Christian senses that it is precisely insofar as we are persons that we approximate to divinity. What is most personal is not most “private” but most real and most important. My “subjective” ideas possess a dignity, authority, and reality that makes the mere “objective” seem lifeless in comparison.
As such, God as the Person who gives of Himself without reducing Himself, and so makes things to be that had not been; Who loves what had not previously been there to be loved (and Who makes the “there” there–place–as itself lovable): He sets all things in being not of necessity but by grace, by the utter gratuity of caritas. This mystery of grace and creation, which Benedict XVI has elsewhere and powerfully described in terms of freedom, love, and reason, precedes everything–everything, that is, save God as Trinity, as a Perfect Community of Persons in One Nature. In the Trinity, grace and personality are perfectly one. As St. Thomas Aquinas underscored, this entails that God, as Personality Itself, is outside any species or genus: He is not a person like us, though we are persons insofar as we bear a likeness to Him. As such, there is no ground besides, outside of, or Before God on which to base our discussion of Him. There is no secular terrain on which the Christian God features like a mountain and another god or gods like rivers and forests, all of whom can be summed up, compared and contrasted, as so many individuals in a ginned up science of divine geography called Theology. Personhood and grace precede all things, because by grace things come to be, and by God as Person things are eternally known, loved, and given form.
Speaking of Personality as it relates to God irks me. Mr. Wilson identifies Personality with "Personhood" -- if this is the case than "Personhood" here cannot mean the same thing as the abstraction taken from "Person" as applied to the Three Divine Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. (Otherwise we would have the absurdity that God is both One Person and Three Persons.) How would a Thomist speak of the same thing? Is it the case that the Church Fathers spoke of the Divine actions, God's love of us and so on, or of the Three Divine Persons, rather than of abstractions pertaining to the Godhead?
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