Question #46: Can SSGO’s ‘relational horizon’ approach meet Thomistic concerns and tests? Specifically, can it preserve each Person as a full, subsisting divine ‘who’-identical with the one simple essence-without lapsing into either modalism (‘mere modes’ of one subject) or partialism (‘pieces’ of God)?
SSGO’s claim is that each divine Person is the entire divine essence, realized in a unique relational stance. It uses metaphysical or motives as problem solvers (Benovsky), and a relational ontology first approach in language borrowed from Marion (but not his phenomenology primary mode of knowing approach). So, in theory, a Thomistic perspective may worry that describing Persons as “self-standing relational modes” as this system does with those things might reduce them to mere aspects of one underlying subject or else divide God’s essence into discrete segments. Yet SSGO answers by insisting that a “mode” is not a lesser configuration of something deeper, but rather a fully subsistent identity in which the entire divine act of being is possessed. In Thomistic language, as far as I understand it, this means that the “mode” is not an accident or external property added to God; it is identical to God’s essence in act, but understood under a relational origin such as unbegotten, begotten, or proceeding.
To avoid modalism, SSGO clarifies that a relational mode does not qualify the essence from outside. Instead, the very way God’s essence exists in the Father, for instance, is “unbegotten fullness”; that same essence in the Son is “begotten fullness.” Neither is a portion or variant of God, but the entirety of God, wholly and eternally possessed. That means there is no hidden subject plus an added vantage. Each Person is, by the irreducible relation of origin, the one divine act of being. Thus, the Person is a genuine “who,” not a mode in the sense of a passing way of being.
From a Thomistic vantage, than, the concern about partialism is also met. SSGO’s premise is that if something is the entire essence, it cannot be a “piece.” Since each Person is the full essence, no partition is introduced. In other words, there is no composition “God plus Fatherhood.” Rather, Fatherhood just is the divine essence in its unbegotten stance, fully and without remainder. The same applies to Son and Spirit. Because SSGO emphasizes that these “modes” are primitives, it treats them as subsistent subjects of the one essence, matching Aquinas’s notion that the divine relations are neither accidents nor partial shares.
Finally, SSGO maintains identity with the single divine act by insisting that the Person is not “God plus a vantage,” but rather God as lived in this unique relational identity. This parallels Aquinas’s principle that the relations are the divine essence under distinct oppositions of origin. There is no stacking of extra properties; all that is in God is God. Hence, SSGO can say that the Father, Son, and Spirit do not multiply or fragment the essence but eternally express it in the distinct ways that begetting, begottenness, and proceeding entail. Each Person, therefore, remains identical with the one divine being, differing only by how that one essence is held in an irreducible relation of origin.
SSGO’s perspective generally deals with these issue primarily through its biblical analysis, and directly follows from how we dealt with Hebrews 1 and Romans 11:36. Please refer to those questions and answers for more. But, overall, Thomism and SSGO do not need to be in opposition necessarily.