The scriptural seed: revelation as relation

Israel’s God makes himself known by making covenants—revelation as relation. “I will establish my covenant… to be God to you and to your descendants after you” (Gen 17:7); “I will take you for my people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the LORD your God” (Ex 6:7). Knowledge of God is not first a theory of being, but a history of communion: election and exodus—“I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself… you shall be to me a kingdom of priests” (Ex 19:4–6)—law and temple—“Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex 25:8); yet “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee” (1 Kgs 8:27)—and prophetic mercy—“I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6); “let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me” (Jer 9:23–24). The promise of a new covenant makes the same point interiorly: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts… I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:31–33).

The New Testament discloses the depth of that communion as missions: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son… God sent the Son into the world” (Jn 3:16–17); and “When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father” (Jn 15:26). The risen Lord seals the pattern in the Church: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you… Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:21–22). Paul and Peter name the same double sending: “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son… and because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:4–6; cf. Tit 3:5–6).

From these sendings the leitmotif becomes explicit: from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—“For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph 2:18); “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things… and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Cor 8:6), sealed doxologically as “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor 13:14). The Fathers receive and crystallize the same rule: “The way to the knowledge of God goes from the one Spirit through the one Son to the one Father; and conversely… from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.47); and Augustine’s classic triad, “From whom, through whom, and in whom are all things: from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit” (De Trinitate I.6). Liturgy simply prays what Scripture and Fathers teach: “Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit…” (Roman Missal, Eucharistic Doxology; cf. Mt 28:19).

Already we have exitus and reditus, but not as a cycle of nature—rather as the triune life shared: “In him all things were created… through him and for him… and through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Col 1:16, 20); until the Son “delivers the kingdom to God the Father… that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:24–28). This return is personal and filial: “to all who received him… he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12); “you have received the Spirit of sonship… the Spirit… bears witness that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15–16); indeed, we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). In short: revelation arrives as relation—from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit—and the Church receives this as the basic pattern of revelation and worship, so that there is but one salvific economy in which the Spirit actualizes the Son’s mediation—or as Ratzinger puts it, “This is the same Spirit who was at work in the incarnation and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and who is at work in the Church. He is therefore not an alternative to Christ nor does he fill a sort of void …” (CDF, Dominus Iesus §12).

Patristic consolidation: names, persons, and origins

The first great task is to confess the Son and the Spirit as truly God without breaking the unity. Nicaea guarded what the Gospel already implied: the Son is consubstantial with the Father—“…of the substance of the Father… consubstantial with the Father (homoousion tō Patri)” (Council of Nicaea I, Creed, 325). Constantinople confessed the Spirit as Lord: “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, 381).

The Cappadocians then clarified the grammar: one ousia, three hypostaseis, distinguished only by relations of origin. Basil states the formula plainly—“We confess one ousia and three hypostaseis” (Ep. 214.4). Gregory of Nyssa keeps the unity while naming the distinctions: “We both confess the distinction of the hypostases and the union of the nature” (Ad Ablabium). Gregory of Nazianzus specifies the personal properties: “The Spirit… proceeding from the Father indeed, but not after the manner of the Son; for it is not by generation, but by procession that He is” (Or. 31.8–9). And Hilary tightens the point that these names are relational, not essence-labels: “The names Father and Son are not names of substance, but of relationship” (De Trin. VII.31). Here, relation is not an add-on in God; it is constitutive of the personal distinctions, yet does not divide the simple divinity.

Augustine makes two decisive moves. First, he shows that what distinguishes the Persons is relation of origin, not substance: “Not according to substance but according to relation is one called Father, another Son” (De Trin. V.5.6); and he guards unity by insisting that “in all such works the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit work inseparably” (De Trin. I.12). Second, he advances a careful apophatic discipline: “If you comprehend it, it is not God” (Serm. 52.6); “God is more truly thought than spoken, and more truly exists than is thought” (De Trin. VII.4.7). Thus the personal idiom of relation is anchored, and the guardrail is set: we speak truly, but we do not comprehend.

Boethius then gives the classic account of person—“Persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia” (“A person is an individual substance of a rational nature,” Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, c. 3). Received within Trinitarian grammar in the Latin tradition, this definition is refined so that in God the “personal” is precisely origin-relation—the Persons are not parts of a whole but (in the later scholastic shorthand) subsisting relations in the simple God. This becomes the medieval touchstone for speaking of names, persons, and origins without fracturing unity.

Dionysian hierarchy: the structural map of participation

Pseudo-Dionysius articulates how the Triune gift orders the universe and the Church. Celestial and ecclesial hierarchies are not social ladders but what he calls a “sacred order, knowledge, and activity… assimilated, as far as possible, to the likeness of God, and uplifted to the illuminations given it from God” (Celestial Hierarchy 3.2). They are a structural map of illumination and ascent: within each rank there are “purifications, illuminations, and perfections” by which the higher orders “raise the lower unto the higher ranks” and exercise “the providences of the higher for those beneath” (CH 3.2–3). The one Light diffuses itself through orders of angels, sacraments, rites, and ministries, raising each rank to act as a transparent conduit for those below, because the Good is praised as Light precisely for its diffusive causality: it “enlightens every mind,” “drives away ignorance,” and “unites” those it illumines (Divine Names 4.2–3). This is relationality at its most “structural” extreme: a cosmos inscribed by provenance and participation, where the divine ray is mediated through ordered ministries for the ascent of those who receive (CH 3).

At the same time Dionysius sharpens the apophatic line. God is beyond every name even as the divine processions give us names in truth. Hence Scripture “celebrates [the Cause] by every name and yet calls It Nameless,” for “the superessential Deity is beyond Mind, beyond Life, beyond Being,” “eluding all discourse, intuition, and name,” even while being confessed as the “Cause of all things” (DN 1.1; 1.6). The right approach therefore obeys “the Hierarchical Law” (DN 1.1): we receive the names as gifts measured to our capacity, and we proceed by affirmations (because God is the Cause of what we name) and by negations (because God “superessentially transcends” what we affirm), until, as Mystical Theology bids, we “leave behind everything perceived and understood… all that is not and all that is,” and are borne toward union with “Him who is beyond all being and knowledge” (MT 1.1; 5). Structure and silence grow together: the clearer the ordered participation, the firmer the confession that its Source exceeds every mode.

Lateran IV and the analogical rule

Lateran IV codifies two axioms that govern all later speech. First, divine simplicity: God is not composed of parts—“tres quidem personae, sed una essentia, substantia seu natura simplex omnino” (“three indeed are the persons, but **one essence, substance or nature, altogether simple”) (Lateran IV, Firmiter credimus, canon 1). Second, the rule of analogy: “inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari quin maior sit dissimilitudo notanda”—“between Creator and creature no similarity can be noted without an even greater dissimilarity being observed” (Lateran IV, ibid.; received in CCC §43). These two together prevent both collapse into univocity and loss in equivocity.

They also keep the relational idiom honest. We can and must speak of relations, procession, and return, but never as if God were one more instance within our genera, nor as if divine relations were creaturely ties “scaled up.” Hence Thomas: “Unde manifestum est quod Deus nullo modo est compositus, sed est omnino simplex” (“therefore it is clear that God is in no way composite, but altogether simple,” ST I, q.3, a.7); and when we name God we do so “neque univoce neque aequivoce, sed analogice” (“neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically,” ST I, q.13, a.5). This is why even our talk of God’s outward works must respect the Creator–creature interval: “in Deo relatio ad creaturam non est relatio realis, sed rationis tantum” (“in God, relation to the creature is not a real relation, but only of reason,” ST I, q.45, a.3, ad 1). The result is a disciplined boldness: confess processions and missions, exitus and reditus, yet deny every hint of a genus over God or of parts within God—the very balance Lateran IV enshrines.

The high medieval synthesis: subsisting relations and participation

Aquinas gives the metaphysical precision. God is ipsum esse subsistens—“the essentially self-subsisting Being,” so that “all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation.” He is “pure act, without any potentiality,” which secures simplicity. Within that simplicity, the divine hypostases are not parts but relations of origin that subsist: “a divine person signifies a relation as subsisting.” Hence the many divine names do not parcel out God; they name one reality under “many and diverse concepts.” And all operations ad extra are common: “to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.” So when Scripture speaks of the Persons’ temporal missions, the novelty is on our side: mission introduces “a new way of existing in another,” not change in God. In the same vein Aquinas holds that in God “relation to the creature is not a real relation, but only a relation of reason,” preserving divine immutability while doing justice to real effects in us.

At the hinge between God and creatures, Aquinas thematizes participation. Because God alone is esse itself, everything else “is [only] by participation.” That is why “God is in all things… as an agent is present to that upon which it works… as the cause of their being,” and why conservation is continuous donation. Likewise, exemplar causality: “The knowledge of God is the cause… of other things.” Put together, you get a moderated yet real structure of created orders—forms, powers, and ends—that image their source without rivaling it.

Bonaventure presses the same truth along an exemplarist-liturgical path. He opens the Itinerarium by invoking “the First Beginning whence all enlightenment flows as from the Father of Lights,” explicitly threading James 1:17 into Christian metaphysics and worship. And he renders exitus–reditus in affective and ecclesial practice: the Seraphic vision discloses “six stair-like illuminations, which begin from creatures and lead… unto God,” so that the whole economy becomes ascent through Christ into praise.

Earlier, Eriugena had already sung procession and return in an apophatic key that the high medievals receive and refine. God is “motion at rest and rest in motion,” a terse paradox that shows why the One can be everywhere active without inner alteration. This anticipates the later scholastic insistence that exitus and reditus are theophanic effects in creatures, not mutations in God.

Across these voices the tradition triangulates three poles it keeps together: structural participation (order, measure, exemplar), personal origin (subsisting relations, missions without change in God), and apophatic reserve (naming by analogy, guarding simplicity). That triangulation is precisely what lets a relational-first reading remain Catholic: it is from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit—one simple plenitude, personally ordered, diffusively shared; and “No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit.” (CDF, Dominus Iesus §12).

Liturgy and angelology: the enacted and the ordered

The medievals place the Dionysian map into the Church’s prayer. For Pseudo-Dionysius, hierarchy is not a social ladder but a God-given pattern by which light descends and the low are raised: “Hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity… assimilated, so far as possible, to the likeness of God, and uplifted toward the illuminations given it from God” (Celestial Hierarchy 3.2). Its aim is unitive: “the purpose of every hierarchy is to enable those arranged within it to be as much as possible like God and in union with Him” (CH 3.1). Hence within each order there are purifications, illuminations, and perfections, and the higher ranks exercise “the faculties which raise the lower unto the higher ranks” and “the providences of the higher for those beneath” (CH 3.2–3). The same pattern governs the Church’s rites: through “perceptible symbols we are lifted up to the simple and primordial truth,” as “the Hierarchical Law directs us” (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1.1). The one Good and Light thus “enlighten[s] every mind… driv[es] away ignorance… and unites them in one” (Divine Names 4.2–3); the cosmos and the Church become a structural map of illumination and ascent, a world inscribed by provenance and participation.

The Eucharist is both summit and source, the enactment of triune reciprocity in history—“the source and summit of the Christian life” (Lumen gentium 11)—where Augustine’s liturgical maxim sounds: “O sacrament of piety, O sign of unity, O bond of charity!” (Sermon 272). Aquinas draws out the same truth: “The effect of this sacrament is the unity of the Mystical Body” (ST III, q.79, a.1), because here the whole divine economy is received from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—the very doxology the Church sings at the altar: “Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit…” (Roman Missal, Eucharistic Doxology). Even the Roman Canon binds angelology to worship: “command that these offerings be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high” (Supplices te rogamus, Eucharistic Prayer I).

Thus angelic ministries, sacred orders, sacramental signs, and the rhythms of time express a single logic: the world ordered to communion. In Dionysius’ register, that order is the very shape of love: the Good is diffusive, “draw[ing] together all things and attract[ing] them unto Itself” (DN 4), and divine love unites without confusion. Hierarchy is not the opposite of love; it is how love communicates—purifying, illuminating, perfecting—without collapsing differences or dividing the one gift.

Early modern consolidation and the risk of flattening

Scholastic handbooks stabilize the synthesis, sometimes at the cost of thinning its personal and liturgical density. After Trent, the Roman Catechism states the Trinitarian core with textbook clarity: “In one Divine Nature there are Three Persons—the Father, begotten of none; the Son, begotten of the Father before all ages; the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the [Son]… we are… to adore distinction in the Persons, unity in the Essence.” The doctrines remain intact—simplicity, relations of origin, inseparable operations, participation. Vatican I reaffirms simplicity in lapidary form, confessing God as “simplicem omnino et incommutabilem substantiam spiritualem” (“an altogether simple and unchangeable spiritual substance,” Dei Filius, I). And the same Roman Catechism keeps the ad-extra rule explicit: “whatever God does outside Himself… is common to the Three Persons.” Participation is not lost, either, for it cites the apostolic measure of nearness: “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28).

Yet you can sense how a structural idiom—if isolated from worship and Scripture—can drift toward abstraction. The tradition’s own checks are still present; they simply await retrieval. The liturgy keeps the triune grammar enacted at the altar in the Church’s daily doxology: “Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso, tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti, in unitate Spiritus Sancti, omnis honor et gloria…” (“Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours…”). Trent guards the personal and sacrificial density of worship: “In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner the same Christ who once offered Himself… on the altar of the cross; this sacrifice is truly propitiatory.” (Session XXII, ch. 2). And in the broader Catholic imagination, Pascal gives the enduring caution against flattening the mystery into a mere system: “Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob; non des philosophes et des savants.” The remedy, then, is not to abandon the synthesis but to return it to its sources—Scripture, liturgy, and the personal idiom of relations and missions—so the stable structure breathes again as communion.

Ressourcement and Vatican II: communion, gift, and Scripture’s form

Twentieth-century renewal returns to the sources. Przywara sharpens the analogical rule as a rhythm that guards both simplicity and real participation—“a unity not of fixation but of tension.” (Analogia Entis, 201). He also frames nature and grace as intrinsically gift-ordered:

“In God nature and the supernatural are inseparably united according to their objective essence in that the ‘gift of participation’ [Teilgeben] in the supernatural is simply the unanticipated and unmerited fulfillment of that analogous ‘gift of participation’ that is the essence of nature: the ‘participation in the divine nature’ [should be understood] as the blessed crowning of ‘in him we live and move and have our being.’”
— Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 110 (Kindle ed.)

De Lubac retrieves the primacy of grace against any “two-tier” separation of ends, while Balthasar displays the triune form of revelation as glory, dramatic mission, and kenotic love—“Love alone is credible.” (Love Alone Is Credible). Ratzinger gathers these threads into communion ecclesiology: the notion of koinonia “appears with great prominence in the documents of the Second Vatican Council,” and expresses “the core of the mystery of the Church” (Communionis notio).

Vatican II gives this ressourcement its doctrinal contour. Dei Verbum receives revelation as God’s self-communication “by deeds and words having an inner unity” (DV 2); Christ “perfected revelation … through His words and deeds … and the sending of the Spirit of truth” (DV 4). Lumen Gentium presents the Church as communion—“in Christ like a sacrament … sign and instrument of communion with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG 1)—and names her origin and measure: “a people made one with the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (LG 4). Because revelation culminates in worship, the liturgy is theology’s proper horizon: “the summit … the font from which all her power flows” (SC 10). In this ressourcement the personal (missions/processions), the structural (sacramental and episcopal communion), and the apophatic (analogy guarding the Creator–creature interval) resound together again—from the Trinity and for the Trinity, revelation and Church are gift-formed communion.

Personalism and phenomenology: giving, reception, and excess

Wojtyła’s personalism accents the I–Thou without abandoning analogy or dogma. He insists: “A person is a good toward which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.” (Love and Responsibility). In a Christocentric key: “Man cannot live without love… his life is senseless if love is not revealed to him.” (Redemptor hominis 10). Vatican II’s axiom, which Wojtyła championed, gives the anthropology of gift: “Man… cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (Gaudium et spes 24).

Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers disciplined language for how revelation precedes our grasp—how gift arrives before concept. His methodological maxim states it tersely: “As much reduction, so much givenness.” (Being Given). He names revelation’s pressure on our concepts as “saturated phenomena”, where there is an “excess of intuition over intention.” (In Excess). And his idol/icon distinction guards transcendence: the idol measures the divine “according to the measure of the gaze,” whereas the icon “gives place to the invisible as invisible,” letting what gives itself exceed our concepts (God Without Being).

Selected Quote from Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given

Phenomenology does not break decisively with metaphysics until the moment when and exactly in the degree to which—a degree that most often remains in flux—it names and thinks the phenomenon (a) neither as an object, that is to say, not within the horizon of objectness such as, starting with Descartes, it defines the epistemological project of constituting the world and excludes from phenomenality, and therefore from the truth, all that, whether by lack (the pure sensible) or by excess (the divine and the insensible), does not fall under the order and measure of the Mathesis Universalis; (b) nor as a being, that is to say, within the horizon of Being, whether we understand this in the sense of the metaphysical ontologia or claim to “destroy” it in the name of the Dasein analytic or protect it under the cover of Ereignis—for a number of phenomena simply are not, or just don’t appear inasmuch as they are. To let phenomena appear demands not imposing a horizon on them, whatever the horizon might be, since it would exclude some of them. The apparition of phenomena becomes unconditional only from the moment when they are admitted as what they give themselves—givens, purely.

Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–39.

Read within the Church’s guardrails, this modern idiom adds no new doctrine; it lends fresh descriptive power to truths long confessed: the Father as unoriginate Source, the Son as receptive and returning Word, the Spirit as Gift—“the Person-Love, the uncreated Gift” (Dominum et vivificantem 10). Catholic speech remains analogical and apophatic: “Between Creator and creature no similarity can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilarity.” (Lateran IV; CCC 43). Thus gift language names how the one divine act reaches us—“by deeds and words having an inner unity” (DV 2)—and communion names the Church’s form—“in Christ like a sacrament… sign and instrument of communion with God” (LG 1). Apophatic sobriety prevents mistaking a phenomenological description for a theological principle. The older rules still rule.

The through-line: one act, three origin-relations, ordered participation

Seen as a single story, the development secures five convictions that map to your project.

Revelation is relational in form. Scripture sets the canonical pattern of sending and return that becomes the grammar of doctrine and worship.
The divine Persons are distinguished only by relations of origin. This is the Church’s moderate realism about relationality in God: the relations are not external ties but subsisting and constitutive within simplicity.
Participation orders the creature to God. Structure is not a rival to love but the way the gift reaches finite modes without collapse or confusion. Dionysian hierarchy and medieval cosmology mark the structural limit case of this relational intuition.
The economy is Christic and ecclesial. The one personal act of the Son appears in two natures; inseparable operations safeguard unity; the Eucharist enacts exitus and reditus as praise and communion.
Analogy and apophasis are the guardrails. They let us speak truly of Father, Son, and Spirit while denying every creaturely measure that would imprison the mystery.

How the relational path “comes full circle”

The modern exploration of relationality, gift, and phenomenology we’ve been exploring rediscovers what the tradition already binds together. The structural pole is Dionysian hierarchy with Thomistic participation; the personal pole is Cappadocian origins with Augustinian–Thomistic subsisting relations and ressourcement communio; the gift pole is Bonaventure’s itinerary with the liturgical–sacramental economy and contemporary accounts of givenness read within the creed; the apophatic pole is the constant discipline that keeps all three from hardening into systems.

If one sentence condenses the arc in the Church’s own idiom, it is this: the one God, simple and beyond measure, eternally is from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit; and from that plenitude creates, calls, saves, and glorifies by participation, so that in the Church’s worship the gift returns as praise and the world is ordered to communion—in such a way that Christ’s unique mediation remains “exclusive, universal, and absolute” in significance (CDF, Dominus Iesus §15).

That is the relational story, told by the tradition itself.

Bibliography

Scripture (RSV)

Genesis 17:7; Exodus 6:7; 19:4–6; 25:8; 1 Kings 8:27; Jeremiah 9:23–24; 31:31–33; Hosea 6:6; John 1:12; 3:16–17; 15:26; 20:21–22; Romans 8:15–16; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 15:24–28; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Galatians 4:4–6; Ephesians 2:18; Colossians 1:16, 20; 2 Peter 1:4; Titus 3:5–6; Matthew 28:19.

Councils / Creeds / Magisterium / Liturgy

Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Constitution 1 “Firmiter credimus” (canon 1): “tres quidem personae… natura simplex omnino”; “inter creatorem… maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.”
Council of Nicaea I (325), Creed (homoousion tō Patri).
Council of Constantinople I (381), Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.
First Vatican Council (1870), Dei Filius, ch. 1 (“simplicem omnino et incommutabilem substantiam spiritualem”).
Second Vatican Council: Dei Verbum (1965) §§2–4; Lumen Gentium (1964) §§1, 4, 11; Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) §10; Gaudium et spes (1965) §24.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2000), Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. (Quoted verbatim above at §§12, 15.)
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1992), Communionis notio.
Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997), §43.
Roman Missal (Third Typical Edition), Eucharistic Doxology; Eucharistic Prayer I (Supplices te rogamus).

Greek and Latin Fathers

Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 18.47; Ep. 214.4.
Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium: That We Should Not Think of Saying There are Three Gods.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations (Or. 31.8–9).
Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate VII.31.
Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate I.12; I.6; V.5.6; VII.4.7; Sermon 52.6.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.1.

Pseudo-Dionysius

The Celestial Hierarchy 3.1–3; The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1.1; The Divine Names 1.1; 1.6; 4.2–3; Mystical Theology 1.1; 5. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, notes by Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist, 1987).

Medieval / Scholastic

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I (esp. q.3 a.7; q.13 a.5; q.45 a.3 ad 1); III q.79 a.1.
Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Prologue; I.2.
John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), Book I.

Early-Modern and Modern

Catechism of the Council of Trent (Roman Catechism), Part I (Profession of Faith).
Council of Trent (1562), Session XXII, “Doctrine on the Sacrifice of the Mass,” ch. 2.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670).

Ressourcement and Contemporary Authors

Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, trans. John R. Betz & David Bentley Hart (Eerdmans, 2014), esp. p. 201; 110 (Kindle).
Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible.
Joseph Ratzinger, Called to Communion (Ignatius, 1996); CDF, Dominus Iesus (2000).
Karol Wojtyła / St. John Paul II, Love and Responsibility; Redemptor hominis §10; Dominum et vivificantem §10.
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given; In Excess; God Without Being.