Summa (Quaestiones ordinariae) art. LVI - LIX

Book excerpt: Articles 56–59 of Henry of Ghent’s Summa is devoted to the trinitarian properties. Henry was the most important Christian theological thinker in the last quarter of the 13th century and his works were influential not only in his lifetime, but also in the following century and into the Renaissance. Henry’s Quaestiones ordinariae (Summa), articles 56–59 deal with the trinitarian properties and relations, topics of Henry’s lectures at the university in Paris. In these articles, dated around 1286, Henry treats generation, a property unique to the Father, and being generated, a property unique to the Son. The university in Paris distributed articles 56–59 by means of two successive exemplars divided into peciae. Manuscripts copied from each have survived and the text of the critical edition has been established based upon the reconstructed texts of these two exemplars.