Dominic Legge’s book needs no recommendation beyond itself: all its readers will be able to confirm the high value of this research, the conclusions of which are solidly based on a rigorous reading of the texts of Thomas Aquinas.
This work demonstrates the essentially Trinitarian structure of the Christology of St Thomas. It is the first monograph that treats this in a comprehensive way, and it constitutes henceforth the reference work on the subject.
“Aquinas’s Christology is intrinsically Trinitarian.” The key to this affirmation resides in the recognition that the Trinitarian missions, discussed in the first two chapters, are the point of departure for St Thomas’s Christology. The incarnation, life, and work of Christ are presented in those chapters as the “visible mission” of the Son.
Combined with this, Legg shows convincingly that the Son’s visible mission is inseparable from the visible mission of the Holy Spirit, and that these visible missions are ordered to the “invisible missions,” that is, to the gift, at once interior and ecclesial, of salvation.
To be even more precise, the key to this book’s argument is that “a mission includes the eternal procession, with the addition of a temporal effect.”
1 The mission of a divine person “is not essentially different from the eternal procession, but only adds a reference to a temporal effect.”
2 This approach to reading Christology in light of Aquinas’s theology of the divine missions brings numerous consequences in its wake; I would like to note four that, in my view, merit special attention.
