Unrepeatable God

In The Living and True God: The Mystery of the Trinity (New Revised Edition ) (p. 54) , Luis Ladaria makes the intriguing point that the Persons of the Trinity cannot be persons in precisely the same sense: “we can in effect doubt that the term ‘person’ or hypostasis means exactly the same when we apply it to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. The ‘numbers’ in God are always problematic, all in him is unrepeatable.” He acknowledges tat “the terminology of the three persons [is] consecrated by tradition” and “without doubt not only legitimate, but also necessary.” As Augustine knew, we need some answer to the “Three what ?” question/

Still, strictly, if God is not part of a genus, nothing in God is an individual in a genus either. It is not as if there is a general category of “person” into which the Father, Son, and Spirit all fit. Perhaps failure to recognize the analogical distance in the use of the word “Person” as it relates to each of the three contributed to the unitarian slant of some Western Trinitarian theology. For if each is “person” in precisely the same way, then there has to be an overarching singular category.