Boethius developed his principles for the transfer of predications from created natures to God within the context of the dominant theological controversies of the Sixth Century. What he identified as at stake in the Christological and Trinitarian controversies was Christian salvation as real, where real is not reducible to incorporeality but includes historical contingents. This formed one term of Boethius' dialectic. The other term was the nature of human knowledge. Therefore, his predication "person", the central term in the debates, concerning God was a function both of his emerging Neoplatonic appropriation of Aristotle's descriptions of first and second substance, and of his Augustinian conviction of the truth of Scriptural testimonies of historical events. The key terms are predicated analogically according to a model of theology as a science that Boethius drew from Proclus. Such analogical predications attempt to offer some explanation of the truths of catholic doctrine short of explaining their causes. I will argue that Boethius employed the term person heuristically in Augustine's sense of quid tres . In this case, the heuristic aimed at an unknown with the characteristics assigned to it by Christian faith and Neoplatonic metaphysics. Neither substance nor relation is intended as a primordial characteristic of the source of all. The adequacy of the terms employed in the Opuscula sacra is verified not by cosmological demonstration, as if the terms were univocal with the causes of created beings, but strictly in terms of what is required in order to preserve the reality of Christian salvation adsumptione , and the truth of the Scriptural witness to the events of salvation history. For Boethius, God is not verified as the cause being and goodness and in creatures in the same way as the distinctions and unity of the Persons of the Trinity are verified. The former is demonstrated by a principle of preeminence, the latter by advertence to the authority of Scripture and the rule of faith.
