CONTRA FATUM

"[...]the only principle which really implies its own existence, and which postulates everything else for itself, the only principle which has power over itself, which does not lose itself in the product of its activity, which returns more profoundly into and on itself every time that it goes forth from itself, is Will, personality. God is a Person, that is, He is the self-centralized Absolute, the eternal fundamental being, which knows itself as a centre, as the I am in the midst of its infinite glory (Isaiah xliv. 6.), which is conscious of being the Lord of this glory." (Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 73)

"It is no accident, or rather, is foreordained blind inspiration that the Stagirite spoke both worse and better than he meant. For when he says that ‘indeed the inquiry or perplexity concerning what being (on) is, in early times and now and always, is just this: what is substance ( ousia ) (Meta Z 1.5, 1028b).’ he begs the question by his reduction of the problem of Being to that of one kind of substantial being. For the categorial determinations of the meanings of Being that have their focus or reference to a more fundamental kind of being are multiple. For as Tradition has taught us to see, there is another substantive mode of existing which is that of the personal mode of existence. The logos was in our tongue but we could not see. There are hypostases that are a personal mode of existence ( tropos hyparxeos ) that is the referent or fundamental kind of being that has characteristic manners or modes ( tropoi ) of being as modifications of the first-persona...

 "Latin philosophy (Christian theology) considers the nature in itself first and proceeds to the agent; Greek philosophy (Christian theology) considers the agent first and passes through it to find the nature. The Latins think of personality as a mode of nature; the Greeks think of nature as the content of the person. The western lack of understanding of what the Greek Fathers had accomplished in the nature of the distinction and relations of priority within it between ousia and hypostases led to a certain re-paganization of Trinitarian thought in which the philosophical essentialism of an unreformed ousiological metaphysics engenders the accent to fall on the divine unity in the west." (Fr. Theodore Regnon, S.J., ??)