Some follow the more Thomist school of thought about the Trinity. That has a crossover with the issues of Eternal Generation. Thomist have a flag planted in each of those debates and that leaves them with a difficulty reconciling them.
So, like Aquinas, Dolezal’s view of the Trinity is that there is one God, with three “subsistent relations.”
Now it is possible that Dolezal is working with an unconventional definition of “relation.” If he is, he has not told us, and I confess that in all my study of scholasticism over sixty years I have never found a definition of “relation” that could sustain this kind of talk. Some philosophers have distinguished four elements of a fact: things, properties, actions (or states), and relations. So “the yellow cat is on the mat” can be analyzed as two things (the cat and the mat), a property (yellow), a state (is), and a relation (on). One can imagine a scholastic philosopher trying to determine by process of elimination how to describe the persons of the Trinity: well, they are not things (substances), for God is only one substance. They are not properties (attributes). They are not actions or states. So they must be relations. But what can it possibly mean to say that persons are relations? Well, they are not ordinary relations (like “on” in our example) but substantive relations. But what could that be? What would it mean to regard “on” as a substantive (or any other relation, like “behind,” “taller than,” “nephew of,” “to the right of,” etc.)?
Here, Dolezal identifies the relations as Christians have often done, by reiterations of the names of the persons. For “paternity,” “filiation,” and “spirated procession” are of course reiterations of the names “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit.” I do believe there is some additional biblical evidence for “eternal generation” and “eternal procession;” these are not merely extrapolations from their personal names, though I think that these concepts are basically grounded in the nomenclature. But in this discussion it is easy to forget the question I posed earlier: what is a substantive relation, and why is this concept sufficient to identify the three persons?
When we speak of the eternal generation of the Son from the Father, what are we talking about? It appears that we are talking about two persons, the Father and the Son. But how can there be two persons within a being who is supremely simple? It is no answer to say that we should somehow focus, not on the persons, but on the relations between them. There are two persons (and another, making three), and that fact creates a problem for people who try to attribute simplicity to God.
But the difficulty is worse than that. For to Dolezal, the “persons” are not the beings who are related by eternal generation. Rather, the persons are the relations themselves, the “substantive relations.” In this case, the persons are not the Father and the Son; rather the persons are paternity and eternal generation (and similarly for eternal procession). The “persons” are abstractions11, not what we normally call persons, and not even something reasonably analogous to those we normally call persons. And even if we can defend the concepts of eternal generation and procession from Scripture, Scripture never comes near to asserting that these abstractions are what the Father, Son, and Spirit really are.
So I think the analysis of the Trinity into substantive relations is a failure.
The Council 