 Following Aquinas, Koons says that God (a.k.a. the divine nature) understands all things through himself; God is essentially omniscient and essentially self-understanding. Thus, the divine nature implies the existence of three relational qua-objects, which are the Persons of the Trinity. These are not merely three ways we can think of God, or three ways God may appear to us, but rather these objects result from God’s essential self-understanding (345). Each of these four things–God (the divine nature), the Father, the Son, and the Spirit–has the divine nature as its one metaphysical component, and each has all the divine attributes (346). Each of those four is numerically distinct from each of the three others (347).