The doctrine of the Trinity is surely complex: three persons and one nature at a visceral level defies what humans think about being. How do those three relate? Are they co-equal? Are they co-eternal? What does it mean that one person of the Trinity assumed human flesh? Where were the other two? And how could they be perfectly united if one of them is on earth?
Yet in another way the Trinity projects a certain simplicity. For at a basic level, the Trinity immediately helps Christians to make sense of their faith and categorize what constitutes error. Don’t recognize Jesus as truly God? That’s heresy (Arianism and Unitarianism). Think Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are simply three modes of the same single being? Also heresy (modalism and some pentecostals). There’s a reason we call the Trinity the heart of the Christian faith.
Fr. Thomas Joseph, O.P., in his new book The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God plumbs the depths of this most central of Christian dogmas. At 715 pages, it’s no easy text, and certainly not for theological novices. Some of his most controversial arguments — that the processions of the Son and Holy Spirit must be immanent, not transitive; and that modern Trinitarian theology has too often obsessed with the analogy or likeness between the immanent Trinity and the supposed economic Trinity has “projected human attributes” onto God — will likely seem esoteric to most readers.
But Fr. White’s logic and prose help us perceive what Trinitarian theology has to do with the Christian life.
The Trinity is a reasonable Mystery
One of the first things Christians (and non-Christians) need to understand about the Trinity, and theology more broadly, is that it is informed by philosophy, the study of truth based on natural reason. Theology, explains Fr. White, is “bound by intellectual responsibility to face scrutiny from philosophical quarters.” Indeed, it is impossible for theology to be devoid of philosophical commitments. This is because every theology, be it Catholic, Protestant, or anything else, reasons about God and transcendent truths based on certain premises that are antecedent to theology, such as explaining how an infinite, transcendent being communicates to finite beings.
“All theology has philosophical commitments,” writes Fr. White.
Nor should the faithful fear natural philosophy, which says Fr. White, “is a form of wisdom insofar as it can attain to a knowledge of the primary cause of the things.” Philosophy can even identify God as personal, the creator of human persons, and the source and providential guide behind all of creation. But philosophy has its limits: “The knowledge of God that philosophy provides is indirect, inferential, and imperfect.” Nevertheless, philosophy that aspires to a natural knowledge of God can by extension open us to the possibility of revealed knowledge of God.
Indeed, we might even say that the two disciplines have a reciprocal relationship. Theology that obviously contradicts or denies logic and natural learning in human culture, including verifiable conclusions based on modern science loses its legitimacy, and slowly collapses in on itself. Alternatively, argues Fr. White, when philosophical traditions “close themselves off a priori to the possibility of revelation or mystical union with God, they self-sterilize by delimiting, in arbitrary and unwarranted ways, the human search for transcendence.”
Such philosophies can actually become unreasonable, because they may deny things (like miracles) that they cannot disprove. In the case of the Trinity, theologians have taken great pains to communicate its reality (and the relations between its three persons) in a way that is both intelligible and coherent.
The Trinity and our Christian Faith
Nor does Trinitarian theology exist in a vacuum of complex and esoteric intellectual frameworks. As Fr. White explains, Trinitarianism is thoroughly biblical. For example, in the New Testament we can perceive through various stories and apostolic reasoning that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, the Son (Jesus) throughout the New Testament makes references to the Father and the Spirit as interpersonal subjects who are in certain respects distinct from himself. Finally, Jesus in the Gospels manifests his divine identity and authority in various implicit and explicit ways.
It was through such themes that the early church fathers began formulating and articulating what eventually coalesces into what we now possess as a coherent Trinitarian theology. Some of those themes include that God is one in being and essence (ousia), and there are three persons (hypostases) in God. Moreover, as St. Augustine observed, the relations between the persons must not merely be held by each person in a fashion unique to Himself, as this would undermine the idea that God is truly one in being and essence. Instead, the great church father reasoned, the relations in God must mysteriously characterize the persons in all that they are, because the other two persons receive all that they are as God by way of generation (the Son) and spiration (the Spirit). This was later affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 A.D.
Perhaps this already seems a bit too arcane for the laity — but Trinitarian theology truly does have immediate applicability to our Christian faith, including regarding soteriology, or the theology of salvation. For if God is eternal and unchanging, and not finite or evolutionary (as many heretics in the past two millennia have posited), God is able to act within suffering (particularly the suffering of His Son) and both redeem the world and overcome human suffering without being overwhelmed by it. “If Jesus is not God in his crucifixion, then he cannot save us, and it is only by a genuine theology of the divine nature that we can have some understanding of what it means to say that Jesus is God,” declares Fr. White. Without a Trinitarian understanding of Christ, the salvation of the Christian evaporates.
The Trinity and us
The implications of Trinitarian theology extend beyond soteriology to anthropology, as Fr. White proposes three ways in which creation itself resembles the Trinity. First, creatures bear what he calls “the ontological insignia of the Father,” in that they are both substantial (meaning have a substance) and are also enduring. Secondly, all of creation refers back to him, because each creature originates from another, and is thus given their being, rather than being self-generated. “Their derived existence is itself a testimony to the gift of being, which stems ultimately from the divine paternity,” writes Fr. White.
Finally, for those creatures which are intelligible, they also “bear the imprint of the generated World, through whom God made all things, and who is the source of order and intelligibility in creation.” Moreover, insofar as those creatures are themselves good and tend toward perfection, they also resemble the goodness of the Spirit, “the Love in whom God has made all that is good.” Humans in a special way manifest the image of God in an especially privileged way, because they possess the immaterial faculties of intellect and will, as does the Godhead. This is furthered by divine grace, which conforms the recipient to the uncreated love of God.
Through this final reflection, we can begin to appreciate how Trinitarian theology communicates truths to many of the most controversial debates of our contemporary political moment. If we are truly substantial and enduring, what we do with our bodies (and souls) really does have an eternal quality to them. If our lives possess a certain givenness that derives from the Trinity itself, then our attempts to refashion boys into girls or girls into boys is deeply mistaken. And if humans by virtue of their intellect and will truly, if imperfectly, reflect the Godhead, then their lives are of an incalculable worth, and worthy of protection from conception to natural death.
In other words, Trinitarian theology isn’t just for the theologians. It is related to all of human knowledge, to the things about the Christian faith that we hold most dear, as well as what we understand about ourselves and our place within the secular polis. The Trinity, it turns out, is not only relevant, but even perhaps indispensable. We should be grateful that a mind as deep as Fr. White’s, whose prose is always penetrating, has helped remind us of this eternal truth.
The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God
by Thomas Joseph White, OP
CUA Press/Thomistic Ressourcement Series. 2022
Paperback, 715 pages
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We read: “It was through such themes that the early church fathers began formulating and articulating what eventually coalesces into what we now possess as a coherent Trinitarian theology.”
Benedict XVI stresses more, or even instead, that the doctrine of the Trinity did not emerge from philosophical speculation, but from having to digest an unexpected EVENT in human history:
“For the Christian, the interplay of faith and reason is most evident in the doctrine that a Trinitarian God is revealed by a definitive encounter with Christ in human history. The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God, out of an attempt by philosophical thinking to figure out what the fount of all being was like; it developed out of the effort to digest historical experiences . . . In the formative period of the New Testament comes a completely unexpected event in which God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side: in Jesus Christ one meets a man who at the same time knows and professes himself to be the Son of God. One finds God in the shape of the ambassador who is completely God, not some kind of intermediary being, yet with us says to God ‘Father’” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius, 2004 and 1968, p. 163).
What God communicates through a Trinity of divine persons is reasonable and truth laden (Casey Chalk’s thesis). From a very personal perspective for myself, and through the second person Christ born of the Father although timeless beyond chronology because God is pure act Trinity draws us into that very personal communion of love.
Margaret Turek in her essay identified community as Trinitarian, that is through the very personal love of God revealed through the Word’s incarnation, death and resurrection from the dead. Any thought of God as an amorphous New Age presence, or as Conservative Judaism perceives a rather disinterested God sans our own resurrection from the dead, seemingly a legacy of Sadducee theology is shattered by Christ’s revelation of a loving, personally involved – what is more personally driven than to die on the cross for us and despite our condemnation due to our sins he rises from the dead that we might live – than the resurrection from the dead.
As Chalk highlights the Trinity is a reasonable truth that conveys a multitude of truths. Most poignant is the truth that Jesus, that God in the humanness he absorbs in the person of the Word made flesh Christ dies for love. For our love. That Being itself, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, the height of majesty, good, and beauty would manifest all the pangs of intimate love on the grandest, intellectually overwhelming scale during his passion.
Easter happiness is succinctly inspired in us with the knowledge of this very personal, intimate love of God.
Plato had concluded that the entity that is the ground of being is “the Good”. It is not jealous and gives freely. But Plato did not arrive at viewing God as unlimited Love. This came with the Christian revelation of Charity as the greatest of virtues. It is a virtue not only received as a gift in baptism but it is also a characteristic of God who in his unlimited Charity can bring into being another like himself. Hence, the basis of the Trinity is God’s limitless Love. No other religion has this. Typically gods are understood as something like the top rule giver, as a principle of order, as one’s master, as fate …. Only Christianity has a God whose Charity can and does make a Trinity be – and be understood as a necessary corollary of the essence of God as Charity.
Yes, and this from von Balthasar:
“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of WHY Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, NOT THE WHY. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (“My Work in Retrospect,” 1993).
I have long wondered why Islam wants to keep God in chains. The god they call Allah is one single being that lacks the power to create another like himself. Who determined this when no one can?
If I may enter this friendly fray that touches on efficient causality in God and the creation, Aquinas like his mystical contemporary Bonaventure relates the efficient causality of God to Man’s final causality in his Commentary on the Metaphysics 775. Why did God create man, the universe when he’s entirely sufficient in himself?
That question leans against, so to speak, the condition that nothing can cause the omnipotent divinity to act. God is thereby defined as Pure Act. Bonaventure apparently had no issue with this although Aquinas did. His solution is a hypothetical, that if we actually were able to attribute a cause to the unchangeable divinity, it would be in the sense that his love [caritas] is the cause of Man’s creation (Commentary Meta 782).
From this writer’s perspective, although nothing can increase God’s goodness, his happiness, or cause him to act – God who is love itself, his very essence is also pure act the effect of which is [or can be] the creation of the universe and man in his image. And the gift of grace the effect of that love in us, given freely at his discretion.
As alluded to by the other participants here, his eternal knowledge coincides with his eternally begotten Son, and within a created sequential time frame the real drama of the incarnation, passion, death and resurrection of the Son of Man.
When I was a young man, I was taught by a Thomist. I reached the point where I could explain everything in terms of act, potency, the 4 causes, etc. But at some point I came to realize that all of this was a nominalist word trap. For example, I can legitimately say based on experience that an egg might become a chicken. I could also say that an egg could be potentially a chicken. The words are different but no additional knowledge is gained by using the different way of speaking. The situation becomes very problematic when following Aristotle’s way of differentiating experience into ‘what is from’ and ‘what it is that could become’ into an abstract ‘potency’ and ‘act’. If God is pure act, what was it that was in potency to become him? I know and have experienced the comfort in the pit of my stomach when I could ‘explain’ everything in terms of potency and act. Fortunately I came to understand that the word ‘act’ has no referent. To say that God is ‘pure act’ conveys nothing. No one knows more about God by this verbal trick. Unfortunately we now live at the pinnacle of an intellectual history where generations of very respectable thinkers disputed how to properly apply these words; viz. potency and act. It was part in parcel of their of breaking apart experience in words. This was very laudable because of their heartfelt concerns but it did not enlighten then or now. To say that God is Unlimited Charity Who Cares is a more accurate way of speaking because it grasps the relationship of God to creation, and us.
Martin the principles mentioned become nominal if you understand them as equivalent to arithmetic. They’re simply principles, real knowledge, for the intellect seeking to comprehend the reality before it, which reality is much more expansive than the intellect’s principles.
As to God Understood as Pure Act, again this is inferred from things [all created things] that act in sequence, or from potency to act. In God there is no sequence or change because of his infinite incomprehensible [for the human mind] being. There can be no potency in God, supreme and unqualified Being to act; there is, similar to Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez, an autonomy [for example accidents and anomalies] in the created universe that operates by its own principles [physics etc] of which God is the efficient cause.
So Aquinas has been mistakenly interpreted throughout the centuries as a casuistic thinker that can be understood in logical sequence. Whereas Aquinas didn’t develop a mathematical [similar to Kant] system, rather a rational modus operandi for understanding the essence and cause of things. Perhaps to put it as literature, between the principles there’s the entire richness of the reality of what exists.
And to understanding God as Charity Aquinas correctly posited that the Essence of God, Love, is identical with his Existence [see Aquinas Essence and Existence]. Only in God is this true [since we do not find the cause of our existence in our essence]; so we speak of God as Pure Love.
Father, I thank you for this opportunity to get my thoughts together. As you know, scripture is clear that no one knows God directly. However, scripture also reveals things about God that cannot be known by human reason, which is called ‘revelation’. Nevertheless, Aquinas and Aristotle are clear that the world of experience is rational. The process of exclusion whereby this realization is achieved is given by observing that irrational persons, like inebriated people in Aristotle’s example, act without being able to fix on simple goals. Rationality necessitates action with a purpose. Hence, in the world of experience, everything is observed to be acting with purpose. Even the explosion of a volcano behaves as an ordered process directed at such things as releasing built up pressures. But, since experience shows that all of known reality is rational, it follows that there must be a reason for this. This reason can be delineated by observing the nature of the order found in experience. It is thus that Aquinas concludes that some things concerning God can be known by human thought. He even names the intellectual processes by which this can be achieved; they are via negativa, via remotiva and analogia entis. Simply put, these involve reasoning from what is found in experience to conclude to things that God could not want, that God must want and what the nature of beings indicate of God’s wishes. However, they do not reveal ‘God as He is’ – but reveal only what should be some of God’s intentions in creating the world of our experience. So, I cannot agree with your Kantian inclination of setting up ‘potency’ and ‘act’ as ‘a priori’ principles used to comprehend reality. There can be no principles by which the intellect knows things. If they existed, and were known, then the mind would be self-limiting – and Kant did attempt to limit truth to Newtonian physics and puritan ethics. The mind by nature must be open to consciousness of all being when it is made available in experience and not restricted by categories. Otherwise, the Beatific Vision would never be a possibility.
Martin there isn’t anything in what I said that justifies, “So, I cannot agree with your Kantian inclination of setting up ‘potency’ and ‘act’ as ‘a priori’ principles used to comprehend reality”. You’re misunderstanding is equating Aquinas, and what I said with Kant. My point was clear, there is no potency, there can be no potency in God, as you presume, “If God is pure act, what was it that was in potency to become him?”. Then you presume Act means nothing. Martin, whatever language you’ve developed as it corresponds to your thoughts the language is off kilter insofar as understanding Aquinas, and the truth of our theological, philosophical knowledge of God.
Although, I agree we cannot know God, that is, know him in his essence, by intellectual inference and articulation, we can, however, have an understanding, correct, and entirely meaningful of God. And, yes, we know God more succinctly through the revelation of Christ, and less frequent by contemplation, for the few who make the sincere effort.
Sorry to say I detect a form of Nietzschean nihilism in your thought. For example, if I can act well, that is morally, how does one process that I can act wrongly, with evil intent. If there’s no potential in me [potency means power] to do so, then how is that coherent, able to be understood? Denial of act and the potency [potential or power] to act differently is a form of nihilistic nominalism. Rethink your position Martin, because God gave us an intellect and the ability to convey by words, language what corresponds to reality. Otherwise we drift off to the vagaries of idealism.
Martin you are correct, insofar as, and not too dismiss your ample intelligence and knowledge – the ways Aquinas determines God’s will by via negativa, remotiva, that “they do not reveal ‘God as He is’ – but reveal only what should be some of God’s intentions”. Although, we’re not going to develop a rational modus for knowing God as he is. And as agreed you’re correct on revelation [although I certainly don’t discount reason insofar as its vital purpose in relation to faith], specifically Christ who reveals the Father. Boethius [Manlius Severinus] would argue, that we can become like him, thereby knowing him by participation in his goodness. By acts of charity, the willingness to suffer for truth, for sake of love of God, and our brother. St John of the Cross speaks to this knowledge through contemplative prayer in The Living Flame of Love. The mind, in this world receives that knowledge of the incomprehensible God by his willful grace, unknowingly, in silence in a spiritual language beyond comprehension. We become aware of it in our deepened love for him, and in our fervent desire to seek the good of others.
Please forgive me father. I did not mean to insult you by implying that you were Kantian. You are not, obviously. Where my mind was and how the words came out differed. I was thinking of an error in our intellectual traditions that sneaks in everywhere. I guess that I am inclined to see it even when it is not there. The error is that for centuries there has been a lack of understanding that humans acquire knowledge before they understand how knowledge is acquired. There is no choice. If the process of acquiring knowledge is not working correctly, all attempts to learn things about it will be futile. Nevertheless, philosophers have been preoccupied with learning about the knowing process to the point of dictating what it can achieve and what principles must be understood to define correct knowledge. This is a demonic task. So, when I hear “principle of Knowledge” as I understood you to be saying about potency and act, the hair on the back of my head stood up. Sorry, I was wrong.
Thanks for your kind response Martin. My prayers are with you in your quest.