The notion is unfortunately widespread that the mystery of the Blessed Trinity is a mystery of mathematics, that is to say, of how one can equal three. The plain Christian accepts the doctrine of the Trinity; the “advanced” Christian rejects it; but too often what is being accepted by the one and rejected by the other is that one equals three. The believer argues that God has said it, therefore it must be true; the rejecter argues it cannot be true, therefore God has not said it. A learned non-Catholic divine, being asked if he believed in the Trinity, answered, “I must confess that the arithmetical aspect of the Deity does not greatly interest me”; and if the learned can think that there is some question of arithmetic involved, the ordinary person can hardly be expected to know any better.
(i) Importance of the doctrine of the Trinity
Consider what happens when a believer in the doctrine is suddenly called upon to explain it — and note that unless he is forced to, he will not talk about it at all: there is no likelihood of his being so much in love with the principal doctrine of his Faith that he will want to tell people about it. Anyhow, here he is: he has been challenged, and must say something. The dialogue runs something like this:
Believer: “Well, you see, there are three persons in one nature.”
Questioner: “Tell me more.”
Believer: “Well, there is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.”
Questioner: “Ah, I see, three gods.”
Believer (shocked): “Oh, no! Only one God.”
Questioner: “But you said three: you called the Father God, which is one; and you called the Son God, which makes two; and you called the Holy Spirit God, which makes three.”
Here the dialogue form breaks down. From the believer’s mouth there emerges what can only be called a soup of words, sentences that begin and do not end, words that change into something else halfway. This goes on for a longer or shorter time. But finally there comes something like: “Thus, you see, three is one and one is three.” The questioner not unnaturally retorts that three is not one nor one three. Then comes the believer’s great moment. With his eyes fairly gleaming he cries: “Ah, that is the mystery. You have to have faith.”
Now it is true that the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is a mystery, and that we can know it only by faith. But what we have just been hearing is not the mystery of the Trinity; it is not the mystery of anything, it is wretched nonsense. It may be heroic faith to believe it, like the man who
Wished there were four of ’em
That he might believe more of ’em
or it may be total intellectual unconcern – God has revealed certain things about Himself, we accept the fact that He has done so, but find in ourselves no particular inclination to follow it up. God has told us that He is three persons in one Divine nature, and we say “Quite so”, and proceed to think of other matters – last week’s Retreat or next week’s Confession or Lent or Lourdes or the Church’s social teaching or foreign missions. All these are vital things, but compared with God Himself, they are as nothing: and the Trinity is God Himself. These other things must be thought about, but to think about them exclusively and about the Trinity not at all is plain folly. And not only folly, but a kind of insensitiveness, almost a callousness, to the love of God. For the doctrine of the Trinity is the inner, the innermost, life of God, His profoundest secret. He did not have to reveal it to us. We could have been saved without knowing that ultimate truth. In the strictest sense it is His business, not ours. He revealed it to us because He loves men and so wants not only to be served by them but truly known. The revelation of the Trinity was in one sense an even more certain proof than Calvary that God loves mankind. To accept it politely and think no more of it is an insensitiveness beyond comprehension in those who quite certainly love God: as many certainly do who could give no better statement of the doctrine than the believer in the dialogue we have just been considering.
How did we reach this curious travesty of the supreme truth about God? The short statement of the doctrine is, as we have heard all our lives, that there are three persons in one nature. But if we attach no meaning to the word person, and no meaning to the word nature, then both the nouns have dropped out of our definition, and we are left only with the numbers three and one, and get along as best we can with these. Let us agree that there may be more in the mind of the believer than he manages to get said: but the things that do get said give a pretty strong impression that his notion of the Trinity is simply a travesty. It does him no positive harm provided he does not look at it too closely; but it sheds no light in his own soul: and his statement of it, when he is driven to make a statement, might very well extinguish such flickering as there may be in others. The Catholic whose faith is wavering might well have it blown out altogether by such an explanation of the Trinity as some fellow Catholic of stronger faith might feel moved to give: and no one coming fresh to the study of God would be much encouraged.
(ii) “Person” and “Nature”
Let us come now to a consideration of the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity to see what light there is in it for us, being utterly confident that had there been no light for us, God would not have revealed it to us. There would be a rather horrible note of mockery in telling us something of which we can make nothing. The doctrine may be set out in four statements:
In the one divine Nature, there are three Persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father: no one of the Persons is either of the others.
The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.
There are not three Gods but one God.
We have seen that the imagination cannot help here. Comparisons drawn from the material universe are a hindrance and no help. Once one has taken hold of this doctrine, it is natural enough to want to utter it in simile and metaphor – like the lovely lumen de lumine, light from light, with which the Nicene Creed phrases the relation of the Son to the Father. But this is for afterward, poetical statement of a truth known, not the way to its knowledge. For that, the intellect must go on alone. And for the intellect, the way into the mystery lies, as we have already suggested, in the meaning of the words “person” and “nature”. There is no question of arithmetic involved. We are not saying three persons in one person, or three natures in one nature; we are saying three persons in one nature. There is not even the appearance of an arithmetical problem. It is for us to see what person is and what nature is, and then to consider what meaning there can be in a nature totally possessed by three distinct persons.
The newcomer to this sort of thinking must be prepared to work hard here. It is a decisive stage of our advance into theology to get some grasp of the meaning of nature and the meaning of person. Fortunately the first stage of our search goes easily enough. We begin with ourselves. Such a phrase as “my nature” suggests that there is a person, I, who possesses a nature. The person could not exist without his nature, but there is some distinction all the same; for it is the person who possesses the nature and not the other way round.
One distinction we see instantly. Nature answers the question what we are; person answers the question who we are. Every being has a nature; of every being we may properly ask, What is it? But not every being is a person: only rational beings are persons. We could not properly ask of a stone or a potato or an oyster, Who is it?
By our nature, then, we are what we are. It follows that by our nature we do what we do: for every being acts according to what it is. Applying this to ourselves, we come upon another distinction between person and nature. We find that there are many things, countless things, we can do. We can laugh and cry and walk and talk and sleep and think and love. All these and other things we can do because as human beings we have a nature which makes them possible. A snake could do only one of them – sleep. A stone could do none of them. Nature, then, is to be seen not only as what we are but as the source of what we can do.
But although my nature is the source of all my actions, although my nature decides what kind of operations are possible for me, it is not my nature that does them: I do them, I the person. Thus both person and nature may be considered sources of action, but in a different sense. The person is that which does the actions, the nature is that by virtue of which the actions are done, or, better, that from which the actions are drawn. We can express the distinction in all sorts of ways. We can say that it is our nature to do certain things, but that we do them. We can say that we operate in or according to our nature. In this light we see why the philosophers speak of a person as the center of attribution in a rational nature: whatever is done in a rational nature or suffered in a rational nature or any way experienced in a rational nature is done or suffered or experienced by the person whose nature it is.
Thus there is a reality in us by which we are what we are: and there is a reality in us by which we are who we are. But as to whether these are two really distinct realities, or two levels of one reality, or related in some other way, we cannot see deep enough into ourselves to know with any sureness. There is an obvious difference between beings of whom you can say only what they are and the higher beings of whom you can say who they are as well. But in these latter – even in ourselves, of whom we have a great deal of experience – we see only darkly as to the distinction between the what and the who. Of our nature in its root reality we have only a shadowy notion, and of our self a notion more shadowy still. If someone – for want of something better to say – says: “Tell me about yourself”, we can tell her the qualities we have or the things we have done; but of the self that has the qualities and has done the things, we cannot tell her anything. We cannot bring it under her gaze. Indeed we cannot easily or continuously bring it under our own. As we turn our mind inward to look at the thing we call “I”, we know that there is something there, but we cannot get it into any focus: it does not submit to being looked at very closely. Both as to the nature that we ourselves have and the person that we ourselves are, we are more in darkness than in light. But at least we have certain things clear: nature says what we are, person says who we are. Nature is the source of our operations, person does them.
Now at first sight it might seem that this examination of the meaning of person and nature has not got us far toward an understanding of the Blessed Trinity. For although we have been led to see a distinction between person and nature in us, it seems clearer than ever that one nature can be possessed and operated in only by one person. By a tremendous stretch, we can just barely glimpse the possibility of one person having more than one nature, opening up to him more than one field of operation. But the intellect feels baffled at the reverse concept of one nature being totally “wielded”, much less totally possessed, by more than one person. Now to admit ourselves baffled by the notion of three persons in the one nature of God is an entirely honorable admission of our own limitation; but to argue that because in man the relation of one nature to one person is invariable, therefore the same must be the relation in God, is a defect in our thinking. It is indeed an example of that anthropomorphism, the tendency to make God in the image of man, which we have already seen hurled in accusation at the Christian belief in God.
Let us look more closely at this idea. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore it is certain that man resembles God. Yet we can never argue with certainty from an image to the original of the image: we can never be sure that because the image is thus and so, therefore the original must be thus and so. A statue may be an extremely good statue of a man. But we could not argue that the man must be a very rigidman, because the statue is very rigid. The statue is rigid, not because the man is rigid, but because stone is rigid. So also with any quality you may observe in an image: the question arises whether that quality is there because the original was like that or because the material of which the image is made is like that. So with man and God. When we learn anything about man, the question always arises whether man is like that because God is like that, or because that is the best that can be done in reproducing the likeness of God in a being created of nothing. Put quite simply, we have always to allow for the necessary scaling down of the infinite in its finite likeness.
Apply this to the question of one person and one nature, which we find in man. Is this relation of one-to-one the result of something in the nature of being, or simply of something in the nature of finite being? With all the light we can get on the meaning of person and of nature even in ourselves, we have seen that there is still much that is dark to us: both concepts plunge away to a depth where the eye cannot follow them. Even of our own finite natures, it would be rash to affirm that the only possible relation is one person to one nature. But of an infinite nature, we have no experience at all. If God tells us that His own infinite nature is totally possessed by three persons, we can have no grounds for doubting the statement, although we may find it almost immeasurably difficult to make any meaning of it. There is no difficulty in accepting it as true, given our own inexperience of what it is to have an infinite nature and God’s statement on the subject; there is not difficulty, I say, in accepting it as true; the difficulty lies in seeing what it means. Yet short of seeing some meaning in it, there is no point in having it revealed to us; indeed, a revelation that is only darkness is a kind of contradiction in terms.
(iii) Three Persons – One God
Let us then see what meaning, – that is to say, what light, – we can get from what has been said so far. The one infinite nature is totally possessed by three distinct persons. Here we must be quite accurate: the three persons are distinct, but not separate; and they do not share the divine nature, but each possesses it totally.
At this first beginning of our exploration of the supreme truth about God, it is worth pausing a moment to consider the virtue of accuracy. There is a feeling that it is a very suitable virtue for mathematicians and scientists, but cramping if applied to operations more specifically human. The young tend to despise it as a kind of tidiness, a virtue proper only to the poor-spirited. And everybody feels that it limits the free soul. It is in particular disrepute as applied to religion, where it is seen as a sort of anxious weighing and measuring that is fatal to the impetuous rush of the spirit. But in fact, accuracy is in every field the key to beauty: beauty has no greater enemy than rough approximation. Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, says Pascal, the face of the Roman Empire and so of the world would have been changed: an eighth of an inch is not a lot: a lover, you would think, would not bother with such close calculation; but her nose was for her lovers the precise length for beauty: a slight inaccuracy would have spoiled everything. It is so in music, it is so in everything: beauty and accuracy run together, and where accuracy does not run, beauty limps.
Returning to the point at which this digression started: we must not say three separate persons, but three distinct persons, because although they are distinct – that is to say, no one of them is either of the others – yet they cannot be separated, for each is what he is by the total possession of the one same nature: apart from that one same nature, no one of the three persons could exist at all. And we must not use any phrase which suggests that the three persons share the Divine Nature. For we have seen that in the Infinite there is utter simplicity, there are no parts, therefore no possibility of sharing. The infinite Divine Nature can be possessed only in its totality. In the words of the Fourth Council of the Lateran, “There are three persons indeed, but one utterly simple substance, essence, or nature.”
Summarizing thus far, we may state the doctrine in this way: the Father possesses the whole nature of God as His Own, the Son possesses the whole nature of God as His Own, the Holy Spirit possesses the whole nature of God as His Own. Thus, since the nature of any being decides what the being is, each person is God, wholly and therefore equally with the others. Further, the nature decides what the person can do: therefore, each of the three persons who thus totally possess the Divine Nature can do all the things that go with being God.
All this we find in the Preface for the Mass on the Feast of the Holy Trinity: “Father, all-powerful and ever-living God, … we joyfully proclaim our faith in the mystery of your Godhead …: three Persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendor, yet one Lord, one God, ever to be adored in your everlasting glory.”
To complete this first stage of our inquiry, let us return to the question which, in our model dialogue above, produced so much incoherence from the believer – if each of the three persons is wholly God, why not three Gods? The reason why we cannot say three Gods becomes clear if we consider what is meant by the parallel phrase, “three men”. That would mean three distinct persons, each possessing a human nature. But note that, although their natures would be similar, each would have his own. The first man could not think with the second man’s intellect, but only with his own; the second man could not love with the third’s will, but only with his own. The phrase “three men” would mean three distinct persons, each with his own separate human nature, his own separate equipment as man; the phrase “three gods” would mean three distinct persons, each with his own separate Divine Nature, his own separate equipment as God. But in the Blessed Trinity, that is not so. The three Persons are God, not by the possession of equal and similar natures, but by the possession of one single nature; they do in fact, what our three men could not do, know with the same intellect and love with the same will. They are three Persons, but they are not three Gods; they are One God.
(Editor’s note: This excerpt from Theology and Sanity was first posted at CWR on June 7, 2020.)
——————–
Frank Sheed (1897-1981) was an Australian of Irish descent. A law student, he graduated from Sydney University in Arts and Law, then moved in 1926, with his wife Maisie Ward, to London. There they founded the well-known Catholic publishing house of Sheed & Ward in 1926, which published some of the finest Catholic literature of the first half of the twentieth century.
Known for his sharp mind and clarity of expression, Sheed became one of the most famous Catholic apologists of the century. He was an outstanding street-corner speaker who popularized the Catholic Evidence Guild in both England and America (where he later resided). In 1957 he received a doctorate of Sacred Theology honoris causa authorized by the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities in Rome.
Although he was a cradle Catholic, Sheed was a central figure in what he called the “Catholic Intellectual Revival,” an influential and loosely knit group of converts to the Catholic Faith, including authors such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Arnold Lunn, and Ronald Knox.
Sheed wrote several books, several of them republished by Ignatius Press, the best known being Theology and Sanity, A Map of Life, Theology for Beginners, Knowing God, and Christ in Eclipse. He and Maise also compiled the Catholic Evidence Training Outlines, which included his notes for training outdoor speakers and apologists and is still a valuable tool for Catholic apologists and catechists (and is available through the Catholic Evidence Guild).
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Enjoying this vintage ‘Sheedian’ apologetics, thanks to CWR.
Sadly, in today’s ‘quick-grab’ world few people are willing to hear the full apologetic argument. Yet, many are open to hear that God is love. The following is a humble effort to apply that in introducing enquirers to the Holy Trinity.
The common counsel that: “God’s nature is unfathomable” must not prevent us from seeking understanding of God. Even so, it might seem strange to have a special ‘Holy Trinity Day’. After all, every single day and, indeed, absolutely everything, depends completely on the Divine Trinity. Yet, having a special Sunday set aside to celebrate the Holy Trinity can be of benefit if it causes us to inquire into the infinite riches of the nature of God.
Christians are sometimes questioned over our faith that: “God is One and God is Three”. Yet, surely much of reality come in triunities? Each day has a morning, noon, and night. We will eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner; using knife, fork, and spoon. An egg has a shell, white, and yolk. Formal dinners have an entrée, a main course, and a desert. Our torso has head, chest, and belly. Our arms have hands, fore-arms, and upper arms. Our rooms have floor, walls, and a ceiling. Traditional families are composed of husband, wife, and child. If we watch sport, we expect our team to win, lose, or draw. In baseball you have three strikes, then you’re out (and criminals, too, may have reason to reflect on that rule). Out driving, we’re attentive to the red, amber, and green of traffic lights. Our planet has land, sea, and sky. In the sky we see sun, moon, and stars. Our universe has galaxies, stars, and planets. Atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Triunity is inherent in just about everything, from the miniscule to the cosmic.
Why then should anyone be surprised to hear that almighty God is also a triune being, who is constitutively defined by the Apostolic tradition as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Even though that’s easy to say (and simple people find it’s easy to pray) theologians have made it a matter of almost unimaginable complexity and of division. The New Testament teaches that Holy Trinity is all about God’s oneness in diversity yet, over the centuries, disputants have made trinitarian theology into a unique source of doctrinal conflict and even schism.
In introducing the Catechism, Pope John Paul II states that the unity of faith of the People of God has its: “supreme model and origin in the Unity of the Trinity”. So, let’s enquire into the character of that unity. Certainly, it’s a bit like water, which is of the same substance, whether in the form of ice, liquid, or steam. Yet, the substantial unity within God is categorically superior because it derives from the voluntary choices of the three Persons to love in an unlimitedly unselfish way. Molecules can’t but persons can choose to love like that, constantly forgetting self so as to serve others. Interestingly, Apostle Paul says our physical universe is suffering birth-pangs, as it painfully evolves people of that exceptional sort.
The lesson for each of us, including the theologians, and for the Church herself, is that the trinitarian unity within God is attainable when, by grace, we freely choose to genuinely love one another in an unselfish and self-giving way.
Apostle John makes the Holy Trinity accessible and far more personal than any theologian:
“My dear people let us love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Anyone who fails to love can never have known God because God is love. God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through him; this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away. My dear people, since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another. No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us because he lets us share his Spirit.” 1 John 4:7-13.
————————————————————————————— 6.06.2020 mJr
A difficulty arises if we make nature the determining principle of three persons one God. The difficulty is technically three persons can share the same nature and not be God. Each of us shares a human nature. Mr Sheed’s argument assumes nature is equivalent to personality with all its personal features. Being is what ultimately determines that Father Son and Holy Spirit share the same nature unique to them because they are One in Being with God. What is first evident to the intellect is that God is.
“Be Perfect, Like your Heavenly Father Is Perfect.”- Jesus The Christ
God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), Exists, In Essence, as a Communion Of Perfect Love. At the end of The Day, it may still be a Great Mystery, but it is no mystery that we exist, because Perfect Love exists.
When I was in RCIA my teacher said that the simplest way to understand the Trinity is to compare it to ice, water, and vapor. All three of them are the same substance (H20) but they are each different.
While possibly helpful, does this analogy (H2O = ice-water-vapor) really work? In theology it sounds too much like MODALISM—-the early heresy that there is one God, but with three different faces/phases (rather than three distinct Persons in one divine Nature).
Apart from the actual word—-“Trinity”—-the doctrine itself is taken DIRECTLY from Scripture (more than a later word game), and from what the incarnate Christ said and did: at his Baptism He was testified-to by the distinct Father, and yet later He spoke with the Father as One, and then it was He who at Pentecost sent the indwelling Holy Spirit in his place (“place”, a very constricting spatial concept).
With our finite minds, then, we therefore affirm 1+1+1=1. As a protection against erosion of the self-revealed Mystery into any more mutilated and manageable one-liners (of which 88 such heresies already by his time, said St. Augustine). Anything less than this protection (against our own finite fingerprints) is MYTH-MAKING or, in our time, rationalism and reductionism. Might as well try to see actual sunlight by reading braille!
Here’s how a historian (!) describes our gifted contact with the Triune and yet self-disclosing mystery of God:
“Trinitarian Christianity presents itself, NOT as a dogma, but as the rejection of dogma, NOT as the assertion but rather as the denial of anthropomorphism and myth, and it calls for a final and conclusive expulsion of these elements from the description of ultimate reality as the preliminary to a starkly realistic account of the nature of man” (Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, Oxford University Press, 1974, 432, caps added).
The nature of the Trinity PLUS the “nature of man”???
About which, this from the Second Vatican Council: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light . . .Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, [ALSO] fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
There are the tree states of matter: solid,liquid,gas
There are the three dimensions of space: width,breadth,height
THere are the three tenses of time: past,present,future
There are an image of the three persons of the Creator God: Father, Son, H.Spirit
In my view, part of the problem of our understanding of the Trinity is our concept of person. Our concept of person is something which is divided and finite. There is only one person per human nature. God, however is both undivided and infinite perfect.
This tells me that the truest concept of a person is that it is three in one – not one in one as in our human nature. The corollary is that each of the divine persons is not like three human persons [as we might visualize] that are somehow one
St.Faustina , in her Diary mentions a # of times , her deep and vivid experiences of The Trinity , with the added qualification of words not being enough to describe same .
‘Holy , holy , holy ‘ – the hymn of heaven .., thus holiness as the profound aspect of heaven and of God ..
The term ‘love ‘ having taken on thick dark glasses of carnality , esp. in our
times ,earthly models to convey the Trinity thus would not likely be a great benefit for many .
Pagan faiths have counterfeit figures , who are depicted as warring and cursing each other ..and Masonic curses are said to invoke such powers , thus also adding to the darkness that can undermine the holiness needed .
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/06/05/catholic-priest-psychologist-offer-advice-for-stressful-times/ – this interesting article has the mention of the effect of writing something 27 times – 9×3 🙂
Persons in ministry advocate that biblical verses be used for such writing – such as ‘my house shall be called a house of prayer ‘ – so that our bodies too as temples of The Spirit , thus blessed more ..
good means for the kids too , to make use of their time .
Thank God too that Mother Church invites us to say The Creed often enough ..
and all such measures given us all , to grow in His holiness , waiting in trusting love,to thus make up for the rebellious haste in The Garden – till we too have the truer and deeper experience of The Trinity .. as love and goodness , holiness ,majesty and mercy , all as in One nature ..
as we already can thank and praise God , with all , on this Feast Day and every day .
Glory be !
J.P.G.
Regarding the modern Earthly models of love not being sufficient, I would agree. However, it’s very easy to remind people that the Greeks had four words for love. The Christian meaning, though, is not Eros – it’s Agape. The three forms that are not Agape point to Agape. Agape is true, real love.
Thank you for the act of agape 🙂
God revealing Himself for us through His actions in creation too , such as how we perceive the movements of the earth , as night and day and changes in the seasons , not as movements per se ..
Love that is God , as action of perfect sharing .. Father of all goodness , from all eternity , showing forth His goodness , telling The Son – ‘My Beloved Son, I want all that is of Me to be Yours and You , O My Beloved Spirit , You be the One to do so , on MY behalf ‘ ..and The Son , in His turn , perfectly echoing same to The Father ..through the same Spirit , also having desired to show that love , in the act of redemption , as an eternal action of gratitude to The Father , in the ongoing Oneness of The Three , in The Incarnation ..
yet , even as much as like in that experience of St.Augustine about The Trinity , we might experience only a thimble full of the joy , love and sharing in perfection of that communion in this life .. which would be enough to make us sing His praises with all our hearts ..
The dark , sad counter effects too we see , in the lie as to how heaven is all about carnality , the lust for power has created a history of the related killings and such in many a family in power …
our own culture too , not spared from such lies ..
Blessings !
Our vocabulary is limited that’s the problem of explaining The infinite conaturality of three infinites
The arithmetic of the Holy Trinity is: 1 x 1 x 1 = 1
BTW, Theology & Sanity and Society & Sanity are 2 of the best introductions to traditional Catholic theology and social doctrine. A Map of Life by Sheed is also an excellent introduction to the basics of orthodox Catholic theology I don’t know why his books are not recommended more often (especially in orthodox/traditional circles).
About “unity” and disintegration…
The Council of NICAEA: Unity of three “persons” in one divine nature;
The Council of CHALCEDON: Unity of two “natures” in one Incarnation;
The Nature of MAN: Unity of body and soul;
The Nature of MARRIAGE: Unity of binary Man and Woman;
SEXUALITY: Unitive and procreative;
The Nature of the CHURCH: Unity of one, holy, catholic and apostolic;
The Nature of THEOLOGY: Unity of Faith and Reason;
The Nature of MORAL THEOLOGY: Unity of formal teaching and concrete praxis.
The Zeitgeist of Today?
Pluralism of Trinune One with equivalent alternatives;
Bifurcation of Christ as either divine or sociable;
Half-blessing for whole “couples” of men;
Marriages as either regular or “irregular;”
Sexuality as recreation divorced from procreation;
Mystical Body of Christ as a big-tent aggregate.
Homogeneity of Gender Theory and of homosexuality;
Apostolic priesthood rendered as Unisex;
Morality as either “abstract” or “pastoral.”
Not the mystery of time and eternity, but “time is greater than space.”
When I read such a lengthy apologetic, I must admire the times which could generate a man who could make the argument, also the man who would sit through it, and the man who then also could follow it….three persons, one nature….
While personally wondering where was Socrates when you needed him….
The doctrine necessitated simply because many wanted Jesus to be full/true God’s incarnation and what he is reported to have said as a complete man as irrefutable Word, and his death is a sacrifice capable to atone (original) sin of Adam and somehow of all humans. In my humble opinion all these errors stems from the inadequate faith of the involved theologians resulting in placing yet another yoke to mankind aka sinners.
Considering all of God’s work in the past 2000 years (and His prior works) it is safe to conclude that Jesus was created like every body else, but because of the adequate Faith of the Virgin Mary, God could accomplish this miracle (in the eyes of sinners) and thus with the then existing understanding of people Jesus is fathered by true God but being already ‘materialists’ it has to be incarnation. As a matter of fact we all are born of our parents simply because God wants us to believe so untill we become eligible to get the Faith and convinced that we are created out of nothing as the original sin/freedom necessitate true God to remain be hidden. Jesus’ resurrection is similarly God’s work and effectively Jesus is God’s beloved son and now living as a visible member/head of the body of invisible God/Christ in paradise. His words similarly is nothing but the opinion of the greatest saint some quiet of the mark such as his second coming or ending of this world. So effectively a minor revision aka change of mind can make our dogmas more closer to the Truth and appealing to sinners as they can be another aspiring Jesus, member/body of invisible God with the Hope of living for ever rather than trusting on his death or his accomplishments attributed as unassailable as he is defined as God.
Similarly all aspects of Holy Spirit can be explained with graces of God. As a matter of fact Jesus himself interchangeably used God our Father and His Spirit such as in the case to congratulate Peter when he concluded Jesus was indeed the expectant Messiah. And God being the only existing reality and everything else are being materialised live by God preclude the notion of life/spirit is not a creation and God gives His Spirit to us for our eternal living. In other terms, word plays such as essence, nature, person are attempts of sinners to master the God so that they can remain in sin, the original freedom of living up us as gods, the way we live now, and preferably for ever even after He reveals us the Truth.
We read: “…it is safe to conclude that Jesus was created like every body else…”
St. Augustine struggled with this same self-contained dark hole of the human mind, but the this about his conversion:
“…he was confronted with the difficulty of conceiving substance as spiritual, but with the discovery that this was possible, the greatest of his intellectual problems was solved. For he was thus enabled to perceive that, so far from being ultimate, ‘form’ and ‘matter’ alike were merely figments of the human mind; they were the spectacles through which men saw the corporeal or object world. His subsequent emancipation from the delusions of materialism and idealism [both!] followed as a matter of course and, with this, the revolution was complete [….] by his acceptance of Trinitarian Christianity, he identified himself with the effort of thought initiated by Athanasius. To that effort he made a contribution, the slight and sketchy ‘De Incarnation’ on the one hand and, on the other, the massive proportions of the ‘City of God'” (historian Charles Norris Cochrane, “Christianity and Classical Culture,” 1940/1974, pp. 396-7).
Augustine had a word for all of us with our inadequate understanding and the tendency to, say, reduce spiritual substance to a single lens, and prostitute our minds to our own fancies: “fantastica fornicatio.”
While our concepts are always imperfect, the Church is the guardian of the Incarnation and holds that time is NOT greater than space (so to speak), but rather and with Pope John at the opening of the Second Vatican Council: “This certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which faithful obedience is due [obedience: ob-audire to listen deeply], has to be explored and presented in a way that is demanded by our times. One thing is the deposit of faith, another thing is the manner of presentation, always however with the same meaning and signification.” And, “…the truths which the Church intends to teach through her dogmatic formulas are distinct from the changeable conceptions of a given epoch and can be expressed without them…” (under Pope Paul VI, Mysterium Ecclesiae, 1973).
Some “stuff” to possibly think about, even at der Synodal Weg and in Rome at the Synod 2024 roundtables.
God is love. Love involves an exchange between persons. The infinite love of God is at the foundation of the complete and total intimacy of union between the Three Persons of the Trinity, of one substance.
*
The one flesh union of husband and wife is in the image and likeness of the Trinity, to model the exchange that takes place in the Trinitarian Godhead. Being made in the image and likeness of God we were made for union with God. The complete image and likeness of the one flesh union is the union between God, man, and woman. Original Sin has disfigured this union. You can see this in the disunion and finger pointing between Adam and Eve after the Fall. Alienation was the fruit of Original Sin. Alienation from God, from each other, and the self-alienation that came about from the loss of Original Righteousness. When we think about God we are burdened by a weakened will and darkened intellect. As it is said in the Bible:
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The Light of the Body. 22 “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be. (Matthew 6:22-23 NABRE)
*
When Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened they lost the sound eye. True divine illumination requires a sound eye. Purification is a major part of contemplative prayer.
The Idea of the Trinity of God
For My GrandChildren
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We learn as youngsters in the Church that there are three persons in One God; God the Father, God the Son who is Jesus and God the Holy Spirit. This mystery of God’s Nature is beyond our ability to fully understand we are taught, after all, we are only mortal humans with limited cognitive power in our minds and God is the Almighty, the All Powerful and the Eternal Creator Being.
So how may we expect to understand the supreme majesty of God Who surpasses all understanding? Well, certainly, we are unable to get a grasp of the magnificence of the Creator of all in the universe except by seeing and understanding that all of life itself which surrounds us is miraculous. It is inexplicable. How may a few pounds of chemicals, dirt and water, rise up from the earth, become alive, and speak and think? By what power can this occur? Thus we have an innate sense of the miraculous that prompts us to seek and to detect signs of God the Creator even if we can only do this very dimly. Our grasp on ultimate reality is quite fragile and fraught with faulty perceptions. So have St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas taught us.
To help us understand the complex nature of God we are sometimes directed by good intentioned people to the example of St. Patrick’s three leafed clover as a symbol of God’s triune Being. This clover model is suggested as a help to us to understand the notion of God as three Persons yet only One Supreme Being. Let us hope a better idea of God may come from the Word of God Himself as reported in:
Matthew 22
The Greatest Commandment.
*34i When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,35and one of them [a scholar of the law]* tested him by asking,36“Teacher,* which commandment in the law is the greatest?”37j He said to him,* “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.38This is the greatest and the first commandment.39k The second is like it:* You shall love your neighbor as yourself.40* l The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
So here we have it from Jesus Himself – all we need to know about life and living is thus revealed to us in these few sentences if we have opened our hearts and voluntarily accepted God as He wishes. The Catholic Church also teaches us that we humans, ourselves, are privileged to be made in the image and likeness of God.
From Genesis 1;
27 God created mankind in his image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female* he created them.
What exactly does this mean to us? Jesus says to us to love God with our Minds, our Hearts and our Souls. We are, according to Christ, composed of three parts that make up our person; mind, heart and soul. Our minds we use for thinking and learning and developing rational decisions. A heart we have for experiencing Love even though it may entail pain and sacrifice. A soul we have for seeking the ultimate Truth of God, the reality beyond the material, beyond time, beyond mortality. All of these, heart, mind and soul, are inseparable parts of us. Can a person live without using their mind? We see the results of such tragic attempts every day. Especially today the world seems to have fallen inrto the madness of mob thinking.
Can we live without a heart to love? The isolation and depression of those who have no love in their life is a plague on the modern world. Many people attempt to replace love in their lives with materialism or obsessions or addictions. But it is only love which binds families, societies and nations together. All those other distractions are ultimately destructive. Does not love inspire you to try to do your best for your parents?
Can we live without soulfully seeking the Truth of God? No, our lives and our nations will be consumed by fires of iniquity if Christ is not our King. Chaos and destruction seem to be so prevalent today in our ‘modern’ world as God is mocked and despised and He is displaced in our society by materialism, drugs and sexual licentiousness. These errors wreak havoc upon our families and thus upon the moral fabric of our nations.
So, let me ask you, my good grandchildren, if may we think of God the Father, the Creator, as the Mind of God, that great power Who created all knowledge and all things? Despite all the vaunted science of our ‘modern’ world it has become apparent to the more thoughtful scientists of today that the fine tuning of the Universe, and of earth, was specifically designed to make our human existence possible. All of science, as it seeks the truth, must eventually point to the existence of a Creator Who is beyond all time and beyond all matter. If science discloses a real truth then it must have shown a light on the path to God the ultimate Truth. How can it be otherwise for there can only be One Truth.
And then further, may we also regard Jesus, the Son of God, the embodiment of God, as the Sacred Heart of God who brought us God’s message of Love in a human form? He appeared to us in human form that we might better understand the message of God; the continual confusion of the Apostles notwithstanding! It is a mighty challenge in our lives to ponder why God should appear among us a a human. We may reach the realization that absolute Love is perfectly Humble, and that the Perfect Justice of the Creator, who gave us free will, demands atonement for our human failings. This is because the Perfect Holiness of God cannot abide imperfection(evil) in His Presence. This atonement Christ accomplished for us in Divine self sacrfice and brutal suffering to negate the effects of our wayward acts if only we will know sorrow for them and open our hearts to return the Love of God as best we are able. Jesus shows us the Heart of God even when pierced by a lance on the Cross.
And, thirdly, may we think of the Holy Spirit as the Soul of God, the Divine Inspiration which reveals to us the Truth of God and gives us strength and fills us with the fire of fervent devotion who believe in Him? After all it was the Holy Spirit Who finally inflamed the Apostles’ with the fire of truth to go forth and teach all nations. Even this was still necessary, this fire of the Holy Spirit, descended upon them at Pentecost, to propel the Apostles into courageous lives proclaiming the Faith to the world. Three years of Jesus’ miracles and instructions finally came to fruition in their souls after the descent upon them of the Holy Spirit in tongues of flame.
If we will allow these less than complete notions of God to help us get an idea of how we are are truly made in the image and likeness of God then, we hope, we may better understand why Jesus told us to Love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul. Thus informed all our questions in life may be held up to this supreme law which is given to us by Christ our King. He gave us this law in reply to a few pernicious religious officials who were trying to humiliate and entrap Him as they suspected He was a fraud. This Law of Christ is known as the Golden Rule. And, as we are children of God, this law surely suffices for us; we need nothing more to find our Way, the Truth and the Life. It makes life a lot easier to understand.
Blessed be God, Blessed be His Holy Name.
“Be Perfect, Like your Heavenly Father Is Perfect.”- Jesus The Christ
God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), Exists, In Essence, as a Communion Of Perfect Love. At the end of The Day, it may still be a Great Mystery, but it is no mystery that we exist, because Perfect Love exists.
God Is Love. Love Exists In Relationship. Love Is Ordered To The Personal And Relational Inherent Dignity Of The Persons Existing In A Relationship Of Love, And Is Thus Complementary
Perfect Love Does Not Divide, It Multiplies, As In The Miracle Of The Loaves And Fishes.
God Is The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Complementary Love, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque).
The fact that God Exists As An Ordered Communion Of Perfect Complementary Love is Not A Math Problem, when you realize that Love Exists In Relationships And Only God Exists In A Relationship, A Communion Of Perfect Love.
“At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved. “Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.” “Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.” “For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”