How can we begin to think about the mystery of the Holy Trinity?
The Trinity is the mystery of God's inner life, and we only come to know about it by
way of divine revelation.
We know God is the Holy Trinity because God has spoken and told us so, because God has
become human.
By faith, we know that Jesus Christ is the son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light, true God from true God.
And by faith, we come to know the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit personally as
God.
We can pray to them.
We can even develop a kind of deep spiritual relationship with God as our Father or with
the Holy Spirit as well as with Christ.
We can also think about this mystery, however, conceptually without losing sight of the personal
relationship we have with the Holy Trinity. How can we begin to think about the Trinity
in a theological way?
When St. Thomas asks that question, he begins with a very interesting first article in the
Summa Theologiae where he asks, is there procession in the life of God?
Now he's not talking about liturgical processions.
He's talking about the eternal derivation of one person from another.
The Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
The Bible gives us a major clue as to how we can think about this mystery of processions
in God in the opening chapter of John's Gospel.
In John 1, in the first lines we read that in the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with God and the Word was God.
Now the Word in Greek there is logos, which can mean something like concept or rationality,
intellectual, spiritual thought.
So in the beginning, before all time began, you might say, there's the Father and his
Word, his rationality, his wisdom, which proceeds from him.
Jesus later says in the same Gospel, I proceeded and came forth from the Father.
And if you follow this line of thinking, then it makes sense to think about the Holy Spirit
as analogous to love.
When we first come to know something, we can then begin to love something.
You can't love what you don't know, but if you know something, you can begin to aspire
to love it.
And so if the Son of God is the eternal word and logos from the Father who proceeds from
the Father eternally, then the spirit can be thought of as the divine love who proceeds
from the Father and Son.
God first knows himself eternally and knowing himself, he begets his eternal wisdom and
Word and then God loves himself and his Word and the Spirit is the love that spirates forth
from the Father and the Son.
When we start to think about these eternal processions, then we can start to understand
why there are real relations in God.
This is the classic terminology.
There are real relations between the Father and the Son and between the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit.
The relations are relations of origin.
The father is related to the son as the one who generates the son eternally as his word.
The Son is related to the Father as the one originating from the Father eternally.
The Spirit originates eternally from the Father and the Son as their spirated love, and so
he is eternally related to them.
From this kind of thinking about processions and relations, we can develop the idea of
persons.
The Father is the person who is the origin of Trinitarian life, who eternally generates
the Son and spirates the Holy Spirit.
He communicates the whole life of God, the essence of God to the Son and to the Spirit
so that they possess all that the Father has.
The Son and Word is he who is eternally generated by the father who proceeds from him and is
related to him and who, with the Father, spirates the Spirit.
The Spirit is the eternal person who is spirated love,
subsistent love spirated forth from the Father and the Son.
Why do we speak of generation?
Clearly we don't mean that the eternal Son of God is physically generated from the Father,
that would represent a grave misunderstanding.
The eternal Son of God is the Word of God or concept, you might say, by analogy, reason.
The begetting in question is immaterial, but the notion of sonship suggests the communication
of a nature.
A father communicates to his son, the human nature that the father has, but the divine
Father communicates to the divine Son, the divine nature, which is wholly immaterial.
This immaterial begetting, this communication of divine life, is analogous to the formulation
of a concept in our minds.
You think out what you are in a word, in an idea, in a concept.
Now in us, a concept is a very flimsy thing.
It can come and go.
It's a little property of our being, but when the Father conceives the eternal Word, he
transmits to the eternal Son to have in himself the fullness, the plenitude of the immaterial
divine nature, and that's why we say in the creed that the Son of God is God from God,
light from light, true God from true God.
The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in being an essence.
This is a classic idea contained implicitly in John's Gospel.
For example, when Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am," and he assigned to himself the divine
name, he's one with the Father as he also says in that Gospel.
The Church uses a technical term here from Greek, homoousios, consubstantial so as to
denote that all that is in the Father as God in virtue of the divine nature is given to
or communicated to the Son and the Son possesses all that is in the Father.
This doesn't mean the Father ceases to be God when he generates the Son.
It means that the Father who is eternally God also communicates to the Son eternally
the plenitude of divine life so that everything in the Son is from the Father and everything
in the Father is in the Son.
As Jesus says in the gospels, I am in the Father and the Father is in me.
Each of them is the one God, so we say of the Son that he is God from God, but we can
say this also of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the one God who receives everything that is in the Father and Son by
way of spiration.
Now, this sort of reflection only makes sense in the first place because we've come to discover
Christ as God and man personally in faith and to discover the Father and the Spirit.
But because we have this personal relationship with the Holy Trinity, we can reflect on it.
And in doing so, come to understand more deeply who it is that we know and love.
Christ is the uncreated word of the Father, the eternal Son of God.
He is the wisdom of the Father who has become human for our sake.
The Holy spirit is the eternally spirated love of the Father and the Son who has been
sent into the world to sanctify the Church and to enable us to be united to God.
The persons of the Son and the Spirit are given to us to lead us to the Father.
So thinking about the Trinity and praying to the Trinity are not identical activities,
but they're certainly not opposed or disunited either.
In fact, the two activities naturally go together and they help sustain one another.
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