The Dogma ->
The analogies of knowledge and love ->
The inner life of God ->

IN GOD

The Dogma

God is subsistent Being itself. The word 'being' applies strictly only to God. Deus solus vere essentiae nomen tenet — God alone has the name of true being (St Jerome). For all other things, ourselves included, compared to that pure and perfect substance, are not even shadows. That is why God gave his name when speaking to Moses as He who is (Exodus iii, 14). Tam verum enim esse Deus habet, quod nostrum esse, suo comparatum, nihil est — so truly has God being, that our being, compared to his, is nothing (St Bonaventure).

God is one. He possesses unity in a super-eminent manner: or, more accurately, he is unity itself, absolute simplicity. In him there is no distinction of parts, no accident, no change. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord (Deuteronomy vi, 4). Nonetheless, this one God is three Persons. God is Father: he begets a Son in a unity of nature, without division or change. And from the Father and the Son Son proceeds equally the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; and these three are but one and the same God. This trinity of Persons is no less necessary than the unity of being.

The Trinity is essential to God just as much as his divine nature. The divine processions are not something added to his essence, already formed and complete: they are the very substance, the very perfection of God. To be in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is in reality the same as being God, although our intellect cannot grasp the equivalence of these statements. Both propositions, nevertheless, bear witness to the same necessity, and if we are able to state them separately it is because we only know God in in-direct ways, in the obscurity of faith. We must be on our guard lest we attempt to measure the mystery of the Trinity by the narrowness of our weak and discursive concepts.

The divine eternity is a changeless present, wherein the Father begets the Son, and both breathe forth the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine com-pares the Son to air, ever filled with light, receiving at every moment a renewal without change of the whole light of the sun. The divine generation did not take place at the beginning of time, once and for all. It is a divine act, or rather it is the divine act, eternal and unending, which never ceases and is never interrupted, any more than is the divine Being from whom, in reality, it cannot be distinguished. Now — at every moment of time — this act is being accomplished : the Son is born of the Father. Ego hodie genui to — this day have I begotten thee (Psalm ii, 7).

The divine Persons are subsistent relations. Amongst creatures, relations such as paternity or sonship are only accidents. Take away the ' accident', and the father and the son remain just men. In God, however, everything is simple, all is subsistent, all is God. That is why in the Blessed Trinity the fatherhood is the whole being of the Father, which is identical with the divine being. So, too, the sonship of the Son is the whole being of the Son, and the same holds of the Holy Spirit. According to his whole being, the Father is ad Filium; and, according to his whole being, the Son is ad Patrem. Were our supernatural vision sufficiently pure, sufficiently deep, we would see in this not only the perfect solution of the apparent contradiction between these truths — God one, yet three—but the necessity of the one included in that of the other. 'Each of the Persons' says St Gregory Nazienzen, `refers not less to the others than to himself; and that is the reason for their reduction to unity, which is utterly beyond our comprehension'.

The divine Persons are really distinct. That is why there can exist between them those interchanges of knowledge and love, which can only belong to subsistent personalities. The Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Father: the duality is so real and so true that it suffices to constitute the requisite number under the Old Law for the value of a witness. If I judge, my judgment is true, because I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me. And in your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is true (cf. John viii, 16-17).

Yet, although the Son is a different Person from the Father, he is not something different: alius non aliud. In order to be truly the Son, he must stand in opposition to the Father by a real relation and it is precisely this relation which brings him back into a unity of nature with the Father, a unity more perfect than any unity men can conceive.

The analogies og knowledge and love

IN the account given in the book of Genesis, on the sixth day, before the creation of man, God spoke thus: Let us make man to our image and likeness (1 Genesis i, 26). The plural seems to underline the action of the three Persons. Images of God, we carry within us a certain reflection of the divine generation. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church have studied this signature of the creative Spirit engraved in our very nature, and the deductions they draw from it give us some idea of the nature of the processions which constitute the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. It is quite true that we can only approach such an understanding by a very distant analogy. Nevertheless, it is not without a providential disposition that such comparisons have been stressed by Christian thinkers who were at the same time contemplatives and saints. Their origin, their antiquity, their admirable correspondence with the scriptural texts confer on these speculations a singular authority.

A spiritual being has two vital operations—to know and to love. Now since God is being in its absolute plenitude, these two operations belong to him by necessity of essence and nature. The first vital operation of God is the act of knowing. By that act, which is his essence itself, God produces a perfect concept of what he knows perfectly; that is to say, himself. It is the procession of the interior Word. In that divine Word, God, so to speak, defines himself. The Word, that is, is the adequate expression of the Father. The Word Logos, which St John uses in the first chapter of his Gospel, means both word and reason; for it is the reason of God, as it is the reason of everything else. That Word is rightly called the Immaculate Mirror, the Image of the invisible God, the Splendour of his glory, and the of his substance (Wisdom vii, 26; Colossians i, 5; Hebrews i, 3).

This intelligible fruit of the divine knowledge is also called `generated knowledge' — notitia genita, Deus intellectus. In so far as this essential representation of himself proceeds from him - perfectly equal and similar to its source in the of the same nature — God is in the truest called Father. Fatherhood belongs to God it before it can ever be attributed to men. It is from that divine and primal paternity that all paternity in heaven and earth has its origin and name... of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named (Ephesians iii, 15).

The Word is thus truly the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, co-eternal, enjoying me omnipotence and the same immensity. Of all the ways in which a being can produce another being, the most perfect is by generation. For he who generates imparts his own nature to the one generated, and pours into that being his own life. And since no dignity can be wanting in God, generation must be found in the Godhead. Shall not I that make others to bring forth children, myself bring forth, saith the Lord (Isaias lxvi, 9). There is no doubt that generation is infinitely greater than creation, for the Creator does not give himself, whilst the Father is in the Son with his whole being and essence. The Father is in me, and I in the Father (John x, 38).

The Word is also named Truth and Power by appropriation: that is to say, in terms which can be referred to the other Persons, but which seem specially to belong to him, because of his procession according to knowledge. We venerate in the Father unity, eternity and power; in the Son, equality, beauty and wisdom. The Son is also called Ars Dei, Life, the Ray, the Dawn, because he is the integral manifestation of the divine Essence. It is in him that the Father knows himself, and that we shall one day know the Father. He that seeth me, seeth the Father also. If you know me, you know also my Father; and from henceforth you know him, and you have seen him (cf. John xiv, 9 and 7).

The Father and the Son meet eternally in essential beatitude. They give themselves to one another in a most intimate unity and from that union leaps up an immaterial flame, the ardour of infinite Love, namely the Holy Spirit. For the act of the will produces in the one willing a new reality, and it is this reality, subsistent and eternal in God, that is the third Person of the Blessed Trinity. The name Love is peculiarly his, for he is the love with which the Father loves the Son abd the Son the Father. He is called Spirit by analogy with the life-breath which animates us, and records the rhythm of our emotions. He is the Gift par excellence, for the essential character of love is to give, and the first thing that love gives is itself. Goodness is attributed to the Holy Spirit by appropriation. The Fathers also called the third Person the Divine Fire, the Spiritual Balm, the living Source, the enjoyment and communion of the Father with the Son, for he is the embrace which consummates their union, the seal of plenitude upon the mystery of the divine processions.

St Thomas summarizes thus the cycle of the e operations ad intra. "Both in us and in God" he says, "there is a certain cycle in the acts of the intellect and the will, for the will tends towards that which was the beginning of the understanding. But whereas in us the circle ends in that which is external — the external good moving the intellect, and the intellect moving the will and the will by appetite and love tending to the external good — in God, the circle ends in himself. For God, by comprehending himself, conceives the Word, which is the type of all things comprehended by him (inasmuch as He comprehends all things by comprehending himself), and from this Word he proceeds to love all things and himself. Thus someone has said that "the One engenders the One, and reflects its own heat upon himself" (Mercurius Trismegistus: Poemand IV).

And the circle being closed, nothing more can be added, so that a third procession is impossible' (St Thomas: De Potentia Dei, Q.IX, art. 9). And the Angelic Doctor concludes with a word which opens out for us the perspective of a new mystery, an extension and echo of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. 'There remains only room for that external procession, which we call creation'(ibid.)

The inner life of God

These analogies serve in a way to introduce us to the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. For now, by enlarging our noblest thoughts to infinity, we shall endeavour to arrive at some conception of the beatitude of the three uncreated Persons.

The Father expresses himself wholly in his Son, mplating himself in the latter with infinite satisfaction. He imparts his whole substance to him and finds himself wholly in him. And the Son in turn contemplates in the Father the inexhaustible treasure of the Essence which he is himself. Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased (Mark i, 11). And all my things are thine, and thine are mine (John xvii. 10).

The Father's thought and the Son's thought are the same — unique and absolute, one truth, one expression of that truth, with the sole difference 'Thee' and 'Me'. No one knoweth the Son but the Father; neither doth any one know the Father but the Son (Matthew xi, 27). It is, as it were, an eternal and motionless exchange of uncreated light, a perfect correspondence of knowledge and mutual recognition. As the Father knoweth me, so I know the Father (cf. John x, 15). The Son receives continuously life the Father, and therein is all his being. For as the Father hath life in himself, so he hath given to the Son also to have life in himself (John v, 26).

When two opposing currents in an ocean meet and mix, the very violence of their embrace produces an immense wave, which seems to assault the sky. The Holy Spirit has been likened to such a wave. The Father and the Son, essentially united in the same love, form but one Source for the breathing forth of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, who is called Holiness of God, proceeds from their union in the same essential unity: Caritas de Caritate. The life of the Father and of the Son is thus the breathing forth of the Spirit in love, and the life of the Spirit is to proceed from the Father and the Son, and therein lies the eternal superabundance of charity without end. Charity is the bond of perfections (Colossians iii, 14).

This reciprocity of infinite love, in the simplicity of the same essence, is the substance of the real. All that we see or take for events or beings, what are they but an echo or faint and almost extinct reflection of that unique Reality?

So, then, the life of the three Persons can be summed up in one phrase: God is Love (I John iv, 16). 'To be several Persons in the same divinity is nothing else than to be three with but one and the same love. It is the supreme love, but with a different property in each Person. The Person is nothing else than the supreme Love with a distinctive property' (Richard of St Victor: De Trinitate, Bk. V, c. 20). In this very nature of God, considered as subsistent Love, the same writer (and others after him) have thought to have found the most profund analogical reason for the divine processions. Amor extasim facit. 'Love does not leave the one loved in himself: it causes him to go out mself, and enter wholly into the beloved' (Denys the Areopogite). Without cessation, the Father goes out of himself wholly, and enters into the Son; and the Son unceasingly returns to the Father with the whole of his being, and the Father and the Son pour selves forth in like manner into the Holy Spirit.

The Greek Fathers insisted on this mystery. They not only considered in the divine hypostases the static co-existence and the mutual compenetration, but also that eternal effusion and reflux of the Persons in the unity of the Essence. Such is the original meaning of the word Perichoresis, whicg we translate circumincession. It indicates reciprocal circulation of one thing to another, in such a way that each attracts the other, while at the same time they are in opposition to one another'. These are, indeed, the relations of origin which constitute the Persons, and distinguish and unite them in one and the same nature. Each Person, by what is proper to himself, is then drawn wholly towards another. 'Let us admire' says one theologian, on the subject of the Perichoresis, 'that sublime conception which reveals to us the movement of the divine life, not only in the faculties of knowing and willing, not only in the depths of their nature, but even in the very constitution of the divine subsistents. Oh the per-beatitude of the three Persons ! Any satiety is unthinkable in you, for you are not simply that placid happiness that one experiences by being in the company of another, but rather that shock of joy which comes when one has found the other, never more to part!' (Père de Régnon).

The Jews and the sages of pagan antiquity venerated a lone and solitary God. Revelation has taught us to adore in our God the living truth of three Persons, who coexist in an eternal embrace. Mere human thought could never have conceived such a mystery; but having found it by a divine grace, our concept of the primal Essence has become incomparably richer and more profound. In order to accept this new and wholly divine knowledge, we must break with the categories of our natural knowledge. It was in this sense, possibly, that the prophet glimpsed the thought of God invading the earth, like the all-powerful tide of a new ocean, causing its waves to overflow its shores, overthrowing its ramparts, inundating the plains and covering the mountains. Repleta est terra scientia Domini, sicut aquae maris operientes for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea (Isaias xi, 9).

Note well, with Cardinal Cajetan, that in raising ourselves to God according to our natural ideas, we surely deceive ourselves if we do not pass utterly beyond them in order to lose our-selves in the abyss of the divine Essence. ` We imagine the distinction of the absolute and the relative as anterior to the divine reality, and so we think that we should place it under one or other member of that division. But it is the reverse that is true. For the divine reality is anterior to the concept of being and all its distinctions. There is not in the divine reality on the one hand unity of nature and on the other, and as it were supplementarily, a trinity of Persons, but a one inexhaustible truth, one same incomprehensible secret, one same transcendent and sovereign necessity'.