De Trinitate

May 1st- Feast of St. Joseph the Worker (ora pro nobis!)

Today's Gospel (Sixth Sunday of Easter)
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. "I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." (John 14:15-21)

At dinner the other night I was asked to explain the Holy Spirit. Dutifully I explained that the Holy Spirit was the third person of the Blessed Trinity, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the three being consubstantial but distinct as persons. The Old Testament makes it clear that God is One; from the New, we deduce that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are somehow equal sharers in the Divine Nature, and between the two we derive the Trinity. In a way it seems so simple, even obvious; after all, it is not as if we professed One God who was also Three Gods, or One Person who was also Three Persons, either of which (though suitably mystical and mysterious) would be a blatant contradiction and affront to reason; no, it's a simple matter of God being three with respect to the Divine Persons and one with respect to the Divine Nature. And how fitting! Thus (and only thus) can we say, not as a mere platitude, that God is love, for love can exist only between persons, plural; thus God can say "Let us create man in our image" and create two persons whose love begets a third.

Simple, even obvious? Then why was I surprised to hear from my questioner that this was the first explanation he had ever heard which made sense? More than that- why was I just as surprised that my explanation had made sense as I was that the explanations of others had not? Granted, the latter is (sadly) all too believable. But the former- how could I have so easily explain what has baffled the minds of theologians for centuries? The answer is of course, that I didn't. I was only stating the facts. We know, through reason and through revelation, certain facts about God, and the Trinity is what fits these facts, or more properly what these facts fit. Faith assents to it, reason raises no red flags of contradiction; but to explain it, to understand it- there we run up against the mystery; it is utterly beyond us. St. Augustine, it is told, was walking along the seashore trying to understand the Trinity when he saw a small boy trying to empty the ocean with a seashell into a hole in the sand. One can no more comprehend the Trinity, he realized, then pour the ocean into the sand. Which puts me, or anyone trying to explain it, in the awkward position of trying to explain something that cannot really be understood in the way that any questioner might reasonably want to understand it. Sure, we can admit that it's beyond human comprehension- in fact, if we're honest, we must- but of course that sounds suspiciously like a cop-out. We might say the same thing about a God who is Three Gods, the only difference being, of course, that the Trinity does not actually violate reason, it merely transcends it. A crucial difference, though a subtle one. But this gets into faith and reason, which will be the subject of future musings, so for now, (lest we forget) back to the Holy Spirit:

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium,
et tui amoris in eis ignem accende;
Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur/Et renovabis faciem terrae.

"I have a far more solid and central ground for submitting to Christianity as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this; that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)