Before we begin our study of the Incarnation, I thought it might be good for us to have at least an elementary understaning of The Trinity. Aquinas discusses the Trinity in Questions 27 -43 of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. Fr. Farrell provides a commentary to this.
To divine eyes, the mysterious inner life of God is completely clear; God can comprehend all its ineffable perfection, for the infinite alone can comprehend the infinite. This is knowledge that has been God's from all eternity and that will never belong to any other though all of an eternity be given to its contemplation and all the graciously tender thoughtfulness of God be exerted in unfolding the story to lesser minds.
We are humbled before these inscrutable truths, but not humiliated; rather we are exalted as a man of mediocre virtue is exalted by contact with heroic sanctity. What a tragic thing it would be if his paltry virtue were the highest peak to which the heart of man could aspired What a traffic, desperate thing it would be if our paltry minds could encompass all truth! What an inspiring thing it is for the heart of a man to know that there is inexhaustible beauty beyond the faint shadow that he can perceive; what an incredibly gracious thing it is that man should be given, as far as he can be given, the eyes of God to see beyond the shadow into the infinite reality!
As told to man by God
Statement of the mystery of the Trinity
For God has not spoken of His mysteries in guarded whispers behind the locked gates of heaven; He has shared them, as far as they can be shared, with the least of intellects, the intellect of man. He has told us something of that ineffable inner life of His; and that something is almost too much for our minds to bear, like a joy that crowds the heart to the breaking point. The mystery of the Trinity, as God has told it to us, is the mystery of three divine persons, really distinct, in one and the same divine nature: coequal, coeternal, consubstantial, one God. Of these persons, the Second proceeds from the First by an eternal generation; the Third proceeds from the First and the Second by an eternal spiration.
Sole source of this knowledge
There is absolutely no way in which we could have come to this knowledge of ourselves. It had to be told us by God. It is told vaguely, dimly in the obscure words of the Old Testament, as though to prepare the mind for the terrific impact of so great a truth; then, in the New Testament, there is the clear statement both of the trinity of persons and their identity of nature; finally, in the declarations of the Church, the mystery is stated with a clear-cut brevity that staggers the mind. This is the only source of our knowledge of the Blessed Trinity -- - the authority of God -- only God could know of it, only God could tell of it; He has told us and we bend our minds in humbly grateful belief.
Validity of this knowledge
The modern cannot understand why we accept a truth we cannot verify by our own intellects. To us, it does not seem a wisely superior thing to doubt that God, Who gave us the intellects by which we pan out flakes of golden truth, should give us nuggets beyond the capacities of our laborious panning process, indeed, beyond our wildest dreams of rich strikes. From whatever point of view we take, it is the doubt of these mysteries that needs explanation, not their belief. We can prove, and have proved, that God is supreme intelligence, the first truth; that, consequently, He is incapable of deceiving Himself or others, of being deceived by others.. Why then doubt His word? Knowledge of God arrived at by reason from the world of reality is undoubtedly valid, as we have shown; should knowledge of Cod be less valid when it comes directly from God Himself? Or, to put the same truth in simpler terms, is first hand knowledge necessarily to be classed as inferior to second hand knowledge? Yet surely the knowledge garnered from the effects of God in the world is second hand by comparison with knowledge coming directly from God. No, the fact that this knowledge comes to us as a completely free gift from God is not a reproach to its validity but a guarantee, a divine guarantee, of it.
Reason and the mystery of the Trinity
In general
The Trinity is a mystery; no doubt about it. Unless we had been told of its existence, we would never have suspected such a thing. Moreover, now that we know that there is a Trinity, we cannot understand it. The man who attempts to unravel the mystery is in the position of a near-sighted man straining his eyes from the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a glimpse of Spain. We cannot probe the depths of the ocean of divinity with the foot-rule of the human intellect.
It may feel grand to adopt a righteously indignant attitude against mysteries, snatch up a hatchet and sally forth as a crusader dedicated to smashing the dark windows behind which mystery carries on its revels. But why not start the crusade at home? Long before we have finished in nature, our hatchet will be dulled, our arm fatigued, our soul humbled enough to see that there are undreamed of truths in this world; undreamable truths in the world of divinity. What, for instance, do we know of electricity beyond the fact that it works and something of how it works? There is very much to be explained about radio beyond the mysterious selection of the dogged entertainers who use it as a medium of slipping into our houses. Over and above the realization that a red light gives us a choice between stopping our car and accepting a ticket, we know that it involves some 130,000,000 vibrations a second; but that is not much help. A culture developed from the brain or spinal cord of a mad dog will arrest the development of rabies; but no one knows why. And so on. yet we are surprised, indignantly surprised, that the divinity should propose truths beyond the capacities of our minds!
Ordinary common sense should tell us that this is a natural concomitant of the inevitable limitations of our nature. A small cup can hold only so much water; not the whole ocean. Our eyes can see only so much of the spectrum, not all of it, they can take in only so much light under pain of blindness; there are rays of light invisible to our eyes, sounds inaudible to our ears we take these limitations for granted. As our eyes are only human eyes, our ears only human ears, so our intellects are only human intellects; there are truths we cannot know by those intellects.
When such truths are made known to us by a superior intellect, there is not much we can do with them. Certainly we cannot prove them; we have little result from attempting to probe them; we can show they are not violations of reason, that is that they do not involve contradictions, and we can dig up a few clumsy illustrations. Thus, for instance, we can show that the idea of three persons in one nature is not inconceivable, it is not the contradictory statement that the same thing is at the same time one and three. As a matter of fact, the exclusion of this often alleged contradiction against the truth of the Trinity is absurdly simple; all it involves is the manifestation of the fact that there is a distinction between person and nature. In the construction of a cross-word puzzle, the principle by which the puzzle was drawn up is a human nature, but the principle who drew up the puzzle was John Jones. The first answers the question why such a thing was possible -- - no other nature engages in such activities; the second answers the question who did the work involved. The distinction is fairly obvious from a normal man's resentment of the inference that he is any less identically human than any other man as contrasted with his assured knowledge that there is no identity between his person and the person of any other man who has ever existed.
In the mystery of the Trinity, the persons are distinct from each other; but each one is identical with the divine nature, Here the question is not one of conceptual possibility -- - assured by our perception of the distinction of person and nature in the world about us -- but of fact. Is this not a violation of the mathematical principle that two things equal to a third are equal to each other? The Father is not distinct from the divine nature, the Son is not distinct from the divine nature: therefore the Father is not distinct from the Son. The revealed truth is that though Father and Son are not distinct from the divine nature, they are distinct from each other; nor does that truth violate the mathematical principle in question here. Perhaps we can see the root of the confusion if we reflect that the qualities of action and passion are the same as immanent, but not the same as each other; for example, a blow in the face as given and the blow as received are the same as immanent, i.e. at the point of contact, but they are certainly distinct from each other under their own proper and formal conception. The Son, precisely as Son, is distinct from the Father, precisely as Father; though both are identical with the divine nature.
By way of illustration we hit upon such clumsy things as the merging of three flames into a single flame; the light of a candle, which is red, yellow and blue, yet one light; or the trunk of a tree springing from the roots and the fruit coming from both root and trunk, yet all three make up one tree. These are clumsy examples, examples that limp so badly that they are a hindrance, rather than a help, to the tranquillity of our restless intellects. As has been insisted throughout this chapter, human reason cannot get much done with truths that are entirely proper to the mind of God. Perhaps the best procedure, in dealing with the Trinity, would be to single out the basic theological terms, subject them to analysis and illustration, so that we might be able to achieve an accurate statement of the mystery and maintain our slender intellectual foothold on the flowering truth of three divine persons in one divine nature.
Basis of the distinction of persons -- the processions
These basic terms, which enter into the very revelation of the mystery, can be reduced to three: processions of origin, subsistent relations, and person. Examining each of these in order we shall at least come to a knowledge of what the mystery of the Trinity does not involve and of what, therefore, we are precisely to believe in believing that mystery.
By faith we know that the Son proceeds from the Father, the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son; that is, the Father is the principle of the Son, the Father and Son are one principle of the Holy Ghost. To have distinction we must have difference; and, since there is no difference whatever on the side of nature -- - the three Persons having the numerically same divine nature -- - the sole possibility of difference lies in the processions of one person from another. To our way of thinking, a principle is the cause of a thing. We cannot comprehend how one Person can proceed from another without depending in some way or another. This is precisely the heart of the mystery; this is precisely what we shall never understand. But we can understand the meaning of the statement: the Father is not the cause of the Son, nor are the Father and Son the cause of the Holy Ghost. This is what we are to believe. There can be no relation of causality between the divine Persons for this would destroy the truth that they are all divine. The word "principle" is used because it signifies an order of origin in an absolute way, without determining a particular mode that would be foreign to the origin of the divine Persons. In a word, this term "principle" is invaluable because of its indefiniteness, because it hides a truth we cannot understand, shading our eyes from its splendor; it does not distort that truth.
Procession, here, is not to be understood in the sense in which a word proceeds from a man's mouth to wander up and down the world, but, analogically, as an idea proceeds from the mind of a man but stays in his head. The divine processions are not processions to the outside but within divinity itself, with all that perfection of immanency that is uniquely God's.
Procession, then, in God is not as it is in the lowest creatures, that is, either by way of local movement or by way of cause proceeding to exterior effects. Rather it is in the order of the most perfect activity in its most perfect form, intellectual activity. In this order, what proceeds is not necessarily distinct from its source; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds, the more closely it is one with its source, for the more perfect it is, the more immanent it is. The faith teaches us there are two of these processions in God: that of generation, by which the Son proceeds from the Father; and that of spiration, by which the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as from a common principle. We shall touch upon these again at a somewhat greater length later on in this chapter.
Reality of the relations set up by the processions
The point to be noted here is that these two processions set up relationships in God: the double relationship of paternity and filiation arising from generation; and the double relationship of active and passive spiration arising from the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son. In our human order, a relation arising, say, from the anthropological classification of a man as Alpine, Mediterranean or Nordic, is purely a thing of the mind, a relation of reason; for it does not arise from the principles of the same nature. On the contrary, a man's relations to his end, to his acts, to his Creator are all real relations, arising from the very principles of his nature. A visitor to Washington, however short his stay, will certainly see the massive pillars of the Supreme Court building. By his glance at those pillars, a relation is set up between him and the pillars; on the side of the pillars that relation is a relation of reason, for the nature of pillars does not give rise to the relation brought about by being seen. In the divine order, the relations of paternity, filiation, active and passive spiration are real, not rational, relations, arising from the numerically same divine nature. As real they are distinct terms: paternity is not the same as filiation, nor is active spiration the same as passive spiration. They are real, they are intimately opposed, and, as entirely distinct from any relation in the created world, they subsist. The opposing relationships constitute the three divine persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Only by such opposition of origin is there distinction in divine things; there are then, not four, but three divine persons since there is no opposition between active spiration and the relations set up by generation.
All this is, of course, impossible to understand. The whole purpose of this exposition was not to make the mystery intelligible but rather to make clear wherein the mystery lies that our faith might embrace it. Nevertheless, our intellects are a restless, rowdy, independent lot; they chafe under the restraint of the incomprehensible, even though that restraint in reality be a release from the chains of the natural into the unsuspected freedom of the truths proper to God. The irritation is far from logical; but it is none the less quite universally human. If we can get some little grip on a mystery, even though it is by no more than our finger-nails, we feel very much better. It was perhaps in recognition of this childish stubbornness which is so common a human weakness that God moved men to conceive the most celebrated illustration of the trinity.
The classical illustration
It is to be remembered, however, that this is only an illustration; it is not to be taken literally, univocally. It limps because it compares the divine to the human; but it does give us that finger-nail grip so necessary to pride. It goes like this. Life is activity. In the created world, it is a process of change, a process of attaining perfection or of using perfection attained. But throughout its keynote is immanency. The more perfect the immanency, the more perfect the life. The highest life, and consequently the most immanent activity, we know is intellectual. Coming to the absolutely perfect life of God, we can expect activity, the highest, the most perfect activity; hence activity of the most sublime immanency. Both from the fact of the perfection of the immanency of this activity and from the fact that God is pure intelligence, we can expect that His activity is intellectual activity, of which there are, to talk in our human fashion, only two principles: the intellect and the will.
The entirely immanent activity, then, from the side of the intellect of God, will be the knowledge of God, God knowing Himself. This knowledge depends in no way on anything or anyone outside of divinity, it is not measured; it proceeds to a term -- - God known -- - which is utterly perfect because utterly immanent. God knowing Himself is the principle from which proceeds the eternal Word of God, God known.
On the side of the will, which in us follows on knowledge, there is the eternal and immanent act of God's love. God, eternally knowing Himself perfectly with sublime immanence, generates the eternal Word, the Son, the perfection of the Father; the eternal and immanent breath of love of the Son for the Father and the Father for the Son is the Holy Ghost, the sign of divine love that subsists. The perfect immanency of these acts insists that no one of these three is distinct from the divine essence but entirely identical with it; the opposition of the relationships insists that they are distinct one from another. They are one God and three divine persons: consubstantial, coeternal, coequal.
The divine persons
Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not called persons by a kind of poetic license; this is not figurative speech. They are persons. This is one point we can see clearly by clarifying our own notion of what a person is, shearing away the accidentals that the essential might stand out. A person, to put it as briefly as possible, is an individual intellectual substance, whatever kind of intellectual substance or in whatever way distinguished from other persons of the same nature; thus there are human persons, angelic persons, divine persons. The human person subsists in a human nature and is distinguished from all other human persons in the way proper to human nature, that is by signate matter; an angelic person subsists in an angelic nature and is distinguished from all other angelic persons in the way proper to angelic nature, that is, by a specific distinction; a divine person subsists in a divine nature and is distinguished from other divine persons in the way proper to divinity, that is, by the opposition of the relations of origin.
Sometimes we give these divine persons names that belong to them by reason of their divine nature; such names, for instance, as almighty, good, merciful. These names belong, not to any one person, but to all three for the numerically identical divine nature is common to all three. At other times, we address the divine persons by names that belong to them, not by reason of the divine nature, but by reason of the opposition of the relations of origin; such names, for instance, as Father, Son, Holy Ghost. These are completely proper names: the name of the Son cannot be given to the Holy Ghost, for title to it is by the relation of filiation which is proper to the Son alone. It is worth noting that when we say the "Our Father" we are addressing the whole Trinity, not merely the first Person; for God is our Father, not by the eternal generation of the Son, but by creation which, like all external operations, is common to the three Persons.
One of the most reassuring things about the mystery of the Trinity is its incomprehensibility. It is grand to have so concrete an assurance that our minds do not tell the whole glorious story of intelligence, that the crumbs of truth we amass so laboriously are only crumbs, not the sum total of truth's banquet, that the feeble glow which hardly lights up a path for our own steps is not the light of the world. The concrete assurance of this incomprehensibility comes to the solitary human mind like the comfort of a lost child's discovery of its parents; with a joy too big for words and too deep for laughter, with rekindled hopes and the utter, unquestioning, eager surrender of faith.
Conclusion
Some children, however, seem to have been born disillusioned. Someone has told them the truth about Santa Claus and now they spend their days in pouting. They are determined to be happy with the introduction to the story of intelligence, to be surfeited with the crumbs of truth, to light up the world with the match they have just blown out. They will get along without God and His incomprehensible mysteries, above all they will have nothing to do with the Trinity. Yet they never quite make their renunciation stick. Though they abolish God and the Trinity, they make a travesty on the divinity and the divine persons.
