{"id":16886,"date":"2016-08-27T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2016-08-27T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=16886"},"modified":"2016-11-21T16:48:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:48:44","slug":"reflections-on-the-trinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2016\/08\/27\/reflections-on-the-trinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the Trinity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trinitarian God is of course essentially and permanently mysterious. We cannot grasp\u00a0or comprehend the Divine Persons in this life, nor even in the life to come: Heaven indeed\u00a0promises us an unparalleled intimacy with Them, but this intimacy will not arise from the\u00a0fact that we<\/em> will encompass Them<\/em>, but rather from the fact that They<\/em> will encompass us<\/em>.\u00a0We will not see the Trinity as we see an object<\/em>, as a reality outside us that we can measure\u00a0and survey. Rather we shall see the Divine Persons in a way that resembles how we see\u00a0our very selves here and now, we shall relate to them somewhat as we relate here and now\u00a0to our own lives, which are too intimate to be an object, too enveloping of us ever to be\u00a0measured. For the life that we will be leading in Heaven will not be our<\/em> life, as something\u00a0apart from the Trinity, but will be a participation in the very life of the Trinity Itself. More\u00a0precisely, we will be living by participation in the Son, in His relation to the Father in the\u00a0unity of the Holy Spirit. We will not, then, be grasping or comprehending<\/em> the Divine\u00a0Persons, but rather we will be living in<\/em> and through<\/em> Them.<\/p>\n

Not even the intimacy of heaven, then, will abolish Trinitarian mystery. At the same time,\u00a0however, this mystery, the Trinitarian incomprehensibility<\/em>, does not mean that the\u00a0Trinity is completely unintelligible<\/em>, something about which nothing can be thought or\u00a0said. On the contrary, the mystery of Trinitarian life is an excess of intelligibility, offering\u00a0not too little<\/em> to think or say but too much<\/em>: whatever we receive, there is always more to\u00a0come, whatever shows itself is never shown exhaustively, because it is infinite and\u00a0therefore inexhaustibly rich. Some theologians go as far as to say that the mystery of the\u00a0Trinity is an inexhaustible richness even to the Divine Persons themselves. Whether or\u00a0not we want to say this, however, the Trinitarian plenitude is certainly inexhaustible to us.\u00a0The life of heaven, in which we share in the Son\u2019s relation to the Father in the Spirit, will\u00a0therefore be a filial life, a life of infinite abundance, and therefore of endless discovery.<\/p>\n

Now this idea of endless discovery<\/em> is, of course, an evocation of movement<\/em>, of travel<\/em>, of a\u00a0dynamic process. And if this truly characterizes the vision of the Trinity -\u00ad the gift of\u00a0participating in Trinitarian life itself \u00ad then the implication is that Trinitarian life must\u00a0Itself be dynamic: not static and serenely immobile, but alive, in act<\/em>, in fact eternal\u00a0activity<\/em>. And this is indeed what the revelation of the Trinity discloses to us.<\/p>\n

To see this, think of the words we use in speaking of the Triune God. We say, for example,\u00a0that the Father begets<\/em> or generates<\/em> the Son, and we say that the Father and the Son\u00a0breathe forth the Spirit<\/em>, Who accordingly proceeds<\/em> from Them. Now these, and other\u00a0such terms, seem to speak \u00ad mysteriously of course -\u00ad of events<\/em>, of something like unfolding\u00a0patterns<\/em>, of relations<\/em> of exchange constituting a back and forth of giving<\/em> and receiving<\/em>, of\u00a0offering<\/em> and being offered<\/em>. And what this, in turn, suggests is that the Divine Persons can\u00a0truly be conceived as something like activity<\/em>, and in fact that they can be truly conceived\u00a0only<\/em> in this way. The Trinity manifests to us not that God simply is<\/em> \u00ad- like an eternal\u00a0monument, impassively self\u00adcontained and unyielding. It manifests that, in God, to be<\/em> is\u00a0to happen<\/em>, not in mere existence<\/em> but above all in life<\/em>. The Triune God is an eternally\u00a0inexhaustible vitality<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In speaking in this way of the Trinity -\u00ad as event<\/em>, as happening<\/em>, as activity<\/em> or vitality<\/em> -\u00ad we\u00a0are speaking of God Himself, as He is in<\/em> Himself, without any reference to creation. This\u00a0is worth emphasizing, because we might easily slip into thinking that such ways of\u00a0speaking only become appropriate and meaningful when we come to reflect on God\u2019s\u00a0entry into the world<\/em>, when the Son takes flesh and dwells among us. We might think this\u00a0because it seems to be only in worldly terms, in terms of time and space, that categories\u00a0like \u2018event\u2019, \u2018happening\u2019 and \u2018activity\u2019 make sense. This, in turn, might be thought to imply\u00a0that the Trinity Itself, outside of time and space, must therefore be entirely free of such\u00a0categories. But I think this would be a mistake.<\/p>\n

For what does it mean, to say that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us? It means,\u00a0of course, that One of the Divine Persons, the Son, manifested Himself in worldly terms,\u00a0in terms of time and space. But it means more than that. Not only the Son is manifested,\u00a0but also the Father and the Spirit. This is because the Son, in His flesh, draws them into\u00a0view<\/em>: from the world He draws them into<\/em> the world -\u00ad not as incarnate, of course, but as\u00a0Persons to Whom He, the Incarnate One, in His worldly existence, most intimately\u00a0relates. In the Incarnation, accordingly, the whole Trinity is in fact manifested in the\u00a0world, appearing according to the conditions of space and time.<\/p>\n

But we have to ask, nonetheless, how this is possible. How can the life of the world receive\u00a0the revelation of the Trinity, how can it bear the weight of expressing the Trinitarian\u00a0mystery? The answer, I think, is that the life of the world can do this because worldly life\u00a0originates<\/em> in the life of the Trinity. In other words, worldly life, in worldly time and space,\u00a0are not realities alien<\/em> to Trinitarian life, but are reflections<\/em> of it -\u00ad albeit finite<\/em> reflections,\u00a0but nonetheless truly mirroring something of the eternal and inexhaustible vitality of the\u00a0Trinitarian Persons themselves. The time and space of the world are able to express the\u00a0Trinity, then, only because, in Trinitarian life Itself, there exists something corresponding\u00a0to them, in other words an eternal time and space<\/em> in which the life of the Divine Persons\u00a0Themselves unfolds. For this reason, the world is able provide a language<\/em> which, in and\u00a0through the Incarnation, the Trinitarian Persons can use to speak of Themselves. This is\u00a0possible only because the Trinity is Itself superabundant vitality and activity -\u00ad a vitality\u00a0and activity in which, according to the gifts of creation and sanctification, the world is\u00a0enabled to share.<\/p>\n

But finally we also need to ask what kind of activity the Trinity is<\/em>. What does the Trinity\u00a0do<\/em>, what is that eternal vitality which, in and through the Incarnation, comes down from\u00a0heaven to show itself on earth? The answer that the New Testament gives is that the\u00a0Trinity is the activity of Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n

God is Love, St John tells us. It is worth reflecting, however, that this couldn\u2019t be true if\u00a0God were merely One<\/em>. St John means that God is Love in Himself<\/em>, not merely because He\u00a0loves the world: on the contrary, He loves the world only because He Himself is Love. But\u00a0if God were merely One, He couldn\u2019t Himself be Love, for then there would be no-\u00adone but\u00a0Himself to love, and what we call self-\u00adlove isn\u2019t in fact Love at all, because Love requires\u00a0an otherness<\/em> to oneself, a going out of oneself<\/em> in the direction of another. So the solitude\u00a0of the Divine One couldn\u2019t be Love; but what the Trinity shows us is that Divine life isn\u2019t\u00a0solitude, but rather communion, a union of Persons, of Father and Son and Spirit, Who,\u00a0in Their interrelations, make a unity which, alone, is the One God.<\/p>\n

It is essential that we see that this is the correct way to think of it. God isn\u2019t first<\/em> One and\u00a0then<\/em> Three, but rather He is Three, in Love, and therefore<\/em> He is One. Divine Oneness,\u00a0Divine unity, is the Oneness and Unity of Love, and nothing else. In the Trinity, no\u00a0Oneness exists prior to or even alongside the Oneness of the inter\u00ad-relatedness of Father,\u00a0Son and Spirit. And each Person<\/em> is God, and God is, only in virtue of their inter-relatedness. This inter-relatedness is Love \u00ad and so, other than as Love, God is\u00a0unthinkable.<\/p>\n

This in turn means that everything else we attribute to God -\u00ad for example, His Power, His\u00a0Wisdom, His Justice \u00ad- has to be seen in the form of Love, as founded in Love, expressing\u00a0Love and ordered to Love. We do not, perhaps, always remember this. Too often, perhaps,\u00a0Christians have tended to imagine Divine Power, for example, or Divine Justice, in\u00a0abstraction from the Love which is, in fact, its only foundation and meaning. In truth,\u00a0Christian Faith can permit itself no other image of God than Love -\u00ad the Love which is the\u00a0eternal activity of the Divine Persons, from which the world originates, and into which it\u00a0is called to return.<\/p>\n

By Fr Philip Cleevely, Cong. Orat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trinitarian God is of course essentially and permanently mysterious. We cannot grasp\u00a0or comprehend the Divine Persons in this life, nor even in the life to come: Heaven indeed\u00a0promises us…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16887,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Trinity-cropped.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8brX6-4om","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16886"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16888,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16886\/revisions\/16888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}