O altitudo divitiarum sapientiae et scientiae Dei: quam incomprehensibilia sunt judicia ejus, et investigabiles viae ejus![1] O the depth of the riches of God’s wisdom and knowledge: how unfathomable are his judgments, and inscrutable his ways! “The Church also esteems the Muslims, who worship the one God, living and subsistent, merciful and omnipotent, the Creator of heaven and earth.”[2] It might surprise that this meditation commences with such a declaration from the Second Vatican Council. Yet in the current climate of widespread migration and an attendant upsurge in Islam, there is a pressing need to reinforce appreciation of the Christian creed and thereby establish the distinctions between the two faiths. The current pontiff has given an impression at Abu Dhabi that we have a belief in common with Islam. The feast of Trinity Sunday, however, brings into stark relief the truth of God’s self-disclosure in both Old and New Testaments and the necessity for seeking to better understand and revere God’s unique identity.
St Anselm described God as the “supreme being” - that Being than which no greater can be conceived, through a process of natural reasoning[3]. With St. Thomas Aquinas he taught that God’s reality can come to us from outside, guaranteed by authority. God is apprehended by way of concepts, while our thinking is dependent on the senses. One cannot comprehend the incomprehensible, yet attributes of God can be identified and pondered. The non-religious, those that doubt or deny the existence of God, must have some concept in mind of what or “who” they are denying. Even for them, the notion of God is of a supreme eternal being, the source and summit of all existence, whose characteristics can be described and analysed as not meriting belief. For those who acknowledge the existence of God, two important assumptions can be made, namely, that God cannot be separate from or uninvolved in all creation, and that God freely chose to assume a human nature to reveal this essential involvement. The Old Testament reveals that the naming of God within the tradition of Israel is “I am”. It also signals the advent of a Messiah, that God would reveal himself personally as “Emmanuel” that is “God with us”. To take a step further and ponder the two elements of the Pauline quotation above, and taking scientia, knowledge, as a starting point, we affirm that God is omniscient, in other words, all-knowing. In fact, if there were even the slightest defect or lack in his knowledge, he would not be the One whom none greater can be conceived. But reflect, that before all else, God knows himself perfectly and completely, such that there can be no skerrick of self-knowledge lacking or defective in any way. This may be termed the “self-idea” of God, which is in fact his perfect image. St Paul confirms this, describing Our Lord as: “the image of the unseen God and the first born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, everything visible and everything invisible …before anything was created, he existed”[4]. To take the concept further, an idea remains an idea until it is completed or perfected, that is, when it is expressed. What is an expressed idea other than a word? Now one can cherish more deeply the prologue of St John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. One could easily replace the noun, “word”, with “self-idea” and then the truth and beauty of this imagery becomes even more transparent as does the theology of St John. Is it any wonder that this text for so long formed the conclusion of the daily Mass? Now the Nicene Creed makes this equally explicit and splendidly clear in the Latin text: “Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum. EtexPatre natum ante omnia saecula. Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero…Et incarnatus est de Spirito SanctoexMaria virgine…” The only-begotten Son is born “ex”, out of the Father before all ages; and takes flesh “ex”, out of the virgin Mary. Jesus receives his human DNA from that of Mary and the divine nature from his being of the same substance of the Father. Equally, the Holy Spirit “quiexPatre filioque procedit…” proceeds out of the Father and the Son. By a similar line of deduction, meditating on the divine attributes of “sapientia”, wisdom, and omnipotence, what binds the begetter with the begotten is the power-bond between them which is perfect and complete, the begetting. It is a loving union because God’s power is the might of perfect love which is identical with both the lover and the beloved. G.M. Hopkins expresses this essential three-ness sublimely in terms of the Utterer, the Uttered, the Uttering.[5] God’s power and wisdom is the Expressing of Divine Love. One can only conclude that, given that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he can only be Three, and cannot be one as in Islam or Judaism. God is a Trinity of persons, “neither confusing the persons nor distinguishing the nature. …The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit possess one Godhead, equal glory and co-eternal majesty…. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, yet they are not three Gods but one God…..The Father was made by no one; the Son is from the Father only, being neither made nor created but begotten. The Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, being neither made nor created nor begotten but proceeding. Furthermore, in this Trinity there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’, no ‘greater’ or ‘less’; for all three Persons are co-eternal and co-equal.”[6] In declaring himself to be the Son of God, Jesus affirms that he is one in nature or essence with his Father: “I and the Father are one”[7]. The Jewish crowd clearly understood these words. They set out to kill him: “...we stone you for no good work but for blasphemy, and because, while you are a man, you make yourself God.”[8] This was confirmed by the Sanhedrin accusing him of manifest blasphemy: “We have a law and by that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.”[9]
The entire Christian life is Trinitarian, from the moment of baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, through daily prayer “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. This indwelling of the Holy Trinity in an individual soul is the greatest treasure imaginable. St Elizabeth of the Trinity speaks of her love of “my Three”, explaining that it is a capture in which one is plunged into God through humility. In his Holy Sonnets, John Donne could pen:
Batter my heart, three-personèd God, for You
as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend:
that I might rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new…
[1] Romans 11: 33. [2] Vat II: Nostra Aetate 3. Ecclesia cum aestimatione quoque Muslimos respicit qui unicum Deum adorant… [3] “O my soul, have you found what you are seeking? You were seeking God and you found him to be a certain highest being of all than whom a greater cannot be thought. You found this being is Life itself, light, goodness, eternal blessedness and blessed eternity and you found that this being exists everywhere and always.” Anselm, Proslogion, ch. XIV. [4] Col. 1:15-17; See also 2 Cor. 4:4; as well as Heb. 1: 3. The perfect copy of his substance (hypostaseos). [5] Poems of Gerard M. Hopkins, Appendix n. 86, p.150: “She caught the crying of those Three, The Immortals of the eternal ring, The Utterer, Utterèd, Uttering, And witness in her place would she.” [6] Extracts from the Creed of St Athanasius. [7] Jn 10: 30. Έγώ καί ό πατήρ έν έσμεν. [8] Jn 10: 33 Άπεκρίθησαν αύτψ οί Ίουδαίοι. Περί καλοϋ έργου ού λιθάζομέν σε αλλά περί βλασφημίας καί ότι σύ άνθρωπος ών ποιείς σεαυτόν θεόν. [9] Jn 19: 7. Nos legem habemus et secundum legem debet mori quia Filium Dei se fecit.
