Three in One: The Great Mystery of Love
The wife kissed her husband as he entered the home and gently said, “I Love you.” He quickly replied with a look of affection, “I love you too.” As a husband and wife grow in love, their love for each other deepens, not only due to their shared experiences, but also because each one comes to an understanding of their own and each other’s imperfections and accepts them. No, they do not fully understand or penetrate into the other’s total self: it is part of the mystery which will forever be outside of their comprehension. Yet it is a mystery that continually intrigues and stimulates each other; making their love the biggest mystery….a wonderful, creative mystery. Writers and poets throughout history have attempted to penetrate the mystery of love in order to define it….but with only fleeting glimpses at the reality of love. Love is still a mystery, despite all of the efforts of mankind to define it. It is the undefinable, yet indispensable, wonderful mystery of mankind.
While human love can be mystifying, unintelligible, and often baffling, though nearly always uplifting, man can occasionally grasp much of its content and witness it in action. However, the love that permeates the Holy Trinity….the Father,Son, and Holy Spirit….stops mankind cold with wonder and mystery. The Holy Trinity is indeed the great mystery of love; it is beyond man’s limited intellectual abilities to fully comprehend the love within the Holy Trinity. Yet man is able to comprehend some aspects of the Holy Trinity because God, through Jesus Christ, taught us about the existence of the Holy Trinity. It is then expected that God would provide man with some insight into the nature of life and love as it exists in the Trinity.
The natures of God and man differ. Mankind’s nature is rational, limited in time and space, material and spiritual, able to create (generate) its own kind through the physical actions of the man and woman; the generated being bears the same nature as the man and woman, in that, it is material and spiritual, rational, and limited. A being generates it own kind. As it is also true with God who is personal, unlimited, timeless, eternal, intellectual, a single unity, unchangeable, complete in everything, and loving. God’s son will possess all the same capabilities as God the Father, including love.
St. Thomas Aquinas succinctly compares the creation of a human with the generation of God’s Son in his “Reasons for the Faith Against Muslim Objections.”
“For any wise man can observe that the mode of generation is not the same for everything, but generation applies to each thing according to the special manner of its nature. In animals it is by copulation of male and female; in plants it is by pollination or generation, and in other things in other ways. God, however, is not of a fleshly nature, requiring a woman to copulate to generate offspring, but he is of spiritual or intellectual nature, much higher than every intellectual nature.
Even though our own intellect falls far short of the divine intellect, we still have to speak of the divine intellect by comparing it with what we find in our own intellect. To be a son, it is required that the one coming forth from the other must not only resemble its source but also be of the same nature with it. But in God understanding is not different from his being.
So the Word he conceives by his essence, when he understands himself and everything else, is as great as his essence. It is therefore perfect, simple, and equal to God. We call this Word of God a Son because he is of the same nature with the Father, only begotten and perfect.
In humans love comes from two different sources. Sometimes it comes from a bodily and material principle, which is impure love, since it disturbs the purity of the mind. Sometimes it comes from a pure spiritual principle, as when we love intelligible goods and what is in accord with reason; this is pure love. God cannot have a material love. Therefore we fittingly call his love not simply Spirit, but the Holy Spirit, since holiness refers to his purity.”
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, the influential 20th century theologian, commented in his Meditations on the Apostles Creed, “Credo,” that the Holy Spirit is “an incomprehensive Someone who is someone Other than the Father and the son and whose characteristic task will be to work in a divinely free way from within the humanly free spirit, revealing to our limited minds the depths of God that he has explored.” Von Balthasar added that the Holy Spirit will assist us to “undergo initiation by him into the mystery that God is love and through him we can readily learn what love is.”
Yes. it is true to identify the Holy Trinity as a mystery and it is equally true that this mystery is beyond’s man’s very limited intellectual capabilities to totally comprehend it, but, thanks to Jesus Christ, man can begin to inquire into God’s nature and to capture at least a glimpse of His nature. Man’s final destination is to become united with God; thus man has good reason to seek out the true nature of God and prepare himself for his meeting with God, the source of all Love.
Suggested Readings:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Rationes.htm Thomas Aquinas discusses the Holy Trinity in his reply on “Reasons for the Faith Against the Muslim Objections.” Chapters 4 and 5 (The document is quite short and layman friendly; it is well worth one’s time to read it.)
“Credo” by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Subtitle “Meditations on the Apostles’ Creed.
“Theology and Sanity” by Frank Sheed. Chapters 6,7,8,9 Sheed discusses the Holy Trinity at some length.
“Introduction to Christianity” by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) Chapter 5, “Belief in the One Triune God.”
“The Faith Explained”, by Leo Trese. Chapter 3, “The Unity and Trinity of God.”