Jesus is our Savior, because of his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead. In him, the Father has reconciled us to himself, and through him he has given us his Spirit, which makes us children of God, partakers of the divine nature.
Jesus can save us through his death on the cross, because he is the Son of God, and therefore, true God and true man, Mediator between God and men. And the Holy Spirit can divinize us, because he is God like the Father and the Son, who proceeds from them, and has been sent by them into our hearts.
Through this free and supernatural divinization, we become adopted children of God, but Jesus is the only, natural, eternal Son of the Father, true God like the Father and the Holy Spirit.
The mystery of our salvation and the mystery of the Holy Trinity are, in a certain sense, one and the same. The Good News, the Gospel, is that the Father has sent his Son into the world, made man, so that through his death and Resurrection he may grant us the gift of the Holy Spirit, who makes us children of God, “sons in the Son,” as Saint Paul says, and brothers among us.
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not die but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).”The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5,5)
In what follows, we will try to show how what we believe about the Divinity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit is not opposed either to the unity and uniqueness of God, nor to the real distinction of the three divine Persons among themselves, nor, therefore, to human reason.
Jesus is the Son of the Father; therefore, he is a Person distinct from the Father, to whom he can speak as « you ». And the Father is God. Jesus, then, who is the Son of the Father, is the Son of God and therefore is God as the Father is God: just as the son of a man is a man, so the Son of God is God.
Now, God is only One, He is Unique, there can be only One God.”Listen, Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is One.”God is the Infinite, and the Infinite can only be One, since two infinities would limit each other and would no longer be infinite.
Therefore, Jesus and the Father are two Persons, and they are two divine Persons, and they are two divine Persons truly distinct from each other, but they are also One true God. And the same thing happens with the Holy Spirit: he is a divine Person distinct from the Father and the Son, and for that very reason, he is One God with the Father and the Son. That is the adorable mystery of the Holy Trinity.
There is no contradiction, because we affirm the Unity on the plane of Divinity or divine Nature, and we affirm the Trinity on the plane of the divine Persons. One and three are said at the same time, but not in the same sense. But there is mystery, incomprehensible to our intelligence. Each divine Person possesses Divinity in its entirety, not part of it, because the Father is not God in part, but totally, and so are the Son and the Holy Spirit. And Divinity is one, numerically speaking, just as this table on which I write is one. And yet the Father is not the Son, and the Father and the Son are not the Holy Spirit.
This is not the case among us humans, because although we are all different human persons who possess the same human nature, and there we can see a certain vestige and like a shadow of the Trinitarian Mystery, but in our case, each different human person is a different man or woman, while in God, the Three divine Persons really different from each other are not three gods, but One true God, who is blessed forever.
This incomprehensible mystery is therefore not achievable by human reason alone, it is not rationally demonstrable, it cannot be known by demonstration of human reason alone. It can only be accessed by faith in the historical Revelation that God has made of himself and his plan of salvation in Jesus Christ and that he communicates to us through the preaching of his Church.
It is not surprising that there are mysteries in God that surpass our ability to understand; rather, it would be very surprising if finite intelligence could fully understand the Infinite. As Saint Augustine says: “If you understand, it is not God.”
That is why Jesus says:
“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding, and have revealed them to the little ones. Yes, Father, because it pleased you. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to make him known.”(Luke 10, 21-22)
No one knows the Father, except the Son, and therefore, no one can know the mystery of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, if the Son himself made man, Jesus Christ Our Lord, does not reveal it to him, and if he does not accept that revelation with faith in the Word of Jesus, which is the Word of God. And it is the “little ones”, that is, those who do not rely superbly on their own reason or their own wisdom, who are the only ones who can receive this Revelation and this Word of God in faith.
Now, assuming faith in the revealed Trinitarian mystery, a glimpse to try to understand to a certain extent at least how that can be possible, is given to us by the fact already brilliantly pointed out by the Fathers of the Church, that the names of “Father” and “Son” are names of relationship. As one of them said, saying “Father” is already implicitly naming the Son, and saying “Son” is already implicitly naming the Father. They are mutually relative notions, that is, they are only understood in relation to each other.
These relationships are relationships of origin. From all eternity, the Father begets the Son, communicating to him the totality of the divine Essence or Nature, without losing anything of it, and the Son proceeds from the Father in the identity of that same divine Nature that he eternally receives from Him.
And from all eternity, the Father and the Son « spirate », as theologians say, the Holy Spirit, communicating to him the totality of the divine Nature without losing anything of it; and the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from them, eternally receiving from them that same fullness of Divinity.
That is, from the fact that the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Son is therefore begotten and eternally proceeds from the Father, it follows that there is a relationship from the Father to the Son as from begetter to begotten, and from the Son to the Father as from begotten to begetter. The first is the relationship of Paternity, and the second is the relationship of Filiation.
And also from all eternity there is in the Father and the Son a relation to the Holy Spirit that theologians call « active spiration », and a relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son that they call « passive spiration » or « procession ».
These processions, which ground the relations of origin among the divine Persons, are themselves grounded in the divine operations. God is eminently active. His activity is identified with his being, as are his operative principles, his Intellect and his Will. Divine activity consists in knowledge and love, above all in God’s knowledge and love of himself.
Now, through intellectual knowledge there proceeds in us, in our intelligence, a conception of the thing known, a “mental verb” or “inner word”, which our intelligence produces from experience. But faith tells us that in God there is also a Word. Then, we can conclude that in God there is also an intellectual procession through which the Word exists (“..and the Word was in God”).
But in God, due to divine Simplicity, there can be nothing that is not identified with the divine Essence. Therefore, the Word is God himself (“…and the Word was God”). And yet, there must be a real distinction between what comes from something, and what it comes from, since nothing can really come from itself. Therefore, the Word must be distinct from the Father.
The “generation” of the Son, then, in God, consists of the interior, intellectual “diction” of the Word, who is the Son of God insofar as he is “conceived” (conceptum, hence our term “concept”) by the divine Intelligence, by way of similarity with the divine Essence, which is what is proper to intellectual knowledge.
And for the same reason, from the divine Will, that is, from the love that God, knowing Himself, has of Himself, the Holy Spirit must proceed, which, since love presupposes knowledge, proceeds not only from the Father, but also from the Son, and since, although it receives identically the same divine Essence, for the same reason that in God there can be nothing that is not identified with that Essence, nevertheless, it does not receive it by way of similarity as is the nature of intellectual knowledge,For this reason he is not the Son, as the Word is.
And since there are no more operations “ad intra” in God than those of knowledge and love, there are also no more than three divine Persons in God.
But from this it follows that the divine Persons are nothing other than those same relations with which they relate to each other.
Because we only know this about the Father: that he is God, and that he is Father, that he has the divine nature, and that he has the personality, so to speak, of the Father. This paternal “personality” is constituted by the relationship of Paternity to the Son, but furthermore, it cannot be constituted by anything other than this relationship.
Because the “other” thing that we know there is in the Father, in addition to the paternity relationship, is the divine Nature, which is common to the Three Persons. Therefore, the only thing that can distinguish each other and constitute the three Persons as distinct Persons are the relationships they have with each other.
In effect, it is not just a question of one Person with three different relations, which could then be thought to be the divine Essence with three relations, but of three different Persons related to each other, who then no longer have more than the same relations to constitute themselves as such truly distinct Persons.
Therefore, being a Father in God is nothing other than the same relationship of “fatherhood.”The Person of the Father is nothing other than that relationship of Fatherhood towards the Son, and the Person of the Son is nothing other than that relationship of Filiation towards the Father. And the Holy Spirit is nothing other than that relationship of “Procession” to the Father and the Son.
These divine relations are therefore “subsistent”, that is, they do not have a subject in which they exist other than themselves, but rather they are subsistent by themselves, as they are truly identified with the only divine Essence.
In fact, what is characteristic of real relationship is to really distinguish related things from each other. It is not possible for there to be a real relationship of a thing with itself, because the relationship essentially says “alterity”, “otherness”, we would say, that is, a relationship to another, precisely, to something different. Therefore, the relationship essentially implies an opposition between its subject and its term, in the sense that they cannot be the same thing: we call the “subject” of a relationship that which is related to something, and we call the “term” of the relationship that something to which the subject is related.
When we say that John is Peter’s father, we are saying that John is the subject, and Peter the term, of that “fatherhood” relationship;Their roles are not interchangeable, you cannot be father and son under the same paternity relationship, for example;One cannot be the father of oneself or the son of oneself, one cannot be the subject and term of the same real relationship.
Therefore, in the case of friendship, for example, when John is a friend of Pedro and Pedro is a friend of John, these are two different real relationships of friendship: one, which has John as subject, and Pedro as term, and another, which has Pedro as subject, and John as term. And nothing takes away from this the fact that friendship is a relationship that requires reciprocity and that does not exist if the reciprocal relationship does not exist on the other party: I cannot be John’s friend if John is not my friend.
Thus the Fathers and the Councils came to establish this Trinitarian maxim: “In God everything is one and the same, where the opposition of relationship does not hinder”, that is, the relative opposition that exists between the subject and the term of the same relationship. Only this can and does introduce real distinction and real plurality in God.
This means that the divine relations, that is, the divine Persons, are only really distinguished from each other, because they only have relative opposition to each other: they are not really distinguished from the One and absolute Essence, because with it they have no opposition of relation.
They are really identified with the one subsistent divine Essence and are therefore subsistent relations, without a subject distinct from themselves; they need none, since they are identified with the subsistent and absolute Essence. This is why the Persons can be identified with their mutual relations: they are not a subject distinct from those same relations.
And that is also why each Person-relation is totally and fully identified with the one subsistent divine Essence—that is, is God—while at the same time being really distinct from the other divine Persons-relations.
Thus, in God unity and uniqueness belong to the side of Nature or Essence, which is one, absolute and subsistent, while plurality and distinction belong to the side of the relations, that is, the Persons. There is, therefore, no contradiction; there is Mystery: an excess, a superabundance of light, which only the limitation of our created intelligence turns into darkness.
This is why, finally, there are in God three divine Persons really distinct from one another, even though there are four relations of origin: Paternity, Filiation, « active spiration », and « passive spiration » or « procession ». For only between Paternity and Filiation, on the one hand, is there relative opposition, and between active and passive spiration, on the other; whereas between Paternity and active spiration, or Filiation and active spiration, there is no relative opposition and hence no real distinction: active spiration is the same Paternity and the same Filiation, that is, the Father and the Son considered not insofar as they are opposed to each other as Father and Son, but insofar as they are one origin of the Holy Spirit. Thus there remain in God only three relations really distinct from one another: Paternity, Filiation, and passive spiration or Procession. That is, three divine Persons really distinct from one another: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Thus we can finally face the most acute objection that is directed against the Christian faith in the Trinity, and that is based on the “principle of comparative identity”, which says that “two things identical to a third, are identical to each other.”On this basis, some reason thus: if two things identical with a third are identical with each other, then, if the Father and the Son are really identical with the divine Essence, as Christians confess, they must be really identical with each other, thereby destroying faith in the Trinity.
To answer this objection, one must first note that, although the Persons are really identical with the divine Essence, they are conceptually distinct from it—or, as the scholastics say, distinct not really but by a distinction of reason founded in reality. Indeed, the notion of « God » does not necessarily include the notion of « Paternity »: otherwise the Son, because he is God, would also be Father. Paternity, Filiation, and passive spiration or Procession necessarily flow from the divine Nature, since God would not be God if he were not Trinity; yet none of them, taken separately, constitutes a defining element of that Nature except precisely in its mutual relation with the others.
This means that the identity between the Persons and the Essence, being real, is however not absolute or in all aspects. Now, if the principle of comparative identity is necessarily valid in the case in which said identity of the two things with the third is absolute, when it is not, another distinction must be made: either between the things that are identical to a third there is relative opposition, or there is none.
If there is not, the principle of comparative identity also applies without exception, that is, two things identical to a third, although they are actually identical and not conceptually, are really identical to each other. For example, Josephine’s husband and the Emperor of France were two things conceptually different from each other, but really identical, because both were really identified with the person of Napoleon.
But if between things that are identical to a third but conceptually different from it, there is also relative opposition, as happens in the case of the divine Persons, which are really identical and conceptually different with respect to the divine Essence, and furthermore, relationally opposed to each other, then the principle of comparative identity does not apply there: these Persons must be really different from each other, since, as we saw above, it would be contradictory for there to be real identity between the subject and the term of the same relationship, since the relationship is essentially”to another” (ad aliud).
And this distinction cannot be objected to with the principle of comparative identity itself, because that principle is precisely what has been distinguished through this distinction. But then, there is no way to show that the doctrine set forth by this distinction is contradictory.
May God then bless these poor reflections and those who meditate on them, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Author: Lic. Néstor Martínez
Source: revistafeyrazon.wordpress.com
