FEAST OF THE MOST HOLY
TRINITY
2020
Father John
A. Perricone
Sometimes things are so close, we
can’t see them. Take the Holy Trinity,
for instance. It so close to everything
that constitutes reality that we fail to recognize It. The Holy Trinity surrounds us the way water
surrounds a goldfish. The mystery of the
Trinity possesses a double immersion in our life. The first is a natural one. The goodness of the Trinity penetrates every
corner of the cosmos, everything that is real.
St. Thomas elaborates: “Therefore, God is in all things by His power,
inasmuch as all things are subject to His power; He is by His presence in all
things, as all things are bare and open to His eyes; He is in all things by His
essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as their cause of their being.” God so radiates Himself through all creation,
that it prompts St. Thomas to teach that man can discover the truth of God’s
existence by allowing his reason to roam about creation and recognize Him as
the cause of all he surveys.
But the close scrutiny of reason
can never disclose the Trinity. That is
the exclusive privilege of supernatural Faith, given only by Christ’s grace. Even though a man arrives with certainty at
the knowledge of God’s existence, still, the knowledge of the Trinity would be
as far from him as the mastery of calculus is from a dog. Mere certitude in God’s existence, while
praiseworthy, furnishes scant comfort to man’s deepest yearnings. St. Cardinal Newman’s remarks after studying
St. Thomas’ Quinque Viae touches upon
this: “The only problem with the argument of God as Unmoved Mover is that it
leaves men unmoved.” Only love
moves. Herein lay the majestic sweetness
of Faith in the Trinity. Moreover, man’s
participation in that Trinitarian life through grace. You see, man can marvel at God in His
Creation through His actual graces, but man can only become a friend of God
through sanctifying grace. We don’t make
the Sign of the Cross saying, “In the name of the Creator….”. Though God is
Creator, such acknowledgment leaves us strangers to God. Rather, when we pray, “In the Name of the Father…”, we arrive at the intimacy of
love. St. Thomas’ treatise on the
Trinity, upon which the Church depends for her infallible dogmas, is
notoriously complex. To the untrained
eye, almost impenetrable. But in in his Commentary on the St. Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans, he teaches us in language more accessible:
Thus
St. Hilary says that ‘eternity is attributed to the Father; ‘appearance, or
beauty, to the Image; and use, or ‘delight’, to the Gift.’ To the Father, Who is the beginning, eternity
is attributed; to the Son, Who is called ‘Image’ (cf. Col 1:15), beauty is
attributed; to the Holy Spirit, Who is the Gift, use or enjoyment is
attributed. Hence our salvation consists
in the stability of eternity, in the beauty of the light, and in the enjoyment
of delight.
Before unpacking St. Thomas’ rich
teaching on the Trinity, Chesterton again is apposite:
…There
is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure
monotheism for the Trinity. The complex
God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far
less likely to gather the mystery of a sultan than the lonely god of Omar or
Mohammed. The god who is a mere awful
unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.
The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly
much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather around the
Trinitarian idea…the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even
in the most inmost chamber of the world.
For Western religion has always felt
keenly the idea of ‘it is not
well for man to be alone.’…So even asceticism becomes brotherly; and the
Trappist were sociable even when they were silent…For to us Trinitarians God
Himself is a society…This triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an
English fireside; this thing that bewilder the intellect utterly quiets the
heart; but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come
the cruel children of the lonely God…who with scimitar in hand have laid waste
the world. For it is not well for God to
be alone.
The Father is the Origin and
Creator, Who brings being from nothing.
But He does not dwell in isolated solitude. Not from all time, but from all eternity,
He generates His Son, distinct from Himself as Person, but one and equal to
Himself as God (cf. Nicene Creed, “…born
of the Father, before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true
God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, By Whom all things were
made.”) This part of the Mystery is
not merely daunting theology, it is the everlasting blueprint of love. Persons pour out themselves to others in the
selfless oblation of love, while still retaining the uniqueness of their
personhood. When the world loses the
force of this dogma, it freezes itself in isolation, communicates only in the language
of violence and resorts to the dark arts of manipulation. The eclipse of the Sign of the Cross consigns
man to a pantomime of truth, a ‘falsification of the good’, and victim to a
spiral of delusions creating an Orwellian world where all the vectors of sanity
vanish. Isn’t this the scenario we face
today as we watch a seditious and anarchic cult hypnotize tens of thousands of
Americans to occupy our streets and terrorize the innocent? It beggars the imagination to see political
officials, law enforcement and even Catholic bishops kneeling before Maoist
white privileged children, bored with their parents’ gated manorial existence,
pleading for atonement. Tiananmen Square
seems wholesome compared to this. Black Lives Matter make Huxley’s Lord of the Flies seems like Hansel and
Gretel. Only a Hieronymus Bosch could do
this hellish landscape justice. Chesterton is prescient here:
The
great march of destruction will go on.
Everything will be denied.
Everything will become a creed.
It is will become a reasonable position to deny the stones in the
street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It will become a rational thesis that we are
all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and
two make four. Swords will be drawn to
prove that leaves are green in summer…
We
will be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human
life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which
stares us in the face. We shall fight
for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the
skies with a strange courage. We shall
be those who have seen and yet believed.
Into such chaos the Son executes
His work. First, at the moment of
creation, He bestows order on the formless reality which His Father creates
(cf. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:2)
The Son is Wisdom, and from that Wisdom cascades the beauty of the
cosmos, with its extravagant mysteries and secrets. Science, beware! Be on guard lest hubris confound your noble
vocation. Though the cosmos’ layers of divine
secrets are yours for the taking, their unfolding by your ever specialized
tools will never exhaust their divine depths.
So the Angelic Doctor: “For all the might of man’s reason, he will never
be able to discover the full nature of even a fly.” Then comes the most sublime work of the Son:
His Incarnation and Redemption. It is
fitting that the Son be sent by the Father to repair the disorder perpetrated
by man’s sin. The Son restores order,
Who first designed that order. Typical
of God’s infinite generosity, that restoration accomplished by His Incarnation
and Redemption, is more stunning than the original order He fashioned. The
Offertory of Holy Mass attests to this, when the priest prays, “Deus, qui humanae substantiae digntatem
mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti…” (O God, in creating
human nature, didst wonderfully dignify it, and still more wonderfully restored
it…”).
In the womb of the Trinity the
eternal love of the Father and the Son ‘spirates’ the person of the Holy
Spirit. The word, ’spirates’, is a
technical theological term chosen by the Church to stress movement, activity,
life and dynamism. (from the Latin, spiro-to
breathe). Just as our breath is the sign
of life in a body, so in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the pulsating dynamism
of the overflowing love of Father and Son;
Their very ‘breath’. When Our
Lord repeatedly promises to send the Paraclete, He is assuring us a share in
this Divine power of love, without which our souls would remain inert. The work of the Holy Spirit can be compared
to a musician looking at the music for a Bach concerto. The perfection of Bach lies clearly in the musical
notations he wrote on the page. But remaining
on the page, Bach is lifeless. Only when
the musician takes up his instrument and plays does Bach come to life. Thus the relation between the grace unleashed
by Christ’ Cross, and it application by the power of the Holy Spirit.
All this can be poetically
expressed in the laconic, albeit deeply moving lines of St. Augustine’s De Trinitate. He defines Father, Son and Holy Spirit simply
as, “Lover; Loved; Love.”
The Sign of the Cross is the prayer
most emblematic of our Holy Faith, and most beloved by Catholics. When we cross ourselves we make a line in the
sand. Demons watch and tremble; the
world sees and is put on notice. The
Sign of the Cross declares the hegemony of God.
But Catholics make it in vain unless we possess the courage to tell the
world that no knee should bend except to the thrice Holy God.
