There is an oft told medieval tale that speaks of how St. Augustine as he was writing his treatise about the Holy Trinity, was walking along the beach when he encountered a little boy trying to fill a hole that was found in the sand. The boy kept running back and forth from the ocean, and each time he did, he cupped his hands and took a bit of that sea water and poured that little water into the hole. St. Augustine in the tale watched with fascination for some time, before asking the boy what he was doing.

The boy replied, “Trying to fill the hole in the sand with the ocean.”

St. Augustine said, “But, that is impossible dear child.”

The boy rose to his feet and looked at St. Augustine straight in the eye and said, “What you are trying to do – trying to understand the Holy Trinity in that tiny head of yours, is even more impossible.”

As the tale went, the boy then proceeded to vanish before St. Augustine’s eyes, and St. Augustine realised that the boy was in fact a messenger sent by God to teach him certain truths about God.

The truth of the matter is this. God cannot be grasped completely by the finite minds of his creatures. If God could be comprehended, He would not be God at all (Kadavil, 2019; Martin, 2019).

At the heart of the Holy Trinity, is a mathematical conundrum. How is it that 3 = 1 and 1 = 3? The very logic of it is illogical. The beauty of the Mystery is found in how we constantly derive new insight, but never really come to a complete picture of the Holy Trinity.

We turn to the Council of Florence (AD. 1338 to 1445) for help in unpacking the Holy Trinity, and we put on our philosophers’ hats for a moment. The Council of Florence taught that the Holy Trinity consisted of ONE nature in God, TWO processions, THREE persons, and FOUR relations that are found in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity.

This means that there is one God, and the Son proceeds from the Father in the form of being begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. In these processions, are found four relations between God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit:

They are:

  1. The Father actively and eternally begets and generates the Son which constitutes God as the person of God the Father. This generation, is not like how humans generate other human beings, but as we see from John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and from Luke 1:38, “Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word,” is an intellectual generation via the Word that God our Father speaks. The Word proceeds from the person, while remaining in the person. This begetting of the Son is formed within the interior life of God.
  2. The Son is passively generated of the Father, and this constitutes God as the person of Jesus the Son. As John 1:2 says, “He was in the beginning with God.”
  3. The Father and the Son actively spirate the Holy Spirit. The word “spiration” comes from the Latin word for “spirit” or “breath”. The Holy Spirit comes into being as the breath of God. As we witness from John 20:22-23: “And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.’”
  4. The Holy Spirit is passively spirated from the Father and the Son, which makes up the person of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not generated intellectually as Jesus the Son is generated through the Logos, the Word, but the Holy Spirit comes into being through the Will of God, which foundation is love. (Staples, 2014)

God therefore who is love, is revealed in what type and kind of love in Jesus, and how to love like our need for breath in the Holy Spirit. As Elizabeth Klein, Assistant Professor at the Augustine Institute puts it eloquently,

“God, therefore, is the end goal of our love, the means by which we love, and has provided an example of how to love. God, in himself, is the only true version of what is so often referred to as “unconditional love,” because only the Trinity loves wholly, perfectly, without reservation and without ulterior motives. It is precisely this love which God offers to us in Christ, because Christ is not simply a messenger or an angel, but he himself is God, the very incarnation of love.” (2021, para. 6)

The Old Testament in fact gives hints about the Holy Trinity. In Genesis 1:26-27, it is not by coincidence that we read, “Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female* he created them.” [Emphasis author’s own].

While the New Testament explicitly gives evidence for the Holy Trinity. In Luke 1: 35, we see, “And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Subsequently, in John chapters 15 to 18, we see Jesus’s teachings about the Holy Trinity (Kadavil, 2019).

In this Sunday’s readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, we first see a theophany of the personality of God. God is “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34:6) This is followed by an affirmation in the second reading that God is “love” and “peace” (2 Corinthians 13:11), and a statement that sums up the community that is found in the Holy Trinity – “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you.” (2 Corinthians 13: 13). Finally, in the Gospel, we see the doctrinal teaching of Jesus that firms up the Truths about the Holy Trinity –“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17)

Thus through Scripture and the Teachings of the Church, we come to understand bits and pieces of the Holy Trinity and in and through the Holy Trinity, we are invited to live a life that is centred on what the Holy Trinity stands for – love. Love for our neighbour, love for our enemy, love for ourselves, and in this love, a love that is relational to each other.

 

By the Grace of God,

Brian Bartholomew Tan

 

 

References

Kadavil, A. (2019). Reflections for the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. Vatican News. Retrieved May 30, 2023 from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2019-06/sunday-reflections-16-june-2019.html

Klein, E. (2021). Love, Revealed: Understanding the central mystery of the Trinity. Denver Catholic. Retrieved May 30, 2023 from https://denvercatholic.org/love-revealed-understanding-the-central-mystery-of-the-trinity/

Martin, J. (2019). St. Augustine’s Puzzle: How can we understand the Trinity? America the Jesuit Review. Retrieved May 30, 2023 from https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/06/14/st-augustines-puzzle-how-can-we-understand-trinity

Staples, T. (2014). Explaining the Trinity. Catholic Answers. Retrieved May 30, 2023 from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/explaining-the-trinity