Mode v. Person in discussions of the Trinity

[setarcos]

so much. Let me just put this simple thing out there.

So much indeed. I’m sure it would be simple, if humanity didn’t tend to make things complex.

God is not a something, he is a someone. God is also love.

The problem I see here is, by applying the indefinite pronoun to God you imply that God is a member of a group to which other elements belong from which God might be distinguished - i.e., God is someone as opposed to being “someone else”. God is not a member of a group. God is not the only element in a particular group. God is incomparable to anything else in existence. It would be better to say God is not “someone”, he is “something” of which he is the only one. God “is” Love is a statement from a human perspective which cannot be understood in its totality since Love is a quality that excludes certain other qualities of which cannot be excluded from God in his totality without altering our conception of what it means to be nothing “but” love. I.e. God has been described scripturally as encompassing other states of being; e.g., God is a jealous God yet Love excludes jealousy. If you equivocate and redefine Gods jealousy with a label such as “righteous jealousy” then you must allow for redefining the Love applied to God as unique to himself and not humanity.

Imagine God before creation when there are no human beings or any other created things. Just God, and God is love.

I believe you misunderstand Gods relationship to creation. If time starts with creation there is no before creation or after creation as it applies to creation. Time is required to establish before or after. This can only be accomplished within creation in which time has meaning.

What is love and how can God be love if we are not there to be loved?
If love is relationship between persons and if God is love, there must be “interplay” between persons. And yet love is unitive at the same time as it is between persons. Diversity and unity. Or unity through diversity.

Since God created past, present, and future all at once and is eternally present in all of these and outside of all of these concepts of time it makes no difference to say God was alone for this long and then created, or Creation has an age and God hasn’t….THE MOMENT OF CREATION WAS TIMELESS. Creations age is measured only from within creation itself. The thought of creation was always with God since the act of creating was timeless and God is without potential since all potential is always and eternally fulfilled in God. The creative object of God’s love was always with him and never with him, both are true because neither are true because always and never and beginning and end only have meaning within creation yet Gods creative action, of necessity, took place outside of creation and outside of time.
You use a lot of ifs. Can’t love be between an unaware object and that which is aware of its love for the object? Love does not require that its essence be returned in order that it can be complete. Love is complete in itself. Would you limit God by saying his love cannot be complete unless it is returned? Therefore does love “require” that it only be between “persons”, or even mutual awareness? Did not God create and call it good before man came into the picture? Did not God Love his creation in full from the beginning even before its completion? Does not man reflect Gods image in admiration and love for Gods unaware creation?

Think of marriage as the best analogy of the Trinity. Two persons united as one and fruitful in that love. The unitive love is a third reality.

Human marriage is given for humans in order that they may fulfill Gods plan for humans. While the fullness of love is expressed between, in a perfect family, the members it is made up of this does not express the totality of Love perfected. Look to Jesus’s example of loving thy enemy in scripture, or Christ’s laying down his life for sinners. Sinners who’s love back to God cannot be equally measured. Sinners who Christ asked his father to forgive, though they hated him. Loves greatest strength and most enduring power is that, perfected, it is self-sustaining. Love need not be received in order that Love is given. Did not Jesus say to love ones friends is easy, but to love those who are your enemy shows the power of Love which has its strength in enduring through adversity? While Love makes equal, equality does not express Love.

 

[Vico]

I read the quote from Thomas.

I can understand the second abstraction (I think), that is, the abstracting of the form from the matter. But I am having difficulty understanding the first abstraction. Could you possibly elaborate in your own words the distinction between the two abstractions?

When you say “real difference but it is only by our way of thinking” - at first, this would seem to diminish the “in re” aspect of the three Divine Persons - but I don’t think this is what you mean - could you also elaborate a bit more in your own words?

What I am referring to “by way of thinking” is that we think of the Trinity with an analogy to creatures.

There is absolute simplicity in God such that the person (God is not a creature) is not different from essence. The relations of opposition which constitute the persons are essential (“relation as subsisting in the divine nature”); there are not three independent persons of a universal type called divinity, rather only one God absolutely simple. (There is number and order, but procession does not occur in time.)

There are persons with what is common, but there is nothing common without persons.

See: Summa Theologiae > First Part > Question 39 The persons in relation to the essence, Article 1. Whether in God the essence is the same as the person?

I answer that, The truth of this question is quite clear if we consider the divine simplicity. For it was shown above (I:3:3) that the divine simplicity requires that in God essence is the same as “suppositum,” which in intellectual substances is nothing else than person. But a difficulty seems to arise from the fact that while the divine persons are multiplied, the essence nevertheless retains its unity. And because, as Boethius says (De Trin. i), “relation multiplies the Trinity of persons,” some have thought that in God essence and person differ, forasmuch as they held the relations to be “adjacent”; considering only in the relations the idea of “reference to another,” and not the relations as realities. But as it was shown above (I:28:2) in creatures relations are accidental, whereas in God they are the divine essence itself. Thence it follows that in God essence is not really distinct from person; and yet that the persons are really distinguished from each other. For person, as above stated (I:29:4, signifies relation as subsisting in the divine nature. But relation as referred to the essence does not differ therefrom really, but only in our way of thinking; while as referred to an opposite relation, it has a real distinction by virtue of that opposition. Thus there are one essence and three persons.

newadvent.org/summa/1039.htm

 

[setarcos]

We humans are a sorry lot. Jesus lays out the road to truth for us and places a simple map in our hands so that we may recognize when we stray from it. But this is not good enough. We have to take the scenic route and create incredibly complex ideations and un-provable speculations about the true nature of the trinity or the processes of transubstantiation and how it takes place or how Mary is this or that when these things cause nothing but stumbling blocks for others that might otherwise pursue Christ’s salvation and of themselves have nothing to do with what Jesus said was the way to eternal life, in that he never gave revelation as to the necessity of knowing these things. By making assertions about reality which are disputed even among the scholars themselves and insisting on belief in them before one can be admitted into the saving graces of God is to me playing into the hands of Satan. The Church creates in this way a situation in which a truth seeker who doesn’t comprehend what he’s being asked to believe in is never the less asked to agree to its truth, ironically creating within the seeker that which he would seek to eliminate…falsehood. This process is indistinguishable from many cults who capture the gullible and simple minded into being led straight to death. It would also seem to me that insisting on the validity of these disputed claims the Catholic Church sets up her own adversity. Of course I say this with this caveat…I may be wrong. Lol