Questions about the Holy Trinity

[namax91]

Sorry for the long post. Lately I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Holy Trinity (at least as well as a human on this side of Heaven can). I found this talk by Venerable Fulton Sheen on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=gSNNmIRbRtM This lecture has helped me a great deal but a few things confused me. He suggests that one thinks of the Father as the Thinker, the Son as the Thought, and the Holy Spirit as the Love between the Two. This brought up a few questions in my mind. First of all, wouldn’t this imply a sort of hierarchy among the Members? I had always thought that each Person was equal in terms of how much each One is God. With humans at least, one doesn’t say that a thought is equally as human as the thinker. We certainly don’t call each thought a person. Also, I could understand a person loving a thought, but I never imagine a thought being able to love the thinker. Do these sources of confusion simply arise from the fact that God is infinitely more powerful than humans, and the fact that one can never explain in words exactly how the Holy Trinity functions? Or am I missing something? Any help would be appreciated!

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Sorry for the long post. Lately I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Holy Trinity (at least as well as a human on this side of Heaven can). I found this talk by Venerable Fulton Sheen on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=gSNNmIRbRtM This lecture has helped me a great deal but a few things confused me. He suggests that one thinks of the Father as the Thinker, the Son as the Thought, and the Holy Spirit as the Love between the Two. This brought up a few questions in my mind. First of all, wouldn’t this imply a sort of hierarchy among the Members? I had always thought that each Person was equal in terms of how much each One is God. With humans at least, one doesn’t say that a thought is equally as human as the thinker. We certainly don’t call each thought a person. Also, I could understand a person loving a thought, but I never imagine a thought being able to love the thinker. Do these sources of confusion simply arise from the fact that God is infinitely more powerful than humans, and the fact that one can never explain in words exactly how the Holy Trinity functions? Or am I missing something? Any help would be appreciated!

As far as the heirarchy goes your thought is right. There is a certain kind of inequality among the Persons of the Trinity inasmuch as the Son is begotten by the Father and not the Father by the Son, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not the Father or Son from the Holy Spirit. All this is reflected, for example, in Christ’s submission to His Father in the Gospels.

On the other hand as far as “a thought” goes and all that I think you are taking Sheen’s metaphor too literally. Each Person of the Trinity is just as personal as the others, and each is fully and completely the one God. The metaphor is just a way of looking at the inner life of the Trinity in a certain, admittedly anthropomorphic way.

The way I’ve heard it before is to compare it with our own self-consciousness. Each of us has an idea of ourselves, one that is inevitably incomplete and probably partially inaccurate. God’s Idea of Himself is complete and perfect in every way and somehow, perhaps because of God’s Essence being His Existence, this perfect and simple self-knowledge is itself the eternally existing God. Each of us also has, hopefully, a natural and healthy kind of self-love, directed at our mental concept of ourself. In God this Love is likewise perfect and simple and itself completely God. In the case of the Son’s Love for the Father the psychological metaphore breaks down because our mental concept of ourselves is not a real, exitsing person in some sense distinct from ourselves, unlike the Son. In the case of the Son he really does exist and loves the Father just as the Father loves the Son, in such a way that this divine Love proceeds from them as from a single source, not two sources.

Anyway, it’s highly mysterious and the more you go into it the more any particular metaphor, like this psycological one, will show itself to be insufficient.

 

[DelsonJacobs]

Sorry for the long post. Lately I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Holy Trinity (at least as well as a human on this side of Heaven can). I found this talk by Venerable Fulton Sheen on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=gSNNmIRbRtM This lecture has helped me a great deal but a few things confused me. He suggests that one thinks of the Father as the Thinker, the Son as the Thought, and the Holy Spirit as the Love between the Two. This brought up a few questions in my mind. First of all, wouldn’t this imply a sort of hierarchy among the Members? I had always thought that each Person was equal in terms of how much each One is God. With humans at least, one doesn’t say that a thought is equally as human as the thinker. We certainly don’t call each thought a person. Also, I could understand a person loving a thought, but I never imagine a thought being able to love the thinker. Do these sources of confusion simply arise from the fact that God is infinitely more powerful than humans, and the fact that one can never explain in words exactly how the Holy Trinity functions? Or am I missing something? Any help would be appreciated!

Sheen is merely offering an illustration to help the limited human mind to comprehend something that “one can never explain in words exactly,” as you put it. He is not making dogmatic statements and explaining the Trinity exhaustively, something which would be impossible to do anyway.

Now even if some sort of order or “hierarchy” (in human terms) exists within the Trinity (and we have more than enough reason to believe that it does), members within a hierarchy can still be totally equal.

Take the Church for instance. Who is the greater human: the Pope or you? The answer? Neither. You are both human beings, equally important in the eyes of God.

Now just because the Pope sits at the top of the hierarchy structure in the Church, does that mean you are no longer equals? Of course not. Nothing has changed. The Pope just has a position that leads us in the Church, but does not make him a super-human or delegate others to suddenly become sub-human. We are all still equal as humans.

So it is in the Most Holy Trinity. All Persons are equals but all do not have the same function. The Father often leads, the Son often follows, and the Spirit often cooperates from the work between these two. That is likely why God has been revealed to us under the human terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” to help us see the differences that are shared in the unity that is the Trinity. Just because One may do more or take the lead over Another does not make any of the Persons involved any less God. Cooperation works that way. That’s what so beautiful about unity.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Sheen is merely offering an illustration to help the limited human mind to comprehend something that “one can never explain in words exactly,” as you put it. He is not making dogmatic statements and explaining the Trinity exhaustively, something which would be impossible to do anyway.

Now even if some sort of order or “hierarchy” (in human terms) exists within the Trinity (and we have more than enough reason to believe that it does), members within a hierarchy can still be totally equal.

Take the Church for instance. Who is the greater human: the Pope or you? The answer? Neither. You are both human beings, equally important in the eyes of God.

Now just because the Pope sits at the top of the hierarchy structure in the Church, does that mean you are no longer equals? Of course not. Nothing has changed. The Pope just has a position that leads us in the Church, but does not make him a super-human or delegate others to suddenly become sub-human. We are all still equal as humans.

So it is in the Most Holy Trinity. All Persons are equals but all do not have the same function. The Father often leads, the Son often follows, and the Spirit often cooperates from the work between these two. That is likely why God has been revealed to us under the human terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” to help us see the differences that are shared in the unity that is the Trinity. Just because One may do more or take the lead over Another does not make any of the Persons involved any less God. Cooperation works that way. That’s what so beautiful about unity.

Just to clarify, aside from the complications brought in by the Incarnation, all activity of God outside the inner life of the Trinity is done by all three Persons equally. That is a necessity of Christian monotheism. Sometimes we speak as if this were not so, speaking for example of the Father creating or of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul and in the Church. These conventions reflect truths about each Person’s place in the Trinity but properly speaking these are acts of the entire Trinity.

 

[anixx]

Sorry for the long post. Lately I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Holy Trinity (at least as well as a human on this side of Heaven can). I found this talk by Venerable Fulton Sheen on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=gSNNmIRbRtM This lecture has helped me a great deal but a few things confused me. He suggests that one thinks of the Father as the Thinker, the Son as the Thought, and the Holy Spirit as the Love between the Two. This brought up a few questions in my mind. First of all, wouldn’t this imply a sort of hierarchy among the Members? I had always thought that each Person was equal in terms of how much each One is God. With humans at least, one doesn’t say that a thought is equally as human as the thinker. We certainly don’t call each thought a person. Also, I could understand a person loving a thought, but I never imagine a thought being able to love the thinker. Do these sources of confusion simply arise from the fact that God is infinitely more powerful than humans, and the fact that one can never explain in words exactly how the Holy Trinity functions? Or am I missing something? Any help would be appreciated!

Well, actually, Ven bishop Fulton Sheen’s isn’t that original in this matter. St Augustine thought it first. In his book De Trinitatae he explains this very principle. The image of the Trinity in the intellect of the human mind. He named them like this: Mens, notitia sui, amor sui.
It works something like this. I think, aka mens (mind), of myself, aka notitia sui (the fact that I counter-pose myself), therefore, i know more about myself, and I love myself more, aka amor sui (love of self). So, I, the object, inquire about myself, the subject, therefore knowing more about the object, which is I. Knowledge=love. The more I know about something the more I can love the object. Apply this to the infinite God. The Father, from all eternity, thinks the Son, or in a more dogmatic way of saying, gives birth (generatio) to him. The Father , being God, all his thoughts are perfect in every way, so be thinking of himself, the subject of his thought is a person, the Son. Now, seeing himself in the Son, the love of the Father, which by the way is perfect, is reflected in the knowledge of himself in the Son, and this reflection of love, which by the way is perfect , is the Holy Spirit, which is a person. This is called the act of breathing (spiratio). You will see this in Jn 20,22, when Jesus breaths the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, or when God breaths life in the nostrils of the first human. It is the same breath (spiratio), and the same Holy Spirit.
It’s very hard to explain the Trinity in human terms, without philosophy. Actually it’s impossible to fully explain or understand it, for it is the greatest mystery of our faith. Have fun wrapping your head around this. God bless!

 

[DelsonJacobs]

Just to clarify, aside from the complications brought in by the Incarnation, all activity of God outside the inner life of the Trinity is done by all three Persons equally. That is a necessity of Christian monotheism. Sometimes we speak as if this were not so, speaking for example of the Father creating or of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul and in the Church. These conventions reflect truths about each Person’s place in the Trinity but properly speaking these are acts of the entire Trinity.

Thank you for the clarification.

I did, however, write my statement with the “complications brought in by the Incarnation” in mind (for example Jesus’s statement at Matthew 24:36: “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”) which sometimes comes up by some who try to deny the Trinity on the basis on one Person in the Godhead not being involved in a certain detail without this negating their unity and co-equal status. But your point should have been included, so I am glad you filled in as you did.

 

[levinas12]

The way I’ve heard it before is to compare it with our own self-consciousness.

The problem with this analogy is that only one person is involved in self-consciousness whereas the Trinity involves three persons.

It might be helpful to mention two words for the inner life of the Trinity: circumincession (Latin) and perichoresis (Greek).

Any thoughts about what these words might mean?

 

[mikeeh]

Sorry for the long post. Lately I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Holy Trinity (at least as well as a human on this side of Heaven can). I found this talk by Venerable Fulton Sheen on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=gSNNmIRbRtM This lecture has helped me a great deal but a few things confused me. He suggests that one thinks of the Father as the Thinker, the Son as the Thought, and the Holy Spirit as the Love between the Two. This brought up a few questions in my mind. First of all, wouldn’t this imply a sort of hierarchy among the Members? I had always thought that each Person was equal in terms of how much each One is God. With humans at least, one doesn’t say that a thought is equally as human as the thinker. We certainly don’t call each thought a person. Also, I could understand a person loving a thought, but I never imagine a thought being able to love the thinker. Do these sources of confusion simply arise from the fact that God is infinitely more powerful than humans, and the fact that one can never explain in words exactly how the Holy Trinity functions? Or am I missing something? Any help would be appreciated!

Just think of them like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the U.S. government. God makes the laws, Christ enforces the laws, and the Holy Spirit interprets the laws.:dancing:

 

[anixx]

Just think of them like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the U.S. government. God makes the laws, Christ enforces the laws, and the Holy Spirit interprets the laws.:dancing:

Never thought of that. Thank you for this one! God bless!