The Trinity, The Keystone of the Christian Mysteries (by Marie-Michel Philipon, O.P.)
Translator’s Note
My vocation has in part been marked by the work of recovery. I hope, in the coming years, to be writing more in my own voice, though I will probably always engage in some kind of recovery of great old works. I think it appropriate to begin this task of To Be a Thomist with a kind of homage to the tradition that I love so much. This text is a very beautiful summary of the great structural themes of Thomistic theology and, more importantly too, of the very mysteries of faith in their subordination and interrelationship. As an exercise of theological sapience, it deserves a meditative reading.
I would like to thank Revue Thomiste for allowing me to make this text available in translation. I have reviewed the text, but this is still a kind of draft, given the format online in which I am presenting it.
Author’s Text
We find ourselves today in the “New Jacobins” in Toulouse.1 By a providential coincidence, the opening of this great house of studies is taking place under the sign of St. Thomas Aquinas’s patronage over all Catholic universities and schools. During the second nocturn of matins, the liturgy reminded us of the extraordinary praises spoken by the popes concerning the intellectual mission of the Holy Doctor, and we heard Urban V’s solemn declaration to our University of Toulouse, referring to the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas as “the expression of the Catholic truth,” tanquam veridicam et catholicam.
This traces out the goal of our program: inspired by the principles and method of the common Doctor of the Church, we seek to solve the problems of our time.
For this inaugural lecture, could there be a topic more worthy of this magnificent Studium of St. Thomas Aquinas than the fundamental mystery of Christianity: The Trinity: the keystone of the Christian mysteries?
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Allow me to begin with a personal confession. As a young teacher, each year I had to begin covering a new program of studies: the treatises on God, the Trinity, the Incarnate Word, the Mother of Christ, man, the sacraments, etc., all of dogmatics, for over twenty years. When I first began, I took all of this to be a kind of successive line of treatises, the series of Christian mysteries considered one by one, juxtaposed to each other, somewhat like how the person who first studies the Summa Theologiae begins by successively analyzing its articles, then its questions, then a whole group of questions, and then the great treatises considered as a whole—and, at last, when he becomes a master, he connects them all to Thomism’s supreme intuition, the famous 4th article of question 3 in the Prima Pars: in God alone are essence and existence one and the same, “I am that I am,” I am pure existence, the”sublime truth” (SCG I, ch. 22), the keystone of the Summa Theologiae and of the doctrinal synthesis expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas’s particular genius.
The same is true on the level of dogmas themselves. After the successive analysis of the great Christian mysteries, the believer comes to discover their interconnection and their organic bond to the fundamental mystery of Christianity: the mystery of the Trinity. Then, in light of this insight, everything comes to be illuminated “from above,” looking upon all the mysteries with the gaze of harmonious wisdom, a true “economy” of the mysteries which enables us to glimpse, “in the bosom of the Father,” the origin and end of all things. In the end, there is, so to speak, only one, integral mystery, organically connected to the other mysteries, explaining them all: the intimate life of the Trinity flowing into the whole Christ.
This synthetic overview is what I would like to propose to you, deploying an integrally complete theological methodology, first deploying positive research and then undertaking the task of speculative explanation.
1. The Trinity, the Fundamental Mystery of Christianity
After having spoken many times and in various ways to our Fathers through the Prophets, God, in these last days, spoke to us through His Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the Word, who bears the stamp of His substance and the splendor of His glory (Hebrews 1:3), who came to earth to preach to men the kingdom of God and to “tell them” (John 1:18) about the secret and hidden life of the Three in God. The other Prophets, each according to his particular grace and mission, had emphasized certain attributes of God: Isaiah spoke of His greatness and majesty, Jeremiah of His justice, and Hosea of His merciful love and unflagging tenacity. And, the greatest of them all, Moses, had risen all the way to the “sublime truth” that touches intimately the mystery of God’s Ineffable Being: I am He who is (Exodus 3:14). But no one has ever seen God (John 1:18). Only a God, the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father (ibid.), could come and reveal Him to us. He has manifested to men the authentic Divine Reality: God the Father; God the Son, equal to the Father and “One” with Him (John 10:30); God the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son.2
To see all of this, we would need to follow, step-by-step—indeed, even the smallest of His daily steps—the Incarnate Word speaking to men by way of a marvelous pedagogy, slowly and progressively initiating them into the mystery of His intimate relations with His Father, announcing to them the Spirit who proceeds from the Father (John 15:26) and takes what is his (John 16:14). With all their infinite nuances, one should place each text concerning Jesus, each of His statement, in its “context,” amid listeners who were slow to understand (Luke 24:25), and yet always moving forward, unfolding the full development of the supreme revelation.
A first intimate expression, a single sentence, in the midst of thirty years of silence, though as dazzling as the light, shows us the Son entirely devoted to the things of his Father (Luke 2:49). And with what a sure tone does Jesus speak to His mother, saying, “my Father,” as she stands there amazed. From the Trinitarian theophany of Jesus’s baptism on the banks of the Jordan (Matthew 3:16–17; Mark. 1:9–10; Luke 3:21–22), to the words of the risen Christ, commanding His Apostles to teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), the essential lineaments of the supreme mystery of Christianity gradually take shape. The words revealing this mystery arise in the midst of the various circumstances of His life. We can follow the stages of this progressive revelation through the Gospel. When the time came for the Incarnate Son to return to His Father, He could give testimony to Himself that He had fulfilled His mission on earth: Father, I have accomplished the work you entrusted to me; I have manifested your name to mankind (John 17:4 and 6). His main task as Prophet was completed: He had revealed the Trinity to the world.
The Incarnation of the Word inaugurates a new age, one that is explicitly Trinitarian, a new creed, in a God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a new economy, with new worship, a new priesthood, a new people, a new kingship characteristic of what we can call, with Saint Ambrose, “the royal kingdom of the Trinity,” regnum Trinitatis (cf. Ambrose, Exposition of the Christian Faith, 3.12 and 5.12). The Gospel inaugurates a new religious era, one that is essentially Trinitarian. The mystery of the Trinity, which remained in the shadows throughout the Old Testament, bursts into light in the New. The coming of the Word changed the intellectual life of the world. The Church of Christ will forever be illuminated by this Triune mystery.
This fundamental dogma is at the heart of the Apostles’ teaching, echoing Christ’s own words.
The very first lines of St. Peter’s first letter present, in very light of our faith, the profoundly Trinitarian meaning of the entire economy of salvation. Christians are chosen by the foreknowledge of God the Father, sanctified by the Spirit, so that they may obey Jesus Christ, having been purified in His blood (1 Peter 1:2). Is this not a kind of summary of the entire wisdom of the Gospel? The faithful, who are loved by the Father and made holy by the Spirit, are assimilated to Christ as adopted sons, reborn (1 Peter 1:3) through His grace, which gives us a share in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), as he will come to say in his second letter.
St. Paul’s vision of the universe is based upon the same Trinitarian foundations: may the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God (the Father) and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all (2 Corinthians 13:13). In his letter to the Ephesians, at a time when his own personal thought has reached its full maturation, the Apostle sets before us God’s plan for the world, coming from the Father who has showered us with heavenly blessings and has predestined us to the grace of adoption in His Son, Jesus Christ, with the seal of the Spirit (Ephesians 1:14). And how many other texts bear witness to the Trinitarian significance of the Pauline universe!
But it is above all in St. John that the Trinitarian perspectives of the New Testament shine forth, whether he is reporting the words spoken privately by the Master, or whether he is presenting to us his own religious conception of the world. His Gospel is the Gospel of the Word, of the only Son of the Father, who is one with Him. None of the other evangelists speak to us as does St. John concerning the how the Father and the Son, from whom the Spirit proceeds, are one in nature and bound by intimate relations. The Christian dogma of the Trinity here finds its most explicit positive3 data, and the eternal filiation of Jesus illuminates the profound meaning of our own divine filiation. St. John is the one who has presented to us the simple and sublime words in which the Lord Himself has summarized our entire spiritual life as being such a permanent intimacy with God. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our dwelling in him (John 14:24). The Spirit of Love, the Paraclete, will also dwell in you (John 14:16). This indwelling of the Trinity in our souls constitutes the essence of our interior life: to live in communion (1 John 1:3) with the Father and the Son, by the breath of the same Spirit of love. And does not Christ’s redemptive work consist in gathering together all the scattered children of God (John 11:51), to bring them to perfection (consommer) in the unity of the Trinity, in imitation of the indivisible unity of the Father and the Son (John 17:22)?
According to the doctrine of Christ and the Apostles, the Christian spiritual life is therefore essentially Trinitarian.
Israel’s fierce monotheism constituted an obstacle, one that was humanly insurmountable, to adhering to a Trinitarian profession of faith. It calls to mind the difficulty experienced by Saul of Tarsus, a Hebrew born of Hebrews and an ardent Pharisee. How difficult it was for him to admit this communion [société] of Three Persons within the one God. The same was true for all converts from Judaism. This manifests all the more the intellectual revolution that is the Gospel of the only Son of the Father. Mankind suddenly found itself face-to-face with a Triune God. The religious outlook of souls was forever changed.
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We can follow the footsteps of this Trinitarian revelation in the patristic tradition, in the East as in the West.
The mystery of the Trinity constitutes the background of all the expositions of Christian doctrine sketched out by the Fathers. It dominates the ecclesial perspectives found in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, connecting together in an indissoluble unity all the testimonies of the famous martyr: deacons, priests, and bishops are bound to the invisible Christ and the Father. “Let all revere the deacons as Jesus Christ, the bishop as the image of the Father, and the presbyters as the senate of God and the assembly of the Apostles. Without them, there is no Church” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Trallians, 3.1). “Where the bishop is, there is the Church, for there is Christ” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8.1–2). Ignatius always sees Jesus with his Father, being but one with Him. Through the deacons, priests, the bishop, and Christ, the entire ecclesial hierarchy is united to the Father “by the Spirit.” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians, 9.1). “The presbyterate... fitted to the bishop as the strings to the harp... makes a hymn to the Father through Christ Jesus” (ibid., 9.1–2)
In these words, we hear a bishop, distressed by local divisions, concerned about the unity of the Church for which he will die. His contemplative and mystical vision is already that of a martyr of the faith: an ecclesial, hierarchical, and Trinitarian vision that rises from the world, through Christ and the Spirit, towards the Father.
And we cannot pass over in silence Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, who was a Trinitarian doctor par excellence. Throughout his writings and orations, everything proclaims the Trinity. His soul was profoundly alive to this mystery, and he ardently communicated its flame to all the faithful who had been entrusted to him. It is said that when he was patriarch of Constantinople, crushed by worries and duties and exhausted by illness, he desired to leave his people and flee into solitude. In his farewell speech, as he exhorted his faithful to remain firm in the faith, all of them—clergy and laity alike—with one voice began to mourn the departure of their pastor. According to someone who witnessed the oration, it was a sorrowful spectacle: Men and women, young and old, from all classes and all conditions of life, were lamenting when, all the sudden, a cry arose from amid the crowd: “Father, if you leave us, you will take the Trinity with you!” At these words, Gregory, distraught, put off his decision to leave and remained among them for some time, until the election of a bishop worthy to govern them.
An ardent propagandist of this supreme devotion, Gregory of Nazianzus expended his energies as the intrepid defender, preacher, and poet of the Trinity. He called It, "the First Virgin” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Moral poems [PG 37, col. 523]). He desired that her illuminating and beatifying vision be given to the Christian soul, who is only passing through this world. His wish was that the Christian would have no other desire in his soul than for the Trinity (ibid., col. 915). He never ceased to invite all the faithful to exalt and adore It. And, finally, in one of his poems, in a striking passage, he presents eternal Wisdom coming to be incarnated among men in order to proclaim to them: “Go all to the Trinity” (ibid., col. 913)!
And, turning to the West, what can be said concerning of Augustine’s genius, which was so essentially Trinitarian? In his De Trinitate, he confessed: “I began this book when I was still young; I am finishing it in my old age” (St. Augustine, De Trinitate, dedicatory letter). In fact, throughout his entire life of thought, his mind was dominated by the Trinitarian mystery. “If nothing is more difficult or more dangerous than to speak of the Trinity, nonetheless, nothing is more delightful or more fruitful,” he declared (ibid., 1.3). “The only joy that is fully satisfying, beyond which nothing more is to be desired, is to enjoy this Triune God, in whose image we were created” (ibid., 1.8). It constitutes the end of all our acts, our eternal rest, the happiness that cannot be snatched away from us... The contemplation of the Trinity face-to-face will establish God, all in all (ibid., 1.10). The Trinity is the "supreme Good, which only purified eyes can contemplate” (ibid., 1.2).
As with St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and all Christian Doctors, for St. Augustine, the Trinity is the principle and end of all things. In It is found the supreme origin of all things, and all beings in the universe bear the imprint, image, or vestige of this creative Trinity (ibid., 10.6). And if the Trinity is the source of all things, the vast movement of the universe in its return to God must also find its ultimate fulfillment in Him. For the elect, this will be “consummation in unity.” Like the reflection of the great mystics of the East, that of Augustine ceaselessly returns to this capital text, which he interprets with the utmost realism. As he explains, Christ, in order to avoid all danger of absolute identification which would lead to pantheism, does not say, “I and they are one,” but rather, we are one, through identity of the members of the mystical body with its Head. Moreover, it is unity, in imitation of the unity of the Trinity, not by nature and in the same substance, but according to the indivisible agreement of one and the same willing (ibid. 4.9)4
We could heap up countless texts showing the primordial place of the mystery of the Trinity in the whole of Christian thought.
Let us simply take gleanings from a few major texts in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many do not sufficiently note that the treatise on the Trinity is the keystone of his theological synthesis, the architectonic principle whose illuminating influence penetrates everything articulated point by point in the Summa Theologiae. His treatise on God is not a “theodicy.” It concludes by setting forth the mystery of the Trinity whose radiation reaches all His works ad extra. The question concerning the divine missions begins the discussion of God’s activity “outside” Himself; and, through creation, the redemption, and the ultimate state of glory, a vast movement of the communication of the Trinitarian life circulates in the world of pure spirits and among men, whose economy of salvation takes place by way of their return to the Father through the Son, who is the Mediator, moved by the Spirit.
There is no, single major section of the Summa that is not, through its key articles, connected to this primary, Trinitarian perspective. Thus, God the Creator is not a distant and solitary Pure Act, but, rather, God the Father, Word, and Love, each of the divine Persons acting in accord with His characteristic note and position within the Trinity: the Father as the originating Source of all, the Son as the creative Wisdom and Art of the Father, to the breath of the Spirit, who brings about all of God’s gifts. The eternal processions are the type (ratio) and cause for the production of creatures.5 This is not the reasoning of a mere philosopher, but a Christian doctor contemplating the inseparable work of the whole creative Trinity, whose vestige or image is borne by all the creatures that are scattered throughout the universe.6
In the same way, he meticulously analyzes the role of the Trinity in the Incarnation of the Word and in the work of our redemption, accomplished personally by the Son, though under the inspiration and primordial action of the Father and the whole Trinity.7
The same Trinitarian perspective dominates his theology concerning the mystery of the Church and the sacraments. The Holy Spirit is the uncreated Soul of the Church, its supreme Principle of unity.8 The priest, in each of his priestly acts, presents himself as “the minister of the Trinity.”9
Our entire spiritual life is Trinitarian in character. Sanctifying grace communicates to us the divine nature, as it subsists in the three divine Persons. Faith makes us participate in the Word and charity in the Holy Spirit.10 From the grace of adoption in baptism up to its ultimate consummation in the vision of God, the soul’s entire progress and all the stages of the spiritual life take place under the indivisible action and constant protection of the entire Trinity.11 At the end of his earthly existence, man is called to contemplate all things in the Word, the numerically same, substantial Thought of the Father, the same vital terminus of the contemplative bliss of the Three Divine Persons and of all the elect: “The vision of the Trinity in unity is the end and the delightful fruit of the whole of human life.”12 As the sun sets upon the created universe, it will be judged by Christ, in the presence of the sovereign Trinity.13
For Thomistic wisdom, as for the Gospel, the Trinity is the supreme light that explains all things.
The Trinity is the privileged mystery for mystics and great spiritual authors. For all his life, St. Ignatius of Loyola retained the memory of the illuminating graces regarding the Trinity that he received in Manresa, where through such graces the Three Divine Persons took full possession of his soul. The fragments of his Diary relate similar experiences. His understanding was “so enlightened concerning the mystery of the Trinity that it seemed to him that, on strong grounds, he would not know as much about It... even if he were to study It his whole life long (February 19, 1544)). The Trinitarian sense is the dominant trait of Ignatian mysticism, animating its powerful Christocentrism.14
This primacy of the Trinity bursts forth with singular force in Carmelite mysticism. The entire movement of the spirituality of Saint Teresa of Avila converges towards the Interior Castle’s seventh mansion, where the union of the soul with God comes to its consummation in spiritual marriage. This supreme grace is characterized by the intellectual vision of the Trinity, in the depths of the soul. The Three Divine Persons manifest themselves to the soul in their unity of substance and their Trinity of Persons, intimately communicating themselves to it to enjoy them, enabling it to experience the depth and truth of these words of the Lord: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him (John 14:23). “How different is hearing and believing these words from understanding their truth in this way! Each day this soul becomes more amazed, for these persons never seem to leave it anymore, but it clearly beholds, in the way that was mentioned earlier, that they are within it. In the extreme interior, in someplace very deep within itself, the nature of which it does not know how to explain, because of the lack of learning, it perceives this divine company.”15—“It should be understood that this presence is not felt so fully, I mean so clearly, as when revealed for the first time or at other times when God grants the soul this gift. For if the presence were felt so clearly, the soul would find it impossible to be engaged in anything else or even to live among people. But even though the presence is not perceived with this very clear light, the soul finds itself in this company every time it takes notice. Let’s say that the experience resembles that of a person who after being in a bright room with others finds himself, once the shutters are closed, in darkness the light by which he could see them is taken away. Until it returns, he doesn’t see them, but not for that reason does he stop knowing they are present.”16
The mystical doctrine of St. John of the Cross is even more Trinitarian, as much as this Holy Doctor rises to the most sublime descriptions of the transforming union. The last stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle and the entire Living Flame of Love are nothing more than a hymn of love by the purified soul that has reached a point of equal love, in consummate intimacy with the Three Divine Persons. Here, we touch the summit of mysticism on earth, and we can understand why the pen fell from the hands of this Holy Doctor when he tried, in vain, to describe the awakening of the Word in the soul and the eternal aspiration of Love. The Church perhaps has no other doctor who is so explicitly Trinitarian. The final pages of his works and his entire supreme masterpiece, the The Living Flame of Love, do nothing other than sing of the Trinity:
O living flame of love
That tenderly wounds my soul
In its deepest center…17
“This flame of love is the Spirit of its Bridegroom, who is the Holy Spirit. The soul feels Him within itself not only as a fire that has consumed and transformed it, but as a fire that burns and flares within it, as I mentioned already. And that flame, every time it flares up, bathes the soul in glory and refreshes it with the quality of divine [and eternal] life. Such is the activity of the Holy Spirit in the soul transformed in love: the interior acts He produces shoot up flames, for they are acts of inflamed love, in which the will of the soul united with that flame, made one with it, loves most sublimely. Thus, these acts of love are most precious… And, in this state, the soul cannot perform acts because the Holy Spirit performs them all and moves it toward them. As a result, all the acts of the soul are divine since both the movement to these acts and their execution stem from God… it is in the depths of the soul that the Holy Spirit celebrates this feast of love.”18
And did not St. Thérèse of Lisieux herself, whom Pius X called “the greatest saint of modern times,” receive the central grace of her life on the feast of the Trinity (June 9, 1895), as is recorded in her act of self-offering to the Merciful Love, a living synthesis of her doctrine, which is explicitly addressed to “the Blessed Trinity”? Indeed, at the top of her coat of arms she had placed a luminous triangle symbolizing the Holy Trinity.
And what about the Carmelite saint of Dijon, Elizabeth of the Trinity, whose own grace was to live to its depths the mystery of the indwelling of the Trinity, such that she is the incomparable model for all souls who, in this modern world, will wish to live their baptismal vocation to “praise the glory of the Trinity” in stillness of soul and the silence of love?
We could stack up countless testimonies like this, drawn from all the various schools of spirituality. But the main and decisive argument is to be found in the daily life of the Church herself, which attests in a simple yet grand way to the fact that this is the primordial Christian mystery, constantly exercising its influence upon all of her various kinds of spiritual activity: her teaching authority, priesthood, and kingship.
—Her Creed is foundationally a profession of Trinitarian faith. And her acts of defining dogmas, as well as her canonizations of saints, are always done in the name of the indivisible Trinity and for His glory.
— The entire economy of the sacraments is administered, beginning with baptism, “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The whole of the Church’s liturgy is fundamentally Trinitarian, marvelously expressed by the final doxologies of her hymns and the perpetual Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui sancto which complete the recitation of each psalm. And is not the Eucharistic sacrifice, the center of Christian worship, anything other than an offering by the whole Church united to the oblation and immolation of Christ’s love, to the glory of the Father and of the whole Trinity? [As is said in the Roman Rite Mass:] “Suscipe Sancta Trinitas...”
— The entire missionary activity of the Church, and its governing of peoples, is exercised throughout the world with a view to building the City of God, in other words, “to gather into unity all the scattered children of God” (John 11:52). In the final analysis, God created the universe, the angels and men, and sent His Son to earth, for no other reason than to lead the elect to the vision of the Trinity. The entire movement of this world finds its only true meaning in the vision of God.
Truly the mystery of the Trinity is the soul of the Gospel—“the substance” of the New Testament, to use a formula from the Fathers—the fundamental mystery of Christianity, “the greatest of all,” at once their source and their crowning, as Pope Leo XIII once stated.19 He is the Alpha and Omega of all things. The most secret life of souls is hidden in the intimate life of the Three Divine Persons. As the glorification of the Trinity was the essential work of the Incarnate Word, so too is this glorification the essential work of the Church of Christ.
2. In What Sense the Trinity is the Fundamental Mystery of Christianity
These few positive data suffice for revealing to us the central place that the mystery of the Trinity has in Christianity. We must now show how it is its fundamental mystery. Theological science, in fact, is faced with two tasks: first, to recognize the data of Revelation, determining its existence through a positive-theological investigation of the documents [in which the mysteries are expressed] (fides quaerens documentum); second, to penetrate the profound meaning of this Revelation by means of analysis and reflection, so as to grasp its inner-connections, seeking a synthesis that knows how to bring all things back into unity (fides quaerens intellectum).
Let us try to discover, first analytically and successively, how the mystery of the Trinity penetrates each of the great Christian mysteries. Then, synthetically, we will see how it constitutes their organic bond and architectonic principle.
We can reduce the whole of Christianity to five principal mysteries: the Triune God, Christ, the Virgin, the Church, and us. We need only a simple analysis to see that if we do not explicitly connect these Christian mysteries to that of the Trinity it is impossible for us to grasp their profound meaning.
The God revealed in the Gospel is not only the God of the philosophers and scholars. The God who is Pure Act is the Trinity, a Trinity that does not break His unity, but a Unity that flowers as the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This fundamental truth involves incalculable consequences. It is the truth that gives Christianity its true countenance. The intimate life of God unfolds in the light of the begetting of the Word and in the spiration of the Eternal Love. Consequently, God’s entire work ad extra is marked with the Trinity’s seal. From the theologian’s point of view, the treatise “De Deo Uno” ends in the “De Deo Trino”: it is as essential to God to be Trinity as it is to be Unity.
Everything in the mystery of Christ is Trinitarian: His being, His personal life, and His redemptive action.
—His personal, divine being makes Him “One of the Three,” Unus de Trinitate, the only Son of the Father and, with Him, the Principle of one and the same Spirit of Love.
— His personal life was immovably anchored within a Trinitarian milieu. His intellect continually had the vision of the Trinity, never ceasing to contemplate, down to its smallest details, the entire unfolding of the universe in the radiance of this Trinitarian splendor. And with infinite joy, his will turned toward this Blessed Trinity, the supreme Good of His soul and that of all the elect.
— His threefold mission as Mediator also had a Trinitarian meaning. As Prophet and Teacher, his primary message was to reveal the Father, having promised His Apostles the coming of the Spirit, who would complete His work of truth in the Church. As Priest, He offered on the Cross the unique sacrifice of praise and redemptive atonement, thus inaugurating, in His Church, true worship of the Father “in spirit and in truth,” instituting the sacraments—at once signs and instruments of sanctification for all souls redeemed by His blood. And as King and Supreme Shepherd, He leads His Church towards the City of God where all men are called to live in eternal communion with the Trinity.
So too, everything involved in the mystery of Mary is equally Trinitarian. Is not the Mother of God the Mother of the Word? In this way, the entire Marian mystery is carried “to the very borders of the Divinity” [Cajetan], for the divine maternity and the eternal generation of the Word both have the same living terminus, within the Trinity[: the Word Incarnate, He who is eternally begotten of the Father]. Thus associated with her Son in the communication of this same Trinitarian life, the Virgin-Mediatrix worked with him, as co-redemptrix of the world, to acquire all the graces of salvation. Now, in heaven, she has become the dispenser of all the blessings of the redemption. No single grace descends from the Trinity into souls without passing through the hands of the Mother of Christ. Is she not the universal Mediatrix to the one Mediator, and through Him, with Him and in Him, the Mediatrix to the Father and to the whole Trinity?
How, in its own turn, could the Church of the Incarnate Word not be the Church of the Trinity, since it finds in the Three Divine Persons its eternal origin, its exemplary and final Cause, with the Holy Spirit being truly the soul of the whole mystical body of Christ? In this light, we can define the Church: the whole Christ animated by the Trinity. This Trinitarian character of the Church’s vocation is missed by many. However, her threefold power, participated in by Christ, is exercised in view of the same ends. Through her teaching authority, she instructs men concerning all Christian truths, in the light of the Trinity. Through her ministerial priesthood, she offers to the Holy Trinity the only sacrifice approved by God, and she communicates to men the intimate life of the Trinity through the administration of all the sacraments, beginning with baptism, “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Finally, through her kingship and her spiritual government of souls, she advances in the midst of the nations, vigorously battling as the Church Militant, leading men to the vision of the Trinity in order to gather them into unity.
And, if we now turn our attention to the essence of our own spiritual life, its Trinitarian character is obvious, for the very root of this life is found in grace, which is a participation in the divine nature as it subsists in the three Persons. Consequently, all the acts of our theological virtues, which are properties flowing from this God-fashioned, dei-form grace—we should like to write “this Trinity-formed grace”—introduce the Christian into the very cycle of the Trinitarian life, enabling him to live there as an adopted son, in the image of the Son, “in society,” or rather “in communion” with the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, sin itself has a Trinitarian meaning, as a rejection, delay, or denial. And, finally, the very stages of our spiritual life are nothing other than the soul’s progress in its ascent towards the Trinity. Thus, our entire spiritual life develops in a continual movement from the Trinity in baptism to the Trinity in the vision of God, where, in the Word, the unity of the whole Christ will come to its completion.
Thus, there can be no understanding of the true nature of God, nor of the mysteries of the Incarnation, Redemption, Mariology, Ecclesiology, or grace and the Christian life without explicit recourse to this fundamental mystery.
The Trinity not only sheds its light on each of the Christian mysteries. It constitutes them. Indeed, it constitutes the very fabric of the economy of salvation. The whole of Christianity comes down to this fundamental intuition: the communication of the Trinitarian life, through the mediation of Christ, the Mother of Christ, and the Church, in two distinct and complementary phases, one on earth sketched out amid trials and the time of meriting, marked by the obscurities of faith, and the other in consummate perfection in the splendor of the vision of God, in the City of God. In short, the whole of Christianity is nothing other than: the communication of the Trinitarian life to the whole Christ. Therefore, when we consider the economy of salvation as an organic synthesis, the dogma of the Trinity is the architectonic principle of all Christian knowledge, the explanatory cause of everything. To truly lay out this synthesis, we would need to set forth from contemplation of the eternal generation of the Word and the eternal spiration of the Holy Spirit, from the life of the Three who constitute the source, exemplar, and end of our spiritual life. Hence the capital importance of the treatise on the divine missions, the foundation for all Christian mysticism.
In sum, a two-fold movement animates this communication of the divine life, whose essential articulations we can now grasp:
1˚ The descent of the life of the Trinity to us, through Christ’s sacred humanity, the Virgin, and the Church;
2˚ the ascent of souls towards the Trinity, through the flowering of our grace of adoption and the faithful practice of all the virtues, until we are wholly transformed into the image of the Son and brought to consummation in Him, through the Beatific Vision, into unity with the Father, by the breath of the same Spirit.
***
Thus, in order of dogmas, the divine life descends to us from the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit, with the three divine Persons—in undivided unity, in order to communicate their Trinitarian life—making use of the principle mediation of Christ’s sacred humanity, “the instrument of the Word,” the secondary and subordinated mediation of the Co-redeeming Virgin, and the ministerial mediation of the Church.
And in order of mysticism, our ascent towards the Trinity takes place with the aid of grace, through our personal collaboration, under the ever-more constant and dominating impulse of the Holy Spirit—something that is said by appropriation, and therefore, in reality: by the impulse of the entire Trinity. And all this pushes onward until the supreme hour of that transforming vision which will bring about the consummation of all things in unity.
This is why, in accord with the traditional axiom that prayer is the expression of our faith, lex orandi, lex credendi, the Church sings in her liturgy:
O Lux, Beata Trinitas.20
Alpha et Omega quem dicimus.21
Indeed, the Trinity truly is the keystone of all Christian mysteries.
Marie-Michel Philipon, OP
Toulouse, Studium of St. Thomas Aquinas
November 13, 1957
Since the time of the restoration of the Order of Saint Dominic in France, the house of studies for the Toulouse Province of the Friars Preachers has been located in the famous cloister of Saint-Maximin (in Var), dating from the 13th century, one of the jewels of Provençal Gothic architecture. At the express wish of the Reverend Father Emmanuel Suarez, the Master General of the Order, a large studium was recently built in Toulouse, already welcoming a good number of foreign students.—This text was the theme of the inaugural lecture, given on the occasion of the foundation and beginning of courses in this new house of studies, in the very cradle of the Order, in the heart of the intellectual capital of the South of France.↩︎
[Tr. note: The Byzantine Catholic translator of this text cannot avoid wishing to add a slight inflection: through the Son.]↩︎
[Tr. note: In the sense of “positive theology”, the study of the sources in which we find the “data” of faith and theological speculation.]↩︎
In full (trans. Arthur West Haddan): “He did not say, ‘I and they are one thing’; although, in that He is the head of the church which is His body, He might have said, and they are, not one thing, but one person, because the head and the body is one Christ… whence they are cleansed through the Mediator, that they may be one in Him, not only through the same nature in which all become from mortal men equal to the angels, but also through the same will most harmoniously conspiring to the same blessedness, and fused in some way by the fire of charity into one spirit. For to this His words come, ‘That they may be one, even as we are one;’ namely, that as the Father and Son are one, not only in equality of substance, but also in will, so those also may be one, between whom and God the Son is mediator, not only in that they are of the same nature, but also through the same union of love.”↩︎
See ST I, q. 45, a. 6: “God the Father made creation through His Word, which is His Son, and through His Love, which is the Holy Spirit. Thus, the processions of the Persons are the ‘types’ (rationes) of the production of creatures.”↩︎
See ST I, q. 45, a. 7 and the whole of q. 93 concerning the image of the Trinity in men and pure spirits.↩︎
Concerning the mystery of the Incarnation, see ST III, q. 2, a. 12, ad 3 and the whole of q. 3. For the mystery of the Redemption, see ST III, q. 48, a. 5: “It is proper to Christ as man to be the Redeemer immediately; however, the redemption may be ascribed to the whole Trinity as to its first cause”; ibid., ad 2: “Christ as man paid the price of our redemption immediately, though at the command of the Father as the original author”; In III Sent. d.19, a. 4, quaest. 2: “Properly speaking, only Christ is the redeemer, although the whole Trinity could also be called the redeemer (redemptrix).”↩︎
See Expositio in symbol apostolorum, a. 9: “Just as we see in one man a single soul and body, though made up of various members, so too the Catholic Church is one body and has many members. However, the soul that gives life to this body is the Holy Spirit.” Also see ST III, q. 8, a. 1, ad 3.↩︎
In IV Sent., d. 18, q. 1, a. 1, ad 5: “The Trinity, in the same way, remits sins as one person. And therefore, it is not necessary that the priest, who is the minister of the Trinity, would have three keys…”↩︎
See ST I, q. 38, a. 1: “The rational creature does sometimes attain the enjoyment of a divine person, as when it is made partaker of the Divine Word and the Love Proceeding, so as freely to know God truly and to love Him rightly.”↩︎
See ST II-II, q. 109, a. 9, ad 2: “The activity of the Holy Spirit… moves and protects us, together with the Father and the Son.”↩︎
In I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, expositio textus.↩︎
See ST III Suppl., q. 89, a. 3: “Judgment is attributed to the Son because He will appear, in His human nature, to all, both good and wicked, though the whole Trinity will judge by authority.”↩︎
See J. de Guibert, SJ, La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus (Rome: 1953), 33: “In the fifty pages of the edition of the Monumenta containing details concerning the graces he received, we have been able to find 170 passages referring to the Trinity. But, more than this frequency with which he mentions it, and even more than the number of Masses celebrated in honor of the Trinity, what is particularly significant is the place occupied by this mystery in the favors granted to the Saint. Among the passages that have been framed with a pen-stroke as being related to more important graces, a dozen speak of visions of the Trinity, and the other four concern Jesus, the Incarnate Christ, in his role as mediator alongside the Trinity.↩︎
St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 7th mansion, no. 6 (trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez).↩︎
Ibid., no. 9.↩︎
John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, stanza 1 (trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez).↩︎
John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, commentary 1.3–4 (trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, alt.).↩︎
See Leo XIII, Divinum illud munus: “This dogma is called by the doctors of the Church "the substance of the New Testament," that is to say, the greatest of all mysteries, since it is the fountain and origin of them all. In order to know and contemplate this mystery, the angels were created in Heaven and men upon earth. In order to teach more fully this mystery, which was but foreshadowed in the Old Testament, God Himself came down from the angels unto men.” Thus, God sent His only son to earth, and He governs the universe, only so as to lead the predestined to this blessed vision of the Trinity. This was what Jesus prayed for, in His greatest prayer prior to His death: Father, may they be one, as we are one! (John 17:21).↩︎
Hymn, Vespers, Saturday, Dominican Rite.↩︎
Hymn, Vespers, Feast of the Holy Trinity, Dominican Rite.↩︎
