Gifted at homiletics, Monsignor never, at least in my time hearing him, used a script or notes. What follows is not a homily, per se, but it reflects the substance and style from which his St. Victor parishioners benefited year upon year. It's a mind bending theological subject, but I like how he addressed it, and I thought that Internet posterity, should one exist, should have it for future generations.
We are told that modern man feels alienated, adrift in the world. He has lost the sense of security that cones from being part of a purposeful, rational existence. Man asks--despairing even as he asks of getting an answer--what is the meaning of his existence? Where has he come from? Where is he going? What meaning does his history have? Or perhaps, is life without meaning? Irrational, absurd?
It is not too much to say tat the reason all these questions arise in such pessimistic fashion (they are certainly not new questions--but it is a new development for Western civilization that there are now no generally accepted answers) because in large part Western man simply has lost true faith in God. Man currently is trying to explain himself in isolation, apart from God, in a vacuum. I do not necessarily mean that all idea of God has been formally rejected in our culture. Some, probably most, still retain a conviction about a First Cause, the Author of Intelligent Design. However, even this notion is giving way more and more to explicit atheism. But God known by reason has never been the God known and called as such by Western man. Western man has been Christian man and his God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God revealed to us as our Father by His Son, Jesus Christ. . . My faith, our faith, is our knowledge of the true God as He has chosen to reveal Himself to us by His word. That knowledge in us--His Name, His Identity--He has chosen to make known to our generation of men. We are the people whom He has gathered together in this age from east to west to give glory to His Name.
We must proclaim Him as He is. We must proclaim Him as He has revealed Himself and as we know Him in faith. Man's reason is valuable and he is obliged (and will recognize the duty if he has good will) to use reason to bring him to a limited, natural knowledge of God. Reason, again when it is accompanied by good will, will assist man, after he has come to faith, to understand, at least in part, the meaning of God's revealed truth. But reason does not save. Reason itself does not give us a knowledge of the God Who loves us, Who forgives us, Who will to save us. It is faith that saves, and therefore, as we are God's children, as His love is in us, so for the sake of our brothers who lack faith, what we must offer the world is the witness of true faith.
In the words of the General Catechetical Directory, "The greatest way the faithful can help the atheistic world to come to God is by the witness of a life which agrees with the message of Christ's love and of living and mature faith that is manifested by works of justice and charity." The opportunity faith offers modern man is not alone an access to the world to come, but it gives release as well from the grinding despair and pessimism in this world that result amidst the hardships of life without knowledge of the God Who sees us in our misery, Who cares, Who rescues.
The consequences of all this preamble is to say that when we speak about God in fact we preach and offer to the world knowledge of the God Who is a Trinity, for there is no other God. This is a truth known by faith, an absolute mystery revealed to men by God. Reason can perform two fundamental tasks in regard to the mystery of the Trinity; it can show that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about the doctrine--by a reflection on and study of the concept of the Trinity--it can help us to an understanding of its meaning. But reason does not bring us into union with the Trinity. We will never know, love and serve Father, Son and Holy Spirit by us of reason alone. It is faith that brings us to acknowledge and confess the Trinity. It is faith that enables us to share the life of the Trinity. It is faith in the Trinity that saves.
That faith has come to us in divine revelation. In the Old Testament the revelation of the Trinity was prepared in the belief held by Jews that God revealed Himself by appropriate historical acts to save His people. He did not reveal Himself in an abstract text-book set of teachings about Himself but by deeds fitted to the circumstances of His people's needs. By these acts God not only intended to reveal Himself but also to communicate, to give Himself to His people. Therefore, as long as God was not ready to enter upon His irreversible self revelation and self communication in Jesus Christ and He was only promising but not yet manifesting the final age of history which belongs to the Spirit of God (the Parousia) then for the Old Testament Jews the revelation of the Trinity would have been a word of revelation not accompanied by a saving effect. God did not nor does He act in this fashion. It required the "fullness of time", when all was made ready by the many less self-revealing and saving acts that had gone before, that finally He revealed Himself as the Trinity when He spoke through His Son
The New Testament is therefore the logical place to look for God's word to us about His Triune Nature. As in the Old Testament there is no formal or analytical or systematic teaching about the Trinity in the Gospels or Epistles. The nearest we have to a full and explicit statement is the admonition in Matthew to baptize "in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (28:19).
But in a wider sense, of course, the doctrine of the Trinity is fully contained in the New Testament. It is clear when Jesus is referred to as Son of God that His Divinity is being named. He is not merely a cosmic power intermediate between God and the world, but He exists before the world in the realm of the divine. For the New Testament authors Jesus is simply "the Son" not a mere prophet. He is the absolute bringer of salvation.
The New Testament also closes out any view of the Spirit as a cosmic or religious power intermediate between God and the world. He is none else than the Spirit of God. The Son and the Spirit bring to mankind the saving presence of God (the Father) Himself, but the Son and Spirit are not simply identical with Him Whom they reveal to the world.
It is evident how hesitant and groping the religious language of the New Testament authors is, when they try to speak of the unity and distinction of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Where then do we find the convincing proof in revelation of this word of God regarding His nature? The answer must be that the very incarnate Jesus is for us the presence of God (the Father) and still is not the Father. ("Philip, do you not know that he who sees Me sees the Father?")
This absence of a systematic treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity in Sacred Scripture makes more important the task of the Magisterium in formulating that doctrine. What then, does the Church teach us as the doctrine of the Trinity? There are numerous ancient and medieval statements of the doctrine. Outstanding among these are the Athanasian Creed and the Decree of the Council of Florence. One of the finest statements, which I quote here not because it is the most authoritative but because of its clarity, is from the First Vatican Council. That Council, as you know, was interrupted in 1870 before it could compete its work. But the council fathers had prepared a statement on the Trinity to combat the errors of now all but forgotten priest, Anton Gunther. The statement is an accurate summary of what the Church teaches on the Trinity. Here it is.
"Of all the mysteries which we profess in light of faith, the supreme mystery is God Himself, who is One in Essence, Three in Persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. According truth of the Catholic faith, the blessed Trinity is one God, because the essence or substance common to the three Persons is really and numerically one. For from all eternity the Father generates the Son, not in producing in emanation another essence equal to His own, but in communicating His own simple essence. And in like manner the Holy Spirit proceeds, not by a multiplication of the essence, but He proceeds by a communication of the same singular essence by one eternal spiration from the Father and the Son as from one principle. This essence, then, or nature, one in number, truly is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; it is equally three persons and each of them individually. Thus the persons are really distinct from one another, but in nature or essence they are one and the same. And since in God everything is one where there is no relative opposition, there is one will and one operation with which the most Holy Trinity creates, arranges and governs everything extrinsic to itself." (The Church Teaches, page 137)
What this statement (let us not call it a dogma since it was never enacted by the Council) emphasizes is the unity of Almighty God even though there are Three Persons in the One God. What is reflected as well in the statement is the tremendous development in understanding of the Trinity that has been accomplished by theology over the years. Without going back at all on my previous statements about the primary task that faith has in proclaiming the truths of Christ, and that it is faith that saves, not reason, the contribution of reason in understanding this doctrine must be acknowledged. After all, theology is the application of reason to matters of faith. When theology is under the guidance of the Magisterium, human progress in knowing Divine truth can be tremendous. And so it has been in the history of the dogma of the Trinity. Theology has defended it from error, clarified its meaning and developed our understanding of revelation in a way that truly enriches the practice of faith in the Trinity.
To be explicit, theology has distinguished for us the concepts of nature and person. We understand that not alone in God but in man as well these things are distinct. Just as in human nature, humanity is the common substance of each one of us in this room yet each one is a distinct person, so also nature and person are distinct in man. The two concepts are important for understanding the doctrine of the Trinity. "Person" indicates who you are; "nature" what you are. "Who are you? To answer that I give my name, "George"? What are you? What I am is a man, my nature, we are all equally, none more or less than others, human beings. But I alone am the "who" that I am. Personhood makes me unique; it makes me to be me, to be me in such a unique fashion that I am I and no other.
These ideas are applicable to the Trinity. There is but one God, that is, one Divine Nature, but in that Nature, there are three Divine Persons. What do we ascribe to the Divine Nature? What to the Divine Persons? Again, the analogy from human nature and human personhood are useful. What belongs to each of us, by reason of the fat that we are human--rational soul and physical body? What do we ascribe to person? This is a difficult question, never fully answered It is somewhat close to the answer to say that person is what operates nature, the person you are is "in the driver's seat" to operate the nature you have.
To some extent that is the way it is with God. There is one Divine Nature and to the Nature of God belongs the one Divine Mind, the one Divine Will, the One Divine Knowledge, everything that God to be God must have belongs to Him by nature. And we must predicate only one of these attributes to God, whatever they may be: immensity, eternity, goodness, love, truth, justice, mercy--only the one but shared in equally by each of the Three Divine Persons. Synonyms for the Divine Nature, by the way, are: Divinity, Deity and Godhead.
All right, what then does each of the Three Divine Persons have as Persons and not by reason of the Divine Nature? Or in other words, what makes each Person to be a distinct Person in the Trinity? The answer is best given from the names of the Divine Persons: The Father's Personhood is His Fatherhood, the Son's His Sonship, and the Holy Spirit's the gift of the Love of God.
I think that is always useful when talking about the Trinity to remind that the God is pure spirit. Because He has no body, He does not become a Father in a human way, by sexual generation, but He generates the Son by intellectual generation. It is from the Mind of the Divine Nature that God the Father generates the Son We ask what is the first idea and essential idea that the ind of God must generate? The idea God must have is of Himself. And since He is infinite, perfect, all wise, etc. then the idea He generates will be an absolute Image of Himself--infinite, perfect, all wise and all the other Divine attributes: whom we call God the Son. This is an indication only of the way that traditional Christian theology considers the generation of the Son from the Father. IT is perfectly in accord with Sacred Scripture, which calls God the Son "the Word" (a word is an expression of an idea) and "the Image of His Being."
God the Holy Spirit originates from the movement of love between Father and Son. Since God is all-perfect His love of Himself must find a perfect expression of love--that expression we call the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.
We should now point the direction in which theology may well go in developing the understanding of the Trinity. Put simply we may say that the more attention is being given to the roles of each Person in the work of our salvation. You will readily agree that the emphasis heretofore has been almost totally on the role of the Second Person as Saviour. This is not a mere mental device in order to facilitate study of the Trinity, but rather the more clearly we study the roles of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in salvation history the ore those roles tell us who the Father is, the Son, the Holy Spirit. It is identity between the Persons in the Trinity and the roles or missions of each in our salvation which theology is now asserting.
To conclude I return to my original point: it is faith that saves, faith in the Trinity. We cannot deny our duty to study this doctrine with reason analytically and systematically. Scripture must be searched for meaning. But above all this must be done in a spirit of faith. It is God Who wills that we come to know Him. He has sent His Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, into the world to teach us all things. No one with faith will deny that the Spirit illuminates, inspires and guides all who sincerely will His coming. Our prayer in faith is to God Who has taught the faithful through the light of the Holy Spirit that He will give us by the light of the same Spirit the wisdom to know Him and always to rejoice in that knowledge.
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