Threeness of Persons, Oneness of Love

You are one, and from you nothing can be born except yourself. And this is the one love, between you and your Son - the Holy Spirit which proceeds from you both. This love is nothing less than you and your Son; for your love for him and he for you are as great as you are.1 

  

There is at least one point we definitely drove home in class: the Holy Trinity is a mystery. As soon as we start to say “The Trinity is like...” we need to be prepared to add “...but is not actually that”. For every similarity, we find a greater dissimilarity. Our starting place must be what the Holy Trinity is: One God, Three Persons. We take this on faith, but our faith seeks understanding. Maybe the Trinity is like...water? Water is one thing, but we can find it in three forms: liquid, ice, and vapor. So is the Trinity like water? NO! That’s modalism, Patrick. Our analogy has failed because we have failed to capture the distinctness of the three persons of the one Godhead.  

Maybe we shouldn’t beat ourselves up so much. Even though the Trinity is an ineffable mystery (would we expect anything less of God?), we can seek understanding through our analogies, imperfect though they may be. Hugh of St. Victor confronts the puzzle of imperfect analogies head-on. The Holy Trinity, he says, may be likened to mind, wisdom, and love.2 The upshot of this analogy is that it allows us to see how man is made in the image of God: for he too has a mind, the wisdom of his mind, and the love of them both. But, while mind, wisdom, and love allow us to think about the Holy Trinity, and even to find its image in man, we are left wanting. For, “since man himself is a person, but these are found to be only affections, as it were, adhering to the person and existing in relation to it, to be person is not at all proper to these, but only to be present in the person.”3 The analogy is imperfect precisely because we are attempting to describe as the persons of God those things which, in human beings, only adhere to us (individual persons). In other words, though we may be made in his image and likeness, we are not triune persons. God, however, cannot have any nature other than his own, so his mind, wisdom, and love, are all him - three distinct persons, one God.  

I appreciate Hugh’s explanation, but am left wanting for better imagery. We are talking about persons, but making explanations out of mind, wisdom, and love. This is not to say that I think Hugh’s explanation is wrong; it is to say that I want an explanation which offers a more tangible picture. 

St. Anselm, with his simple, dense and doctrinally air-tight description of the Trinity hits the mark. The son is the Father’s Word, the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and his Word.4 By this account, the persons are distinguished in accord with the Athanasian Creed: the Son is generated by the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.5 We have three persons, in a relationship of love. The Father, the Son, and the love between them. But does this not give rise to the same problem which arose with Hugh? How can we conceive of the love between two persons as another person? 

I think that this task might not be so hard as we might imagine it to be. Because we are made in the image of God, the Trinity is written into our nature. So let’s look to the beginning:  

  

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him... So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 6 

  

Is this all mythological talk? However we might answer that question, here is what we do learn: Adam, the first man, made in the image and likeness of God, is not meant to be alone. He is, rather, meant to live in relationship. But this relationship must be lived with someone who is like him. In fact, it must be lived with someone who is so like him that she is of one substance. And so, God fashions Eve from his rib - one person is begotten of another. Human beings, man and woman, are incomplete without each other. “Therefore”, we are told, “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”7 Man and woman, are two, but they are also one. Twoness of persons, oneness of flesh.  

A nice nuptial Mass

Can we have, in human love, an image which is also triune? I believe so. To find the third person, we only need to continue the story. A man and a woman fall in love, which is to say that they recognize they are incomplete without each other: “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” They make arrangements with the requisite authorities, maybe have a nice nuptial mass, go home together, and then...cleave to one another, and become one flesh. This union is not a mere expression of the closeness of their bodies. It is rather the consummation of the reality of their love for one another, drawn into a permanent union. And what comes of this love? If they are lucky, from and by the love of the man and woman will proceed another person. The conception of a new human being proceeds from the love between the husband and the wife.8 And so, marriage is an image of the Trinity. 

Like all images of the Trinity, this one will fall short. In the Trinity, Anselm would have us know, the love proceeding from the Father and the Son literally is the third person, coeternal with them both, of equal greatness, of one substance.9 Yet, the marital union of man and wife and the child conceived from this union do give testimony to a unity of love and threeness of persons. Knowing, then, the beauty of the image of the Trinity in marriage, how much more beautiful must be the love of the persons of the Trinity! How can we not say, with Bernard and the author of the Song of Songs, “O, that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”? 10 

Note well: God is not a projection of our own erotic desires. Rather, the capacity for love which is written into our nature is a reflection of his image. For man to be made in the image and likeness of God means that all of man's activities reflect God's image. While all animals can procreate, the special point about human procreation is that it can be an act of love, an act whereby two persons give themselves entirely and permanently to one another, an act of love from which proceeds another person of equal greatness and of the same flesh as the other two. To be made in the image and likeness of God means that the command to be fruitful and multiply means something more to man and wife than it does to other animals: it means that they join to one another in love, and through this love participate in creation - as God, in his infinite love, created us. 

-TvB

Footnotes:

Image: Rogier van Der Weyden, Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, Right Wing (detail). Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Accessed via pintrest.

1 St. Anselm, “Proslogion”, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion (London: Penguin, 1973). 262 (Ch. 23, lines 663-667)

2 Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America: 1951). 53

3 Hugh of St. Victor, 53

4 St. Anselm, 262 (lines 660, 665)

5 Sullivan, J. (1907). The Athanasian Creed. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved February 7, 2019 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02033b.htm

6 Gen 2:18, 21-23 RSV

7  Gen 2:24 RSV

8 Though I do not have the book in front of me to make an exact citation, this point, that in marriage a new person proceeds from the union of love between the husband and wife, is drawn from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Marriage: the Mystery of Faithful Love. (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1991)

9 St. Anselm 262 (Ch. 23, lines 663-667)

10 Song 1 RSV - (Following the Hebrew, replacing "you" with "he")