Describing an Indescribable Mystery
Posted by Pat Gohn in Faith on Thursday, July 08, 2010 6:00 AM
As I read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, my mind often hears the distant voices of my grammar school teachers enjoining me to “look up the words I do not know.” As one traverses the landscape of the Catechism, one encounters language requiring translation and definition. This is especially true in understanding the Trinity. Today’s column seeks to build our vocabulary!
For centuries the Catholic Church has sought precise language to teach and defend the dogma of the Trinity. But how does one describe an indescribably mystery? It is here that the language of philosophy helps.
CCC 251:
In order to articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin: “substance”, “person” or “hypostasis”, “relation” and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand.
Let’s examine the three terms of substance, person or hypostasis, and relation. Taken together, they describe the theology, or theologia, the inner workings of the Trinity.
First, often rendered as essence or nature, substance is the divine being in its entirety. This encompasses everything about God… God’s “what-ness.” It is what God is as a whole or totality. Substance is God’s supreme reality and existence.
CCC 252:
We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity [Council of Constantinople II (553AD)].” The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire: “The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e. by nature one God. [Council of Toledo XI (675AD)]. “
Substance helps us understand the Trinity is One.
Many of us can define the Trinity as “three Persons in One God.” But what is this divine Personhood, with a capital “P”?
Second, Person designates the real distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as well as their relationship to one another. Hypostasis, defines this distinctive Personhood. Different from the “What” of God, it defines the “Who” of God.
We often find hypostasis applied to Jesus Christ: The hypostatic union describes Jesus as fully God and fully a man at the same time. The divine and human natures are joined in Jesus, without cancelling or diminishing the other. They exist in a sublime union. Jesus is both God and man.
Similarly, the hypostasis of the Trinity is each Person of the Trinity existing fully, totally, in union with the other. Yet, they are marvelously distinct. The Trinity is both One God and three Persons.
Person or hypostasis helps us understand that the divine persons of the Trinity as distinct from one another.
Third, relation recalls the relational names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit describe their distinctiveness as Persons. These relationships with one another do not oppose their Oneness or Personhood.
Relation helps us understand the divine persons are relative to one another.
Substance, Person, and Relation, describe the interior “Who” and “What” of the Trinity.
But what of the “When-Where-and-Why” of the Trinity? What terms describe what the Trinity does? That would be the divine economy, or oikonomia.
The divine economy is the common work of the three divine persons throughout history. It is God’s amazing activity in creation, and the governing of it. It is everything God does in the vast thing we call “God’s Plan” regarding the salvation of the world.
The Trinity does what the Trinity is: this triune God of Love invites human persons to union with itself, and provides the means for that to happen. As the Trinity are inseparable as divine persons, so, too, their work is inseparable from them.
The Catechism states it succinctly and beautifully in CCC 260:
The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity.
This is Church-speak for the sublime mystery of what the work of the Trinity means for us.
But before we had 2000 years of the Church’s meditation on this truth in the Catechism, we had the words of Jesus, who said it best…
“If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him.” (Jn 14:23.)
Want to read more?
Check out CCC 236:
The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works.
—Pat Gohn is a wife & mother celebrating 27 years of Catholic family life. Her Catholic writing, podcasting, and ministry life are found at PatGohn.com.
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