The Persons of the Trinity

[MarieT]

The Holy Trinity is the mystery of God in himself.

It's a mystery in the strict sense, it can't be proved by rational arguments, and it depends exclusively on God's revelation and above all on the incarnation of the Son, His life in the flesh, and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

How can we know the Divine persons?

Strictly speaking, Christians know something about the mystery.

At Sunday Mass, they profess their belief in the Holy Trinity, one God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Christians are baptized in the name of the Triune God.

Belief in the Trinity is the very substance of being a Christian, consecrated by baptism in this holy and mysterious name.

Saint Thomas Aquinas recommends that starting from this foundational knowledge given to us by the Christian faith, we push our minds to probe more deeply into this highest mystery while keeping in mind our limits.

Our minds will not be able to investigate it fully, and in this life, nor adequately grasp it.

Aquinas believes that it is worthwhile to enquire into the names and identities of the divine persons so that our minds get some glimpse of the highest truth... if only with a feeble and limited understanding, which in turn gives us the greatest joy.

Our minds need to purify the images and concepts so that they can apply truthfully to God.

That's a challenge for us because we often understand things by using analogies to other things that we know, and from those things we construct images in our minds.

But when we are speaking about the divine persons, nothing in this world will be fully adequate to the divine reality, and no image will be able to represent God without introducing some distortion.

Regarding the mystery....we can know something of it through Divine Revelation, but we cannot know everything about God.

The best place to encounter the names for grasping something of the identity of the divine persons is Sacred Scripture.

Aquinas notes that we find two kinds of names in Scripture.

Some names are proper to a single divine person,
and they designate what is really distinct about that person, their proper names.

But we also find in Scripture, other names and titles that technically speaking could belong to any of the three divine persons, although they're especially applied to or appropriated to one of them.

Examples in the Gospels:
we often hear Jesus referring to his Father,
and he also tells us that he is the Son of the Father,
and likewise that he will send us the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, from the Father.

Now all of these are proper names,
but we read elsewhere in Scripture other names and titles, for example, that the Father is Almighty or Omnipotent.

This Title is appropriated to the Father because in truth all three divine persons are almighty.

The Proper name: "Father":
In one sense, the name Father can apply to God,
simply speaking,
in so far as God is the source of creation
and exercises a kind of Providential care and love for creation.

Analogy to human fatherhood
because human fathers are a certain source for their children and also care for their families.

And this is what the word Father is pointing to when we speak about God in General.

In another sense the word Father designates the first Person of the Holy Trinity,
the one who is a principle without a principle,
the one from whom proceeds the Son and the Holy Spirit,
and we principally understand Him in relation to His Son.

The son has three proper names revealed in Scripture.
Son, Word and Image.

The Gospel of John uses 2 names in a single sentence.

The Word became flesh and dwelled among us,
full of grace and truth and we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.

Colossians Chapter 1 He is the image of the invisible God

To understand this, and building on an insight of Saint Augustine, Aquinas thinks the most fundamental name here is “Word”
and from there we will be able to understand the names of "Son" and "image."

If one tries to think of themselves in their mind, it is difficult to capture the very essence of our being.

Our minds are limited and we don't perfectly understand ourselves.

We're creatures in time, we have bodies, we change, we have a past and a future, and much about us remains obscure and unknown to us.

But this thought experiment shows us at least this much.
As you understand yourself, there is something in your mind, a kind of idea or image or mental word, that is both from you and remains in you, distinct from you who are thinking it but that also corresponds in some way to who you are.

It’s the fruit of your act of understanding yourself.

Now God's intellect is infinitely superior to ours

He understands himself in an infinitely perfect way.

He conceives an image of himself that is a single divine word that expresses himself with absolute perfection
And this is the Son, the image of the invisible God.

Since God is a pure spirit without a body, His spiritual and immaterial Word is perfectly identical with the one who speaks it in eternity in absolutely every way except for one.

The divine word is God from God. He is from the Father.

This is the Father's eternal generation or begetting of the divine Son.

And as God Conceives His word by one perfect act of self understanding, He likewise loves what he understands as perfectly and infinitely good, and so from the Father and the Son precedes a third person, the Holy Spirit, who is divine Love in person.

Along with the Father, the Father's Word breathes forth Love in the person of the Holy Spirit.

This proper name "Word" then designates that the second person of the Trinity proceeds by way of intellect.

Finally, the third person of the Trinity is known by three proper names
Holy spirit,
Love and
gift.

The most prominent of these names is Holy Spirit.

Aquinas believes that even though the words "Holy" and "Spirit" taken separately could refer to God as a whole, taken together they form a single proper name that refers to the Holy Spirit's unique way of proceeding from the Father and the Son by way of breathing forth or spiration.

The Father and Son breathe forth the third person, who is thus rightly named the Holy Spirit.

Love is also a proper name for the Holy Spirit.

He proceeds by way of love as the mutual love of the Father and the Son.

From this proper Name of love, we see why a third name used for the Holy Spirit by Jesus in John's Gospel: that he is gift, also counts as a proper name because love is the reason for a truly gratuitous gift.

And this proper name of "Gift" points out to us the Spirit's aptitude,
his readiness to be given to human beings in the invisible mission of grace.

These names of the Holy Trinity give us a glimpse into the heart of the mystery of God in himself and even though we don't fully grasp what they signify in God, Aquinas thinks that we should give thanks to God for the great privilege of knowing Him by name.

Taken from a lecture by a Dominican: Aquinas on the Trinity