The doctrine of the Trinity is the most fundamental revelation that God has made to humanity about himself. Once grasped, it seems logical, even inevitable. It explains why God is love. If God were absolute, outside of space and time, complete unto himself and existing as a single Person, then how could he love? Love is by definition relational. Love needs a source and an object. Without an object for his love, particularly another person, a single-personed God’s love would be unrequited. He can’t love himself. If that were the case, then God would be the supreme Egoist. A person may respect himself, desire good for himself, but he cannot love himself since love is defined as the union of individual persons. Yet, the Judeo-Christian God is described as Love. How can that be so? It is so because God is one God, but He consists of three Persons. In order to understand how this seeming contradiction is possible, it is necessary to understand that God is outside of time.
We will discuss the nature of time in more depth later, but for now it is important to note that time is a quality of matter, just as gravity, mass, charge, and so on. While time has always been an object of deep contemplation for philosophers, it was only with Albert Einstein in the 20th century that time became understood scientifically. Yet, it is clear that time is not simply a scientific concept, a mere property of the material world. Non-material things such as concepts or ideas do not exist in physical time. While concepts and ideas may be understood or held by material brains, they exist outside of time in minds. Concepts and ideas do not age, they do not change. They continue to exist even if the material brain in which they were once held forgets them or dies. The number four exists whether material brains exist to think about numbers or not. Two plus two equals four regardless of whether a brain exists to perform addition or not. Because time is a property of material things, purely spiritual beings such as God and angels do not experience time the way material beings do.
There are aspects of Trinitarian theology that are important to grasp in order to gain a deeper understanding of the sacrifice of the Mass and how it brings us to our goal of deification. In “De Trinitate,” St. Augustine develops what is known as the “psychological image” of the Trinity. Scripture repeatedly describes God as a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one God. This paradox is the core mystery of the Judeo-Christian faith and of all reality.
We have remarked elsewhere that any names that are predicated with reference to each other like Father and Son and the gift of each, the Holy Spirit, are said properly in that triad or trinity, that is, they belong distinctly to the several persons; the trinity is not the Father, the trinity is not the Son, nor is the trinity the Gift. But whatever they are each and severally called with reference to self the trinity is also called, not three such in the plural, but one such; thus the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and the Father is good, the Son is good, the Holy Spirit is good; and the Father is almighty, the Son is almighty, the Holy Spirit is almighty; yet there are not three Gods, or three good ones, or three almighty ones, but one God, good and almighty, the trinity itself.1
Augustine offers several “triads” to help understand who the Trinity is and how it functions. One is an analogy to the human self, which God explicitly made in his own image in Genesis.2 The human self consists of thoughts, emotions, and will, but one person. Augustine offers the analogy of love since it consists of he that loves, that which is loved, and love itself. He also offers a variation on that theme with the image of the mind, knowledge, and love. Augustine is the first to admit that all analogies to created things are inadequate to describe the mystery at the core of the uncreated Godhead and may even lead to misunderstandings and heterodoxy. The psychological model has been criticized for not really explaining how these “triads” that describe the necessary aspects of a particular person explain the need for three separate persons to exist as one. One heresy that the psychological model may lead to is “modalism,” which is the belief that the Trinity is not three distinct persons but rather three “modes” or forms of activity under which God manifests himself. A popular Trinity analogy that actually perfectly describes the heresy of modalism is likening the Trinity to water, which exists as liquid, solid, and gas. Unfortunately, they are all the same water, just in different forms because of temperature, not distinct entities existing as one. The forms do not perfectly co-exist at the same time. When the temperature varies, the forms vary with it.
In the 18th century, the American revivalist Congregationalist preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards made a valuable advance upon Augustine by applying the tools of philosophical idealism.
And this I suppose to be that blessed Trinity that we read of in the holy Scriptures. The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of himself, and subsisting in that idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth, in God’s infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine idea and divine love, and that therefore each of them are properly distinct persons.3
Edwards emphasizes the Father’s self-consciousness or “having an idea of himself.” Adding to Edwards’ description the notion of time, the logic of the Trinity unfolds with clarity. If we hold in our minds an image of a limitless, infinite, immutable spiritual being completely outside of time and space, the fact that this being is outside of time would immediately confer upon him some intriguing attributes. If time is the continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present and recede into the past, then in order for something to change, that something must change across time. If the continuum of time did not exist, or if time stood still, then events would also come to a standstill; for there would be no mechanism by which a present moment could recede into the past and be replaced as the present moment by a new and different moment from the future. Therefore, if time didn’t exist or stood still, change would not be possible. If something completely unsubjected to time was a purely spiritual personal being, then he could not change. Since a purely spiritual being would consist of nothing more than a mental life, his thoughts would also be unchanging. If the thoughts of this being fully exist and cannot change because he is outside of time, then his mental life exists in a perfect existential moment. Everything that he is exists fully and completely in the present moment. If this being is self-conscious, that is, he knows that he exists, who he is, and is aware of his thoughts, then he must always be completely conscious of himself.
We can have a limited understanding of God’s consciousness by stopping for a moment and being conscious of being conscious of as many of our thoughts and memories as we can. If we could maintain a perfect and eternal concentration upon all of our own thoughts and everything we know, then we could approximate the way that God’s perfect self-consciousness works. Of course, since our minds are time bound, we are merely creating the illusion of timelessness by quickly shifting our minds between as many thoughts as possible. For God, that is not necessary, since he is always perfectly and self-consciously aware of everything. God’s perfect awareness of his thoughts perfectly mirrors the original thoughts; the self-conscious thoughts are identical to the original thoughts. He knows what he knows and he knows that he knows what he knows — always.
Because they are outside of time and always known to God, this original mental life and its self-conscious image have perfect separate existences of their own. The only difference between them is how they originated. The second, eternally present self-conscious thought is completely dependent upon the initial thought of which it is the perfect image. This is the key to God’s trinitarian nature. If he is eternal and outside of time, a perfectly self-conscious perfect person with a perfect will, then his eternal self-consciousness, his perfect “image” of himself, must exist as a “second person” that is eternally reflecting upon the first “person” who originated him from himself. Since “personhood” is so fundamental to God the Father, then his perfect image must also have the characteristics of a person. A perfect image of a red apple is another actual red apple, not a high-resolution picture of a red apple; otherwise, the special qualities that make an apple an apple, such as its texture, juiciness, and flavor, are lost. They may look the same, but they are not the same. The perfect image of a person must also be a person; otherwise, the special qualities that make a person a person are also lost. Since a person is characterized as having a will, self-consciousness, and self-possession, a person is always uniquely his own. Therefore, we can see how a spiritual, infinite, timeless self-conscious person can have a self-image who is also a spiritual, infinite, timeless, self-conscious person. The initial first person is the source, the begetter, the Father of his own self-conscious image, which is his Son.
In theological usage, “word” is the translation of the Greek word logos, which represents all of the mental activity of God. If the second person of the Trinity is the “image” of the first person of the Trinity, then it becomes clear why the second person, who is the self-conscious totality of the Father’s mental activity, is known as the “Word” of God.
An objection to psychological images of the Trinity is that as a person, the Son must also be self-conscious, so does that then mean that he has his own self-image? That self-image would also be a person and would therefore have its own self-image in an eternal regression of self-images and therefore an eternal regression of divine persons? The answer is emphatically, NO! Just as the Son is the self-image of the Father, the Father is the reciprocal self-image of the Son. Together they share the same image, which is exactly why these multiple persons comprise one God. This is why Jesus can famously say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), for he and the Father don’t just share but actually are the same self-image. However, the Father and the Son as distinct persons must have their own wills. We know this from Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane when he says, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).
Why are the first and second persons of this mental trinity described as a father and a son? The second person is the eternal progeny of the first. He is therefore the same substance as the first person, though not the same person. The persons of God are therefore all comprised of the same Being or “stuff.” Just as human parents cause children to come into existence, the first person of the Trinity causes something that resembles himself to come into existence. We do not make our children; that is something that happens outside of our control. We do, however, cause them. The first person of the Trinity does not make the second person as much as he causes him simply by being a perfect, eternal, self-conscious person outside of time.
Traditionally, the first person of the Trinity is called the father and the second person the son, not mother and daughter. Yet, as a purely spiritual being, God is neither male nor female. Fatherhood is different from motherhood. A mother’s relationship to her offspring is different from that of a father’s. A father initiates the conception of a child. The mother receives a physical cause from the father and a change occurs in her body that results in a new being created within her. The divine Father, or first person of the Trinity, initiates the word or image without the need to “receive” anything. Hence, of the sexes, the male most closely describes the independence of God. It is also the way God describes himself in Scripture. Of course, Christians believe the second person of the Trinity is the Son who enfleshed himself, took on a human nature along with his divine nature, was conceived of a virgin named Mary, and chose to be born into human history as the male person, Jesus of Nazareth.
St. Augustine, De Trinitate, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 241.
“And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26).
Ralph Cunnington, “A Critical Examination of Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” Themelios, accessed August 8, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/a-critical-examination-of-jonathan-edwardss-doctrine-of-the-trinity/.