Category Archives: Trinity

Guest Post: On Trinitarian Symbolism in the Family

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By Connor Szurgot

When speaking of the Blessed Trinity, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself.” (CCC 234) Beyond even that epic and truly awe-some reality is the reality that, since every cause is in some way in its effect, all of created reality is in some way Trinitarian. One of the clearest examples of this Trinitarian symbolism in created reality is the family. As such, the devil seeks to attack the Blessed Trinity through His image: the family.

A Community of Persons, United by Love

Through the mystery of the Trinity is not able to be fully comprehended by man, certain facts about the mystery can be understood. Some of those facts are: 1) There is one Divine nature, 2) there are three distinct Divine Persons in the Godhead, 3) each of these Divine Persons is co-equal, co-eternal, and fully God, 4) each of the Divine Persons is only differentiated from the others by their relations to the other Persons. These relations are as follows: 1) the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, eternally begets the Son, the second Person of the Trinity and 2) the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. Without delving too deep into this mystery, it is important to understand that all three Persons are united in love. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and this eternal perfect love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.

With that understanding established, it is not hard to see how the family images this. A man and women love each other so much as to give themselves to each other in the life-long bond of matrimony and the fruit of their married love is a child. What unites them in the child on a material level are their shared genes. (Indeed, the father and the mother are in a way now more completely united since the child is the product of both of them.) Yet, beyond the material level, the are united in mutual love, one for another. Also, each member is distinct in their role within the family. They are a community of persons, united in love, that images the community of Persons, united in eternal love.

The First Attack: Gender Theory

Progressive gender theory advances the idea that men and women are the same. This positions leads to two conclusions: 1) to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ has no actual meaning and 2) that one can switch between being a man or a woman at will because what you are is defined only by what you think you are. In addition to the obvious absurdity of this claim, a problem with this is shown by a passage from Genesis, “So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them.” (Gen. 1:27) Notice two things: 1) that God clearly created two distinct sexes and 2) that He created them in the image of God. Clearly, the complementarity of man and woman are supposed to reveal, in a subtle way, something about the Trinity.

The complementary of man and woman is supposed to model the relationship of the Father and the Son. The Father (the man) eternally loves and gives Himself to the Son (the woman) Who receives Him and gives Himself back in return. The man is the giver in the relationship while the woman receives him and gives herself back in return. The natural inclinations in man and woman show this to be true and to attempt to defy this is not only to make oneself miserable, but to destroy this image of the Trinity in man.

The Second Attack: Divorce

Divorce is the first of these three attacks that has found its way into mainstream acceptance among Protestant Christian circles. This is strange since Christ is very clear that, “[husband and wife] are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:6) This practice attacks the Trinity by destroying the Love that binds the Father and the Son together, the Holy Spirit. When a man and woman give themselves to each other in marriage, something new is created even before they step away from the altar. The objective reality of their marriage comes into being and exists in a way that is separate, but dependent on the two people in the marriage. This dependency is not upon the will of the two people joined, but upon their lives. Their marriage will objectively exist until death do they part.

When a couple divorces, they tear apart and divide what God has created to be the symbol of His Unity in the Trinity: the family. The painful effects of such a rupture are often far reaching. It can be particularly damaging to the children of their marriage, who have lost what was supposed to be their image of complete and unconditional love—their image of God on earth.

The Third Attack: Contraception

The second attack of the three that has broken through the walls of the broader Christian kingdom and proceeded to pillage and destroy the interior of that kingdom is contraception. At the beginning of Creation, God gave all animals the blessing of the ability to produce another being like itself. Only in man, however, can we call this blessing procreation instead of reproduction. Only man has been given the privilege of assisting God in the creation of new souls. It is a privilege so important and sacred that it has always been entrusted to two people and marked with a degree of pleasure befitting the goodness of such an act. Moreover, it is a power which makes man truly God-like in the love which motivates it. To will to bring into existence a creature that you will care for and sacrifice for and who has done nothing for you, is indeed incapable of doing anything for you at the beginning, is an act imaging the love that drove God in the act of creation.

The act of contraception, however, opposes the image of the Trinity by removing from a man and woman the natural end of their love and the damage caused by this removal is proportional to the good it damages. While a single contraceptive act, even between a man and wife, is gravely sinful as it opposes the end set forth by the natural law, the effects of a contraceptive mindset are even more terrifying. Through the adoption of a contraceptive mindset, our culture has separated marital love and the creation of children into two separate camps. The fruits of such a separation are bountiful in our culture: pre- and extra-martial relations, masturbation, pornography, abortion, fatherless children, the acceptance of homosexuality and numerous other sexual disorders. It paves the way for marital love, which is supposed to express perfect self-giving to another, to corrupt into selfishness and mutual use. The Trinity shows that love is fruitful by its very nature. The love between the Father and the Son spirates out from them and is another Person. To act contrary to the natural end of love is to act contrary to love itself.

The family is the building block of society and God has will that it be the building block of the supernatural society of the Church as well. He has also made it the natural image for His very Nature, the greatest mystery of the Catholic faith. We must defend this great gift from God which has been entrusted to us by living and proclaiming the truth.

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Holy Spirit, Trinity

The week between Pentecost and the Feast of the Holy Trinity is an excellent time to meditate on Who the Holy Spirit is.  Because He is the Person of the Trinity that we seem to know the least about, He is also the one Who is the most likely to suffer at the hands of revisionist theologians, especially those with misguided feminist sympathies.  All too often He is referred to as “she.” Given how confused we are as to who man is, it is not surprising that we easily fall into error as to who God is.  If we are made in the image and likeness of God then we must understand exactly who God is in order to understand who we are.  Despite the fact that the Trinity is a great mystery of our faith, we can apply reason to revelation in order to develop a deeper relationship with the Holy Spirit.

To know the Holy Spirit, we must first begin with some foundational Trinitarian theology.  Revelation speaks of man unique in all visible creation as being made in God’s image.  Specifically, it is the spiritual powers of our soul, the intellect and will that make us so.  We can conclude that God, Who is pure spirit, has these powers of knowing and loving.  Because He must have the perfection of all-being (in order to be God) we know that He is all-knowing and all-loving.  Because He is eternal, He must have both an eternal object to know and an eternal object to love.  If God is all-knowing then His knowledge, even of Himself, must be perfect.  If God is all loving, then His love must have an object for all eternity and because He is God, He loves this object perfectly.  Are you with me so far?  This is as deep as I am going to go, but there is a key concept from here that must be understood in order to go any further in this.  It is the concept of perfection.

What does it mean to be perfect?  Existence itself is the most basic kind of perfection.  In other words, I can create the perfect wife in my head, but if she doesn’t actually exist then she is not perfect.  What does this have to do with God?  Well, if God has perfect knowledge of even Himself then to be perfect that knowledge must exist as a Person.  This is the second Person of the Trinity, the Son.  He is the “Word Made Flesh”, the Logos.

This Second Person then is the object of the love of the First Person, the Father, for all eternity.  Because the Second Person is also God, He loves the First Person for all eternity.  This love between the Two Persons is also perfect.  This means that the Love exists as a Third Person, the Holy Spirit.

To summarize, God the Son is everything that God the Father knows about Himself.  This means that God the Father pours out all of Himself into God the Son, holding nothing back.  This perfect exchange is then a Person Himself, the Holy Spirit.

So why go into this Thomistic explanation of the Trinity?  Because some will avoid the gender problem of the Holy Spirit by simply gender neutralizing Him.  To call Him an “It” or “Sanctifier” takes away one of the most important aspects of the Trinity—the fact that He is a person.  It puts Him on the level of function and values Him only for His utility.  That is why the Church has from very early on fought this heresy known as Modalism which says the different names for the Persons of the Trinity emphasize the different aspect of the one God.  In other words, the names of Jesus and God simply identify different modes of the same individual.

Along the same lines, some will identify the Trinity as the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.  But this speaks of what the Persons do (more accurately what we attribute to them) than Who each Person is.  It is like calling the server in the restaurant “Waitress” or calling her by her name.  One reduces her to her function, the other addresses her as a person.

Holy Spirit Stained Glass

So, if we must give Him a personal pronoun when referring to Him, why must it be He and not She?  In addressing this, we must make an important clarification.  God is not male or female.  That is, the terms “male” and “female” refer only to the biology of God’s creation.  Animals are both male and female and they are not made in God’s image.  What I am saying though is that God, and specifically the Holy Spirit, is fundamentally masculine.

Returning to the question, why must the Holy Spirit be a He?  The short answer is the same one that we swear to every Sunday during the Creed.  The Holy Spirit is masculine because He is the “Lord and giver of Life.”  To see what this means we need look no further than our own bodies.

The man is the giver of life in that he is the initiator and source in procreation.  The woman is receptive and the receiver of life.  In an analogous way, God comes from outside of creation and brings life.  So in order to be the giver of life that comes from without, the Holy Spirit must be referred to as He.  This Divine masculinity is revealed when the Holy Spirit was able to overshadow Mary at the Annunciation and the Word became Flesh.

There is another, more fundamental reason why we refer to the Holy Spirit as He and not she.  In John 15:26, Jesus reveals to us that “when the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, He will testify to me.”  Christ is the fullest revelation of God and He reveals to us how we are to understand Holy Spirit as He.  To argue otherwise denies the central dogma of the Christian faith that Jesus is the full disclosure of God to man.

But it is also important to acknowledge that there must be femininity in God because there is femininity in creation.  None of what I have said should be interpreted as denying this obvious truth.  And it seems that it is the Holy Spirit Who also reveals this more so than the other two Persons.  Cardinal Ratzinger, echoing the teachings of the Church Fathers said: “Because of the teaching about the Spirit, one can as it were practically have a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine, in a mysterious, veiled manner, within God Himself.”  In the primordial family of the Trinity it is He Who reveals the aspects of motherhood by serving as the bond of love between Father and Son.  He reveals these most especially through both the bridal and maternal actions of the Church and His unique relationship with Mary (whom St. Maximillian Kolbe calls the “quasi-incarnation” of the Holy Spirit).

Bishop Bruskewitz seems to summarize the issue well: “Unfortunately, in our time, the devil is not only in the details, but also in the pronouns. Because of the onslaught of radical feminism, and other ideologies that are not compatible with the Catholic Faith, there is a great sensitivity to the kind of pronouns used for the Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity.”  Nevertheless we should be faithful both to what is revealed to us by Our Lord in His choice of pronouns in John 14-17 and faithful to the truth of man and woman who are made in God’s image.