“The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith’. The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.’ " (Catechism of the Catholic Church 234)
To commemorate Trinity Sunday, here is a selection of five books that previous guests have recommended.
- On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius
by St. Gregory Nazianzus - The Wellspring of Worship
by Fr. Jean Corbon - Three Treatises on the Divine Images
by St. John of Damascus - Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today
by Joseph Ratzinger - The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God
by Gilles Emery OP
To mark Trinity Sunday last year the interview posted was with Fr. Gilles Emery OP, the leading expert on the Trinitarian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. In that interview, he discussed his books on the subject, the significance of St. Thomas’s teaching, and some of the contemporary debates.
However, Fr. Emery is not the only guest who has talked about the central mystery of the Christian faith. So have several others, while broaching other subjects. They have even recommended excellent books about the Trinity. So, to commemorate Trinity Sunday this year, it made sense to go through the archive, pick out those books, and repropose them. Here then are five such books that delve into the fundamental mystery of the faith. Hopefully, they will help us deeper our friendship with the three divine persons.
1.
Many books have been written about the mystery of God, one and three. Perhaps the finest summation is that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Naturally enough, it featured prominently in the interview with Fr. Emery, a scholar of his Trinitarian theology. Nevertheless, Fr. Emery argued that St. Thomas’s teaching is illuminating because it is rooted in the Church Fathers.
"What did I find in Aquinas? First, Aquinas’s thought about the mystery of the Trinity is in direct continuation with the Church Fathers. This is not so visible in my publications, but in in the courses I give at the theological faculty in Fribourg, I always begin with a semester-long exploration of the Trinity in the Bible and the Church Fathers. Aquinas’s theology is still in living contact with the theology or doctrine of the Church Fathers. In a sense, he is still one of them. He thinks with them. He relies on them: not just Augustine, but many others too. He has the huge advantage of being consistent with the patristic reading of the Bible. The retrieval of the patristic reading of the Bible could find in Aquinas a helpful bridge. He retrieved it. With his help, we can too."
Fr. Emery was not claiming that we can skip the Fathers and read St. Thomas instead. Quite the contrary.
"When I taught, my goal was to have the students access the sources directly. I had them read Tertullian, Basil of Caesarea’s Treatise on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius, Augustine, or Irenaeus of Lyons directly: in the original Greek or Latin, if possible, or in translation. We have good translations in French with Sources chrétiennes. My goal has always been to send the students directly to the sources themselves and not to textbooks. Ironically, I have written textbooks during my professional career. However, I think that students and even theologians should read the sources directly, not through textbooks or secondary literature."
The advice that both St. Thomas and Fr. Emery give, therefore, is redite ad patres: go back to the Church Fathers. Following this advice, the first recommended reading should be from one of the Church Fathers. Fr. Emery mentioned some. So far none of these has made the shortlists of the other guests. One guest, however, did recommend a set of important patristic writings on the Trinity that Fr. Emery did not mention: a series of orations by one of the most important Fathers and doctors of the Church, St. Gregory of Nazianzus.
The five discourses in question (nn. 27-31) have become known as the Theological Orations. They are so-called because they discuss God himself (theologia) rather than the economy of salvation (oikonomia) which plays out in creation (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 236). Moreover, Gregory’s teaching about the Trinity is so authoritative that he is one of three saints that the Orthodox churches call the theologian. The other two are the apostle John and Symeon the New Theologian. St. Gregory of Nazianzus was awarded the title as early as 451, when the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon already refer to him as the Theologian.
The five Theological Orations were given at Constantinople around 379-380. In 379 Theodosius became emperor of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, succeeding Valens, who had fallen the year before at the Battle of Adrianople.
Gregory had moved to the imperial capital under Valens, right when Arianism held sway there, with the emperor’s support. Theodosius, on the other hand, was Pro-Nicene. His ascent to the throne opened an opportunity for Gregory to address the public more openly about the errors of prevalent strand of Arianism—Anomoeanism—and instruct them about who God really is. The Theological Orations are Gregory’s pastoral response to the influential yet heretical teaching of Eunomius of Cyzicus. In them, Gregory is not only catechizing the Pro-Nicene faithful and but also bringing the heterodox back to the true faith.
Anomoeanism had been started by Aëtius of Antioch but its main exponent was his follower, Eunomius of Cyzicus. Proof thereof is that each of the three Church Fathers known as the Cappadocians wrote to debunk the latter’s writings. There is, example, Basil the Great’s Against Eunomius, Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius, and Gregory Nazianzen’s Theological Orations.
Whereas the Council of Nicaea had declared that the Son is of the same nature or essence (homoousios) with the Father, Eunomius denied its teaching and held that the Father alone was truly God. He even rejected the position of those Arians who sought to hijack and compromise Nicaea by proclaiming the Son to be similar in nature (homoiousios) to the Father rather than consubstantial with him. He insisted that the Son and the Spirit were not at all similar in essence to the Father. If we do call them divine, it is not in the strict sense of the term. Eunomius relied heavily on dialectic, or rather its abuse, to convince people that the traditional reading of Scripture and faith in the Trinity were unsound. This rationalist streak was so marked that he even claimed to know God as God knew himself.
Gregory, on the other hand, shows how such rationalism is unwarranted. On the one hand, it wrongly supposes that we can think about God the way we would about any other matter. That is not the case. Prayer and purification are needed. On the other hand, the rationalist wrongly supposes that our limited intellect can know in full the one who transcends all creation when it cannot even fully grasp the essence of creatures. Consequently, the rationalist fails to appreciate that saying something about God works differently from saying something about a creature. To say something about God we use the words coined to refer to things in the world around us but always on the understanding that God differs radically form the creature. We mean that God is such-and-such, but not in the way that a creature is. Appreciating this is crucial for a correct understanding of the words Scripture uses to describe God: the Father, the Son, and the Spirt. However, that is precisely what Sabellians, Arians, and Anomoeans fail to appreciate. Much of the Theological Orations is taken up with exposing their fallacious semantics and explaining what Scripture really says about God. Moreover, Gregory turns Eunomius’s dialectical method against him and dialogues with his congregants in question-and-answer format. He thereby shows that they are capable of reasoning their way to the right answers on these challenging questions and that Eunomius, far from being a master dialectician, is a rationalist guilty of sophistry.
“The aim is to safeguard the distinctness of the three persons within the single nature and quality of the Godhead. The Son is not Father; there is one Father. Yet he is whatever the Father is. The Spirit is not Son because he is from God; there is one Only-begotten. Yet whatever the Son is, he is. The three are a single whole in their Godhead and the single whole is three in its individual distinctions.” Gregory of Nazianzus
The theological debates have changed but the issues that Gregory addresses in the Theological Orations are fundamental and perennially important. Though the subject matter is challenging, the Theological Orations are also full of spiritual guidance. They have been published in the Popular Patristics series. The same translation is also available with a detailed commentary in Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen.
2.
So far, we have followed Fr. Emery’s advice and gone back to the Fathers of the Church. However, the Fathers are neither the only staring point of his lectures on the Trinity. There is also the liturgy. Indeed, it is the main starting point.
"I begin with the liturgy because it comes first for most Christians, if not all. Our first access to the Trinity is through the liturgy. I would give priority to it in the order of discovery, and not just there. The liturgy is the beginning and the end of our Christian lives. It is the natural place to discover, celebrate, and live with the Trinity. So, I begin with the liturgy, especially through the doxologies."
Interestingly, two of the guests have proposed a book that focusses precisely on how we encounter the Trinity in the liturgy. Both David Fagerburg and Christopher Carstens recommended Fr. Jean Corbon’s The Wellspring of Worship. David Fagerberg selected it as a prime book on liturgical spirituality. Christopher Carstens singled it out as one of the best books on the liturgy because it “gives the big picture of what the liturgy is.”
For David Fagerberg, “Corbon brings the Trinity front and centre by saying ‘liturgy is the energy of the Blessed Trinity in the world.’”
Christopher Carstens, on the other hand, noted how the book helped him in his work as the director of the Office for Sacred Worship in the Diocese of La Crosse. It helped him with its focus on the Trinity.
"It seems like most of my day is about questions such as, ‘What colour vestments are we going to wear? What is the best way to do the blessing of throats on the feast of St. Blaise, when we have so many people? Should we celebrate ad orientem?’ Things like that. These are important questions. However, Fr. Corbon’s book opens our eyes to the reality and enormity of the liturgy. The action of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the world, creation, and the economy of salvation is present. This mystery becomes sacramentalised, symbolised, or ritualised in things that human beings can see, smell, taste, touch, or hear: the sacramental signs that compose the rite. Ideally, this transforms us so that we become divinized. We are transformed and live according to the mystery when we are in our families or workplaces, during our entertainment and so forth."
Fr. Corbon wrote the sections on the liturgy and prayer in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Like those parts of the Catechism, Wellsprings of Worship is beautiful, spiritually rich, and made for meditation.
3.
The next reading brings together the preceding two strands, the Church Fathers and liturgy. It is a Church Father’s writing on an important liturgical object: icons.
Some sacred images are of the Trinity, such as Andrei Rublev’s The Hospitality of Abraham or El Greco’s The Trinity. Most, however, are of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the saints.
Nevertheless, every icon is deeply Trinitarian. We bedeck our places of worship with icons of Mary and the saints because they are the ones who are in deepest union with the Triune God and reflect his glory in the holiness of their life. The Trinity is present even more deeply in an icon of Jesus. It is not just an image of Jesus, the Lord, but of the whole Trinity. Jesus is the image of the Father (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). When Phillip asks Jesus to show the Father, the Lord tells him that “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9). Moreover, just as “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit,” (1Corinthians 12:3) nor can anyone see a sacred image of Jesus and worship him as Lord unless moved by the Paraclete.
Every icon, therefore, draws us into contact with the Trinity.
The Trinitarian character of sacred images is also stressed in the first of the books selected by iconographer Aidan Hart: St. John Damascene’s classic defence of icons.
St. John of Damascus, Hart notes, “makes an interesting point that not only the whole of creation, but even the Holy Trinity, is underpinned by image.”
“He defines seven types of image. There is Christ. He is the perfect image of the Father. So the principle of image exists within the Holy Trinity even before the whole world was created. The second type of image he describes are the ideas in the mind of God. St. Paul talks about the eternal plan of God (Ephesians 1:11). God creates like an artist. We have an idea in our mind, then we fashion it into an artwork. The idea exists before the artwork. Thirdly, there is the human person who is an image by imitation of the creator. He says, for example, that we reflect the trinitarian nature of God by being a union of mind and word and spirit. Fourthly, the whole the material world is an icon of invisible things. The sun and the moon, a rock even, all declare something of God's presence. Fifthly, St John talks about types, which are material images of things to come. The Old Testament temple is a type of many things. The Ark of the Covenant for example is a type of Christ. It is wood and gold, just as Christ is human and divine. Sixth, he said that there are objects that recall past sacred events, like the jar of manna, which was there to remind the Israelites of God's provision for them in the wilderness. Finally, he says that images can be made of anything that can be seen, anything that has form, shape and colour.”
St. John of Damascus’s Three Treatises on the Divine Images helps us appreciate the importance of sacred images for our faith, prayer, and worship.
“Without images,” Hart observed, “Christianity can too easily descend into a system: a philosophy, moralism, or whatever.”
David Clayton made the same point even more forcefully when discussing Catholic sacred art.
“It is also clear from the Second Council of Nicaea that sacred art is not just permitted. It is mandated. We are bound to do this. The council fathers believe that if we do not do this, we lose the faith. There are many reasons for that belief and I am not going to claim that this is the only one. However, we are now in a situation where sacred art is not at the heart of the Catholic Church’s worship, certainly not in the liturgy. It might be in some devotional prayer. However, it has not been at the heart of worship for some time. We see, in parallel, the faith declining in numbers. If there is one thing that we could do to contribute to building up the faith, it is to have authentic liturgical reform and harmonise it with the veneration of images.”
"I still remember the warning that the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote to me on one of his calling cards. ‘The triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—do not presuppose him but propose him!’ ”" Benedict XVI
4.
Corpus Christ follows Trinity Sunday. This is apt. We come into communion with the Trinity through the Eucharist.
This is something that Richard G. DeClue stressed in his discussion of Eucharistic ecclesiology.
“It is highly Trinitarian. Its basic notion is that the triune God is the origin and end of everything. Moreover, the triune God is the loving community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If salvation is a sharing in the divine life, then salvation is a communal reality, not an individualistic one. It includes the communion of the saints. That is why the Eucharist is so important for making us the one body of Christ. It brings us into communion with one another in Christ. It is the fusion of the vertical union between God and man that Christ has established. It is also the source of the horizontal community between the members of the body of Christ. It makes the Church the sacrament of salvation and unity for the whole human race here on earth. The social aspects of dogma or the communal understanding of Catholicism shines forth in Eucharist ecclesiology."
Asked about which of the five selected books on Eucharistic ecclesiology was most suitable for the general reader, DeClue did not hesitate to recommend Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today.
This essay on ecclesiology does not speak directly about the Trinity. Rather, it dwells on questions such as the primacy of Peter or the relation between particular church and the universal church. That said, our communion with the Triune God passes through our participation in the body of Christ: through Eucharistic communion and ecclesial communion. Called to Communion explores and unpacks this side of our relation with the Holy Trinity.
Communion with the Trinity is what Christianity is all about according to Joseph Ratzinger. Tracy Rowland pointed this out in a discussion of his writings.
"For Benedict it is very important that Christianity is a way of life: a way of being. He says that Christianity is not ‘a religion of the book’, although the Bible is a very important component of our faith. Rather than being a ‘religion of the book’, Christianity is a way of life. It is really about our relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is about growing in grace and intimacy with the Trinity so that we become more Christ-like. It is not, as Emmanuel Kant would have it, just another moral code derived from a book.
With the Kantian movement within western culture, Christianity comes to be seen as a moral code. Ratzinger calls this moralism. Christianity, he says, is not a moralism. Of course, we do have a moral theology. It is part of the package. However, we cannot reduce Christianity to a moral code or just another way of being a good person. There is something much deeper: the sacramental life of the Christian, which links us into the life and love of the Trinity. The moral code, so to speak, is one element of the means, not the end."
Rowland was referring to Benedict’s XVI’s What is Christianity?: The Last Writings. There, he stresses that Christianity is simply a relation with the Trinity.
“The paramount task that must ensue from the moral confusion of our time is for us personally to begin again to live by God, turning to him and obedient to him. Above all, we ourselves must learn again to acknowledge God as the foundation of our life instead of leaving him aside as though he were some empty cliché. I still remember the warning that the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote to me on one of his calling cards. ‘The triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—do not presuppose him but propose him!’ ”
Two official Church documents bring out of the Trinitarian character of the Eucharistic ecclesiology. One is from Joint Commission For Theological Dialogue Between The Roman Catholic Church And The Orthodox Church: The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity (1982). Richard De Clue noted how, "Probably the best advances in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue have come through Eucharistic ecclesiology.” The other was issued by Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Communionis notio: Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion (1992). This is the document he was working on when preparing Called to Communion and explaining in it.
5.
This survey of the archive for Trinity Sunday taken several cues from last year’s interview with Fr. Gilles Emery. It is fitting therefore to end with one of his books. It would also be worth including a book that gives a more comprehensive and systematic survey of the Church’s faith in the Trinity than the preceding ones. The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God meets each of these requisites. It is accessible to boot.
Fr. Emery explained that it takes a different approach from most textbooks on the subject.
"The difference is that I give more weight to the foundations of Trinitarian theology, namely liturgy and the Church Fathers. I do not begin with contemporary problems: the question of the immanent and economic Trinity, or whether the mystery of the Trinity is revealed only in the Cross of Jesus Christ, and so on. No, I begin with the basic foundations: liturgy, Bible, Church Fathers. Perhaps, I should have developed a section on contemporary discussions of Trinitarian theology at the end. However, this book is meant to be short and to give an introduction. So, I had to make choices and limit myself to what I thought was a priority: liturgy, Bible, and tradition. Nevertheless, I wrote the chapters on liturgy, Bible, tradition, and Aquinas with contemporary questions in the background. Every line I wrote tried to answer contemporary questions, even when I did not mention them explicitly."
Just as this book begins with the liturgy, so too is it worth concluding with the liturgy and the collect from Trinity Sunday.
God our Father, who by sending into the world
the Word of truth and the Spirit of sanctification
made known to the human race your wondrous mystery,
grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith,
we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory
and adore your Unity, powerful in majesty.
