The Feast of the Holy Trinity follows Pentecost
because it is only by the inspiration of the Third Person of
the Trinity, who leads into all truth, that the mystery of
the Trinity can be known. Human intelligence needs
God’s help to apprehend the inner reality of God.
Certainly, human reason can employ natural analysis to some
extent to describe God in terms of causality and motion and
goodness. Saint Anselm, who models the universality of
Christendom by being both an Italian and an Archbishop of
Canterbury, said that “God is that, than which nothing
greater can be conceived.”
A house is a house because it houses. But what
is in the house is known only by entering it. Since
creatures cannot enter the Creator, he makes himself known
by coming into his creation. “No one has seen God at
any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father, he has declared him” (John 1:18).
Had we invented the Trinitarian formula, it
would be only a notion instead of a fact. There are just
three choices: to acknowledge what God himself has declared,
to deny it completely, or to change it to what makes sense
without God’s help. That is why most heresies are
rooted in mistakes about the Three in One and One in
Three.
Unitarianism, for example, is based on a
Socinian heresy. Mormonism is an exotic version of the Arian
heresy. Islam has its roots in the Nestorian heresy. All
three reject the Incarnation and the Trinity but selectively
adopt other elements of Christianity. Like Hilaire Belloc in
modern times, Dante portrayed Mohammed not as a founder of a
religion but simply as a hugely persuasive heretic, albeit
persuading most of the time with a sword rather than
dialectic. These religions, however, are not categorically
Christian heresies since “Heresy is the obstinate
post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed
with divine and catholic faith . . .” (Catechism,
2089). Only someone who has been baptized can be an
actual heretic.
Cultures are shaped by cult: that is, the way
people live depends on what they worship or refuse to
worship. A culture that is hostile to the Holy Trinity spins
out of control. In 1919, William Butler Yeats looked on the
mess of his world after the Great
War:
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot
hold;
Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world . .
.
That is the chaotic decay of human
creatures ignorant of their Triune God. “The best lack
all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate
intensity.” But to worship the “Holy, Holy,
Holy” God as the center and source of reality is to
confound anarchy: “For in Him all things were created,
things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . .
. He is before all things, and in him all things hold
together” (Colossians 1:16-17).
Father Rutler’s book,
The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of
Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available
through Sophia
Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon
(Paperback or Kindle).
No comments:
Post a Comment