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The love of husband and wife is perfected as it becomes triune; now there is the lover, the beloved, and love--the love being something distinct from both, and yet in both. If there is only the mine and thine, there is impenetrability and separateness. Not until there is a third acting element, as the soil in which the two vines intertwine, is there oneness. Then is the impotence of the I to completely possess the Thou overcome in the realization that there is a bond outside pulling them together, hovering over them as the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, turning the I and Thou into a We. It is this that lovers mean when, without knowing it, they speak of "our love" as something distinct from each.
Without a sense of Absolute Love, which is stronger than the independent love of each for the other, there is a false duality which ends in the absorption of the I into the Thou or the Thou into the I. In divorce cases, this is called "mental torture" or "domination." Really, it is egocentricity, in which one ego loves itself in the other ego. The I is projected into the Thou and is loved in the Thou. The Thou is not really loved as a person; it is only used as a means to the pleasure of the I. As soon as the other ceases to exhilarate, the so-called love ceases. There is nothing left to hold such a couple together, because there is no third term. There may be idolatry when there are only two, but after a while the "goddess" or the "god" turns out to be of tin. There is a world of difference between loving self in another self, and giving both self and the other self to the Third Who will keep both in undying love. Without the Love of God, there is danger of love dying of its own too-much; but when each loves the Flame of Love--over and above their two individual sparks which have come from the Flame--then there is not absorption but communion. Then the love of the other becomes a proof that he loves God, for the other is seen in God and cannot be loved apart from Him.
The difference between this Triune Love as the basis of the love of husband and wife, and its modern counterpart, which is duality, with its tension and conflict, is this: in the latter, each loves the other as a god, as an ultimate. But no human can long bear the attribute of divinity; it is like resting a marble statue on the stem of a rose. When the "deity" of the other is deflated, either because it is exhausted or because one becomes accustomed to living with a "god" or a "goddess," there is a terrific sense of ennui and boredom. To the extent that the other is blamed, there begins to be cruelty because of the supposed deceit. How much wiser the Japanese were as regards their Emperor! They made him a god, but they also made him invisible and untouchable; otherwise the hollowness of his divinity would have been detected. A man who makes himself a god must hide; otherwise his false divinity will be unmasked. But God can become a child and talk in parables and never lose His Divinity.
In authentic love, the other is accepted not as a god, but as a gift of God. As a gift of God, the other is unique and irreplaceable, a sacred trust, a mission to be fulfilled. As Dante said, speaking of Beatrice: "She looks on Heaven, and I look on her." There are perhaps few more touchingly beautiful spectacles in all the world than that of a husband and wife saying their prayers together. The prayer of a husband and wife, said together, is not the same as two distinct individuals pouring out their hearts to God, for in the first instance, there is an acknowledgment of the Spirit of Love which makes them one. Because both are destined for eternity, it is fitting that all their acts of love have that eternal flavor in which their souls in prayer and their bodies in marriage attest to the universality of admiration not only for God, but also for each other. As Maude Royden says:
"Not I and Thou are significant to one another, but to each of us that Third.... Nameless, it has bound us from the beginning, though still covered by a dazzling light when we met each other, unconscious that the Third is more powerful than are both of us. But now we know it. It has disclosed itself to us between your and my isolation, and our love has become a testimony to our impotence to love, our bond an indication of something over us. Now we know it, we poles eternally separated, eternally drawn to each other, imposed upon each other, we have and hold one another, not for our sake, but that in this event of I and Thou that Third may take form, and with it we two as well.
". . . He has, to our eternal gratitude, chained together the human elements in us; he has, to our still profounder gratitude, thrown us back upon ourselves and led each one by himself to the trust that the last solitude of any human being is not to be filled by any other human being, even the most beloved. He has blessed us with the knowledge that marriage also, in the idiom of religion, is created "toward God".... He, The Third and One in whom we are united, is henceforth our law and our liberty; in Him and through Him is our bond holy, our solitude relieved, Nature freed from its dumb existence in itself, the dualism and the opposition of our souls bound up in the more exalted and relieved from the tragedy of their separation.
"Now for the first time can I love thee. Now thou art more than thou alone and my love no longer founders on thee, since it reaches out beyond thee to all that is worth loving, which thou art to me. I love thee; now it means this; I love, I am a lover, because thou existest. Now forever we embrace infinitely more than merely one another; in embracing each other, we give testimony of that by which we are embraced. So thou hast become to me the best that one human being can become to another; the sign and pledge of the lovableness of the ultimate ground whence all things rise. If it is of such that it is said: "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder"; then it does not lie in our power to become divorced--for our bond is knotted and preserved by a third hand. Therein lies at the same time the significance of our divided self--also the sense of our "one for the other." "
It takes three to make love. What binds lover and beloved together on earth is an ideal outside both. As it is impossible to have rain without the clouds, so it is impossible to understand love without God. In the Old Testament, God is defined as a Being Whose Nature it is to exist: "I am Who am." In the New Testament, God is defined as Love: "God is Love." That is why the basis of all Philosophy is Existence, and the basis of all Theology is Charity, or love.
If we would seek out the mystery of why love has a triune character and implies lover, beloved, and love, we must mount to God Himself. Love is Triune in God because in Him there are three Persons and in the one Divine Nature! Love has this triple character because it is a reflection of the Love of God, in Whom there are three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the answer to the questions of Plato. If there is only one God, what does He think about? He thinks an eternal thought: His Eternal Word, or Son. If there is only one God, whom does He love? He loves His Son, and that mutual love is the Holy Spirit. The great philosopher was fumbling about for the mystery of the Trinity, for his noble mind seemed in some small way to suspect that an infinite being must have relations of thought and love, and that God cannot be conceived without thought and love. But it was not until the Word became Incarnate that man knew the secret of those relations and the inner life of God, for it was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who revealed to us the inmost life of God.
It is that mystery of the Trinity which gives the answer to those who have pictured God as an egotist God sitting in solitary splendor before the world began, for the Trinity is a revelation that before creation God enjoyed the infinite communion with Truth and the embrace of infinite Love, and hence had no need ever to go outside of Himself in search for happiness. The greatest wonder of all is that, being perfect and enjoying perfect happiness, He ever should have made a world. And if He did make a world, He could only have had one motive for making it. It could not add to His perfection; it could not add to His Truth; it could not increase His Happiness. He made a world only because He loved, and love tends to diffuse itself to others.
Finally, it is the mystery of the Trinity which gives the answer to the quest for happiness and the meaning of Heaven. Heaven is not a place where there is the mere vocal repetition of alleluias or the monotonous fingering of harps. Heaven is a place where we find the fullness of all life's greatest values. It is a state where we find in their plenitude those things which slake the thirst of hearts, satisfy the hunger of starving minds, and give rest to unsolaced loves. Heaven is the communion with Perfect Life, Perfect Truth, and Perfect Love: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love. The ultimate reason why it takes three to make love is that God is Love, and His Love is Triune. All earthly love worthy of the name is the echo of "This Tremendous Lover," Who is not an individual Ego, but a Society of Love. As every sentence implies a subject, predicate, and object, so all love implies a triple relationship of Lover, a Beloved, and the Unifying Love. No example is quite adequate to describe this inner life of God! The wisest of all pagans, Aristotle, once described God as Pure Actuality, which is as far as reason alone can go. He distinguished between two kinds of activity: transitive, in which the activity moved from the inside out, like heat from a radiator; and immanent activity, which is like thinking and willing within man. All life has some immanent activity, but it is imperfect, since it is bound up with transitive activity. For example, the tree has immanent life, but the fruit it generates falls from the tree; the animal has immanent life, but when it begets its kind, the newborn animal lives an independent existence. The most perfect immanent activity on earth is that of man, who can generate a thought which does not fall from his mind like an apple from a tree. It remains inside his mind to perfect and to enrich it!
God is perfect immanent activity. The best example that we can find on earth for the inner life of God is the study of the human mind! Because it faintly reflects the Trinity, we first study its nature, then use it to exemplify the Triune life of God.
The mind conceives a thought--say, "justice," "faith," or "squareness." Not one of these thoughts has size, weight, or color. No one ever saw "justice" striding along a country lane or sitting down to a meal. Whence has the idea come? It has been generated by the mind, just as the animal generates its kind. For there is generation in the mind, as there is generation in the life of the plant or animal, but here the generation is spiritual. There is fecundity in the mind, just as there is fecundity in the lower types of life, but here the fecundity is spiritual. And because its generation and its fecundity are spiritual, what is begotten remains in the mind; it does not fall off outside it, as the seed from the clover. The embryo of the animal was once a part of its parents, but in due course of nature it was born; that is, separated from the parent. But in intellectual conception, when a thought is born of the mind it always remains within the mind and never separates itself from it. The intellect preserves its youth in such a way that the greatest thinkers of all times have called intelligence the highest kind of life on this earth. This is the meaning behind the words of the Psalmist. Intellectum da mihi et vivam--"Give me knowledge, and I will live." The more inner life one has, the more knowledge. Since God is perfect immanent activity, without dependence on anything outside Himself, He is Perfect Life.
Now we come to the other faculty of the soul, the will. As the intellect thinks and seeks Truth, so the will chooses and pursues Goodness. Choice comes from within. The stone has no will; its activity is wholly determined by force imposed on it from without. It must, in servile obedience to the law of gravitation, fall to the earth when released from the hand. Just as material things are directed to their destinies by laws of nature, so, too, animals are directed to theirs by instinct. There is a hopeless monotony in the working of animal instinct. The bird never improves the building of its nest, never changes its style from the Roman to forked twigs to express the piercing piety of the Gothic. Its activity is an imposed one, not free. But in man there is a choice, and a choice freely determined by the soul itself. Reason sets up one of thousands of possible targets, and the will chooses one of many different projectiles for that target. The simple words "Thank you" will always stand out as a refutation of determinism, for they imply that something which was done could possibly have been left undone.
Not only does the choice come from within, but the will may often seek its Goodness or Love in the soul itself and find repose there. Love of duty, devotion to virtue, pursuit of truth, and the quest of intellectual ideals are all so many immanent goals which prove that man has an internal activity which far surpasses that of lower creatures and gives him spiritual supremacy over them. That is why man is the master of the universe; that is why it is his right to harness the waterfall, to make the plant his food, to imprison the bird for his song, to serve the venison at his table. There is a hierarchy of life in the universe, and the life of man is higher than any other life--not because he has nutritive powers like a plant, not because he has generative powers like a beast, but because he has thinking and willing powers like God. These constitute his greatest claim to life; and in losing these, he becomes worse than a beast.
The best way to grasp, even faintly, the immanent life of God, we said, is to study man's thought and will, which reflect faintly the thought and the will of God. The immanent activity of God certainly cannot be the activity of nutrition as it is in animals, because God has no body. It can, however, be faintly likened to some spiritual activity, as in our own soul, namely, that of thinking and willing. In describing human thinking, three distinct things may be said of it: it has an idea; this idea is generated or born; and finally, it is personal.
Man thinks. He thinks a spiritual thought, such as "relation." This thought is a word. It is a word even before I speak it, for the vocal word is only the expression of the internal word in the mind. The Greek word for "word" is "idea."
This idea, or thought, or internal word, is generated or born. The spiritual thought, "relation," has no size, weight, or color. No one has ever seen, tasted, or touched it, and yet it is real. It is spiritual, and since it is not wholly in the outside world, it must have been produced, or generated, by the mind itself. There are other ways of begetting life than the physical or carnal. The most chaste way that life is begotten is the way in which thoughts and ideas are born in the mind. It may be called, in a diminished way, the immaculate conception of the mind.
Finally, the idea, or thought, or word of man, is personal. Some thoughts of man are banal and commonplace, trite thoughts which no man remembers; but there are also thoughts which are spirit and life. There are some thoughts of man into which he puts his very soul and his very being, all that he has been and all that he is. These thoughts are so much the thoughts of that thinker as to carry his personality and his spirit with them, so that we can recognize them as his thoughts. Thus we say, that is a thought of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Shakespeare, or of Dante.
Now, apply these three reflections about human thought to God: (a) God thinks a thought, and that thought is a Word; (b) it is generated or born, and is therefore called a Son; and (c) finally, that Word or Son is Personal.
God thinks. He thinks a thought. This thought of God is a Word, as my own thought is called a word, even before or after it is pronounced. It is an internal word. But God's thought is not like ours. It is not multiple. God does not think one Thought, or one Word, one minute and another the next. Thoughts are not born to die and do not die to be reborn in the mind of God. All is present to Him at once. In Him there is only one Word. He has no need of another.
The more clearly a man understands anything, the more readily he can summarize it in a few words. Speakers who have nothing to say are like railroads without terminal facilities. In one single idea, a wise teacher sees things which an ignorant man would require volumes to understand. We often condemn people as having few ideas. It is well to remember that God has one Idea, and that Idea is the totality of all Truth. That Thought, or Word, is infinite and equal to Himself, unique and absolute, first-born of the Spirit of God; a Word which tells what God is; a Word from which all human words have been derived, and of which created things are merely the broken syllables or letters; a Word which is the source of all the Science and Art in the world. The latest scientific discoveries, the new knowledge of the great expanse of the heavens, the sciences of biology, physics, and chemistry, the more lofty ones of metaphysics, philosophy, and theology, the knowledge of the Shepherds, and the knowledge of the Wise Men--all this knowledge has its Source in the Word or the Wisdom of God.
The Infinite Thought of God is called not only a Word--to indicate that it is the Wisdom of God--but It is also called a Son, because it has been generated or begotten. The Thought or the Word of God does not come from the outside world; it is born in His Nature in a much more perfect way than the thought of "justice" is generated by my spirit. In the language of Sacred Scripture: What, says the Lord thy God, shall I, that bring children to the birth, want power to bring them forth: Shall I, that give life to the womb, want strength to open it?" (Isaiah 66:9) The ultimate Source of all generation or birth is God, Whose Word is born of Him, and therefore the Word is called a Son. Just as in our own human order, the principle of all generation is called the Father, so, too, in the Trinity the principle of spiritual generation is called the Father, and the one generated is called the Son, because He is the perfect image and Resemblance of the Father. If an earthly father can transmit to his son all the nobility of his character and all the fine traits of his life, how much more so can the Heavenly Father communicate to His own Eternal Son all the nobility, the perfection, and the Eternity of His Being! God the Father is related to God the Son as the Eternal Thinker is related to His Eternal Thought.
Finally, this Word or Son, born of the Eternal God, is personal. The thought of God is not commonplace, like ours, but reaches to the abyss of all that is known or can be known. Into this Thought or Word, God puts Himself so entirely that it is as living as Himself, as perfect as Himself, as infinite as Himself. If a human genius can put his whole personality into a thought, in a more perfect way God is able to put so much of Himself into a thought that that Thought or Word or Son is conscious of Himself and is a Divine Person. We humans can know ourselves, but it is first the exterior world that we know. Then we come to know ourselves as a result of knowing the world. We are dependent on whatever is outside us. But God knows Himself without any original assistance from the outside world. God has an idea of Himself, as a face is seen in a mirror, but this idea is so deep and so reflective of His Nature as to be a Person.
The Father does not first exist and then think; the Father and Son are co-eternal, for in God all is present and unchanging. An unbelieving father one day said to his son, who had just returned from catechism class: "What did you learn today?" The boy answered: "I learned there are Three Persons in God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--and they are all equal." The father retorted: "But that is ridiculous! I am your father; you are my son. We are not equal. I existed a long time before you." To this came the answer: "Oh, no, you didn't; you did not begin to be a father until I began to be a son." The relationship of father and son on earth is contemporaneous; so the relation between Father and Son is co-eternal. Nothing is new, and nothing is lost. Thus it is that the Father, contemplating His Image, His Word, His Son, can say in the ecstasy of the first and real paternity: "Thou art my Son; I have begotten thee this day." (Acts 13:33) "This day"--this day of eternity; that is, the indivisible duration of being without end. "This day" in that act that will never end as it has never begun, this day of the agelessness of eternity--"Thou art my Son."
Go back to the origin of the world, pile century on century, aeon on aeon, age on age--"The Word was with God." Go back before the creation of the angels, before Michael summoned his war hosts to victory and there was a flash of archangelic spears--even then, "The Word was with God." It is that Word which St. John heard in the beginning of his Gospel, when he wrote: "At the beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God." Just as my interior thoughts are not made manifest without a spoken word, so the Word in the language of John, "was made flesh, and came to dwell among us." And that Word is no other than the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity; the Word Who embraces the beginning and end of all things; the Word Who existed before creation; the Word Who presided at creation as the King of the Universe; the Word made flesh at Bethlehem; the Word made flesh on the cross; and the Word made flesh dwelling with divinity and humanity in the Eucharistic Emmanuel.
The Good Friday of twenty centuries ago did not mark the end of Him, as it did not mark the beginning. It is one of the moments of the Eternal Word of God. Jesus Christ has a prehistory that is prehistory--a prehistory not to be studied in the rocks of the earth, nor in the caves of man, nor in the slime and dust of primeval jungles, but in the bosom of an Eternal Father. He alone brought history to history; He alone has dated all the records of human events ever since into two periods--the period before and the period after His coming: so that if we would ever deny that the Word became Flesh and that the Son of God became the Son of Man, we would have to date our denial as over one thousand nine hundred years after His coming.
Every mind and heart in the world is aspiring to this kind of Love which is the very essence of God! We all want Wisdom, Learning, Truth; but we do not want it in books, theorems, or abstractions. Truth never appeals to us unless it is personal. No purely philosophical system can long hold the devotion of men. But as soon as Truth is seen incarnate in a Person, then it is dynamic, magnetic. But nowhere else can we find life and Truth identical except in the Word of God, Who became Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Every other teacher said: "Follow my code," "Observe my Eightfold Way." But Our Lord, the Son of God, and the Son of Man, alone could say: "I am the Truth." For the first time in history, as from all eternity in God, Truth is Personal!
But generation does not tell the full story of the inner life of God, for if God is the source of all life and truth and goodness in the world, He has a Will as well as an Intellect, a Love as well as a Thought. Nothing is loved unless it is known. There is no love for the unknown. Love implies knowledge. The intellect sets up the goal or target; the will is the bow and the arrow combined, directed to that target. Whenever we meet anything good we are drawn to it, and the more good it is, the more desirable it is--whether it be a meal, a vacation, or a human heart. Whenever love is deep and intense, a tremendous transformation is wrought within the soul! This is because love does something to us; it affects us so profoundly that the only way we have of expressing it is by the lover's sigh, which is expressed in the Latin word spiritus! The deeper love is, the more wordless it becomes. Byron spoke of "the sigh suppressed, corroding in the cavern of the heart."
In the Divine Essence, the Father not only contemplates His Son, Who is His Eternal Image. As a result of the mutual love for one another, there is also a spiration, or an act of mutual love, which is called the Holy Spirit. Just as to speak means to pronounce a word, and to flower means to produce blossoms, so to love is to breathe love, or sigh, or spirate. As we know that a rosebush is in flower by its blossoms, so the Father gives intellectual expression to all knowledge by His Word. Now we know that the Father and Son are in love, both for themselves and even for us, through their Holy Spirit of Love. This mutual love of Father for Son and of Son for Father is not a fleeting love like ours, but so eternal and so rooted in the Divine essence as to be personal. For that reason, the Holy Spirit is called a Person. The love of friend for friend is sometimes said to make them one soul; but in no sense does it breathe forth a new person. In the family, however, the analogy is better, for the mutual love of husband and wife does "breathe," not wholly in the order of the spirit but in the order of spirit and matter, a new person, who is the bond of their love. But all this is imperfect, for regardless of how much love there is among humans, the good which is loved remains separated and external.
A kiss is a sign of love; but it is a giving of one's breath, or spirit, which is inseparable from life itself. The purpose of all love is to take the beloved into oneself to possess it, to become identified with it. A mother pressing a child to her breast is seeking to make that child one with her in love. "I bear you in my heart" is a romantic expression of the same craving for unity through love--for love, as we shall see, by its nature is unitive.
But despite this desire to be one with the beloved, there must still be distinctness. If the other person were destroyed, there would be no love. Unity must not mean absorption or annihilation or destruction, but the fullness of one in the other. To be one without ceasing to be distinct, that is the paradox of love! This ideal we cannot achieve in this life because we have bodies as well as souls. What is material cannot interpenetrate! After a union in the flesh, one is thrown back on one's own individual self. In Holy Communion there is the closest approximation there can be on earth to this, but even that is a reflection of a higher love. We can never completely give ourselves to others, nor can others entirely become our own. All earthly love suffers from this inability of two lovers to be one, and yet distinct. Love's greatest sufferings come from the exteriority and separateness of the beloved! But in God, the love uniting Father and Son is a living flame, or the Eternal Kiss of the Father, and the Son.
In human love, there is nothing deep enough to make the love for one another personal, but in God, the Spirit of Love uniting both is so personal that it is called the Holy Spirit. It is a fact of nature that every being loves its own perfection. The perfection of the eye is color, and it loves the beauty of the setting sun. The perfection of the ear is sound, and it loves the harmony of an overture by Beethoven or a sonata by Chopin. Love has two terms: he who loves and he who is loved. In love the two are reciprocal: I love and I am loved. Between me and the one I love there is a bond. It is not my love; it is not his love; it is our love: the mysterious resultant of two affections, a bond which enchains, and an embrace wherein two hearts leap with but a single joy. The Father loves the Son, the Image of His Perfection; and the Son loves the Father, Who generated Him. Love is not only in the Father. Love is not only in the Son. The Father loves the Son, Whom He engenders. The Son loves the Father, Who engendered Him. They contemplate each other; love each other; unite in a love so powerful, so strong, and so perfect that it forms between them a living bond. They give themselves in a love so infinite that, like the truth which expresses itself only in the giving of a whole personality, their love can express itself in nothing less than a Person, Who is Love. Love at such a stage does not speak, does not cry, does not express itself by words, nor by canticles; it expresses itself as we do in some ineffable moments by that which indicates the very exhaustion of our giving, namely, a sigh or a breath, and that is why the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is called the Holy Spirit, something that lies too deep for words.
As the Son is God eternally expressed to Himself (that is, the Eternal consciousness of whole being), so God the Spirit is God in the act of loving (that is, giving Himself without reservation). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father, as He is the Spirit of the Son, but the Holy Spirit personifies that which the Father and Son have in common. Love is not a quality in God as it is in us, for there are moments when we do not love! Because the Holy Spirit is the Bond of Love of Father and Son, it follows that it will also be the bond of love between men! That is why Our Lord, the night of the Last Supper, said that as He and the Father were one in the Holy Spirit, so men would be one in His Mystical Body, for He would send His Spirit to make them one.
The Holy Spirit is necessary to the nature of God as its harmony through love! With a feeble reflection men have always recognized love as the unitive, cohesive force of human society, as they saw in hate the occasion of its disintegration and chaos. As God in creating the world put into it a gravitational pull which affects all matter, so He has put into hearts another law of gravitation, which is the law of love by which all hearts are attracted back again to the center and source of Love, which is God. St. Augustine said: "My love is my weight," which means that every soul has a longing desire to return to its Original Source, its Divine Heart or Center. Desire is everything in nature and, with some appositeness, Heaven has been described as "Nature filled with Divine Life attracted by Desire." Love is the soul's last habitation.
That breath of love in God is not a passing one, like ours, but an Eternal Spirit. How all this is done, no one knows, but on the testimony of God's revelation we know that this same Holy Spirit overshadowed the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that He Who was born of her was called the Son of God. It was the same Spirit of Whom Our Lord spoke to Nicodemus, when He told him he must be born again of "water and the Holy Spirit." It was the same Spirit of Whom Our Lord spoke at the Last Supper: "And he will bring honor to me, because it is from me that he will derive what he makes plain to you. I say that he will derive from me what he makes plain to you, because all that belongs to the Father belongs to me." (John 16:14) In this passage Our Lord tells His disciples that the Holy Spirit, Who is to come, will in the future reveal divine knowledge which has been communicated to Him in His procession from both the Father and Son. It is that same Spirit, Who in fulfillment of the promise "It will be for him, the truth-giving Spirit, when he comes to guide you into all truth," (John 16:18) descended on the Apostles on the day of Pentecost and became the soul of the Church. The continuous, unbroken succession of the truth communicated by Christ to His Church has survived to our own day--not because of the human organization of the Church, for that is carried on by frail vessels, but because of the profusion of the Spirit of Love and Truth over Christ's Vicar, and over all who belong to Christ's Mystical Body, which is His Church.
Divine Life is an endless rhythm of three in oneness: Three Persons in one Nature. If God had no Son, He would not be a Father; if He were an individual Unity, He could not love until He had made something less than Himself. No one is good unless He gives. If He did not give to the highest way by generation, He would not be Good, and if He were not Good, He would be Terror. Before the world began, God was Good in Himself, because He eternally begot a Son. There is no act in God which is not God Himself. Thus, God is the eternal vortex of love, which is ever in blissful activity because He is Three, and yet One because proceeding from one Nature which is God. Here is the White Source of all love whence comes to us all its straggling rays. Here alone is the Source, the Stream, and the Sea of all love. All fatherhood, motherhood, sonship, espousals, friendship, wedded love, patriotism, instinct, attraction, all interaction, and generation, is in some faint measure a picture of God. Father and mother in their unity constitute a complete principle of generation, and the child born of this principle is attached to the parents by a spirit: the spirit of the family. This spirit does not proceed uniquely from the love of parents for their children, but from the reciprocity of their affection. The spirit of love in parents is at once desire, pity, tenderness, bearing all things, suffering all things for the children. In the children, it is an offering such as the birds make to the branches in the springtime. The spirit of the family is as necessary to the family in generation, as the Holy Spirit is to the love in Father and Son.
Three in One, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Three Persons in One God; One in essence with distinction of Persons--such is the Mystery of the Trinity, such is the Inner Life of God. Just as I am, I know, and I love, and yet I am one nature; just as the three angles of a triangle do not make three triangles, but one; just as the power, light, and heat of the sun do not make three suns, but one; as water, air, and steam are all manifestations of the one substance, H[2]O; as the form, color, and perfume of the rose do not make three roses, but one; as our life, our intellect, and our will do not make three substances, but one; as 1 x 1 x 1 does not equal 3, but 1; so, too, in some much more mysterious way, there are Three Persons in God yet only one God. William Drummond sang:
Ineffable, all-pow'rful God, all free,
Thou only liv'st, and each thing lives by Thee:
No joy, no, nor perfection To Thee came
By the contriving of this world's great frame;
Ere sun, moon, stars, began their restless race,
Ere paint'd with purple light was heaven's round face,
Ere air had clouds, ere clouds wept down their showers,
Ere sea embraced earth, ere earth bare flowers,
Thou happy liv'd; world nought to Thee supplied,
All in Thyself, Thy self Thou satisfied.
Of good no slender shadow doth appear,
No age-worn track, in Thee which shin'd not clear;
Perfection's sum, prime cause of every cause,
Midst, end, beginning, where all good doth pause.
Hence of Thy substance, differing in nought,
Thou in eternity, Thy Son forth brought,
The only birth of Thy unchanging mind,
Thine image, pattern-like that ever shin'd,
Light out of light, begotten not by will,
But nature, all and that same essence still
Which Thou Thyself; for Thou dost nought possess
Which He hath not, in aught nor is He less
Than Thou His great begetter. Of this light,
Eternal, double, kindled was Thy spirit
Eternally, who is with Thee the same,
All-holy gift, ambassador, knot, flame.
Most sacred Triad! O most holy One!
Unprocreate Father, every procreate Son,
Ghost breath'd from Both, You were, are aye, shall be,
Most blessed, Three in One, and One in Three,
Incomprehensible by reachless height,
And unperceived by excessive light.
So in our souls, three and yet one are still
The understanding, memory, and will:
So, though unlike, the planet of the days,
So soon as he was made, begat his rays,
Which are his offspring, and from both was hurl'd
The rosy light which comfort doth the world,
And none forewent another: so the spring,
The well-head, and the stream which they forth bring,
Are but one self-same essence, nor in aught
Do differ, save in order, and our thought
No chime of time discerns in them to fall,
But three distinctly bide one essence all.
But these express not Thee: who can declare
Thy being: Men and angels dazzled are;
Who force this Eden would with wit or sense,
A cherubim shall find to bar him thence.
And John Donne, in turn, gave us:
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to 'another due,
Labour to' admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearly 'I love you,' and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you' enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
Love is best understood when seen in its perfection, rather than in its broken fragments. Once seen in heaven, it can be defined on earth. From the above description of the Trinity, we learn the definition of love: Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery. It must first of all be a gift, for nothing is good unless it gives. Without self-outpouring, there is no love. God is good because He made a world. But before there was this extrinsic diffusion of His Goodness, there was the eternal inner generation of the Son, Who is "the splendor of the Father's glory, the image of His Substance." Applied to marriage, love is first mutual self-giving, for love's greatest joy is to gird its loins and serve, to diffuse itself without loss or separation. They Who are Two, the Father and the Son, are One in the Divine Nature; the heavenly pattern of a marriage wherein two are in one flesh.
But if love were only mutual self-giving, it would end in exhaustion, or else become a flame in which both would be consumed. Mutual self-giving also implies self-recovery. The perfect example of this recovery, in which nothing is lost, is the Trinity, wherein Love circles back upon itself in an eternal consummation. Not as two rivers unite as they flow into the sea, do Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit unite in one nature, for this example implies the mingling of two strange unities. In the Eternal Godhead there is what theologians call "circumincession," which means that they "co-inhere" in one another, so that the act of each is the act of God. God-love circles back on itself, so that God is Society, in the sense that in His One Divine Nature there is an eternal communion of Life, Truth, and Love. God is related to nothing other than Himself, and this triple relation of Life, Truth, and Love is called the Trinity. In the world of matter, there must be a medium between objects. That is why scientists originally posited ether in the universe. In God, the Father and the Son cannot be united one to another by anything outside of God, but by Love alone. Thus, God is a vortex of love, ever complete in an endless action of Being, Wisdom, and Love, and yet ever serene, for nothing outside Divinity is needed to His complete happiness.
Since love means a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery, the love of husband and wife, in obedience to the creative command, should "increase and multiply." Like the love of earth and tree, their marriage should become fruitful in new love. There would be mutual self-giving as they sought to overcome their individual impotence by filling up, at the store of the other, the lacking measure; there would be self-recovery as they begot not the mere sum of themselves, but a new life which would make them an earthly trinity. As the Three Divine Persons do not lose their personality in their oneness of essence but remain distinct, so the love of husband and wife leaves their souls distinct. As from the love of the Father and the Son proceeds a third distinct person, the Holy Spirit, so in an imperfect way, from the love of husband and wife, there proceeds the child who is a bond of union which gives love to both in the spirit of the family. The number of children does not alter the basic family trinity, for numerous are the fruits of the Gift of the Most High, He is One. The Sacrament of Marriage, because it is life-giving love and love-giving life, is the image of the Trinity. As the riches of the Holy Spirit of Love are at the disposal of those who live under His impulse, so marriage, lived as God would have it lived, associates partners to the creative joy of the Father, to the self-sacrificing love of the Son, and to the unifying love of the Holy Spirit.
Even those without faith speak of their mutual love in the third person. They say "our love." They speak of love as if love were a third person common to them, belonging to them, and uniting them in a mysterious way. They are paying tribute without knowing it, to the mystery-model of their union. This Third Person, altissimum donum Dei, is also given to human beings to unite them in love, in the measure that the couple accepts it as the "spirit" of their union. Marriage is a trinity even when no child proceeds from it through no fault of the parents. But if the child comes, then love is made incarnate.
Love is at first dual, then triune. Duality, or two in love, is the consolation that God has provided for our finitude. "It is not well that man should be without companionship." (Genesis 2:18) But perfect love is triune, either in the sense that it appeals to "our love" as something outside both coming from God, or as the "fruit of our love," which is the child, whose spirit or soul has come from God.
Love that is only giving, ends in exhaustion; love that is only seeking, perishes in its selfishness. Love that is ever seeking to give and is ever defeated by receiving is the shadow of the Trinity on earth, and therefore a foretaste of heaven. Father, Mother, Child, three persons in the unity of human nature: such is the Triune law of Love in heaven and on earth. "No one can love without being born of God, and knowing God." (1 John 4:7) Love is an eternal mutual self-gift; the recovery in the flesh, or in the soul, or in heaven, of all that was given and surrendered. In love no fragment is lost.
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