Can we understand the Trinity?

Today is Trinity Sunday, and most everyone hears some variety of Trinitarian heresy1 from the pulpit.

In the defense of our clergy, it is challenging to give a complete and coherent account of the Trinity without falling into some sort of error.

A frequent way that clergy avoid this phenomenon is by throwing up their hands, proclaiming it a mystery, and avoiding the situation altogether, but this, though understandable, fosters unbelief. Everything that the Church asks us to believe must be apprehensible, lest we merely be asserting by brute force that certain sounds come out of the mouths of the faithful with no meaning behind them.

Luckily, the dogma of the Trinity can be apprehended, if not fully comprehended. We can grasp what is meant by the dogma as a matter of realities, and not just words, even if our image of that reality can only be seen through a glass darkly.

This is not a problem, however, because it is how we reason and understand everything. We must decompose it into parts, which we can understand severally. We can then use our faculties of discursive reasoning to recompose those parts into a notion that, presuming our reasoning is correct, corresponds to a reality that, although we cannot perceive or apprehend directly, we can still trust in.

The dogma of the Trinity consists of nine doctrinal statements. Each statement is easily apprehensible, even if it is not clear how all nine statements fit together into a single reality. The nine doctrinal statements that together comprise the dogma of the Holy Trinity are as follows:

This is no trouble. We understand one who gives witness in heaven, and we know what three is, so we have a picture in our minds of three giving witness, so we're good.

We know what a father is, and we know what a son is, and we know what the relation between the two is. Then we just need to remove the temporality from it and elevate the analogy, and we're good.

We have an apprehension of the Father and the Son2, and we also have an apprehension of one thing coming from another, so once we correct for this being an atemporal spiritual work, we're good.

Presuming we have an apprehension of what "One Eternal Personal God" means (a topic for another day), then this statement is also apprehensible, and we're good.

Taken in itself, this is exactly the same in form as the previous statement, and so if we can apprehend the one, we can also apprehend the other, so we're good.

As with the previous two, so with this one. Father, Son, and Spirit are each the One Eternal Personal God. All three statements create a certain image in our minds, and we can pass from one image to the next freely, holding all of them without being quite clear how they all fit together. So with all three statements, we're good.

We are drawing a real distinction between the two. This is fine, as we have ample examples of two things being distinct, so we're good.

As well as simply negating the complete identification of the Persons with each other, we are also declaring that each of the Divine Three by Himself is complete in Himself, and we're good.

Since each Divine Person is complete in Himself, He is simply and absolutely God, and would be, even if the Other Two were never revealed to us3. This is straightforward enough, so we're good.

We have a specific mental image or impression for each of these nine statements, and so we can truly be said to apprehend what each of the statements is saying. Since we understand what they are saying, we can really be said to agree or disagree with them, and so when we say "I Believe," we can really agree, not simply assert a meaningless set of syllables. By agreeing with all nine statements, we can assent to the complete Dogma of the Trinity, and thereby worship Him in Trinity and Unity.

Certainly, each of these statements admits of deep awe and worship, to say nothing of the reality of the Trinity as a whole, but that is a matter of an eternity of reflection and adoration. For now, we can be content in our initial grasp of the Dogma, and rest in awe and wonder of the reality.

Blessed be the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.