The real mystery of the Trinity

The real mystery of the trinity is that hardly anyone explains the concept using the thought of two of the best minds in the Catholic tradition – the A Team of Augustine and Aquinas. Theirs is the only explanation I’ve ever read that makes any degree of sense.

Here’s their take on the Trinity.

Think about how you know yourself and how you feel about yourself. First of all, there is you. And because you are self-aware, you form a concept of yourself, which you can come to know. This causes you to have a relationship with yourself, between the two end-points of self and self-knowledge. Your self-knowledge is distinct from you but is definitely a part of you (and you could even say it proceeds from you). In humans, self-knowledge usually evolves in childhood when we reach the age of reason, somewhere around first or second grade (e.g., Lizzie, six years old, saying: “Mom, why do I have to be a separate person?”). So each of us, being self-aware, has a relationship of knowledge between ourselves and the concept we have of ourselves. And the two end-points of that relationship (self and self-knowledge) also have a relationship of varying degrees of love or hate: we either hate ourselves, or are rather pleased with ourselves, or are somewhere in the middle.

Aquinas and St. Augustine think that the Trinity reflects the same sort of relationship of self-knowledge and love going on in God. God the Father represents God. Proceeding from God is God’s concept of himself, or his self-knowledge; the self-knowledge of God is what Aquinas thinks of as God the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the relationship of love between God’s self-knowledge and God.

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