By loving my wife and being loved
by her I learned that a perfect love would make us one. Our love made us more
alike. The longer my wife and I spent together the more we became alike. We borrowed each others expressions, gestures and even habits. The
more our minds became consumed with how to make one another happy the clearer
it became that satisfying the other, not ourselves, gave us our greatest joy.
Yet at the same time, as we became more alike and more self-giving, we also
became more ourselves. My wife’s love and acceptance gave me the confidence to
show her my truest self and she gave me the same honour. It was then that the
truth of the Holy Trinity became alive in my heart and my mind: If I loved my
wife perfectly I would become perfectly like her and yet this process of being
identical would also give me my own true and distinct identity.
Humans are imperfect so we cannot
love perfectly but God is Love itself so He can. We are the image of God (Genesis 1:26) and as creatures we
reflect our Creator in how we love. Yet, the image is merely a reflection and
like a reflection we are only because God Is.
In humans existing and doing are not the same e.g. my existing is different to
my loving my wife. This fact means I can grow and I can change, I can always go
from potentially being something to actually being something. God however
reveals himself to Moses as ‘I AM’ (Exodus
3:14), Being itself. St Thomas Aquinas calls God a ‘perfect act’ (ST 1, Q.2, Art.3) because God does not
change from potentially being something to actually being something. God’s act
of being is so perfect that it leaves
no room for becoming something else. God is ‘the Father of lights with whom
there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (James 1:17). God cannot be ‘better’, God is ‘Best’. Indeed what we
know as goodness, truth and beauty and so on even to their Nth degree are
merely creations that reflect the Creator. When we use terms like this of God
we are speaking analogously and saying what we understand these things to be is
the closest we can get to knowing what God is (ST 1, Q.13, Art.5). In truth to call God Being means we have to
refer to ourselves as becoming and if we refer to ourselves as being we must
refer to God as ‘Beyond Being’ (DN 1,
1, 588A). To say we are loving means God is Love, to say we love makes God
beyond love.
It is because God is so
incomprehensibly perfect in love that He can be three persons yet one God. As
the image of God we know by analogy through experience that love draws us into
relationships. If our love leads to self-realisation through becoming more and
more defined by the one we love we can see that God as Love must be constituted
by a relationship: The perfection of the Trinity is that persons are entirely
and perfectly defined by their relations to one another. This is because that
is what it means to love in its truest sense and God is Love. Further, as what
it means to love is to be in a relationship and God is by his nature the surpassing
perfection of everything God must also by his nature be a relationship and
exist as a relationship (ST 1, Q.2,
Art.1-4). The persons do not start out separated as we do. God being a perfect
act from all eternity exists as Love’s template in perfect self-giving
relationship with the Trinity in an infinite embrace. Always three, always one.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Lover, the Loved and the Love between them (De Trinitate VIII, 10).
