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If a reader does not find in Scripture the threefold personality of God, he or she might still learn much from Scripture about what the Holy Spirit can do in us and for us; but who he is, what he is, and why he comes into the picture at all would have to remain a blank.
It would be unthinkable for any Christian to ask if that would really matter, unthinkable to say that, provided we get whatever gifts the Spirit may have to give us, who or what he is need not concern us. No, one could not actually say that, not in so many words, but it would be possible to act as if it did not matter.
It seems ridiculous to try to give a skeleton analysis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the reality without which there is no reality. Yet Christ has given us lights upon the inner life of God; he did not intend this to be ignored. At least we can make a beginning; in all eternity we shall not have made an end. For more than nineteen centuries the church has lived Jesus’ teaching on the three-in-one and applied her mind to it. There is light and delight in applying ours.
The Word Was God
Within the proportions of this book, we can make as good a beginning as any with the opening of the fourth gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is not difficult to understand what Jesus was saying, so clear a development is it of “no one knows the Son but the Father and no one knows the Father but the Son.” But to take the words in and make them one’s own—life will never be the same after.
God utters a word. He does not utter a word as we utter it, with air from the lungs, shaped by tongue and teeth and lips, sounding in the ears. God is a spirit with no such bodily structuring. His word can only be soundless, within himself, a mental word, therefore, akin to a concept or idea.
The Word was with God. The concept, the idea, did not pass away in the utterance; it remains with God, it belongs. That is difficult enough perhaps. But the Word was God! What mental word, what idea, could possibly be God?
Inside the church and out, minds have wrestled with that question endlessly; a mass of theological thinking has flowered from it. I give what we may call the mainstream of that flow—the Catholic doctrine as given by Rome and by the great churches of the East, accepted by Martin Luther in outline, and by John Calvin. The one idea that could possibly be God is his idea of himself. This answer is mysterious enough, but what other answer would be even worth bothering to reject?
God, then, knowing himself with total knowing-power, produces an idea of himself.
Realize that we have only the words of human language at our disposal. They were produced and continually developed by the human race in order to express not the reality of God, but only what of reality we have experienced by our senses and the instruments that extend their range, by our intelligence and our will and our emotions and our imagination, our dreams, our mystical moments. This is a vast area, but the God who willed our existence out of nothing lies beyond it.
We cannot know him as he knows himself! Our thoughts about him and their utterance in word and gesture must always fall short of his reality.
Still, even at their crudest, there is light and nourishment in our thoughts and words. From the beginning, God has wanted to be known by us. It is part of the uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian religion that he wants not only to be known but loved by human beings. Why else would he have made them in his own image and likeness?
We use human language in our speaking to God. He uses it in his speaking to us. And genuine communication it is.
The idea of himself that God conceives, the concept he forms, is of course totally adequate. Pause upon this. You have an idea of yourself—I too and all of us—but at best it is a sketchy idea. It is not the whole you—too much left out, a lot of illusion woven into it. How far it falls short you keep on discovering—when a friend tells you what he thinks of you, for instance, or when you do something that reveals elements in you that you hadn’t suspected. The plain truth is that we do not know ourselves very well. When a stranger says, “Tell me about yourself,” we can babble about things we have done or experienced, people we are related to. But if we tried to tell the stranger about the self that did, or experienced, or has the important relatives, the babble would trickle into silence. No, we do not know very well the beings we are.
But God’s self-knowledge is perfect. The idea in which he utters this perfect knowledge is equally perfect. There is nothing that is true of himself that is not a living truth in his self-idea. It is eternal, all knowing, all loving—as he is. His self-idea is a person as he is, a self as he is, God as he is.
Thus, within the one Godhead, the one divine reality, there are two selves. Thinking outward from John’s “Word,” logos in Greek, we have been seeing them as the knower and his idea of himself. But after the first dozen or so verses, “Word” disappears from John’s gospel. For the rest of it, and always from Christ himself, we find the word “Son.” The Father produces this second person not for knowledge, but for companionship.
We might wonder why John uses “Word” in the gospel at all, since he ceases using it so soon. Clearly both “idea-conceived” and “son-generated” represent the same relation of likeness. A son is of the same nature as his father; an idea is meant to express the object as it truly is. It is pleasant to realize that to express the production of the Second Person, two words of human procreation—”conceive” and “generate”—are called into service.
When it is of God we are talking, “the idea” has one not-small advantage over “the Son.” We might well wonder how a spirit could generate a son; with the divine mind conceiving the perfect self-idea, that particular difficulty is not thrust at us.
The Spirit Is Breathed
Is there an explanation of the Third Person as spirit to match the generating of the Son, the uttering of the word? “Son” and “word” both suggest the way of his production as a person. Does “spirit” throw equal light on the production of the Third?
In fact, “spirit” seems to raise one instant problem. Given that God is a spirit, why should the third possessor of the divine nature be given as specially his own a name that applies equally to the first and second? This question is not just playing with words: there is light at the end of the game.
To St. Augustine we owe the insight that, as the Second Person is produced within the divine nature by knowledge, the Third is produced by way of love. Knowledge and love, the highest activities of created spirits, thus reach their own supreme height in the uncreated.
The utterance of love within the lover is not as easy for us to put into words as the utterance within the knower of the act of knowing. For this latter we have the words “idea” and “mental word.” But for love, what is there? In what does love utter itself best? It must be something proceeding immediately from the organism, proceeding so immediately from it that it remains within it. Our Lord’s term is “Spirit”-breath. The Fathers of the Church have used a variety of terms.
The Holy Spirit is, for instance, the “sigh” of Father and Son. The term is perhaps not wholly satisfying, for transience seems the very essence of a sigh. One can conceive (though not, of course, imagine) eternal ecstasy uttered in an eternal sigh. Yet again, one associates a certain discouragement with a sigh. A song is better, a song in the heart. Another term the church fathers like is “kiss”; but it is not easy to think of a kiss as a person. And while, in the world the Fathers knew, the kiss was a universal way of expressing love, it is not so in the vaster world that the explorers were to open up in the centuries to follow. St. Augustine uses the word donum, gift. This suggests what the Holy Spirit does, or is, to us, but not so readily what he is to Father and Son. We find the word vinculum (bond) used, as though the Third Person were a bond linking the First and Second, but we must not forget the bond that already exists between thinker and thought.
I hope readers will not mind that the last two paragraphs are from my earlier book, God and the Human Condition (vol. 1, p. 225). I tried to rewrite them but only made them worse.
“Sigh” and “song” and “kiss,” like “gift” and “bond,” carry a hint of the immense activity, the immense productiveness, that Scripture shows pouring out of the Holy Spirit. Obviously, “spirit” is best. Otherwise the Third Person would not have been called “Spirit” in both the Old and New Testaments.
“Spirit,” as used of God, is the lifting of a simpler, cruder word into a higher meaning. Spiritus in Latin, pneuma in Greek, ruah in Hebrew—one way or other all these words can stand for air in motion, wind blowing, lungs breathing. Our ancestors saw air—invisible, essential to life, powerful—as the material element best suited to be used of the unseen, life-giving, omnipotent God. But it is in the basic meaning of “breath” that “spirit” is used of the Third Person. The Son is generated; the Spirit is breathed.
But what can “breath” tell of the production of the Third Person, as “generated” tells of the Second? It would be sad to have light on the production of the Son, and not of the Spirit.
The connection of breath with life hardly needs emphasis—the most primitive people are aware that when breath stops, the man is dead. We are born again, says our Lord, of water and the Holy Spirit. Supernatural life, like natural life, begins with breathing.
Has breath any similar connection with love? Not obviously perhaps. But there is a connection: love has an effect on the breathing, if only because it can make the heart beat quicker! Perhaps one is being fanciful.
I do not suggest that we know the whole story behind the Spirit’s name. God may have a reason of his own for putting the name “Spirit” into our heads—in the very first verses of Scripture’s very first book.
From the Father and the Son
Let us return now to our idea of ourself. We may dislike it to the point of feeling suicidal. We may in a general way like it, rather pleased that it is as it is. We do not think of it as liking or disliking us, for our idea of ourself is only something, not someone. But God’s idea of himself is someone.
Father and Son, thinker and thought, equally loving, can unite in an act of love, pouring into it all they have and are, filling the whole divine nature with lovingness. The whole of their nature is now expressed as love, a love divine as they are, eternal as they are—a third self within the one all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving Godhead. The Father, knowing himself totally, produces the Son, divine as he is; Father and Son, loving each other totally, produce the Spirit, divine as they are.
In the Nicene Creed, we say that we believe “in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The word filioque, “from the Son,” was added in the fourth century to answer a question then being asked about the relationship between Son and Spirit. The Eastern Orthodox have not accepted this addition—for them, the Spirit proceeds from the Father only. Feeling runs strong. If only Augustine could have been at the Council of Ephesus, which declared Our Lady Theotokos, Mother of God. But he died in 430, the year before the council opened.
It has been suggested that to speak of the Spirit as “proceeding from the Father through the Son” (the phrase has been used before, not successfully) might be acceptable to both sides. It is not for me to say whether either would accept this. But in the purely logical order, it would seem that a thought living in the mind of the thinker could hardly be excluded from any other activity of the thinker—his love, for instance. To summarize the doctrine: There are three who are God, but not three gods, only one God. Jesus who revealed the Trinity utters also God’s unity—”The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Mark 12:29).
The doctrine of the Trinity is mysterious, of course. But at least let us see what the mystery is not. Observe that all is within one being, outside whom it does not extend. The thought lives within the mind of the thinker. If, by an impossibility, the thinker ceases to think it, the thought (which the Son is) would cease to be. The love exists in the nature of the two who join to produce it. If, by an impossibility, they ceased to love, the lovingness between them (which the Spirit is) would cease to be. God exists as Father, Son, and Spirit; one life stream flows through all of them.
It is of the nature of the Father thus to know himself. It is of the nature of the Father and the Son thus to love. By the Spirit, as by the Son, all is received; but what is received is all.