The Blessed Trinity

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless and now here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. We have now come to a point where we propose to discuss the Trinity. But as I was preparing something to say about the Trinity, there came to my mind two possible objections that you might have had concerning original sin. May we treat those briefly. One objection might be this. Why is it that I have to suffer on account of Adam? I had nothing to do with him. I was not involved with his sins. The answer is, yes, you were involved. So was I. We were all involved. Every because Adam was ahead of the human race. He river polluted at his source to protect the entire current. Parents are in Texas. The infection passes on to their children. When the President declares war, we are at war and without any individual declaration on our part for the simple reason that the President is the head of our country. So too Adam was ahead of the human race. What he did, we did. Just as one man evil can affect the whole nation as a good and honorable father can affect the family, so to the disobedience of one man, Adam affected us all. But God and His mercy have repaired that harm through the obedience of the new Adam, which is our blessed Lord. A second objection that might be urgent against the original sin is, why should I lose the blessings that Adam had on account of his sins? Is there not an injustice on the part of God to deprive me of the many favors that he had simply because he sins? In answers to that objection, it must be recalled that there is no injustice done because injustice is a depriving one of something that is due. When Adam sins, he lost only gifts. Gifts that God gave him, not things to which he was entitled because of his nation. On Christmas Day when you go around getting gifts to all of your friends, suppose you give every one of them for Christmas of velvet potholder, I come to you the day after Christmas and I say, why did you give me a gift? You might very well answer. Well, I did not even need to give gifts to my friends and to my relatives. If I did not give them anything, I would not be depriving them of that which was their dues. And when I do not give you anything, I am not depriving you of that which is due you injustice. And furthermore, though we lost those gifts, we get them all back. We get back union with God now through grace, but the other gifts which Adam lost, we do not get back until the general resurrection. And we get back more than we lost. As the priest says when he puts water into the wine at the offer of Christmas Eve, near a bitter condi-dixies, at near a bittery at the upper musty. The last doubt is so wonderfully made, the doubt is more wonderfully reformed. Meeting now those objections behind, we come to the Trinity. You know how to bless yourself. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in Him. When you say in the name of the Father, you put your hand to your forehead. When you say in the name of the Son, you put your hand below to the breath. And when you say, the Holy Spirit, you place your hand first on your left shoulder and on your right. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Notice that when you do that, you also make the Son across, which is redemption. You are baptized in the name of the Trinity and now that the Lord often spoke of it. For example, when He said, lowering T.C. all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, our message of the Lord did not take in the name of them. In the name of, because there is only one nature of the nature of God, the Trinity means there are three persons in God and only one nature. Without going into various post-Hallum and explanations of nature and person, a nature answers the question, walks and a person answers the question, who? I repeat, there are three persons in God and only one nature. And a person in the Trinity does not mean the same as a person in this world. A person in the Trinity is not someone with hands and feet in the beard. A person in the Trinity means a relationship or a relationship. For example, there is a road that runs between Chicago and New York. There is a road that runs between New York and Chicago. It is the same road. But it is a different road under a different relationship. You see how, as one thing, you get the multiple. Remember your chemistry? What was the chemical symbol for water? H to O. That is its nature. It has only one nature. But is it possible to have various relationships within that one nature? More certainly. H to O can be a liquid. It can be ice. It can be steam. Is the liquid a different nature from H to O? No. The ice? No. The steam? No. Somehow or other, the three are in one. Just as in the sun, there is substance, light and heat and yet only one sun. Now we are going to apply this in some way so the Trinity, which is a great and tremendous mystery. And when I get through, I will not have explained it to you. I remember once having spent an hour describing with analogies the Trinity to someone who was taking instructions. And I insisted very much upon the fact that it was a mystery. When I finished, the good lady said at the beginning you said that this was a mystery. It is no longer a mystery to me. You made it perfectly clear. Well, I said mad and if I made it perfectly clear to you, I did not explain it right. It should be a mystery. And it will be when I finish. There are various ways of approaching the subject. And I am going to start very low. I am going to start with life to show you that life is complex. And then we are gradually going to take life right up to the Trinity by analogy. It will seem as if I am a million miles away from it but bear with me. I hope the explanation will not be like that of a lawyer who arguing before a judge went into a long history of cases, legal decisions, precedence and in the most confusing way. It had a dim suspicion that he was not particularly clear. And he said to the judge, you are honored to follow me. The judge said that, yes, he said, I do, but if I knew the way back, I would leave you now. So I beg you, very whispery. Life. What is it? That mysterious thing that has bound up with all of our pleasures and destiny. That thing which thrills me and sadness me. Sometimes, seeing that the greatest of all gets spend another time in the most burdensome. That thing which I know best and which I know least. What is it? The first obvious answer is given to us by the common place things round about us. We always associate life with some kind of movement or activity. If we see an animal lying motionless in the field, it gives rise to the suspicion that possibly the animal is dead because there seems to be no movement. And then when a child is full of exuberance and joy, we say it's full of life. Notice that we associate life with movements and our explanation and description is really not too bad. When you come into a more scientific definition, you find out that the movement or the activity has to be what is called imminent, has to be inside of the scene. There's another kind of movement which is called transitive. For example, the light that seems to come from phosphorus, heat that comes from a radiator. It has no power in generating heat within itself, it just passes from the outside. So for example, it has purely transitive activity. So does radium. So I'm rolling down a hill as transitive activity. But life on the other side has this different kind of activity which is called imminent. It is from the inside. Now let us try and find a law from starting this life. And the law is. Notice carefully. The greater the imminent activity, the higher the life. In other words, the more the activity is inside of the living scene, the higher it is. All creation as you know is the pyramid, at the basis of pyramid is the material chemical order, then there are plants and animals, man, angels and gods. We are not going to apply this law. It is so universal that it can be verified in every one of the orders. A stone, as we know, has no even an activity, so Michael Angelo, when he finished the statue of Moses, was struck with his chisel. He had speech. He seemed so lifelike that really it ought to be full of speech, but it had no interactivity. But there is interactivity in the plants. The moral is, has its mouth to the breast of Mother Nature, and it takes up into itself all the vital elements that are needed for it. When you come to an animal, it has higher life than the plant. The plant has the power of education, it has the power of generation, of the getting seeds, but the animal has two powers, imminent power, that the plant does not. One is the ability to move, and the other is the ability to see, to taste, to touch and to smell, what is called sens activities. The plant cannot decide during the winter to move from the York down to Florida or California. We have to be very fair in our example. But an animal can move from light to shade. Then two, thanks to its sense knowledge, it gets the outside world inside of itself. It possesses any new world, the dog can know its master's voice. When you come now to man, is there a higher activity? Oh, yes. Twinking and willing. Man has all of the imminent activity of plants and animals, but he has also something else. That plants and animals have not. Knowledge and love, first of all he thinks. He thinks thoughts like faith, justice, hope, relationship, fortitude. Where do these thoughts come from? They're not in the outside world. You never saw faith out for a walk. You never saw fortitude eating a dessert. You never saw relationship climbing a hill. Where did you get these ideas? Your mind generates it. Your mind is for kind. You never think the only kind of generation in the world is the generation that the animal has, that human being has to be get this kind. There's the chain generation of the mind. The ability to be get ideas or words. Now come to another point about the mind. When the mind gets an idea, generates something. What it generates does not fall from itself. Like an apple falls from a tree. Like an animal falls from its kind, but it is born. The fruit of our mind stays inside of the mind. All we got to do is just simply look into the mind. Now it is. It is distinct from the mind, but it is never separate. That is why when I want to find the thought, I just go back into my mind. I do not look on a shell for it. Take now the will. We have a will and we can choose. We can love. And we have the power thanks to our will of loving that which we think about. We can love the fruit. And love the fruit even that is in our own mind. We do not always need to love things that are outside of us. That is the amazing thing about our will. Is that our love. Just like I thought, can be imminent on the inside of us. We will not have time to touch how the angels think, but let us go to John. God is perfect life. Therefore you will have perfect imminent activity. I say perfect imminent activity. Since He is a spirit, we will have to understand that perfect imminent activity after the analogy of our own, namely after the intellect and our will. So we look inside of ourselves to find some saintly semblance to this divine life. Now we said what we do in our mind is to think and also to love. Now God also thinks. And what does God think? He thinks it's all. Or a word. That thought of God or that word of God is the speech from Him, but it is not separate from Him as my thought. It is not separate from my mind, nor distinct from my mind. I have many thoughts. So do you. For God is only one thought. And in that one thought, the one word is to pay all of the knowledge that is possible, all things that are known and can be known. God therefore does not need any word but that one word, which is the image and the splendor of His substance. Now we call the words of the gospel of John, the word became flesh and wealth amongst us. Who is the word that became flesh? Listen, look God. The second person is a Trinity, the thought of God. Well, you may ask, well why do we call Him the Son of God? Well, that's not difficult to answer. Did we not say that you generate the thought in your mind or the words that is in your mind? Did we not say that the higher generation, the carter generation, or God generation, and eternal words? Now, applying it to the human order. What do we call the principle of generation? The father. Who we not? And what is the term of generation in the earth and the order? The son. All right. Instead of calling God who thinks, the teacher, and instead of calling the thought or the word of God, just the thought, why not call God who thinks the father? And why not call the God or the person who is the talk? The son. That is why the words that became flesh is called the son. That is why the son was said, thou art my son, this day have my begodly. And the son of God became the son of man, and the son of God who became the son of man is Jesus Christ's father. Now let us take another analogy. We have yet the third person the present Trinity. We said we not only think, but we also love. Now, love is a relationship. It's a movement toward that which is love to unite it to oneself. I love you simply because I am communicating to you truth. Now love is not something in me. Love is not something in you. Love is a mysterious bond uniting both of us. Love therefore is always to be understood as something that unites. And notice too, that love is distinct from. The thought it proceeds from the thought and also from the center. God loves. God loves His perfection. Every being loves His perfection. The perfection of the eye is color. It loves color. The perfection of the earth, harmony. It loves harmony. The perfection of the stomach is food. It loves the food. The perfection of God, the father is God, the son. The perfection of God, the thinker is God, the word. Is the word of God. And the father loves his son. Love is not something in the father alone. Love is not something in the son alone. Love is a mysterious bond uniting the two. And because here we are dealing not with the personal and the biological, but with something infinite. Love cannot express itself by cancels by words, by embraces. It cannot express itself like unto any thing that we have on this earth. It can only express itself by that which signifies the very fullness and exhaustion of all giving namely... I will lie. Something that lies too deep for all the blood is speaking. Net bond of love is the night's father and son. It's all holy blood. Holy Spirit. Holy love. And just as color the perfume and the beauty of the rose, does not make three roses but one. One times one times one does not make three but one. Just as I am, I think and I love and yet I have only one nature. So in a far more mysterious way, there are three persons in God, only one God. But such there is in God. It commends in circling love. God is life, truth and love. Now we know the life of the father, the truth is the fun and love of the Holy Spirit. And with John done we say, that are my heart from person God. For you as yet but not breathe, shine and seek to mend that I may rise. And stand, overthrowing me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me news. I like a usurp pound with other views, labor to admit the truth. But all to know it. Reason your vice-roy and me need to defend, but it's captive and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you. It would be loved pain but am because done to your enemy. Revolve me untimely or break that knock again, take me to you, imprisently, for I accept you and follow me, shall never be grieved, nor ever taste except you ravish me. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. On EWTN Global Catholic Radio.