Trinity.
There is a mystery full of deep instruction, a mystery whose divine obscurities surpass all the light whose splendors dazzle us by their supernatural clarity, and which, as a great saint once said, radiates splendid beams and floods with the glory of its fires those spirits who are blind with the blindness of holiness. This mystery, outside of which all is to man dark and incomprehensible, illuminates everything and explains it in the sense that it is the cause, the principle and the end of all things.
This dazzling mystery is the universal criterion of all truth; it is the science of sciences, which is self-defining and whose name is Trinity.
Here we foresee an objection to which we must first reply. Some will be surprised that a system declared to be infallible should rest upon a mystery; they will ask what a mystery can have to do with a purely didactic question. Patience! You shall see that it cannot be otherwise. Nothing is more evident than light, yet light is a mystery, the most obscure of all mysteries. Thus light escapes the eye and it does not see that by means of which it sees. Now, if light is a mystery, why should not mystery be a light? Let us see first what the church teaches us in regard to this mystery.
God is a word which serves as a pretext for every Utopia, for every illusion and for every human folly. The Trinity is the express refutation of all these stupidities; it is their remedy, corrective and preservative. Deprive me of the Trinity and I can no longer understand aught of God. All becomes dark and obscure to me, and I have no longer a rational motive for hope.
The Trinity, the hypostatical basis of beings and things, is the reflection of the Divine Majesty in its work. It is, as it were, a reflection upon us of its own light. The Trinity is our guide in the applied sciences of which it is at once the solution and the enigma.
The Trinity is manifest in the smallest divisions of the Divine work, and is to be regarded as the most fertile means of scientific investigation; for if it is at once the cause, the principle and the end of all science, it is its infallible criterion and we must start from it as an immovable axiom.
Every truth is triangular, and no demonstration responds to its object save in virtue of a triply triple formula.
Theory of Processional Relations; or of the Connection between Principiants and Principiates.
Theorem.
Each term in the Trinity is characterized processionally by the arrangement of the relations which unite it to its congeners. We will represent the nature of these relations by an arrow, the head of which starts from the principiant, touching with its point the principiate.
Example.
This established, let us see by what sort of relations we are to distinguish the persons in the Trinity represented by 1, 2 and 3.
1. The Father--a term exclusively principiant, giving the mission and not receiving it.
2. The Son--a term both principiant and principiate, receiving and giving the mission.
3. The Holy Ghost--a term exclusively principiate, receiving the mission and not giving it.
TYPICAL
ARRANGEMENTS
BASED ON THE KNOWLEDGE
OF THE PROCESSIONAL
RELATIONS INTERUNITING
THE PERSONS IN THE TRINITY.
A. Relation of generation starting from the generator, ending at the engendered (2), expressing by its horizontality the co-equality of the principiant with the principiate.
B. Relation of spiration starting from the spirator or first principiant 1, ending at the principiate 3.
C. Relation of spiration starting from the spirator or second principiant 2, ending at the principiate 3, emanated by way of the common spiration of its double principle 1 and 2.
Vicious Arrangements.
Reversal of the Processional Relations and Confusion Which Leads to Reversals.
These first three examples sin from lack of a necessary relationship, in default of which the extreme terms cannot be designated. Here, therefore, the intermediate term alone can be estimated.
Here the Son offers the relational characteristics of the Holy Ghost.
Here He plays the part of the Father by the arrangement of His relations.
Here the Holy Ghost is evidently out of place, for He indicates relations which belong only to the Word.
(1.) According to these relations, the Holy Ghost plays the part of the Son, and the Son that of the Holy Ghost.
(2.) Here all the relations are reversed so that the Father plays the part of the Son; the Holy Ghost plays the part of the Father; and, finally, the Son that of the Holy Ghost.
(3.) This curious example represents by the identical arrangement of the terms that it brings together, three Sons; that is to say, the person of the Son three times over.
(4.) Another reversal of the relations, which derives the Holy Ghost from the Father, the Father from the Son, and the Son from the Holy Ghost.
