Where did we come from? What are we made for?
These two questions cut to the core of what it means to be a human person. We instinctively desire to know the answers to the deepest questions about our existence. Despite meaningless doomscrolling or gossiping, we ultimately desire to know where we came from and what we are made for.
On May 31, the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. This formal name and feast can sound outdated and irrelevant to our ordinary lives. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the feast holds the answers to our questions about where we come from and what we are made for.
God is the ground of our existence. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, God is “ipsum esse subsistens,” Being Itself. His nature is to exist. God is the only absolutely necessary being, for God did not exist, nothing would exist.
Abstract—or even dated—as this all might sound, contemporary evidence for God’s existence continues to grow. Whether that is the argument from causality (something cannot come from nothing), the argument from morality (if there is no God, there is no absolute right or wrong), or the growing field of intelligent design (the world’s order implies an Intelligence who formed it), the story of where we came from is found in God.
We were made by God, and we were made for God. But who is God? The celebration of the Most Holy Trinity helps us to understand who God is.
One of the central claims of the Christian faith is that there is one God, yet that God is three persons. To be clear: Christians do not believe in three gods but that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share in the one divine nature. God is Father. He is creator. God is Son. He is savior. God is Holy Spirit. He is ever-present and with us.
St. Augustine famously depicted the Trinity in several ways in his work “Dei Trinitate,” and these can help deepen our understanding of God. He said that God is the lover (the Father), the beloved (the Son), and the love they share (the Holy Spirit). The love between the Father and the Son is so powerful that it is its own divine person.
Augustine also depicted the Trinity through the image of human intellect. He wrote that there is a kind of trinity that “exists in man, who is the image of God.” Augustine explained that in man’s mind is “the mind, and the knowledge wherewith the mind knows itself, and the love wherewith it loves both itself and its own knowledge; and these three are shown to be mutually equal, and of one essence.” There is one essence (the intellect) and three equal aspects which are intrinsically connected and necessary in order for it to be the intellect.
All of the above words on the Trinity can allow us a glimpse into the reality of God. At the same time, we must always remember that nothing we can say about God can come close to defining Him.
In his “Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate,” Aquinas explains this truth by noting that “the ultimate consummation of human knowledge of God is to know that we do not know God, inasmuch as we realize that what He is transcends all that we can conceive.”
Before the grandeur of God, we are not called to completely understand Him but to be immersed in His love and to become like Him: wrapped up in communion. For this reason, the Greek word for faith (pistis) means trusting reliance on the other. Faith is intrinsically relational, and the human being was made for relationship. That is why the most important aspects of one’s life are our friendships.
On this celebration of God’s identity (who is perfect relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) may we focus on our friendship with Him and have that drive our love for those we are closest to. Because that is what we were made for.
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