Dio Trinità e l’unità della famiglia umana 

The International Theological Commission regularly produces documents that aid academic theologians in discernments with regard to their subject matter. Dio Trinità, unità degli uomini: Il monoteismo cristiano contro la violenza, a document from two-thousand thirteen, is no exception in this regard. It is a brief treatise of remarkable theological sophistication and conceptual density.

Is Catholic religious belief an endemic source of political division and social violence in human culture? Principal architects of the Enlightenment era, like Gotthold Lessing, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, argued in diverse ways that various dogmatic truth claims of Catholic Christianity were rationally unwarranted, politically divisive and constraining on human freedom. In the past century it become commonplace in some academic venues to argue more radically that all forms of monotheism, centered on a central absolute truth explanatory of all, are sources of social division and violence. In a post-modern context a new definition of polytheism emerged as a way of thinking of truth as irreducibly diverse and as distributed politically to diverse centers of representation. In a pluralistic culture a new philosophical polytheism might gradually displace the monotony and arbitrary homogeneity of Christian monotheism. It is a short passage from these views to the idea that Christian monotheism is incompatible with a free society.

The document proceeds in five parts: the defense of monotheism as a source of political virtue and unity, rather than vice and division; second, the historical treatment of the emergence of biblical monotheism from the Old to the New Covenant, third, a Christological treatment of religious violence, understood in light of the Cross, fourth, a robust defense of the modern rationality of monotheism, and of intellectual openness to divine revelation, and, fifth, a consideration of the ethical implications in the Church of a distinctively Christian notion  religious freedom and of freedom from religious violence, in light of the Trinity and the crucifixion of Christ.

There are many conceptually profound elements of this document. Here I would like simply to underscore four key ideas that I think are of especial worth.

First, on the Trinity and divine simplicity: Trinitarian monotheism. Christian theorists who contend with the question of monotheism and public reason can take the option of claiming that Trinitarian belief is not monotheistic, at least in the ways that Judaism and Islam are and that the social inter-personal character of Trinitarian faith is such that it allows us to avoid all potential criticisms lodged at monotheism as a form of political absolutism by its critics. Our document does not do that. Instead, the document vibrantly underscores the unity and the universality of the two testaments of the bible together: older and newer. The revelation of the one God who is creator, in his transcendence, is the prelude to the revelation of the inner life of God as relational and personal, in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Christian Trinitarian faith, then, is a distinctive form of monotheism. It thus retains the rationality and openness to question that is proper those who claim there exists one God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. To affirm this while also giving theologically significant voice to the mystery of the Trinity as such, the document appeals to the Traditional Augustinian notion of divine simplicity. All that God has as God, He also is as God. The properties of the divine essence, such as wisdom and goodness, are substantial, that is to say identical with the very nature of God. So if the Father is God and the Son and Spirit are also God, then they are each the one God in all that they are, and they possess all that is proper to the divine essence as God. The reason this is important for our purposes is that this influential patristic idea invites one to acknowledge the medieval idea found later in Bonaventure and Aquinas of divine persons as subsistent relations. The Father is Father in all that he is, as the eternal progenitor of the Son, and so the Son is begotten in all he is, as the Spirit is spirated in all that he is. Otherwise said, the persons cannot not be relational in all that they are, and in being related they share eternally in all that they each are as God, so that they are each the one God. Such abstract notions may seem far from the field of our ethical concerns.  However, what they signify is that Christians truly affirm both one God who can be known by reason, and a mystery of the inner life of God as Trinity and as a communion of persons that does not compromise that perfection of unity. Simultaneously this vision of person in God as subsistently relational suggests that the highest measure of personal existence is relational “all the way down” in a perfectly interior interpersonal communion of truth and love. This exemplarity of inter-personal Trinitarian truth and love is manifest in the life of Christ, his passion, death and resurrection and thus it has the first and last word in Christian metaphysics and ethics on any and every political question. The Trinity suffers no violence in itself and those who imitate Trinitarian love cannot do so by appeal to the means of creaturely violence. Furthermore this approach allows one to affirm a Christian personalism rooted in God without breaking intellectual ties with Judaism and Islam, who remain partners in thinking about the political and public nature of religious reason.

Second, the document articulates a specifically Christological approach to the problem of religious violence, in light of the radical claim of Christianity: one of the Trinity was crucified. It is in fact God himself who suffered human death in the crucifixion. The resurrection is in turn a vindication of the future of humanity redeemed and saved from sin, free from the powers of evil. Consequently, there are distinctly Christian ways of thinking about a culture free from religious violence, and about the rational precept of the natural law regarding religious freedom: that the truth about God must be embraced freely, and cannot be compelled by violence. If Christ suffered due to religious violence, and is himself the source of charity in the face of religious incomprehension, and if his first followers died to proclaim the truth of his resurrection, then there is no ground whatsoever in Christianity for compelled conversion or for religiously motivated political violence. The truth of the natural law finds its correspondent in the deeper truth of the revelation of God in Jesus, and in Jesus’ own free undertaking of suffering in order to witness to the truth of the Father, out of a religious sense of the well-being of all persons.

Third, the document maintains an integral relationship between public reason stemming from philosophical resources, and theological understanding of divine revelation, without reducing the two to one another. The fourth part of the document in particular contains a robust defense of the rationality of human belief in God. It provides an eloquent portrait of the human spirit open by nature to questions of divine transcendence, and it articulates well the natural motivation for interest in divine revelation. If we cannot know God perfectly by reason, it becomes reasonable in turn to ask the question of whether there exist supernatural resources to attain to higher and more immediate knowledge of the mystery of God. At the same time, in a world of ideological pluralism, the supernatural grace and revelation of the Trinity help to orient human reason toward its genuine goal, in the wake of inevitable human confusions and weakness. Here again we see the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae from the Second Vatican Council rooted in earlier teachings such as that of Dei Filius from the First Vatican Council. If the human being is capax dei by nature then there accrues to each person a ius or natural capacity for the religious truth that provides them with both responsibilities and rights of religious freedom in the face of civic society.

Fourth and finally, the last part of the document contains a two-fold reflection on the imago dei, similar to the two-fold reflection on the knowledge of God. Just as we can know something of God by nature, so too we can know something by nature of the human person as a being of Logos and Agape, that is to say of intellectual truth and of volitional love. However, there is also a deeper Trinitarian relecture of this facet of reality: the human being is made in the image of the Trinity, so that our capacity for knowledge and love is an expression of the imprint of the Father, who makes us in the image of his Word and his spirated Love. The communion that results between created persons is one that emerges from knowledge and love, and it is one of imperfect and developmental relationality, not perfect and subsistent relationality, but we can grow into the image and likeness of God as persons, as a Church, and as a human community, aided by the grace of the Holy Trinity, and the knowledge of the mystery of Christ.

These are only some select points of the document in question but they serve to indicate its profundity and historical timeliness. The Trinity is the most ultimate mystery of the Christian faith and it illumines all else. By referring to this mystery is such a profound and sophisticated way the members of the International Theological Commission have provided a great service to the wider academic and theological culture of the Catholic Church.

Thomas Joseph White, OP
Rector, University of St. Thomas Angelicum, Rome