Leo Dehon
Baptizantes eos in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
Here we have, my brethren, the name which has protected our entry into the Christian life. Here we have the glorious name which, when invoked, opened the doors of the Church to us; the name which made the treasures of grace descend upon us; the name which produces life and which conserves it; the name of all the blessings of all the holy initiations; the name which will open heaven to us: it is the name of the Majestic Trinity.
What then, my brethren, is this sublime mystery which dominates all our faith? You have meditated upon it a hundred times and you hear its grandeurs repeated every year on the day of this feast. You have already been shown under what terms God has revealed this so clearly to us, taking into consideration that in the time of the old law it was only revealed to the Holy Men. You have also been shown how human reason, by deeply concentrating on the gifts of revelation, can, to a certain extent, clarify this mystery by arguments of probability and comparisons. The necessary teachings are there. However, today I prefer to take a more direct path to achieve our moral objective: by showing you how this dogma illuminates our faith; how it is one of the most solid bases of our hope and how, lastly, it is the bonding link and the model of charity. Let us, therefore, beg for the help of heaven through the intercession of Mary in order to deal with this great subject. Ave Maria.
I.
The dogma of the Trinity illuminates our whole faith with startling clarity.
It takes us first of all into the mystery of the Scriptures, which it reveals to us with incomparable profundity. It is in the holy name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit that the Scriptures are bathed in light. Everywhere in these Holy Books there is, in effect, the indivisible unity of an essence and of a divine power; and everywhere we see this one single God take three distinct names and the three forms of action appropriate to these three names.
Under the holy name of the Father, we see it become the source of all paternity, of all fecundity in heaven and on the earth. In heaven there is a Son which He engenders in the eternal present, in the eternal today of His divinity. This is a Word which He conceived, which He produced. Soon, in the image of this divine paternity, there is a contingent paternity which He gives to Himself in the creation. It is here that we see Him take the name of Father and exercise the functions of Father regarding all those beings whom He created, whom He feeds; those whom He calls to Himself, as if to the paternal hearth, where their happiness and their rest is to be found. This name of Father resounds softly in all the pages of the Scriptures; it shines there ceaselessly for eyes who do not want to be closed to its light.
This one single God appears to us equally under the name of Son. He is frequently called by this name in the Scriptures, where He has all the characteristics of a personality distinct from His Father. The Holy Books show this Son as being conceived before all time, in the profundities of eternity. In what book of the Scriptures does this Son not appear, this Divine Word, this un-created Wisdom, showing Himself at the side of His Father, acting with His Father and speaking of Himself and of His Father as two divine personalities which possess the same divinity in common?
This single God appears to us lastly in the revealed word as Spirit, as love, as divine life. This Spirit acts, it speaks, it judges, it teaches, it sanctifies. This Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son; it is their union and is a personality distinct from the other two. It has a special character in God: it has a completely special role and has attributes which it maintains in doing its divine work, in the very heart of creation.
The unity of a single God, the Trinity of persons, that is the mystery of the Holy Trinity considered in all its wholeness. Such is the torch which lights up the Holy Scripture, such is the key which opens the understanding of it and makes us penetrate into this majestic sanctuary where we discover, with religious fear, the Thrice Holy God who reigns there.
The Trinity shines in all Christian dogmas and it alone can open our comprehension of them. It makes us understand God in this eternity which He possessed before creation, before all ages. It was not inactive, it was not sterile, it was not alone. It existed in Three Persons and formed a divine company which was sufficient and could have been eternally sufficient for its felicity. The Trinity opens up the mystery of creation to us. It is God, exercising, within time, a secondary Paternity. He creates in His image, and in looking at His eternal Son He visualizes the model of all things: through this Son He produces the world. The Holy Spirit hovers over the world which is being born and gives it life and fecundity.
The mystery of the Incarnation can only find its explanation in the Trinity. It is the Father giving His Son to restore to the world that divine form which the world has lost. It is the Son uniting Himself to human nature and, through this nature, to the whole of that universe which has been made in His image. It is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love in which the Father and the Son conceived their designs of mercy, uniting the Word to humanity and subsequently to all creation. For this Spirit which descends upon Mary, this Spirit in which Jesus Christ was conceived, is essentially a force of union. Meditate as much as you like on the Incarnation, you will never be able to penetrate into its profundity without plunging into the chasm of the profundity of the Trinity.
What is the mystery of Redemption, if not the work of the Trinity? It is the Son uniting Himself with the guilty world and, in the Spirit of love, offering Himself to His Father as a holocaust for the sins of the world.
What is the Church? It is the spouse of Jesus Christ, Son of God; it is the daughter of the Father bearing within herself the life of the Holy Spirit which inspires her.
What is Heaven? Again and always it is the Holy Trinity. It is the Son who has restored everything in the Holy Spirit and who offers everything eternally to His Father.
The Trinity, therefore, illuminates all divine knowledge, the knowledge of the mysteries; and the heretics, who in various epochs have desired to eliminate this resplendent Trinity from Christian theology, have plunged into a chaos of innumerable errors, each one being the consequence of the other.
After that, my brethren, if it were necessary, we could again consider how the Trinity is also the light of natural and created knowledge. The divinity could not have been able to produce His works without leaving His own imprint on them. We find the traces of it in the family, in the triplicity of physical forces, above all in the human soul, whose three qualities are the image nearest to our comprehension of this majestic mystery.
Consequently, my brethren, the Trinity is the light of our faith and of our intelligence. Let us therefore offer the homage of our faith and our gratitude to God, all the essence of whom is, as one might say, placed in the service of our eternal health; to God, who has given us this light which illuminates all our faith and makes it unshakable in our hearts.
II.
Belief in the Trinity is the greatest act of confidence which the created being can have in God. It is by this confession that we enter the Church and it is the very condition of our divine adoption. Baptize them said Our Lord, but let it be in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . This is the first principle of Christian doctrine, although it is surely the most sublime. As Bourdaloue remarked, it is necessary that faith makes its masterpiece in its apprenticeship, that is to say, by confessing a God in three persons. A mere child, and already able to speak. What do you tell him? Three persons and a single God. This is his first act of faith, the beginning and the roots of his justification. This is the sum total of our faith.
One cannot be saved without faith, and the essential and the necessary faith is in the Trinity. None of the other mysteries, apart from the Incarnation of the redeeming Word, have the same worth. One could know nothing about them at all and still be saved; but if I ignore the mystery of the Trinity I have nothing to expect from God, and if I believe in it I can hope for everything.
And that is why, my brethren, the formula of faith which we pronounce in confessing the Trinity, and which is conceived in the term ‘in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, is so holy, so majestic, so venerable in our holy religion. That is why, according to the institution by Our Lord Jesus Christ, this formula enters into almost all the sacraments of the law of grace. For if we are regenerated in baptism, it is in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; if we are fortified by the grace of confirmation, it is by the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; if our sins are remitted through penitence, it is through the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; if we are consecrated according to the character of an order, it is in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; if we receive the blessing of priests and pastors and prelates, it is in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: all of which teaches us, says St. Augustine, that in Christianity there is no grace, no salvation, no justification except through faith in the Trinity.
From this it also results that, following the holy and religious custom, we place this profession of faith at the head of all our actions: undertaking nothing, performing nothing without our having first marked upon ourselves the sign of the cross with the words in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; recognizing that the merit of our action depends on this and that without this faith everything which we are about to do will be useless, rejected by God and lost for heaven. It is a practice which has come down to us from the Apostles, with a tradition which is constant and which the faithful have always kept. Reread the constitutions of your kings and the testament of your forefathers and there, on the first line, you will always find this invocation acting like the most holy sanction: in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
It is also for this reason that the Church begins its divine offices by stating its faith in the Father, in the Son and in the Holy Spirit; that all the prayers which are addressed to God in the form of supplication always express these three divine persons; that a psalm, a hymn, a canticle is not chanted without being concluded in this way; that more than a hundred times a day she obliges us, who are the ministers of her altars, to repeat this sacred verse, glory to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, because the Church knows well that we can say nothing more pleasing to God and that this prayer has more virtue and more force than all the others to sanctify us.
Ah! If all the times that we have pronounced these venerable words, Glory to the Father, or these, in the name of the Father, we had done so with respect and affection, how many merits would we not have acquired before God! These names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are divine names, names of glory and of majesty, names terrible in hell. What I am saying is that these are names which are much more lovable than formidable, much more than names of salvation, and therefore they all the more worthy of the attention of our spirits and of the loving sentiments of our hearts.
To sum up, worship of the Trinity is the whole basis of the Christian religion. It is to the majestic Trinity that we offer the Holy Sacrifice, as the words of the holy liturgy tell us. All the feasts of the year are feasts of the Holy Trinity, even if it was not until quite late and only in the XIII century that the Church consecrated a special feast to it, in reparation for the outrages which the heretics did against this majestic mystery and to give the clergy the chance of presenting the foundations of our faith in this mystery to the people.
Lastly, my brethren, the confession of this mystery is such a solid foundation for our hope that the minister of God uses it when he commends your soul on your death bed, in order that divine mercy will be in your favor. Lord, he will say, it is for a sinner that I implore your clemency; he has not been free from human weaknesses; but all the same you know that he has confessed your majestic Trinity, that he has recognized the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Licet enim peccaverit, tamen Patrem et Filium et Sp. S. non negavit, sed credidit.
You see here, my brethren, how belief in the Trinity, but a respectful belief, a religious belief, is one of the greatest expressions of confidence which the created being can have in His creator.
III.
Lastly, the mystery of the Trinity is the bonding link and the model of charity.
I said first that it is the bonding link, as St. Paul teaches us. Ah! My brethren, he said to the Ephesians, I urge you, I who am a prisoner for Jesus Christ, I urge you to love one another, to be tolerant with one another, supportantes invicem in charitate. Oh, be zealous to keep among you this unity of spirit which is the beginning of true peace, solliciti servare unitatem spiritus in vinvulo pacis; for, adds the Apostle, all of you have one and the same baptism; you form one and the same body, which is the Church. Is it not therefore right that you all have the same spirit? Unum corpus et unus spiritus, unus Dominus, una fides, unum baptisma.
In this same God we recognize a Father of whom we are all children, a Son of whom we are all brothers, a Holy Spirit by whom we are all animated. Now, would it not be monstrous that, being all children of the same Father, we should live together like strangers? That, being all brothers of the same Son of God, no sign of fraternity could be seen amongst us? That, all wishing to have the same Holy Spirit, we show such opposed sentiments?
Thus was the reasoning used by the Apostle St. Paul to convince the Ephesians: unus Dominus, una fides. He expressed its force again when addressing the Christians of Corinth. I have been told, he said, that among you there are rivalries, schisms, factions. One is on the side of Paul, the other of Apollo, another of Peter. But is it in the name of Peter, is it in the name of Paul that you were baptized? No, it is in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit that you received baptism, all in the same faith, all by virtue of the same Trinity. That being the case, you are all committed to live in the same spirit and in mutual charity.
The unity of faith is the most sacred bond of charity. Faith in a God of three persons also presents us with the most perfect model of this charity.
It is the example which is proposed to us. We must love each other as the three persons of the Trinity love each other: as the Father loves the Son, as the Son loves the Father, as the Father and the Son love each other in the Holy Spirit. It is Our Lord Himself who invites us. My Father, He said, I offer you all my chosen, all my faithful, all those whom you gave me to instruct. Keep them through your grace so that they may be one as you and I. What did He mean and how can we reach this perfection? The Father and the Son are one and the same God in the Trinity. The Son is consubstantial with the Father. What charity can unite us in the same way? Ah! replies St. Augustine, what the Savior of the world wanted to make us understand is that we must be perfectly united in heart and will; that we must be, through grace and imitation, what the three divine persons are by necessity of their being; that we must be able to renounce our own interests. In the same way that the Son of God said to His Father, everything I have is yours and everything you have is mine. In the same way it is necessary for us to be ready to say to our brethren, these goods which God has given me are also for you as much as for me, and these miseries which you suffer are mine as much as yours. How admirable Christianity would be if in it there reigned such charity! How beautiful families would be if the fathers and the children, if the masters and the servants, if the husbands and the wives, if the brothers and the sisters maintained this perfect harmony between them!
Instead of that there are only divisions and contradictions. Everywhere there reigns caprice, the spirit of opposition, obstinacy, slander and even hatred which ruin charity completely.
In terms such as these would St. Paul have expressed himself, my brethren, if he had been a witness to our conduct! At that time he could not understand how there was dissension among the faithful. Why could you not put up with the injury which you received? On the contrary, you are ready to return it, and that among the faithful ones, et hoc fratribus, and that between brothers!
My God, you have, through the revelation of the majestic mystery of your Trinity, illuminated our faith with the brightest splendors; you have given us, in the confession of this mystery, the most solid foundation for our hope. Grant that we may find there also the strongest bonding link and the most eloquent example of charity.
All powerful Father, who has formed our hearts and leads them where you wish; Son, equal to your Father but made flesh for us whom you have gathered together under a single law of love; Holy Spirit, who is the substantial love of the Father and the Son and through whom charity is spread in hearts; Holy Trinity, it is from your womb that we have all come, and it is to your breast which you wish to call us all to return! Unite us on the earth in faith, confidence and charity, as we must be united in the blessed eternity to which your grace leads us. So be it.