Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday

“Revelation, Reason and Faith”

By Rev. A. B. Sharpe

The doctrine of the holy trinity, which is the foundation of all the doctrines of the catholic religion, brings prominently before our minds the source, too often forgotten or unknown by the world, from which the whole of our religion comes, with all the graces and blessings which it has conferred and is daily conferring on mankind. That source is Divine revelation. But revelation, we must remember, means “unveiling”; it implies that something which was covered from our sight is now uncovered; that there was something which hung like a curtain between us and the things revealed, which curtain has now been drawn aside, thus permitting us to see what lay within it. This, then, is what God has done for us: He has, as it were, drawn aside the veil that hid the supernatural world from us, and so permitted us to see, not indeed the whole of that world, but such portion of it as it is for our advantage to see.

A - The truth of God’s threefold unity has thus been made known to us by God Himself, together with all the other great mysterious truths which depend upon it. No one has discovered it; no one could, because it is beyond the sphere of our natural knowledge. Men can discover and have already discovered a great many of the facts that lay hid in God’s creation; and all such discoveries help us in some degree to realize the wisdom and power of the Creator. But beyond the material universe we cannot go, by any natural power that we possess, however great. For the material universe which our senses make known to us, and which our reason enables us to analyze, to some extent to understand and to adapt to our own use – this material universe is the veil which hides God and the things of God from us. We can learn a great deal about the veil and its nature. We are able to do many wonderful things with it, but we cannot draw it aside. In other words, we have no faculties which are wholly independent of material things. All our knowledge and all our reasoning is founded upon what we learn, through our senses, of the material world. We cannot know or reason about what lies beyond the sphere of our sense; for naturally speaking, our senses are the only means we have of becoming acquainted with our surroundings. Imagine a human being with no senses at all. Such a being is of course impossible; but if her could exist, what could he know? Not the world around him, for he would not have power to observe it, and no one could tell hm of it; not himself, for we can only know ourselves by thinking, and he could not think, for he would have nothing to think of. All our knowledge comes by way of the senses; and of all that cannot be known through the senses we are naturally unconscious, like one who is blind and deaf and paralyzed.

Yet, we must not forget that, as I have first said, we can learn a great deal about the veil that hangs between God and ourselves. And the first thing we learn about it is that it is a veil that hangs between God and ourselves. The first thing we learn about it is that it is a veil – that there is and must be some Power behind the natural world which we behold, to which that natural world owes its activity, its order and its very existence. Even a child or a savage can tell us that the sensible universe is not the whole existence – that it must have its origin in a Power beyond itself, and that upon that Power we and all the inhabitants of the created universe depend for life and truth and all things. Moreover, we can tell by our natural powers that the great Power behind creation is itself no part of material existence – else we could perceive Him, or at least see his traces – that He is a Person, else He could not have brought persons into being – that He is infinite, else He could not be the ultimate and primal source of all things – and that He is good, else there would be something wanting to His infinity, which cannot be. All this we know, by our own natural reason, about God, and only rooted prejudice or willful blindness can hinder any rational being from knowing it. But yet there is in our natural knowledge, no real experience of God’s existence and nature. We know that God must exist, because the world and we exist, as we know that there must be a solid bed below the depths of the unfathomable ocean. It must be so, and we are sure of it; but we have never seen or felt that ocean bed nor can we say precisely what it is. It must be solid; it must be of a mineral nature; it must be visible, tangible and ponderable; but what precisely it consists of at any given spot we cannot say for certain. So, we know that God exists, that He is Spirit, infinite, almighty and perfect; but of the nature of His substance in itself we can discover no more than we can of the soil which underlies the unsounded depths of the mid-Atlantic. Nature does not reveal God – as it is sometimes inaccurately said to do; it only implies God, just as the drawn curtain does not reveal what is behind it, but implies of necessity, by its very existence, that behind it there is something tangible and real.

Now we are reminded to-day that God has been pleased in His goodness to make known to us something of His Divine nature, which but for His revelation of Himself we could never have known. No creature, indeed, can fully know the infinite Creator; for all creatures are by nature finite. Yet, since God has told us, we know truly what He is in the unique threefold personality of His substantial unity.

But what good does it do us to know this? Does it make us any better to know it – should we be any worse if we did not? It may be interesting to theologians and philosophers, but to practical men and women what difference does it make; are they really any the wiser after all?

Now, if the revelation of the Blessed Trinity had been merely the statement of an abstract truth and no more, we should probably have been little or none the better. But God does not reveal mere abstract truths. His revelation is not given to satisfy our curiosity - in fact it never does so, but for far different reasons. Revelation is given us for an eminently practical purpose – for no less a purpose than to enable us to save our souls. Our blessed Lord was made man and lived and died and rose again in order to bring us to God – without whom we should be lost indeed, and in whom is all happiness and joy and satisfaction. He has revealed to us what God is, so far as we need or are able to know it, in order that we may understand Who it is that invites us to love and serve and enjoy him, and what the appointed means are by which we may obtain the grace that we need for this purpose. No one has discovered these things; they cannot be found out by research, or proved by reasoning, or hit upon by a lucky guess: they are beyond the spere of research and of reason and of guesswork; and in point of fact, no one ever thought of them until it pleased God to reveal them. Men have discovered he laws of gravitation, the nature and uses of steam power, the methods by which electricity can be adapted to a variety of practical purposes, the means by which they can widen the limits which natural laws once seemed to impose, and so add the water and the air to their dominions. But this is because they have seen these things actually done – the natural laws which they have discovered have been working for ages before men’s eyes in the material world, before men came to understand them; apples fell from the trees, kettles boiled, the lightning flashed, fish swam in the sea and birds flew in the air from the beginning of human experience; and man by his most wonderful inventions and the deepest of researches has been able only to gain and apply a little more knowledge of what the veil is which limits his natural vision and his natural research. But “no man has seen God at any time”; we cannot study the laws of His being, or imitate His action and life by any help that observation can give us; it is only because “the only begotten Son, who is the bosom of the Father, hath declared Him” to us, that the true knowledge of God is possible, and can be, as it is to us to-day, the guiding principle of our lives and actions and the ground of our hope in eternity.

B – Now, when we consider the Faith as something made known to us by God Himself, we can see at once that several important facts necessarily follow from the primary fact of its revelation.

First, we may notice that since God’s revelation tells us things that we could never have discovered or guessed, because they are naturally beyond our ken, it follows that the facts revealed must be of a somewhat surprising character. For what is surprising is merely what is unexpected and unthought of; and the truths of a holy religion are, as we have seen, by their very nature, truths that no one ever did or could expect or think of. We could not possibly have anticipated that the Divine revelation should be precisely what it is. It is therefore not surprising that people should say: “Catholic doctrines are against experience; I have never known anything like them, and so I cannot believe them. How can God be both three and one – how could God be born of a Virgin – or bread and wine be turned into Him – how can a few drops of water make a complete change in a man’s relation to God, or his sins against God be forgiven by a sinner like himself?” It is quite natural that questions of this kind should arise in men’s minds when they first become acquainted with the Catholic Faith. But a little reflection should convince them that the strangeness which they find in Catholic doctrines is really one of the evidences of their truth. It would not be so, indeed, if those doctrines were human discoveries. If the Church said: “See what we have found out about God; we are so clever and learned and painstaking that we have obtained knowledge which nobody else has got,” then the world would rightly say, “How did you find these things out? Explain and let me judge for myself.” But what the Church says is: “We know nothing but what we are told; we have no special wisdom or cleverness or learning; what we know is what God has told us, and all that we can prove to you, or need to prove, is that our knowledge has come to us from God.” And thus, the very strangeness and unexpectedness of that knowledge helps to show that it is derived from no earthly source, and forms no part of the information which man by considering his surroundings can acquire for himself. It would, so to speak, not have been worth God’s while to reveal to man what he could find out by his own unassisted endeavors.

But, on the other hand, though men could know little about God with any certainty, apart from Divine revelation, yet they have from the beginning wanted to know about Him. For ages men have speculated, reasoned and guessed as to what God’s nature is, and what is man’s true relation to Him; and sometimes their guesses and speculations have brought them, in one respect or another, very near to the truth. So, sometimes, the Church is met by an argument of quite an opposite character to that of the one I have first mentioned. People say, “After all, your doctrines are not very unlike many that were held by the ancient heathens. They did not really get theirs by Divine revelation, and why should I believe that yours, which are so like them, have been revealed to you: If one could have been invented by men, why not the other?” And this, again, is at first sight a very plausible argument. But when one considers it, all it amounts to is this: that by their natural reason men have been able to draw some conclusions from their experience which bear some resemblance to revealed truth. But how could it be otherwise? Man’s reason does not deceive him; it is God’s gift to him, and the only means he has for discovering truth. If reason had ever led man to mere error, it would be altogether untrustworthy, and we would be sure of nothing. But reason is a true guide, even though clouded and limited by man’s fall; and when men try to find the true religion by reason alone, it is inevitable that they should light here and there on some fragment of the truth. The whole truth, indeed, cannot be so found, and the fragments that men have found or guessed are so small and mixed with so much error that they are practically worthless. Man’s reason, indeed, does not mislead him; but his imagination often does, and still more often his prejudices and passions. Thus, the little that man knows by reason about God has been joined with much that he imagined, and much that he thought was true, because he desired it to be so; and thus, the religions or mythologies constructed by fallen became the strange medley that we know of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, of reasoned truth and degraded superstition. It is in the Gospel alone that we find truth and holiness pure and unmixed; not in broken lights and distorted images, but as a complete and self-consistent whole, in which every part is of due relation to the rest. So, just as the strangeness of the Catholic Faith is an evidence of its truth, on the other hand the resemblance which it ears in parts to the guesses that man has made shows that though beyond the sphere of man’s reason, it is yet not contrary to reason, and is in fact what human reason searched vainly for until Christ came.

C – The Catholic Faith, then, is not in any sense the work of the natural reason or the human mind. But it would be a very great mistake to think that it has nothing to do with reason. On the contrary, it is to reason that the Church appeals for the acceptance of her message to mankind, for reason is the Divinely given light without which man would have no means of attaining truth and justice. But what is faith? Not something contrary to reason, nor yet something independent of it. Faith, says St. Thomas Aquinas, is that which perfects reason – it is, in other words, reason used rightly. Reason produces faith when it is used to estimate the value of authority as evidence, and to accept facts as true which are supported by sufficient authority. This use of reason is undoubtedly one with which we are exceedingly familiar, and on which most of our convictions depend. We are quite certain that the world is round and the Great Britain is an island, though we have never ourselves circumnavigated either Great Britain or the globe. But we accept the fact, and to accept the fact on finding the authority sufficient. In the same way we accept the Catholic Faith, not because of our own personal experience, which cannot help us, but because God has revealed it; and again, we know that God has revealed Himself to man on the authority of the Church, in which the revelation was first entrusted, and which has been commissioned by God to make the revelation continuously known to the world. Reason assures us that God is an absolutely trustworthy authority, and a very slight knowledge of the history of the Catholic church is sufficient to enable us to conclude with certainty that the Church’s authority on the subject is also to be fully accepted. Divine faith is simply the acceptance of revelation, primarily on the authority of God, who gave it; and secondarily on that of the Church, which has transmitted it to us by Divine command.

The grace or virtue of faith is the help which God gives us to use our reason rightly in this matter, just as the grace of hope is given us to enable us to hope for eternal salvation, and not only for earthly benefits and the grace of charity to enable us to love God, and not only the things of this life.

Why, then, if the matter is so simple, are there so many varieties of religious opinion, and why are so many without any religious belief at all? The answer is merely this: that varieties of belief, like all other varieties of human conduct, are due to human free will. Grace is given to all, but all do not choose to profit by it; some believe wrongly just as some act wrongly, for want of cooperation with grace, though there are some who, because of ‘invincible ignorance,” are not personally to blame for their wrong belief or wrong actions. It is sometimes imagined that people are not able to help believing or disbelieving. But this is a complete mistake. Our Lord distinctly said that unbelief is a sin; and nothing can be a sin which is not due to free will. Therefore, we must certainly be free to believe or disbelieve as we choose. But even if we had not our Lord’s authority, the fact would be evident enough to all who are not blinded by prejudice. For if people did not choose their own beliefs, everybody would believe the same thing about everything, which everybody is very far from doing. But to choose is to act freely, and the fact is that our beliefs depend upon the motives which actuate us. One person believes what is pleasant, another what agrees with his persona experience, another what his friends mostly believe, another what seems to him high and noble, and another what will make him singular or notorious. But our motives are of our own making; and God’s grace leads us to choose the true motives for belief, without regard to our personal preference or convenience. But it is not everybody that is willing to make this sacrifice, in which nevertheless lies the merit of faith – that merit on which our Lord so strongly insisted, and which He so abundantly rewards.

Why, then, if the matter is so simple, are there so many varieties of religious opinion, and why are so many without any religious belief at all? The answer is merely this: that varieties of belief, like all other varieties of human conduct, are due to human free will. Grace is given to all, but all do not choose to profit by it; some believe wrongly just as some act wrongly, for want of cooperation with grace, though there are some who, because of “invincible ignorance,” are not personally to blame for their wrong belief or wrong actions. It is sometimes imagined that people are not able to help believing or disbelieving. But this is a complete mistake. Our Lord distinctly said that unbelief is a sin; and nothing can be a sin which is not due to free will. Therefore, we must certainly be free to believe or disbelieve as we choose. But even if we had not our Lord’s authority, the fact would be evident enough to all who are not blinded by prejudice. For if people did not choose their own beliefs, everybody would believe the same thing about everything, which everybody is very far from doing. But to choose is to act freely, and the fact is that our beliefs depend upon the motives which actuate us. One person believes what is pleasant, another what agrees with his personal experience, another what his friends mostly believe, another what seems to him high and noble, and another what will make him singular or notorious. But our motives are of our own making; and God’s grace leads us to choose the true motives for belief, without regard to our personal preference or convenience. But it is not everybody that is willing to make this sacrifice, in which nevertheless lies the merit of faith – that merit on which our Lord so strongly insisted, and which He so abundantly rewards.

Let us then, be very thankful to God for the revelation which has made Him truly known to us, and has pointed out to us the means by which we may please Him in this life and become fit for the perfect life with Him hereafter. It is indeed an insult to God that when He condescends to make Himself known to men, they should refuse to believe what He says, or disregard His revelation as if it were a thing of no importance. We are, I trust, in no danger of offering Him that insult. But let our faith not be a passive, merely habitual thing, which lies dormant in our minds; that is often the first step towards losing it. The way to preserve it bright and clear, so that it may be to us a conscious possession and a perpetual source of joy and consolation and strength, is first to make daily acts of faith, and so, as it were, make a fitting answer to God’s message of revelation; and next, to live and act according as faith bids us, so that faith may lead, as it is meant to do to love, and love to the outward acts of obedience and devotion. For by faith, we know God, and to know God is to love Him, unless selfishness and worldliness are allowed to make a violent and unnatural divorce in our souls between the two virtues of faith and love which God has joined together. But to love God is to keep His commandments; and so, faith if we allow it to produce its natural result in our lives, will lead us to holiness, and thus in God’s time make us perfect and bring us at last to His immediate presence, where faith will be no longer needed, because we shall “see Him as He is.”