When discussing the Holy Trinity, the Fathers of the Church distinguished between theology and economy. “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the “economy” the “theology” is revealed to us; conversely, the “theology” illuminates the whole “economy”. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §236).
With this in mind, I thought it beneficial to review the theology of God’s inner life as a transition into a later series on how we can use this knowledge of God’s inner life to discover how, by imitating Christ, we might participate in the economy of God’s works of salvation in our own time. For the first series, I’ve chosen to paraphrase some thoughts of Père Jean Baptiste Henri Dominique Lacordaire, O.P., delivered in a conference at Notre Dame in Paris in mid-19th century. The series of conferences was published in London as a book entitled GOD in 1870. The following thoughts are gleaned from chapter two, “The Inner Life of God”, pages 27 to 58.
Père Lacordaire begins by defining life as a certain state of being, which defines as that mysterious force, called activity, which is the principle of beings’ substance and organization. Since activity is a permanent and common characteristic of all that is, he concludes that being is activity, citing St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition of God as pure act (Summa Theologica, Q. 3, a. 1). From this, Lacordaire concludes that “activity supposes action, and action is life, or, to put it another way, “life is to being what action is to activity” and “to live is to act”. A stone is; a plant grows; an animal lives – gradations of activity, whose presence constitutes a living being (Père Lacordaire, GOD, pp. 30-32).
Lacordaire formulated this in his first general law of life: the action of a being is equal to its activity. Applying this law of life to the inner life of God, he draws the conclusion that, as the action of a being is equal to its activity, it follows that in God there is infinite action, which constitutes the very life of God (Ibid., p. 32).
But what is action, he asks. Action is movement, he answers; but movement supposes an object, an end toward which it aspires. “I move, I run, I risk my life seeking something wanting to me and which I desire; for if nothing were wanting in me, my movement would have no cause, repose would be my natural state, immobility my happiness. Since I move, it is to act: to act is at the same time the motive and the end of movement, and consequently action is productive movement” (Ibid., p. 33).
Since action is the consequence of activity, it follows that production is the final end of activity and being, both of which are one and the same. According to the first general law of life, the action of any being is equal to its activity. To live is to act; to act is to produce; to produce is to draw forth from self something equal to itself. “Every being tends to produce in the plenitude of its faculties, because it tends to life in the plenitude of its life, and it attains that natural term of its ambition only by drawing from itself something equal to itself” (Ibid., p. 34). All of this, of course, is leading up to his second general law of life and how it applies to the inner life of God, which will be the subject of Part 2 of this series.
