We continue Père Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of God. Having laid down and explained the first general law of life, that the action of any being is equal to its activity and how it applies to the inner life of God, he moves on to the second general law of life.
Citing Christ’s words, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required,” he demonstrates the law of production: for life to produce something equal to itself, it must produce life; for a living being to produce something equal to itself, it must produce a being like itself. Fecundity, then, is the extreme and complete end of production, the necessary end of activity. Thus, we arrive at the second general law of life: the activity of a being is begun again in its fecundity. Life is fecundity, and fecundity is equal to life. God, being infinite activity, is also infinite fecundity. For if God were infinitely active without being infinitely fruitful, one of two things would follow: (1) either his action would be unproductive, or (2) he would produce only outside of himself, in finite time and space. Neither of these would be the action of the infinite and purely spiritual being that is God. Therefore, the life of God is exercised totally within himself by an infinite and a sovereign fecundity (GOD, pp. 35-37).
The application of this law to God’s inner life, Lacordaire pointed out, is borne out in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas in which he explains that in God there is an internal procession in the case of an action that remains within the agent itself. St. Thomas gives as an example the case of the intellect, whose action, an act of understanding, remains within the one who understands. Therefore, in God procession is to be understood in the sense of an intellectual emanation – more specifically, the emanation of a meaningful word from a speaker, where the word remains within the speaker [hence, the procession of the Word of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity]. This is the sense in which the Catholic faith posits procession within God (Ibid., p. 39).
From this, Lacordaire concluded that since action is a movement, a movement supposes the acting being and the desired being, and a relation between the acting being and the desired being, without which there would be no more action, no more activity because relation is the very essence of life. A relation consists in the bringing together of two distinct terms, the perfect conjunction of which is unity, the perfect distinction of which is plurality so that their perfect relation is unity in plurality (Ibid., p. 40).
This brings us to Lacordaire’s third general law of life: the end of fecundity is to produce relations between beings, giving an object to and a reason for their activity (Ibid., p. 41). The mystery of life is a mystery of relations, i.e., unity in plurality, plurality in unity.
God is one: his substance is indivisible because it is infinite. God cannot then be many by the division of his substance. Let the substance of God remain what it is and what it should be – the seat of unity; and let it produce in itself, without being divided, terms of relation, i.e., terms that are the seat of plurality in relation to unity. For those two things, one and many, are alike in order to form relations; and if the substance of God were divisible, there would be no unity, and likewise no relations.
God is a unique substance, containing in his indivisible essence terms of relation really distinct in themselves. As we apply these expressions of the visible order to God, however, their proportions at once become changed because they pass from the finite to the infinite; so, it’s no wonder that Catholic doctrine teaches that terms of relation take, in God, the form of personality. Every being, by that alone that it is itself and not another, possesses what we call individuality. As long as it subsists, it belongs to itself; it may increase or decrease, lose or gain; it may communicate to others something of itself, but not itself. It is itself as long as it is; none other is or will ever be so, except itself. Suppose now that the individual being possesses consciousness and knowledge of its individuality, that it sees itself living and distinct from all that is not itself, it would be a person (Ibid., pp. 45-47).
