In this installment of Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of God, he takes up the theology of processions or origins and relations in God. The mind lives, like God, of an immaterial life, and consequently knows that life in which the senses have no part, and which is that of God. The mind does two things only, it thinks and it loves. It thinks, it sees and combines objects of divested of matter, form, extent and horizon. I speak of the mind as it is of its own nature, as it lives when it wills to live at the height where God has placed it.
Thought is not the mind itself; thought comes and goes; the mind always remains. My thought and my mind are two; yet I am one. My thought, although distinct from my mind, is not separated from it. My intellectual life is a life of relation; I find in it what I’ve seen in external nature: unity and plurality – unity resulting from the very substance of my mind, plurality resulting from its action. The mind, like the whole of nature, but in a much higher manner, is fecund, prolific. The mind, created in the likeness of God, remains inaccessible to all division. It engenders its thought without emitting any of its incorruptible substance; multiplies it without losing anything of the perfection of unity. The body keeps us too far from God; the mind has borne us even to the sanctuary of his essence and his life. (GOD, pp. 49-51)
God is spirit; his first act is to think. In God, whose activity is infinite, the mind at once engenders a thought equal to itself, which fully represents it, and which needs no second expression, because the first has exhausted the abyss of things to know, the abyss of the infinite. That unique and absolute thought, the first-born and last of the mind of God, remains eternally in his presence as an exact representation of himself, as his image, the brightness of his glory and the figure of his substance (see 2 Corinthians 4:4; Hebrews 1:3). It is his word, his utterance, his inner word, as our thought is also our utterance and our word; but differing from ours inasmuch as it is a perfect word which speaks all to God in a single expression, which speaks it always without repetition, and which St. John heard in heaven when he thus opened his sublime Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). (Ibid., pp. 51-52)
In God, the thought is distinct without being separated from the divine mind which produces it. The Word is consubstantial with the Father, according to the expression of the Council of Nicaea in 325. In God, the thought is distinct from the mind by a perfect distinction because it is infinite; in God, the thought becomes a person. In God plurality is absolute as well as unity, and therefore, his life passes entirely within himself, in the ineffable colloquy between a divine person and a divine person, between a Father without generation and a Son eternally engendered. God thinks, and he sees himself in his thought as in another so akin to him as to be one with him in substance; he is Father since he has produced in his own likeness a term of relation really and personally distinct from him; he is one and two in all the force that the infinite gives to unity and duality; in contemplating his thought, in beholding his image, in hearing his word, he is able to utter in the ecstacy of the highest, the most real paternity: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7), in this day which is eternity, the indivisible duration of unchanging being, in that ineffable act which has neither beginning nor end. (Ibid., pp. 53-54)
My next post will conclude this series on Père Lacordaire’s conference about the inner life of the Holy Trinity.
