Conversations in Trinitytide

The dogma of the Holy Trinity challenges our narrow conceptions and elevates us. One God in Three Persons? That's a bit of a stumper. Unlike evil which is readily consumable and like all things cheap demands little from us, the Trinity requires a heftier investment of heart and mind. All true relationships require the best investment from us.

God desires our consent and willingness to shed the obstacles (sin) to His life so that we may share in His life. The devil needs our consent to work his agenda in our life. With God, our consent opens out into His life of grace and freedom. Allied to the devil, our consent dissolves into addiction and slavery to sin and death.

Game of Souls

The devil is a scam artist. The marketing scheme employed by the devil is a clever one. For the devil, the game for souls is all about convincing humans that a meaningful life is all about the acquisition of power of one kind or another. Who doesn't want power?! Having power is intoxicating. Power ensures stability or control over one's life, or so many people like to think. The devil acts like a powerbroker, though the contract of power he offers is an illusion that leads to pain, isolation and alienation. And power not only over one's own life! Evil attempts to entice us by playing to the basest of instincts. Once the devil gets a toehold into his victim's soul, that toehold soon becomes a stranglehold.

Power and control are not the first powers we sinners truly need satisfied in order for us to secure happiness. We need love. When we allow ourselves to be loved by God, which is to say when we acknowledge that we need God in our lives to be rescued from sin in order to love others and God, and to be loved by the same, as intended from the beginning, our lives become love-filled, and loving becomes deeper, open to the infinite. The devil doesn't want us to be truly alive. He wants us to be enslaved to a false vision of man that ends with eternal death. Those immersed in the love of God, Christians in a state of grace, can wield power with right authority for good. To a person in a state of mortal sin, power is a weapon to be wielded to preserve power for its own sake, which leads to cruelty, misery and suffering.

God entices us through love, by making Himself vulnerable. Jesus, true God and true man, the Word made flesh; a baby born in a manger. To love is to be vulnerable. The devil plays on our vulnerabilities by selling us that which we imagine we need to thrive, to be free, to be in control. Both God and the devil know what we truly need. God, however, is the only one who can deliver on the promise to provide us peace, love, joy and hope. The devil, by contrast, delivers us into strife, isolation, envy and despair. The devil's hatred of man is his only pleasure. Our fall is his delight. The devil rages in the mission to distract souls from learning that God loves us and, loving Father that He is, wants to give us His life. God does not take away our freedom; we must choose to enter into a loving communion with God. We must freely respond to God's initiative, God's offer of grace. The devil seeks to blind us to God's love and offer of divine life.

Evil is not.

https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/evil

In the light of Catholic doctrine, any theory that may be held concerning evil must include certain points bearing on the question that have been authoritatively defined. These points are (1) the omnipotence, omniscience, and absolute goodness of the Creator; (2) the freedom of the will; and (3) that suffering is the penal consequence of willful disobedience to the law of God. A complete account may be gathered from the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, by whom the principles of St. Augustine are systematized, and to some extent supplemented. Evil, according to St. Thomas, is a privation, or the absence of some good which belongs properly to the nature of the creature. (I, Q. xiv, a. 10; Q. xlix, a. 3; Contra Gentiles, III, ix, x). There is therefore no “summum malum”, or positive source of evil, corresponding to the “summum bonum”, which is God (I, Q. xlix, a. 3; C. G., III, 15; De Malo, I, 1); evil being not “ens reale” but only “ens rationis”—i.e. it exists not as an objective fact, but as a subjective conception; things are evil not in themselves, but by reason of their relation to other things, or persons. All realities (entia) are in themselves good; they produce bad results only incidentally; and consequently the ultimate cause of evil is fundamentally good, as well as the objects in which evil is found (I, Q. xlix; cf. I, Q. v, 3; De Malo, I, 3). Thus the Manichaean dualism has no foundation in reason.

God is.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/06/22/who-is-god/

According to the First Vatican Council (1869-70), it is a de fide dogma of the Catholic Church “that there is one true and living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth, almighty, eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite in will, understanding and every perfection.”

It is important to remind ourselves of this truth, since there are many in the religious world, including those in non-Catholic Christian communities, who have rejected important aspects of it, as I have already noted on this page.

The Church’s belief about God starts with creation. God is Creator of all that exists. (Gen 1:1; Ps 33:8-9; Ps 124:8; Ps 146:5-6) Yet for the Catholic, God is not merely a Divine Craftsman who works with pre-existent eternal matter, but is the source on which all contingent reality, including matter, depends for its existence. (Acts 17:25: Col 1:16-17)

Because God is the Source of all contingent reality, and thus not himself a contingent reality, he must by nature be self-existent, meaning he has the attribute of aseity. In short, God exists necessarily. Unlike the universe and everything in it, nothing is required for God to exist. He simply IS. Thus, when Moses encountered God in the burning bush and asked God to identify himself:

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.”’ (Ex 3:14)

He is, in other words, the self-existent one. This is clearly implied not only in passages where we are told God is unlimited in his power (Jb 42:2; Je 32:17; Mt 19:26), but also when Scripture tells us, by the use of metaphorical language, that God’s nature is to always be. (Is 41:4; 43:10 44:6b)

Being (Leithart, First Things)

Thus, from the viewpoint of Trinitarian ontology, Being itself has to be reimagined. Ancient ontology assumed that Being is what persists in a world of change. Trinitarian ontology insists instead on the primacy of love; love endures. Love is action, an out-going from the self to the Other. Within a Trinitarian ontology, the verb becomes the “new substantive.” Things aren’t most fully themselves when they’re at rest, unchanging, alone. Being isn’t isolated stasis. Beings exist and fulfill themselves not by holding back, but by giving. For created things as for God, “self-having [is] self-giving.” Things are what they are, they possess themselves, in action, in motion, and in relation, in the movement of love. Love is the very “rhythm of Being.”