Question 6.102

6.102 What do you mean by “the trinitarian structure” of man?

How do we describe the Trinity? One God in three Persons. The Son is from the Father, and the Spirit is with the Father and the Son; he is the Vinculum caritatis between the Father and the Son, the bond of love between the Father and the Son. The Trinity is a communion of knowledge and love. Strictly speaking, man is a relational being. He is driven toward God and toward other men. If man loses this orientation, he has nothing left but to look at himself perpetually, and this egotism can take different forms.

Apart from his trinitarian nature, in which he fully actualizes his vocation to be united to God, man becomes closed in on himself. Another person becomes a problem and is no longer an extension of himself. The abandonment of the Trinity is taken to its ultimate consequences when man seeks to divinize his own nature, in a passionate, desperate quest for himself, far from Jesus Christ.

Saint Irenaeus, in his treatise Against Heresies (Contra haereses), develops a Christian anthropology close to Saint Paul’s. We find in it, as though reflected in a mirror, the divine plan to remake man in his own image. For Irenaeus of Lyons, man is modeled by the Holy Spirit in the divine likeness: “At present we receive a share in the Spirit who perfects us and prepares us for incorruptibility and little by little accustoms us to receive God.” Christ is the Archetype of the new man. And so Irenaeus can write: “Life in man is the glory of God; the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation gives life to all who live upon the earth, much more does the manifestation of the Father through the Word give life to those who see God.”

In separating himself from the Triune God, man forgets the true order of things, for God became man so that man might become God. Indeed, the elimination of God causes great violence. Without the Father, man finds himself dependent exclusively on little personal deals, which lead to great loneliness. Without Christ, man becomes a wolf to his fellow-man, and he no longer can love as Jesus does. Without the Spirit, man’s intellect increasingly contemplates itself and finally goes into decline; with the Spirit, reason functions in hope and joy.