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 CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY AND THE MOTHER OF GOD.

a God without feeling, without a capability of suffering, will not suffice to man as a feeling, suffering being, neither will a God with feeling only, a God without intelligence and will. Only a being who comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man. Man’s consciousness of himself in his totality is the consciousness of the Trinity. The Trinity knits together the qualities or powers, which were before regarded separately, into unity, and thereby reduces the universal being of the understanding, i.e., God as God, to a special being, a special faculty.

That which theology designates as the image, the similitude of the Trinity, we must take as the thing itself, the essence, the archetype, the original; by this means we shall solve the enigma. The so-called images by which it has been sought to illustrate the Trinity, and make it comprehensible, are, principally: mind, understanding, memory, will, love—mens, intellectus, memoria, voluntas, amor or caritas.

God thinks, God loves; and, moreover, he thinks, he loves himself; the object thought, known, loved, is God himself. The objectivity of self-consciousness is the first thing we meet with in the Trinity. Self-consciousness necessarily urges itself upon man as something absolute. Existence is for him one with self-consciousness; existence with self-consciousness is for him existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or not. Self-consciousness is for man—is, in fact, in itself—absolute. A God who knows not his own existence, a God without consciousness, is no God. Man cannot conceive himself as without consciousness; hence he cannot conceive God as without it. The divine