Life in the Trinity: The Mystery of God and Human Deification

By Philip Krill and James McCullough

Informed by Scripture and the church fathers, and inspired by the ressourcement theology of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Pope Benedict XVI, this book advances new insight and practical application of the recent retrieval of Trinitarian theology and its vision of human transformation known as deification. Father Philip Krill contributes to a growing retrieval of Trinitarian Christianity and a synthesis of the Western and Eastern theological traditions. A final section on theosis, or deification, rounds out this exploration of God's full intentions for the redemption of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781532695742

Philip Krill

PHILIP KRILL is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, MO

Book preview

Life in the Trinity

The Mystery of God and Human Deification

Philip Krill with James McCullough

Life in the Trinity

The Mystery of God and Human Deification

Copyright © 2022 Philip Krill with James McCullough. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-9572-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-9573-5

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-9574-2

09/17/15

Scripture quotations are from The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1965, 1966, National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of America, copyright © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreia Editrice Vaticana.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Part One: Divine Personhood

Section One: Trinity

Hermeneutic of Love

The Triumph of Hypostasis

Unity-in-Difference

Section Two: Incarnation

The Priority of Christ

The Great Divorce

God without Being

Section Three: Corpus Mysticum

Life in Christ

Corpus Tri-forme

Christus Totus

Part Two: Human Personhood

Section One: Alterity

Theonomy

Heteronomy

Autonomy

Section Two: Communio

Ecstatic Personhood

Communion Differentiates

Hierarchical and Eschatological Communio

Section Three: Eros

The Redemption of Eros65

Triune Subjectivity

Saintly Hearts

Part Three: Transformed Personhood

Section One: Theosis

Incorporation

Theosis

Participation in God87

Section Two: Leitourgia

Homo Adorans

The Wellspring of Worship

Eucharist

Section Three: Ecclesia

Ecclesia de Eucharistia

Anagogical Vision

Leitourgia Lived

Glossary

Recommended Reading

Bibliography

To

Sister Peter Claver (Hannah) Fahy, MSBT,

1899–2004,

who taught me the importance of prayer

and

love of the Trinity

The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God. For the Son of God became man so that we might become God. The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.

—Catechism of the Catholic Church, 460

Preface

The book you now hold in your hand is the result of a misdirected email.

I had been teaching in the Diaconate Formation Program in the Archdiocese of St Louis for a few years. I had heard furtive references from students to a Fr. Phil Krill who taught in the same program but whom I had never met. Most participants in the program spoke enthusiastically about him, about his style, his enthusiasm, about the content of his teaching. Others were more reserved, cautious in their appraisal of him.

Then one day, probably in late 2020, I received an email from this Phil Krill. I opened it, read its content, something about a course he was teaching, instructions about course preparation if I recall. Assuming I had somehow accidentally gotten onto his email list, I was about to close and disregard it when I glanced down at the tagline accompanying his name. There I read:

Promoting a Trinitarian vision of deification and contemplative prayer.

The Doctrine of the Trinity had long been central in my own life and theology. Contemplative spirituality was something I was learning about and continuing to pursue. The concept of deification emerged more recently on my Christian horizon, but has been growing in greater intensity as I pursue study of patristic theology. But in an email tagline, this man had put it all together in a single, integrated mission statement. I responded immediately to the email, introduced myself, and didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

That accidental, serendipitous, providential internet encounter quickly resulted in a meeting which in turn has enriched my life in many ways. I found in Fr. Phil a friend, a pastor, and fellow traveler, a co-sufferer, a concert companion, and now a co-author.

What needs to be understood is that this book is entirely Philip Krill’s. It represents a project he began in a Doctor of Ministry program and developed over subsequent years. It reflects the central and controlling themes of his life and ministry. A more autobiographical work of serious theology would be hard to find. Originally self-published in 2017, Fr. Phil passed along a copy to me and invited my comments. I began reading and was immediately absorbed by the conviction of his expression, the grand synthesis of tradition, and by the spirituality which I had grown toward and was now seeing in print.

My own contributions to this project are modest, consisting basically of editing sometimes Wagnerian sentences into something of more classical balance, of redirecting digressions, removing repetitions, and smoothing the sharper edges of his pastorally motivated grief at the state of Western Christianity. I added a glossary of terms, a list of recommended texts, and the bibliography.

I want to acknowledge the assistance we received from Matthew Wimer and his team at Wipf & Stock in bringing this project to completion.

The heartbeat of this book is that the whole and entire universe is a reflection of the dynamics of relationship, relationship grounded in the very mode of God’s existence. The cosmos is deeper than we realize, more beautiful than we know and, ultimately, truly on our side. This dimension of grace continues to surprise me, and I am grateful for the way that Rev. Philip Krill has articulated it in such a commanding manner in this book.

James McCullough

Part One

Divine Personhood

Section One

Trinity

Hermeneutic of Love

The Holy Trinity is the source, goal, and archetype of everything that exists and can be known. All relationships among persons and things can be understood and appreciated only in light of the persons of the Triune God. Human personhood finds its form, genesis, and fulfillment in divine personhood. On a practical level this means that all attraction, desire, communication, and communion that exist between and among human persons derive from the relationships among the divine persons within the unfathomable mystery of the blessed Trinity.

These are astounding claims. They fly in the face of what St. Paul has described as the wisdom of this world (1 Cor 3:19). Upon what do they rest? They rest upon the words of Jesus: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me (John 14:6). The Person of Jesus identifies himself as the truth. This identification is an affront to the wisdom of men (1 Cor 2:5), but to those who are captivated by Jesus, it is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), making them children of God and heirs of the kingdom of God (Rom 8:16–17).

The men of this age (1 Cor 2:6) think faith obscures our apprehension of truth. What Pope John Paul II termed the hermeneutic of suspicion insists that doubt and skepticism are the best approaches to truth. He described Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx as the masters of suspicion, and for the culture of death that has adopted their assumptions, the truth of things lies only on a materialistic, secular horizon thought to be something best approached by suspending our convictions and laying aside our deeply held beliefs. Without denying or minimizing the benefits of honesty and open-mindedness, it is important to complement the hermeneutic of suspicion with a hermeneutic of love. A hermeneutic of love replaces cynicism and noncommitment with openness and trust. It contemplates things as created with beauty and intentionality. It sees the world as participating in the Triune love of God. The doctrine of the Trinity and its implications must be approached with faith and loyalty if the things and persons God created are to be grasped in their ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness. For it is in God that we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), and it is only in your light, O LORD, that we see light (Ps 36:9). Jesus is the light of the world (John 1:4; 8:12), the Logos from which all other lights proceed, including the light of reason.

The problem, paradoxically, is that it takes an act of faith to see the act of faith as the condition for any knowledge. No one can compel faith. Faith is a gift from God that must be sought and desired. Faith seeking understanding (hermeneutic of love) is different from understanding seeking to justify faith (hermeneutic of suspicion). Contemplative joy and mystical intuition result from the former; agnosticism, atheism, and intellectual arrogance from the latter. Only through faith empowered by love can we know things in the right way. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has said, only the person who is convinced that Jesus knows him personally can gain access to knowledge of him. And only the person who is confident of knowing him as he is can know that he is also known by him.¹ This claim is a stumbling block to many, but to those who believe, it is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24).

This book is an invitation to a hermeneutic of love and to raise our minds and hearts towards the ineffable mystery of the Triune God. In this we follow the early church tradition that insists, If you are a theologian you will pray truly; and if you pray truly you are a theologian.² Let us engage in a kneeling theology. Contemplating the Trinity precedes, and is the condition for the possibility of, knowledge about anything. As we do so, we begin to see that all attraction, desire, and relationships stem in one way or another from the love, attraction, and ecstatic communion existing within the life of the Triune God. There is no excellence in the human realm that is not first within the Trinity.

What we call love derives from the One who is love, namely God. God is a Trinity of divine persons, whose very communion is the definition of love. God as a communio personarum defines the meaning of love. Love is not an impersonal concept or an abstract quality. Love is a divine community of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The mystery of the one-in-three and the three-in-one is the primordial mystery constituting the meaning and definition of love.

Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of interest in Trinitarian theology. Intellectuals of every Christian denomination have professed a renewed fascination with the mystery of the Triune God. This book echoes the vision of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, among others, whose thought birthed this recent rise in Trinitarian theology and who assert the uniqueness of revelation and the priority of Jesus Christ in the human encounter with God. Trinitarian theology must be both Christocentric and pneumatological (Spirit-driven).³ Only a contemplative Trinitarian vision based squarely on the tradition of the early church fathers is capable of satisfying hearts hungry for the depths of a genuinely catholic Christianity.

Genuine catholic theological renewal must look in two directions simultaneously. It must look heavenward in contemplative gaze upon the Triune mystery, and earthward, loving those created in the image and likeness (Gen 1:26–27) of the Trinity. Put another way, our method is always both katalogical (from the top down) and analogical (from the bottom up). ‘Ana-logically’ the truth of the world points to the truth of God, and . . . ‘[k]ata-logically’ (from above) Christ reveals to us a God who is, in his inmost essence, constituted by Trinitarian love.⁴ More to the point, our method here is driven by the beauty and objectivity of divine revelation. As the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared: between the Creator and creature, however great the similarity, even greater is the dissimilarity to be noted.⁵ Natural reason cannot bring us into intimate contact with the blessed Trinity. Our hermeneutic of love, issuing from prayerful contemplation of the Trinity, will illumine and perfect our analogical attempts to understand the mystery.

As we contemplate the mystery of the Triune God, we must also contemplate the incarnation. The only truly human being was, and is, Jesus Christ. He is both a divine person and a human being. We are not fully human until we are reborn in Christ. We need to recapture a renewed sense of Christ’s divine personhood to truly understand what it means to be human. Here again a hermeneutic of love is of central importance. The figure of Christ, as Balthasar reminds us, is only visible and productive as long as it is considered with the eyes of faith. The divine beauty, truth, and goodness of Jesus Christ are revealed only to those who approach him with loving faith. Our knowledge of Jesus is always a personal encounter with the Christ.

Icons found in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions communicate something of the mystical depths of the incarnation and the Trinitarian communio. As I write these words, I am gazing upon the Vladimir Madonna. A Russian icon, the Blessed Virgin caresses the infant Savior, his face pressed to hers in an image of mutual adoration. We catch a glimpse here not only of the inseparable union of Jesus and Mary in the economy of salvation⁶ but also of the Trinitarian glory. Not only does it move us, but it also draws us into itself. In our journey into the Trinity, therefore, we want to enter the divine intimacy we see manifest in the Vladimir icon.

Andrei Rublev’s icon, known as the Old Testament Trinity, is perhaps an even more arresting depiction of the Trinitarian mystery. In this icon we see three angels visiting Abraham at Mamre (Gen 18:1–17) and sharing in his hospitality. Rublev pictures these angels as prototypical figures of the persons of the Trinity. Their tri-forme intimacy draws the beholder into their heavenly embrace. The Son in the center inclines towards the Father. The Father blesses the Son. Both Son and Father point towards the Holy Spirit. The Spirit inclines towards the Eucharist, as if the entire Trinitarian economia were aimed at delivering this sacramental mystery to humankind.⁷

In both of these icons we catch a glimmer of the Trinitarian mystery. They disclose a vision of union, and invitation to intimacy, made possible only by and in Christ. They reveal a promise of communion with God and with each other. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.⁸ All power of attraction, all desire for union, stem from our inseparable connection with the Trinity. We desire to be with others because we share in the being with that defines the Persons of the Trinitarian communio personarum. The meaning of being human is found in our contemplation of, and union with, the Triune God.

1

. Balthasar, Does Jesus Know Us?,

6

.

2

. Evagrios the Solitary, On Prayer,

62

.

3

. Christocentrism must always be contrasted with any form of Christomonism, with which the approach adopted in this project and others is sometimes confused.

4

. Howsare, Balthasar,

73

.

5

. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils,

1

:

230

–

71

.

6

. St. Irenaeus called Mary the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race in Against Heresies,

3

.

22

.

4

.

7

. See Henri Nouwen’s book on icons, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, especially the chapter on Rublev’s Hospitality of Abraham.

8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §

27.

The Triumph of Hypostasis

Who is a person? What is a person? How is a person more than simply an individual example of the human species? These are questions that move us more deeply into our contemplation of the twin mysteries of divine and human personhood.

As already indicated, the Trinitarian communion of persons (communio personarum) is the source, goal, and archetype of everything that exists and can be known, especially human personhood. It is the glory of the Trinity that accounts for the beauty, truth, and goodness of all human relationships. There is no model or pattern for the proper relationship among or between persons, except that of the Trinitarian communion.⁹

It is exceedingly difficult, and requires a singular grace, to conceive of the Trinity as a communion of ontologically distinct yet eternally inseparable divine persons. There are many reasons for this difficulty, not the least of which is that there exists a long philosophical and theological tradition describing God primarily as a divine substance (ousia). It would be impossible and counterproductive for the contemplative vision we seek to recount here the multilayered history of the Trinitarian debates about God as a community of persons (hypostases) instead of as a divine substance (ousia). Both of these important terms, ousia (substance, nature, essence, form) and hypostasis (person), have complex and difficult philological histories. For the first three centuries of the christological and Trinitarian controversies in the church, the concepts of hypostasis and ousia tended to be used interchangeably. It was with the triumph of the term hypostasis (person), primarily in the writings of the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers Saints Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great, that made it possible for the church to conceive of God fully and completely as a communio personarum. This development was revolutionary and transformative for the future of theological reflection.

What do we mean when we say God is a communio personarum instead of a divine nature or substance? What is at stake when we speak about God as a community of persons instead of as the Ground of our Being or the uncaused cause? The very nature of such questions suggests something of why the early church fathers were so much occupied by these issues. In debating and discussing the nature (ousia) of God, the fathers asked themselves in many different ways: How can God be one in nature (ousia) yet different in person