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e. There are certain personal attributes by which the three persons are distinguished.
These
are also called opera ad intra, because they are works within the Divine Being, which do not
terminate on the creature. They are personal operations, which are not performed by the three
persons jointly and which are incommunicable. Generation is an act of the Father only; filiation
belongs to the Son exclusively; and procession can only be ascribed to the Holy Spirit. As opera
ad intra these works are distinguished from the opera ad extra, or those activities and effects
by which the Trinity is manifested outwardly. These are never works of one person exclusively,
but always works of the Divine Being as a whole. At the same time it is true that in the
economical order of God’s works some of the opera ad extra are ascribed more particularly to
one person, and some more especially to another. Though they are all works of the three
persons jointly, creation is ascribed primarily to the Father, redemption to the Son, and
sanctification to the Holy Spirit. This order in the divine operations points back to the essential
order in God and forms the basis for what is generally known as the economic Trinity.
f. The Church confesses the Trinity to be a mystery beyond the comprehension of man.
The
Trinity is a mystery, not merely in the Biblical sense that it is a truth, which was formerly hidden
but is now revealed; but in the sense that man cannot comprehend it and make it intelligible. It
is intelligible in some of its relations and modes of manifestation, but unintelligible in its
essential nature. The many efforts that were made to explain the mystery were speculative
rather than theological. They invariably resulted in the development of tritheistic or modalistic
conceptions of God, in the denial of either the unity of the divine essence or the reality of the
personal distinctions within the essence. The real difficulty lies in the relation in which the
persons in the Godhead stand to the divine essence and to one another; and this is a difficulty
which the Church cannot remove, but only try to reduce to its proper proportion by a proper
definition of terms. It has never tried to explain the mystery of the Trinity, but only sought to
formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in such a manner that the errors which endangered it were
warded off.
4. VARIOUS ANALOGIES SUGGESTED TO SHED LIGHT ON THE SUBJECT.
From the very earliest
time of the Christian era attempts were made to shed light on the trinitarian Being of God, on
the trinity in unity and the unity in trinity, by analogies drawn from several sources. While these
are all defective, it cannot be denied that they were of some value in the trinitarian discussion.
This applies particularly to those derived from the constitutional nature, or from the
psychology, of man. In view of the fact that man was created in the image of God, it is but
natural to assume that, if there are some traces of the trinitarian life in the creature, the
clearest of these will be found in man.