Undset on the Trinity, the Incarnation and Catholicism

This is from "Troskiftet i Norge og den katolske kirke" (The Christianisation of Norway and the Catholic Church), the title of a talk Sigrid Undset gave in December 1928 to a student association in Oslo.

Christianity teaches that God became man and entered into the history of the world as a historical person. Founders of other religions say: “I know the way; I have found the revelation of truth”, or “I have meditated my way to it”. The founder of Christianity says: “Believe in me”, while others say: “Believe what I teach you”. The founder of Christianity says, “I am the way, the truth and the life”. Most pagan mythologies have a tradition that there was a time when the creator or creators walked the earth alongside the creature; that the higher gods accomplished great deeds, battled with ancient giants and calmed the chaos. Since then, however, the gods dwell upon the earth no longer, even if they reveal themselves from time to time while in disguise on an adventure. Christianity teaches the exact opposite: creation is a work of an invisible God who is pure spirit. Everything is brought into being by an act of thought that we cannot begin to comprehend, even if we can form an analogical idea of it by observing our own will in action. Moreover, Christianity teaches that the creator never withdraws from his creation but remains in it, permeating it in such fashion that were he to withdraw even for a moment, it would return to the nothingness from which he willed it into being. This is one of the chief points of medieval theology: that we cannot explain God but can come to some basic conclusions about the attributes of his nature.

Jotunheimen, Norway's highest mountain range, to the north-east of Bergen.

It has been said that medieval scholastic theology and philosophy – two distinct things, in fact – strive to comprehend the incomprehensible and to express the inexpressible. They attempt to comprehend everything that can be comprehended and to say everything that can be said about the incomprehensible and the ineffable that stands beyond the horizon in the same way that gothic spires were built to stand in clear relief against the sky. We can best acquire a sense of infinity when we look over a mountain range and behold the peaks and gorges of Jotunheimen against the infinite transparency of the vast skies. Similarly, the sharply defined dogmas in Catholic theology that we find in St Thomas Aquinas, for instance, more than anything help us to fill our lungs with the infinity of eternity and incomprehensible mysteries.

The Church did not try to explain what the Trinity is. It is a mystery that man cannot grasp and it stretches over and above the uttermost peaks of our understanding. It does not contradict our reason but is beyond comprehension. The very thought of it erects cathedral spires to point to it. If it is true that God is love in one ineffable way or another, he could not have been alone from all eternity – even if he is one. Theology points inward within ourselves and does not find an explanation but an analogy. It teaches that we are a unified personality and that the thoughts born in our consciousness become an reflection of the Word, born of the Father before all ages. The joy we feel in our ability to think is an image of the love, the Spirit, which proceeds from both.

When Athanasius and the other fourth century mighty champions for Catholic dogmas combatted the Arian teaching that the Son had been created in some distant primeval time, but created in time nevertheless, they fought for the Christmas gospel and the revelation that God is love and unchanging throughout eternity. The battle for dogma – futile in the eyes of so many in the present age – is in reality the battle for truth. Is God’s word credible or shall we just believe because it is nice to have a faith - even if it is based on fantasies? The pagans, too, had a sense that the stories of their gods were fantasies, fictions and allegories – mythology.

When the medieval Church preached that every human being is created in the image of God, it was this image of the Trinity that it had in mind. It was well understood that references to the hands of God, his eyes and the shadow of his wings were metaphorical because the Church taught that God is spirit. Likewise (as St Thomas says), there is no question of gender in the divinity apart from grammatical gender; not before the incomprehensible and invisible God in the person of the Son takes a human body and a human soul in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

This is the Christianity of the Middle Ages: God became a man who sits on his mother’s lap, grows up in the poor home of a carpenter, walks through the streets of the towns of Judea, teaches, lays his hands on the sick, kisses infants, eats with others, finally dies in the most shameful and painful manner and rises from the dead. He thereby becomes the Saviour and the Door to the mysteries about which, without Him, we could only speculate but never enter. For us Catholics, Christianity is not the ten commandments. As the scholastics say, they are revealed de facto, but not de jure; in other words, they were revealed to man, but what they teach could be reasoned out with more or less precision. Catholicism taught this long before the discovery of the Code of Hammurabi or any of the other ancient moral codes, whose similarities to the Ten Commandments have so preoccupied modern theologians. The same applies to the Sermon on the Mount, which so many of our contemporaries consider the one essential element of Christianity. For Catholicism, it is not the Sermon on the Mount that is the new and unique thing about Christianity. Rather, it is the mysteries of Christ’s life and death that render the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount something more than unattainable standards that no one tries to implement with any seriousness.

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