HOMO COMMUNICANS,
IN THE IMAGE OF THE TRINITARIAN GOD

1.- Introduction

  To speak of communication is to make reference to a fundamental question of human existence. This is so evident that it hardly needs argument to demonstrate it. “It means immediately focusing attention on man, since the fact is universally recognised that to communicate is an intrinsic and determining reality of human nature”[1]. In his effort to define it, this author states that it is a case of “a kind of instinct related to socialisation, an instinct that leads man to seek community life as an existential dimension”[2]. It is evident that communication has always existed since the human being has existed, to the point where we can call him, by analogy with other fundamental dimensions, “homo communicans”.

  However, we are not about to develop this aspect in all its anthropological extension (which would also imply, for example, analysing both his likeness to and difference from other living beings, since animals also “communicate”); what interests us here is to develop and clarify the theological perspective and more concretely its Christian one. Presupposing a reflection that is based on the Sacred Scriptures we can point ourselves more in the direction of systematic theology or theological anthropology.

2. A basic outline of the question

  The basic affirmation of Christian anthropology is focused on the inalienable character of each man or woman as being in the image and likeness of God: this is a belief we already find in the first pages of Scripture (Gen 1:27). It is not, therefore, just a simple phenomenological analysis of the kind common to the “human sciences”, but its specific focus consists in understanding “the human phenomenon” from the perspective of God's Revelation inasmuch as man is created in his image and likeness.

  At first sight, however, it might seem that such a focus, applying it to the concrete question of communication, might not find an adequate response; indeed, the human faculty of communication, more than showing our likeness to God might seem to distinguish us and separate us from Him; this for two main reasons.

  Firstly, because human communication is, before anything else, an expression of his precarious nature: a human being locked up within himself and incapable of any communication could not survive nor develop his essential qualities; he needs to communicate. This precariousness cannot, for sure, be reconciled with divine perfection.

  Secondly communication, inasmuch as it expresses the totality of the human being, essentially requires corporeality, both as regards verbal language, and paradoxically, but more so, non-verbal language. This is not about setting up dichotomies of the body-soul kind, since it is not the “body” which man communicates, but the person: what happens is that all of man's corporeal and spiritual being is involved in such communication. How might we imagine that this feature likensus to God? It might seem to be contrary: it distinguishes us from Him who is “Pure Spirit”.

  Besides, connected with this second aspect we cannot ignore the fact that while corporeality is essential for communication, it can also be an obstacle to it: I can communicate something that does not correspond with who I am deep down, precisely because the other person cannot know me in the very depths of my being; in other words, I can lie.

  We will not answer these objections just now, precisely because they are based on a presupposition which is completely open to debate: it believesit knows what God is like without having spoken of the Christian God who revealed Himself definitively in Christ Jesus; and again, it is precisely in Him that we describe a God who wants to communicate with us. This is why it is essential that we base ourselves on the identity of the Christian God, especially in his manifestation/revelation  to humanity.

3.- “...when the kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind was revealed” (Titus 3: 4).

  We too often understand the fundamental nature of the human being in the “image and likeness of God” in a static way, as if it were something given once and for all. But from the beginning, Christian theology has attempted to understand it in a dynamic way, including through the dialectic that comes from distinguishing both words: created in the imageof God, we are called to be like Him: it is an intelligent idea that we already find somehow in St Irenaeus, and which is then further developed by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.

  We can also look at it from another perspective, inspired by the famous discussion in the 1950s on the relationship between human nature and God's Grace: a discussion that was subsequently quickly forgotten. One of the aspects of this controversy focused on the need to safeguard God's freedom and absolute gratuitousness in saving mankind, in practice minimising the Christian belief in God's universal desire to save.

To understand this idea, let me quote once more that line from Genesis in a slightly modified form: “Let us make (someone) in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves - man”. This version emphasises that God, wanting to create someone in his own likeness, created man… a belief expressed in a beautiful phrase from our theological tradition: Prius intelligitur deiformis quam homo: we need to understand the human being theologically first as 'deiform' or 'in the shape of God' rather than as man”, meaning: God did not give this direction to man as an afterthought, but man's fundamental orientation towards God constitutes a totally free gift from God, certainly however “given” to human nature as such. If we continue with our gloss on Genesis, finally when God contemplates what he has made, he can exclaim with satisfaction: “Indeed it was very good... however creating the human being, man and woman, is the best thing I could have done” (cf. Gen 1: 31).

  The great theological tradition has liked to express this greatness of man through two expressions of extraordinary depth: every man and woman is capax Dei, meaning that he or she has the capacity to know Him, communicate with Him, dialogue with Him and finally, find his or her fullness and happiness in Him alone. This is why one of the human being's essential features is potentia oboedientialis, the ability to listen to/obey this God who did not create him because he needed to, but so that he might need God… because God created him and loved him unconditionally[3].

  God's entire plan of salvation can be summed up in a single word: epiphany, manifestation. God was not content with just loving us, but wanted to manifest his love for us; and this manifestation has a concrete name: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Word made Flesh.

  Vatican Council II, speaking of this Revelation, indicates that it happens “through intrinsically connected works and words; the works that God does in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and the realities that the words mean; in turn, the words proclaim the works and explain the mystery” (DV, 2).

4.- “…That life was made visible: we saw it”(1 Jn 1, 2): God's Revelation as communication, in St John...

  ..in the New Testament, concretely: in the Gospel and letters of St John we encounter a “theology of communication” focused on the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God made Man, called the Logos of God. The term logos, taken from human experience, is an extraordinarily fruitful one for manifesting the salvation that God offers man, seen under the heading of communication. We know that historically it has served as a bridge since the second century after Christ between the Old Testament concept of the creating Word and God's effectiveness (the dabar of the Lord) and Greco-Roman, hellenistic thinking (recalling that the Logos did not only mean  “word”, but also reason, meaning – so that the adjective logical means not only “verbal”, but reasonable, not absurd or without meaning).

  At the beginning of his first letter the Apostle writes “Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word who is Life –... that Life was made visible: we saw it and we are giving our testimony, telling you of the eternal life, which was with the Father and has been made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we are telling you so that you too may be in union with us, as we are in union with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1:1-3): Christian faith basically consists in the encounter with a visible and tangible Person who has communicated with us,and of whom the Apostle gives testimony so that the believer may also be in communication/communion with God.

  This communication/communion with God makes Jesus Christ the Logos possible, and is the core of human perfection or, evoking the beautiful expression of St Augustine, is the satisfaction of the yearning of each human heart, that can find rest and fullness only in God. To Philip's question: “Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied”, Jesus answers: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? To have seen me is to have seen the Father” (Jn 14:8-9). This complete communication, without reserve, is an expression of his friendship shown to the fullest by giving his own life: “I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master's business; I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father” (Jn 15:15).

  Just the same we can go even deeper. It is cause for a certain oddness that, in his farewell discourse during the Last Supper, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit “the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, who issues from the Father” (Jn 14:17; 15:26; 16:13). In the Johannine logic (and even more in the light of the later Trinitarian theology) one would expect him to be called “the Spirit of Love”. Without pretending to offer an exegesis in the strict sense of the term, I would suggest a theological hypothesis for interpreting this Johannine title: the substratum of a Johannine paradigm that understands Revelation as Trinitarian communication.

  We should not forget that the presentation of Jesus, the Son of God made Man (in fact, the title “Son of Man” in John connotes this function of revelation[4]) as Logos is encountered as a consequence, and in dialectical tension with the invisibility/ineffability/transcendence of God: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son who is nearest to the Father's heart, who has made him known” (Jn 1:18). In human experience, the word(understood in its broad sense, not just as “flatus vocis”) expresses what the mind of man thinks, however without such an expression, he could know nothing. So that there is perfect agreement between thinking and the word, truth is essential: lying, on the other hand, is distortion between what I think/feel and what I express.

Similarly, between the absolute transcendence of God (“no one has ever seen him”) and his definitive revelation in Jesus Christ, Logos of the Father, we find the Spirit of Truth, who is united with the Father and the Son. This title is perfectly encapsulated within the communication paradigm.

Sub contrario, it is equally significant that, in the Johannine work, we find opposition to God characterised as deception, lying: 1 Jn 1:5, 8, 10; 2:4, 21-22, 27; 4:1, 6, 20; 5:10

  This “Trinitarian communication” however does not finish here. As Church, all Christians are called to continue the mission of the Logos through the power of the Spirit: that is, make this Love of God present and true. In fact, in his first letter John repeats the same expression used in the Gospel: “No one has ever seen God” to link it with the testimony of the Christian community, focused on fraternal love: “No one has ever seen God, but as long as we love one another, God will live in us and his love will be complete in us” (1 Jn 4:12). This is what the Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI reminded us of: “caritas in veritate”.

  So in summary, let us recall the end of John's first letter: “We are in the true God, as we are in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, this is eternal life” (1 Jn 5:20). and in his second letter: “In our life of truth and love, we shall have Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father” (2 John, v. 3).

5. From God's communication to God-Communion

  At the beginning we left a number of questions without answer: concretely, how to understand the basic nature of the human being, fundamentally capable of communication since he is made in the image and likeness of God. We could not answer that without first asking ourselves about this God in whom we believe, and in whose image and likeness we have been created.

We have already pointed to the fundamental aspect of God's relationship with humanity understood from the point of view of revelation/communication: however the decisive question comes now: does God's communication belong only to his action, or is it a characteristic of God himself? This evokes the famous “Rahner axiom”: the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity; in other words: God odes not reveal himself any differently from how he is[5].

This is why all that we have said earlier was not just by the by, nor has it led us away from our central concern: on the contrary, it has made us see that our faith has nothing to do with abstract speculation or concepts but with a history of love/communication/salvation between God and his sons and daughters, focused on the Gift par excellence, the gift of his Son Jesus Christ for us: “God so loved the world that He sent his only Son” (Jn 3:16).

  This brings us to the central Mystery of our faith: the God in whom we believe is not a solitary, self-sufficient, non-communicating or uncommunicative God: he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit: God-Love, Three and One.

  Traditional theology has not sufficiently emphasised the nature of communication as a central aspect in intra-trinitarian life, probably because it has not reflected sufficiently on the same thing in human experience; however, it has not been absent from it; it is enough to consider how this feature already appears in the biblical description of Creation: first, as a concern of God himself when he sees man's lack of satisfaction amongst all created beings: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18); but a little later, as a consequence of sin, this communication is blocked at the level of the couple (Adam and Eve) and the family (Cain and Abel) and involves all of society, ending up in the destruction of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9).

  Despite this “oversight” in trinitarian reflection, it has always been there somehow especially as seen from the perspective of complete communion and communication of Trinitarian Life. To express this theology coined the key theological notion of perikoresis: the full “flow” of divine life between Father, Son and Holy Spirit that Hans Urs von Balthasar did not hesitate to call “inter-trinitarian kenosis”[6]: that is, the total, unreserved co-involvement between the divine persons that enables us to speak responsibly of a God who is (and not just“has”) Love. To provide a basis for this central idea, we need to analyse, from human experience, the gift implied by love in any of its authentic manifestations, from a communication point of view: since we do not communicate “something” in this giving, but commit our very selves fully and completely. There is no more complete communication than love. Furthermore, Trinitarian theology somehow shows that this communion/communication makes up who the Divine Persons are: it is enough to recall the  expression of St Thomas Aquinas: “relatio subsistens”. “Thinking” of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as “personal cores of relationship” goes beyond all understanding, going infinitely beyond any human capacity for communication.

In this sense I dare to say: there is no communication in God, but God instead is Communication. We have been created in the image of this God in order to end up being like him, through love (cf. Eph 1:4). Here we see the dynamic of a fundamental dialectical process reappear: each man and woman is by nature in the image of the One God, and nothing can eliminate this essential feature of our identity (not even the most serious sin, not even eternal condemnation, as the terrible, ultimate possibility of human freedom); however, we are called to become like the Triune God: “Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you” (Jn 17:21) is Jesus' prayer to the Father at the Last Supper.

Let's pick up the initial idea: that human communication might seem rather to distinguish us than liken us to God for two reasons: one the precariousness that lies behind the human need to communicate, and the other, the essential corporeality as the basis of its manifestation: these are both things we cannot attribute to God.

To respond to this we might recall that speaking of “image-likeness” implies situating ourselves between equality and difference. Christian thinking has always spoken, in this regard, of analogy. We are like,not “equal” to God. However, we have to avoid the danger of thinking that the analogy leads to “weakening” communication in God; in fact it is quite to the contrary: human communication is a weak reflection of the Mystery of God who communicates. “The greatest of Goodness cannot exist except through the greatest communication. This can exist because we have to exclude both sterility and avarice in God, meaning that he could or would not wish to give of himself completely. However God the Father desires and can communicate entirely the divine essence to the Son and the Spirit, and thus God is not alone.”[7]

If we analyse more deeply these two aspects from our experience, we can see that the human reality of communication is fed from two opposing realities: precariousness, without a doubt, but also plenitude: to the extent that, the more and better we communicate, the more we become persons; the big danger would be when one aspires to be self-sufficient, with no need to communicate with others (this would be the best description… of hell).

On the other hand, we mentioned above in reference to corporeality, an undeniable dialectic: the body is the instrument of communication (verbal or non-verbal), but it can also make it “opaque”, make it difficult or impede communication (in the case of deception). How often we end up saying to those who ask us: “I would like you to see my heart, my most intimate feelings”! This “opacity” in human communication is totally absent in God; so, we can conclude, in what is undoubtedly a paradoxical way, that we are like(not equal, certainly, but neither are we different from) God precisely as “incarnate beings”.

In the full communication of God's love and with our brothers and sisters we encounter our own human happiness/fullness; in Christian terminology, our salvation. “And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3).

Fr José Luis Plascencia Moncayo SDB
Rome – UPS, April 2013.