I have been sharing with my readers the thoughts of St. Gregory of Nazianzus on the mystery and wonder of the Trinity. I would continue to share his thoughts with the hope that they stimulate my readers to actually reflect on how they see God, Who we believe is Three-In-One.

Gregory wonders, can God be in the universe? God must either be “in some part” of the universe or “in the whole.” If he inhabits only a part of the universe, however, God will end up “circumscribed by that part which is less than himself,” hardly a satisfactory state of affairs. Problems also accompany placing God within the universe as a whole. For instance, “Where was He before the universe was created”? If we describe God as being above the universe, what do we mean by “above” ? To describe God as above something seems to demand that we still think spatially concerning where God is, a position Gregory found untenable.

By this time, Gregory, you and I are tempted to scream. Our linguistic and spatial categories are proving incapable of adequately describing God, which turns out to be exactly Gregory’s point: “For my purpose in doing so was to make clear the point at which my argument has aimed from the first. And what was this? That the divine nature cannot be apprehended by human reason, and that we cannot even represent to ourselves all its greatness.” Human beings in their present state are simply unable to gaze directly upon God. As embodied creatures we naturally gravitate to picturing God through the analogies in the visible world around us. Gregory, however, is insistent that the vision of God is an “object of pure thought apart altogether from bodily objects.” Gregory states, “Thus our mind faints to transcend corporeal things, and to consort with the incorporeal, stripped of all clothing of corporeal ideas, as long as it has to look with its inherent weakness at things above its strength.

Still, God has planted reason within us, “reason that proceeds from God, that is implanted in all from the beginning and is the first law in us, and is bound up in all,” the reason that “leads us up to God through visible things.” Yet, our knowledge of God for the present will remain fragmentary at best.

So this is why God became incarnate – became a human being – so that we might have a concrete example of how we are created in His image and have the potential to grow in His likeness.