36. We know only through Jesus Christ that God is Trinitarian.

We know only through Jesus Christ that God is Trinitarian.

YOUCAT Catechism + Catechism of the Catholic Church Lesson 36

Ave Maria series

36.  Can we deduce logically that God is triune?

No.  The fact that there are three persons (Trinity) in one God is a mystery.  We know only through Jesus Christ that God is Trinitarian.  [237]

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci late 1490s mural painting in Milan, Italy. (John 14:1-20) …..36

Men cannot deduce the fact that God is a Trinity by means of their own reason.  They acknowledge, however, that this mystery is reasonable when they accept God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.  If God were alone and solitary, he could not love from all eternity.  In the light of Jesus we find already in the Old Testament (for example, Genesis 1:2, Gen 18:2, 2 Samuel 23:2) indeed, even in all of creation, traces of God’s Trinitarian Being.

[237]

"IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT"

237  The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the "mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God".( Dei Filius 4:Denzinger-Schonmetzer 3015.)⁵⁸ To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit. –Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition