By Mary T. Kroner
With Trinity Sunday around corner—June 4—the writings of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity offer profound insights into the deepest Mystery of the Christian faith and illuminate how the Eucharist gives us access to the Triune life of God.
As a very young child, Elizabeth Catez, born in 1880 in France, was noted for her temper and fits of anger. After she received her First Communion, she found that she could conquer her defects by surrendering herself completely to Christ. She understood from a young age Christ’s love for man expressed by the gift of His Eucharistic presence. At fourteen, she felt impelled to consecrate her whole life to Christ and make a vow of perpetual virginity. After this, she knew she was being called to become a Carmelite, although she was not able to enter for another seven years due to her mother’s poor health and opposition to Elizabeth’s vocation. Elizabeth’s friends and companions during those years perceived a Presence that accompanied her and an orientation of her life towards that Presence, which was the Triune Life of God within her soul. Finally, she was permitted to enter the Carmel of Dijon at the age of twenty-one, and lived there only five short years before dying of Addison’s disease in 1906. She was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 1984.
The Tradition of the Catholic Church articulates that “God is unity in Trinity and Trinity in unity.” Christ Himself says to Philip, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (John 14:9). Christ explicitly reveals here not only His divine identity, but also the divine intimacy, or mutual indwelling, of the Persons. His language expresses the unity of God while preserving the distinct personalities of the Persons.
Elizabeth of the Trinity contemplates the Trinitarian processions of the Father engendering the Son in relation to Creation; the object of God’s contemplation of Himself in the Word includes the creatures He will speak into existence by His Word. It seems curious to Elizabeth that even though His creatures were not necessary to Him, God should contemplate them even before they were brought into existence. Here, she touches on what is perhaps Christ’s most shocking revelation about the Trinity, as found in His High Priestly Prayer. He implores His Father on behalf of those He loves, out of love and not out of necessity:
that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world (John 17:21-24).
On this passage, Elizabeth remarks, “Such is Christ’s last wish, His supreme prayer before returning to His Father. He wills that where He is we should be also, not only for eternity, but already in time, which is eternity begun and still in progress.” Elizabeth’s Trinitarian wonder, therefore, lies not in the fact that God is One in Three, but rather that He loves man as He loves Himself and that He longs to dwell in man as He dwells in Himself.
From the earliest age of the Church, Christians have understood their souls to be the dwelling place of God. The human soul receives the supernatural gift of sanctifying grace at Baptism, when the Divine Essence unites itself with the soul’s inmost being and the soul receives the capacity for God’s presence in it. The intra-Trinitarian movements of God giving and receiving Himself take place in the soul at the moment sanctifying grace is infused. The key here is that we not only receive the gift of sanctifying grace at baptism, but the Giver Himself, which is referred to as the Divine Indwelling.
But why does God dwell in the human soul? What possibly qualifies it as a worthy dwelling place of God? It is because of love, and the final goal of love is union between the one lover and the one loved. Christ’s priestly prayer expresses the union and love within the Trinity and God’s desire for that unity to extend beyond Himself to His creatures. Ultimately, the indwelling is God’s gift to us so that we may know God in faith; for we cannot love what we do not know.
Elizabeth’s faith in the presence and love of the Trinity in her soul is deeply informed by her Christocentric and Eucharistic spirituality; she believes that man’s hunger for Christ is nothing to Christ’s burning desire to give all that He has to man, and therefore, all that the Father has. She reflects on Christ’s words in John 6:56, “He who eats My flesh and drinks my Blood, remains in Me and I in him,” saying,
Love draws its object into itself; we draw Jesus into ourselves; Jesus draws us into Himself. Then carried into love’s interior, seeking God, we go to meet Him, to meet His Spirit, which is His love, and this love burns us, consumes us, and draws us into unity where beatitude awaits us. Jesus meant this when He said: ‘With great desire have I desired to eat this pasch with you.’
She expresses here belief in the two natures in the one person of Christ, which is foundational to union with God in the Trinity. When man receives communion, he receives the Incarnate Word in His humanity and His divinity. Because the Word is one with the Father and the Spirit, the Eucharist unites man to them as the Son is united to them. Through Christ, man is given access to, and drawn into the divinity of God. At communion, Christ not only gives man this access to the Trinity, but also effects an exchange which Elizabeth beautifully explains:
All that He has, all that He is, He gives; all that we have, all that we are, He takes away. He asks for more than we ourselves are capable of giving… He knows that we are poor, but He pays no heed to it and does not spare us. He Himself becomes in us His own bread, first burning up, in His love, all our vices, faults, and sins… Even if our eyes were good enough to see this avid appetite of Christ who hungers for our salvation, all our efforts would not prevent us from disappearing into His open mouth.
The exchange that takes place here is, after man surrenders his will, completely the work of Christ, who takes all that we have and gives to us all that He has. Again, Elizabeth asserts that, at communion, “When we receive Christ with interior devotion, His blood, full of warmth and glory, flows into our veins and a fire is enkindled in our depths. We receive the likeness of His virtues, and He lives in us and we in Him. He gives us His soul with the fullness of grace, by which the soul perseveres in love and praise of the Father!” In other words, He transforms us into “another Christ,” giving praise and glory to God. When man enters into intimate love and unity with Christ in communion, he is drawn more perfectly into the Divinity and Unity of God.
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity was granted a particular gift of the knowledge of the Presence of the Triune God in her soul. While she happened to be a mystic, she would likely be the first to say Christians do not have to be mystics to contemplate the Trinity. God gives the Church mystics so we can know, through them, how He is working in our souls even though we cannot always perceive His activity or His Presence. Everyone receives the baptismal graces of the capacity to know and love the Trinity and Elizabeth’s writings can help Christians gain a greater awareness of Holy Trinity in their souls, a deeper love for a God Who deigns to give Himself so intimately to His creatures, and a deeper love for one another, because the graced human soul is truly the dwelling place of God.
Quotations taken from: Elizabeth of the Trinity, The Complete Works. Volume One, trans. Aletheia Kane (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 2014).
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Mary Kroner is a recent graduate of the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. During her time residing in Lincoln with her family, she became a freelance writer for the Southern Nebraska Register. Her graduate thesis was entitled “The Primacy of the Unity of Love: St. Elizabeth of the Trinity’s Contribution to the Theology of the Divine Indwelling,” which is the full version of this article.
