So many pitfalls of intellectual pride, so much self-satisfied atheism, could have been avoided, had we only fully appreciated the wisdom of St. Hilary of Poitiers, who wrote, many, many years ago: If we assume that an event did not happen because we cannot discover how it was done, we make the limits of our understanding into the limits of reality.

We have words for concepts we cannot conceive, but which have application to something other than linguistic function – which are not simply pieces in a language game.

Some demarcate the necessary, although unknowable: ‘infinity’ is such a word, as is ‘eternity.’

Others have warrant, not of metaphysical necessity, but of revelation.  ‘God is omniscient; God is omnipotent; God is unchanging’ are among them.  ‘God is All-in-All’ is another, as is ‘God is love.’

And then there is ‘Tri-Unity,’ a concept inconceivable, and yet a necessity of revelation. 

For if God is love, then He has been so in eternity.  Creation had a beginning, but God has none.  Had ‘nothing’ ever had application, God could not have emerged from it. 

In that awful abyss of pre-creation, then, when that which is love was alone, where was its object found?  Solitary love is a contradiction in terms.  Unless God is a society of at least two co-eternal loving elements, with the love-relation ever flowing between them, ever perfectly bestowed and ever as perfectly requited, God is not love.

And if there are two elements – call them persons, and call the one Father and the other Son – then one must be source and the other product: the second must originate from the first, for if they have separate origins, the God is not All-in-All.

 And further, this origination must itself be an eternal act.  For if the Father existed without the Son, then He was not love, and would have had to change to become love. Yet God is unchanging.

The Word, therefore, is eternally begotten.

And finally, if God be in eternal relation, the relation that unites the two persons must itself be of God.  That which flows between the two must be as real and as eternal as they themselves, and originate in them.  It must share their life and their being, and must do so eternally.  It is the mutuality in which they both inhere, the medium which they exchange.

 A third element, then, proceeding eternally from the other two, completes the All-in-All.  Call it also a person; call it the Holy Spirit.

And this brings us to the end of thought and back to the inconceivable; or, in other and better words, to the inexpressible.  As Wittgenstein put it, now also long ago, but in the spirit of St. Hilary: That of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.