Invisible Missions as Soul-Seals

The chapter on the Trinity in the new Oxford Handbook of Deification is assigned to Gilles Emery, OP. It’s a perfect match of author and topic (characteristic of this handbook’s taut editing), and Emery’s chapter (34, pages 562-575) is excellent in every way.

Central to Emery’s Thomistic account of “Deification and the Trinity” is the connection he traces from the eternal processions, through the trinitarian missions, to the experience of salvation. Precisely because the topic of deification is the ultimate goal of the chapter, Emery has to put in place some clarifying exposition of the doctrine of the invisible missions of the Trinity. Emery has written extensively elsewhere on this oft-neglected sub-sub-doctrine, but I was struck by how much he managed to fit into the key 363-word paragraph in this Handbook chapter. Here it is, followed by a few remarks:

By “invisible missions,” the Augustinian tradition understands the sanctifying sending of the Son and of the Holy Spirit into human souls and angels. The “invisible missions” give us the fundamental structure of divinization. When the Son and the Holy Spirit are sent, they imprint in souls a “seal” that bears their mark: this seal is a likeness of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The seal or imprint that the Son gives to souls is “wisdom,” that is, sanctifying knowledge of God: such “wisdom” is an operative participation in the personal property of the Son who is the Word of the Father. The seal that the Holy Spirit imprints in souls is charity, which is an operative participation in his personal property as Love. So, when the Son and the Holy Spirit are given, they cause in us the operative gifts that dispose us to be actively united to the Triune God. The indwelling of the divine persons is a Trinitarian event that takes place in a loving adherence to God’s truth (Spezzano 2015, 293). To be more precise: wisdom and charity make their beneficiaries participate in the relation that the Son and the Holy Spirit have with the Father. Here it must be stressed that the “invisible mission” consists first of all in the divine person itself who is sent: “the divine person itself is given” (ipsa persona divina datur) (Aquinas, Summa theologiae I.43.3 ad 1). The energetic union with the Trinity through the deified operations of knowledge (living faith, beatific vision) and love makes of the believers a “temple” of the Trinity; it makes believers “possess” the persons who are sent, so that believers are led to the Father himself. This accounts for the real presence (real indwelling) of the divine persons, which is the heart of deification. Such a real presence is not static but dynamic (Emery 1995, 410– 11). In their “invisible” missions, the Son and the Holy Spirit are “possessed” by the justified faithful as “leading them towards the end and uniting them to it” (Aquinas, Sent. I, dist. 15, quaest. 4, art. 1: “habentur personae divinae novo modo quasi ductrices in finem vel conjungentes”). (Emery, 567-568)

It’s wise to call this tradition Augustinian rather than strictly Thomist, because though the doctrine becomes wonderfully clear and articulated in the thirteenth century, the key ideas are much older and broader. The first few books of Augustine’s De Trinitate are mandatory reading for anybody who wants to think well about trinitarian missions.

This paragraph presupposes that visible and invisible have been distinguished: the Son’s visible mission is the incarnation, while the Spirit’s is seen in that set of manifestations also centered on the Son’s incarnation: the descending dove, the flames of fire. Invisible mission, on the other hand, is known by an internal change in the one to whom the Son and Spirit are sent: sanctification.

Emery says the invisible missions of the Son and Spirit “imprint in souls a ‘seal’ that bears their mark.” In order to elaborate on this, Emery shifts from speaking of “Son and Spirit” (that is, offspring and breath) to speaking of knowledge and love. As a Thomist, he can do this with confidence because Thomas’ theology of the eternal processions treats them as processions by way of intellect (the Son) and by way of love (the Spirit). When these processions are extended into missions, they unfold their character as “wisdom and charity.” That character that they bear in the life of God is made present in the creature, by imprinting itself in the creature.

So Emery’s vision of trinitarian mission is that Son and Spirit bring with them from the Father the wisdom and charity that they are; they imprint this on the creature and seal their own character on the sanctified as an “operative participation.” Furthermore, he insists, it is not just their own characters as if in personal hypostatic isolation, but in their relation to the Father: “wisdom and charity make their beneficiaries participate in the relation that the Son and the Holy Spirit have with the Father.”

That translation from “Son and Spirit” to “wisdom and charity” is crucial for Emery’s account of trinitarian mission. Lacking a Thomist description of the processions second and third persons, it would be very difficult to say what change their missioned presence makes in the recipient. Would we say the recipient is rendered filial and pneumatic by the sent presence of the filius and pneuma? Perhaps. But it would be difficult to paraphrase much beyond that. The Thomist processions give Emery the vocabulary to see the effects of trinitarian mission wherever knowledge of God and love of God become real among creatures. And that is a much broader field to explore.

Finally, Emery is concerned to emphasize the direct and personal presence of the Son and the Spirit. What is given in trinitarian mission is not something appropriated or accommodated, but is actually the person of the Trinity: ipsa persona divina datur. This real personhood grounds “real presence”–as a certain kind of Protestant I am tempted to say a real real presence, the trinitarian-personal reality that is the only possible ground of any sacramental presence.