When you’re young, you think you understand people. When I was 13, almost everyone I knew explained everyone else with a simple word like “insecure.” (Which was probably true, actually.) As we got older, we explained each other in slightly more complicated ways, drawn from the kind of psychology you pick up from Time magazine and intro to psych classes in college, often tracing whatever behavior we wanted to explain by the poor target’s childhood.
It’s a hard habit to break, but as you get older you begin to see that people are mysteries, even to themselves. You’d think that of all people St. Paul understood himself, but even he threw up his hands and admitted to the Christians in Rome that for some reason he didn’t do the good things he wanted to do but kept doing the bad things he didn’t want to do. You simply can’t describe anyone adequately in a few words or even in a long psychological report.
If we are mysteries, God is infinitely more mysterious than we are. We know God is a Trinity of persons, but what could that possibly mean? How do the persons relate to each other? What does it mean to say that the Father has a Son?
I bring this up because it helps explain why the new translation of the Mass uses “consubstantial” instead of “one in being with the Father.” In this column we’ll look at why the translators of the Creed used such an odd and unusual word when they could have used much simpler language.
The old wording certainly sounds better and seems (on the face of it) a lot easier to understand. The new wording is what my grandfather used to call a “twenty-dollar word.” (As you’ll guess, he grew up when $20 was a lot of money.)
It sticks out like a man in a tuxedo at the beach. It makes you feel like you’re listening to some really smart computer geeks who uses a language you will never, ever understand. It can make you feel you’re reading from a script written for someone else — particularly some gray-haired, tweed-jacketed, balding guy with a theology degree.
And this, I think, actually helps us think more deeply about what we’re saying when we pop up at Mass and start reciting the words of the Creed. The unusual word tells us that we are speaking of a great mystery, something that’s way, way above our pay grade. We’re speaking of the relation of the Father to the Son, which is sort of like the relation of a human father to a human son — that’s why Scripture gives us these names and not others — but in other ways not like it at all.
We need to be reminded that we can’t talk about the relation of the Father and the Son the way we talk about anything else. To put it simply, God has revealed this to us, but that doesn’t mean we’ll understand more than a tiny part of its meaning.
Think of trying to describe a beloved grandmother. You can tell people that she was this and she was that, and she did this and she did that, and tell a bunch of great stories about her. You could write out her history. But you wouldn’t be able to capture who she really is. You wouldn’t be able to describe her personality in a way someone else could with certainty pick her out of a group of sweet little old ladies like her.
If grandma can’t be described very well, God can’t be either, especially when we try to talk about the inner relations of the Trinity, and about what it means for the Father to have a Son and for the Son to be the Son of the Father. No matter how good you are with words, there’s a sharp limit to what you can do in this case. When we’re confidently racing through the Creed, we ought to slam on the brakes and remember that we’re talking about a great mystery. That odd twenty-dollar word “consubstantial” tells us to hit the brakes.
David Mills is the executive editor of FIRST THINGS. He and his family attend St. Joseph’s Church in Coraopolis. He can be reached at catholicsense@gmail.com.
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