Aristotle famously said that human beings are political animals. By that, he didn’t mean that we all belong to political parties or have certain ideologies. In his terms Aristotle meant that we are designed to live in community. He thought that the basic unit of human society was the family, and several families gathering together made the polis, or basic political unit. We learn by imitating others and being taught by others. We love telling stories, we have a need to create, and we build and trade. As well as this social aspect, we can also have a rich interior life. We can imagine, have daydreams and capture in our minds the essence of things. As somebody once said, we are the only animals who keep diaries to record and reflect on our inner life.
God is eternally one, but also a communion of Persons. The interior life of God, if we may put like that, is the eternal communion of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one sole God in essence, with three distinct Persons. Here we have to exercise our spiritual muscles to receive the reality of the Trinity, where, in the words of St. Athanasius: “In that Trinity there is no before or after, nothing greater or lesser: because the three Persons are co-eternal and equal among themselves.” So we are social creatures because God is communion. We are rational creatures because the divine Trinity is the fountain of all reason, order and intelligence.
God does more than create us; we are also redeemed. God could have redeemed us with just a word of command. But God wishes to enter into the life of God’s beloved creatures to heal and raise them to participate, by grace, in the divine, eternal life. So great is God’s desire to share communion with us that Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human, was prepared to suffer and die on the cross to communicate that love. Jesus also sent the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to dwell within the Church, and dwell within each one of the baptized. In fact, the whole of the Trinity dwells within us when we live a sacramental life in the Church, when we pray, in our life of good works. We are made for communion, communion with each other and communion with God.