I do apologise for not posting that much recently. I am in the midst of exams for the moment. However, the following should add some food for thought, especially for Latter-day Saints who engage with Trinitarians in how to understand the concept of "[divine] essence," and the concept of "one being, three equally divine, distinct, but not separate persons" and other topics from two recent Catholic theology volumes I picked up recently:
The phrase “three Gods” could only means three distinct Persons, each with His own separate divine nature, His own separate equipment as God. But this is not so. They possess one single nature; they do in fact what our three men could not do—they know with the same intellect, love with the same will. They are three Persons and each is God; but they are one God, not three . . . The Thinker and the Idea are distinct, the One is not the Other, Father and Son are two Persons. But they are not separate. An idea can exist only in the mind of the thinker; it cannot, as it were, go off and start a separate life of its own. The Idea is in the same identical nature; we could equally well say that the nature is in the Idea, for there is nothing that the Father has which His Word, His Son, has not. “Whatsoever the Father has, that the Son has in like manner” (John xvi. 15). Each possesses the divine nature, but each is wholly Himself, conscious of Himself as Himself, of the Other as Other. (F.J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners [London: Sheed and Ward, 1961], 35, 37)
Let us here state, for the sake of those more initiated in theological questions that each Person of the Trinity is identical with the Divine Essence, and consequently is holy, with a substantial holiness, because each only acts conformably to this Essence considered as the supreme norm of lie and activity. It may be added that the Persons are holy because each of Them gives Himself to and belongs to the Other in an act of infinite adhesion. Lastly, the Third Person is especially called holy, because He proceeds from the Two Others through love; love is the principal act by which the will tends towards its end and is united to it; it designates the most eminent act of adhesion to the norm of all goodness, that is to say, of holiness, and therefore the Spirit, Who, in God, proceeds through love, bears pre-eminently the name of holy. (D. Columba Marmion, Christ The Life of the Soul [11th ed.; London: Sands and Co., 1925], 28-29 n. 32, italics in original)
