aphoristic notes on the Trinity

“oure soule is a made trynyte lyke to the unmade trynyte”

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead…

—Romans 1:20

Bohr apparently observed something to the effect that, “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you haven’t understood quantum mechanics,”¹ and the doctrine of the Christian Trinity is often regarded in the same way. It has even been called “the most difficult thought the human mind has ever been asked to handle.”² I would like to take the occasion of Trinity Sunday today to offer a few aphoristic reflections on the theme that can perhaps be elaborated upon at a later date.

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The "worship in the Spirit" suggests the idea of the operation of our intelligence being carried on in the light, as may be learned from the words spoken to the woman of Samaria. Deceived as she was by the customs of her country into the belief that worship was local, our Lord, with the object of giving her better instruction, said that worship ought to be offered "in Spirit and in Truth," John 4:24 plainly meaning by the Truth, Himself. As then we speak of the worship offered in the Image of God the Father as worship in the Son, so too do we speak of worship in the Spirit as showing in Himself the Godhead of the Lord. Wherefore even in our worship the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son. If you remain outside the Spirit you will not be able even to worship at all; and on your becoming in Him you will in no way be able to dissever Him from God — any more than you will divorce light from visible objects. For it is impossible to behold the Image of the invisible God except by the enlightenment of the Spirit, and impracticable for him to fix his gaze on the Image to dissever the light from the Image, because the cause of vision is of necessity seen at the same time as the visible objects. Thus fitly and consistently do we behold the "Brightness of the glory" of God by means of the illumination of the Spirit, and by means of the "Express Image" we are led up to Him of whom He is the Express Image and Seal, graven to the like. 

—St. Basil of Caesarea³

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Axiomatically, God is One and hence one thing that the doctrine of the Trinity does not mean is that there are three gods. Instead, this Oneness is threefold, as a sphere with height, width, and depth, or the light of the Sun, the body of the Sun, and the warmth of the Sun. These are not three suns but one Sun seen in three aspects. Another analogy—by which to undertake in Plato’s words, the “steep and rugged ascent” from the den of images to the light True Being⁴—is the spring, the river, and the sea; a comparison dear to many Greek Fathers, though it strikes me that the clearness of water, the wetness of water, and the fluid dynamics of water is a more accurate comparison. Still another analogy is the thought or “word of the heart,” the word, or “spoken word,”⁵ and the breath upon which the word is born and conveyed between men.⁶ Or again, the root, the branch, and the fruit of a tree, thought again, I would modify this to say something along the lines of the life, the form, and the substance of the tree.

God is said to have “three Persons.” A word about “persons.” The later is an anglicized Latin translation of the Greek word πρόσωπον prósōpon, which, like its Latin counterpart, literally means “mask.” Per- means “through” and sons is “sound.” The reference is to the masks that thespians wear in the dramatic arts, through which their voices pass. Interestingly, the original Greek term had been replaced by ὑπόστασις (hypóstasis), which literally means “standing under,” and which would, hence, more fittingly have been rendered in Latin as “substance,” since hypo- means “under,” just like sub-. But mysteriously, the Latin Church Fathers opted for the first term while the Greek ones opted for the second. This is likely due to the confusing ambiguity between ὑπόστασις (hypóstasis) and οὐσία (ousia), since substantia had already translated the latter of these (howbeit essentia would probably have been a more fitting translation).

But irrespective of the historical etiologies, “person” as well as “substance” present stumbling-blocks for contemporary Christians who wish to understand the Trinitarian doctrine in a deeper manner than that evinced by merely being able to recite a series of dogmatic propositions. Hearkening back to earlier connotations of these terms, however, is illustrative.

“Substance” was originally, as indicated, conceived as something more akin to “essence” than to the ordinary material connotations that surround this word today. Aristotle observed that the same form can be realized in different matter, and, in the case of living things, the matter out of which it is formed must change in order for the thing to remain itself. This pattern is illustrated in the well-known paradox, handed down by Plutarch:

The Athenians preserved the boat—a thirty-oared ship—on which Theseus sailed with his companions and came back safely until the time of Demetrius of Phalerus, changing out the older wood and replacing it with strong, new parts until the ship became a famous example to philosophers of the problem of growth. Some say that it remained the same ship, others claim it did not.⁷

Hence, “substance” referred to the conserved quantity amid the flux of matter, which could not, itself, be material. Enough on that.

“Person,” as indicated, referred to the mask that players wore in dramatic settings. More essentially, this can be grasped as the appearance of some being, which serves as the interface between it and other beings. Our faces serve this role, as do our personalities. Ultimately, because of the parallel and paradoxical translations between the Greek and Latin schools, each of these terms began to assume some of the connotations of its counterpart, as when the eyes of an immature halibut migrate together at a certain stage in its development. Obviously, these are both just words that should be like windows to the truth and not stand-ins for it.

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I argued that Jesus Christ is the image and idea of the Good.

Jesus Christ is the Image of God and the Idea of the Good

Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity. By this logic, the First Person of the Trinity is the Good per se, and the Third Person, the presence in our hearts that draws us towards the Good through love.

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The above illustrates how God works in all three Persons of himself to draw us to him, not as a tyrant executing commands, or a general compelling us through forcible means, but, as Aristotle suggests, as an “unmoved mover”:

There is a mover which, not being moved, moves, being eternal and reality and actuality. The desirable and the intelligible move without being moved. The primaries of these are the same ... It moves as loved.⁸

If I desire a piece of cake, then the cake will draw me to it—if I allow that—but not by efficient cause acting from outside. God draws us to him by “causing” us to love him by being worthy of such love. Thus, we will be drawn to God from in ourselves, if we don’t prevent that. If the cake is not beholden to exert it influence on me by way of course mechanics, then the Creator of the cake and me alike is certainly not constrained in this way. God as infinite object of love is the First Person, God as the Way from human being to divine being, and back is the Second Person, and the power that works in us, if we allow it, which prompts us to convey ourselves towards the object of our love is also God, but in the Third Person. In this manner, God perfects us by drawing us to him and we perfect ourselves by being drawn to him. In this context, “being drawn to,” which in sublunary existence refers to physical approximation, indicates a likeness in nature and essence.⁹ Love is the solvent of our hang-ups and the agent of transformation towards apotheosis. St. Thomas Aquinas observes:

Because the eternal processions of the persons are the cause and ratio of the entirety of the production of creatures, hence it is necessary that, as the generation of the Son is the ratio of the entirety of the production of creatures insofar as the Father is said to have made all things in the Son, so also the love of the Father towards the Son… is the ratio in which God bestows every effect of love on the creature; and therefore the Holy Spirit, who is the Love by which the Father loves the Son, is also the Love by which He loves the creature by imparting its perfection to it.¹⁰

Taddeo Crivelli, “The Throne of Grace,” Single Leaf from a Manuscript, Italian (Ferrara), c. 1460-1470 Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum

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Another way to think of the Three Persons of God is to index them to the grammatical persons, howbeit accommodating the mystical reversal that transpires in any translation between spiritual and material planes (i.e. my total possession of gold is diminished the more I give it away but my total possession of love is increased by the same action):

• God the Father is a distant He (grammatical 3rd person).

• God becomes a “you”—which is, grammatically, second person—for us in the person of Christ, and as a result we can think of the distant He as not merely something immensely powerful, but also as our Father, to whom we sustain an intimate relation.

• In the Holy Ghost, we have taken Christ into us, as it were, and he therefore becomes an I, which is to say, our relation to God is now one of identity, of the grammatical first person.

So the the First Person is the fullness of that power which also appears in the I but regarded in the third person, grammatically speaking. The Second Person is the fullness of that same power, but regarded in another, as a “you,” and the Third Person is the I experienced in first person. That is why the only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin against the Holy Ghost: because I myself would have to go out of sin first—otherwise how could a sin be forgiven that I am still perpetrating? The tenses are in discord.

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“Christ,” the Second Person, is a title for “the Perfect Man.” “Man,” in turn, is a title for “the Priest and Lord of Creation.” Adam was supposed to be the priest and lord of Creation, which is to say, the intermediary between Heaven and Earth.

miscellany (2)

Christ came to accomplish what Adam failed to do and show us what “dominion” really means—as it is written, “…the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”¹¹ A perfect relation to is also a perfect relation to Creation. Christ to worship the Father through the Holy Ghost. We must, ourselves, become Christ and then all is right with us.

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And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness¹²

God’s intentions have embodied themselves in forms and life. Man is a creature of God and hence we can expect to find God’s thumbprint, as it were, in the vital clay. As another metaphor, consider the holographic image of the whole spangled vault of heaven in a single drop of dew. As Julian of Norwich wrote, “oure soule is a made trynyte lyke to the unmade trynyte.” Behold, God’s threefold image in the soul:

† God the Father is the transcendental condition for the soul’s experience
† Christ is the soul’s substance, which represents the divine potential of life being crucified to the cross of experience; for an idea to kindle in consciousness is for the same to die out of the universal spirit, as to pluck a flower is to sever it from its lifeline to the earth
† the Holy Ghost is the spirit of Christ that fills us with love to follow him in inner freedom

What is Life? (3.3)

Augustine famously ventured his own interpretations of God’s image in us:

• mind, knowledge, and love (mens, notitia, et amor).

or, alternatively,

• memory, intelligence, and will (memoria, intelligentia, et voluntas)

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Through creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator. Through the world he reveals the Lord who made the world. Through all that is fashioned he reveals the craftsman who fashioned it all. Through the Son the Word reveals the Father who begot him as Son.

—Saint Irenaeus of Lyons

God as First Person is the anterior unity before Creation. The anteriority is foremost a logical priority and not a temporal one. In other words, the unity of God the Father didn’t “go” somewhere after the world was created.

The Second Person is inherent in every object of God’s love, in the aspect of exitus, and every subject of God’s love, in the aspect of reditus.

Love, as the reconciling power that resolves the paradox of the One and the many and of unity and difference, is the Third Person. Love transcends distinction without abolishing it.

“Icon of the New Testament Trinity,” c. 1450

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God’s freedom is perhaps incomprehensible except in light of his Son. Nothing compelled or necessitated God to have a son. We find this same quality of freedom in our decision to follow Christ, which is never compelled. Even the historical records leave us free to make the “leap of faith” that Kierkegaard described, since sophists and academicians will dispute the fine points of evidence on this matter till Judgement Day.

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The Divine Trinity manifests itself even down to the basic metaphysical structure of experience: subject, object, and the attention that unites them.

More existentially, the threefoldness of the transcendental ego, the empirical ego, and the understanding that relates them also indexes to the threefoldness of the Divine Trinity. This may sound abstract but simply try to parse, phenomenologically, the experience of both watching yourself and of being watched by yourself, and these are not one and yet not two.¹³

Already in the third century, Tertullian was proposing something along these lines:

Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought … Whatever you think, there is a word … You must speak it in your mind …

   Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech … The word is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness you are?¹⁴

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God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

—1 John 4:6

The Trinity expresses the fact that love, as a principle, is inherent in, and essential to, the Godhead and not something ulterior or secondary to it. Love is relational in principle and indicates a union that does not dissolve the difference, but exalts it. The Trinity is a communion of three persons in one essence.

In love, two become one without ceasing to be two, thus they are three: 1 + 1 = 3.

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The Divine Trinity projected onto the plane of causality:

• The Father is uncaused and uncreated

• The Father causes causality, which leaves time as its echo.
  Causality consists in series of internal relations that signify themselves through outward display (i.e. history, myth, etc).

• Internal relation that displays itself outwardly in signs is the essence of Logos.*
  That is why it is written that the Son begotten of the Father.

• The Father begets causality, the Son manifests it.

• The Spirit is the inwardization (Erinnerung) of these relations. Erinerrung is “remembrance” and this is correct: remembrance consists in overcoming time because cause and effect are comprehended as a piece.

Christ repairs the past and prepares the future. When he ascends to sit at the right hand of the Father, the Spirit descends to enter us that we may fulfill this office.

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Georg Kühlewind asserted:

The divine power which works independently of human cognition, and also within cognition, is the Father. The divine power which reveals the Father, and receives this revelation in man, is the Son. And the Comforter, the God who can awaken in human consciousness insofar as it becomes aware of the Logos, is the Spirit.¹⁵

• the Father is the condition for perception

• Christ the λóγος is perception

• the Spirit is the condition for perception of Christ the Λóγος

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Thus, as Maximus the Confessor said, to contemplate the smallest object is to experience the Trinity: the very being of the object takes us back to the Father; the meaning it expresses, its logos, speaks to us of the Logos; its growth to fulness and beauty reveals the Breath, the Life-giver.

—Olivier Clement 

Andrei Rublev, 1411 or 1425–27

Hvis man kan sætte sig ind i kvantemekanik uden at blive svimmel, har man ikke forstået noget af det

1. more literally:

If one can set oneself into quantum mechanics without being perplexed, one hasn’t understood the first think about it.

2. J.I. Packer, “The historic formulation of the Trinity... confronts us with perhaps the most difficult thought that the human mind has ever been asked to handle.”

3. “On the Holy Spirit,” 26 (sect. 64).

4

turning the soul from day that is a kind of night, to true Day—the ascent to what is, which is to say, true Philosophy. (Republic, 521c)

5. a word consists of body and essence, matter and form, or sign and meaning. “Jesus Christ” follows the same pattern of conjunction.

6. One of my favorite passages by Aquinas on the “outer word” and “the word of the heart”:

Consequently, just as we consider three things in the case of a craftsman, namely, the purpose of his work, its model, and the work now produced, so also do we find a threefold word in one who is speaking. There is the word conceived by the intellect, which, in turn, is signified by an exterior vocal word. The former is called the word of the heart, uttered but not vocalized. Then there is that upon which the exterior word is modeled; and this is called the interior word which has an image of the vocal word. Finally, there is the word expressed exteriorly, and this is called the vocal word. Now, just as a craftsman first intends his end, then thinks out the form of his product, and finally brings it into existence, so also, in one who is speaking, the word of the heart comes first, then the word which has an image of the oral word, and, finally, he utters the vocal word."

Et ideo, sicut in artifice tria consideramus, scilicet finem artificii, et exemplar ipsius, et ipsum artificium iam productum, ita et in loquente triplex verbum invenitur: scilicet id quod per intellectum concipitur, ad quod significandum verbum exterius profertur: et hoc est verbum cordis sine voce prolatum; item exemplar exterioris verbi, et hoc dicitur verbum interius quod habet imaginem vocis; et verbum exterius expressum, quod dicitur verbum vocis. Et sicut in artifice praecedit intentio finis, et deinde sequitur excogitatio formae artificiati, et ultimo artificiatum in esse producitur; ita verbum cordis in loquente est prius verbo quod habet imaginem vocis, et postremum est verbum vocis.

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τὸ δὲ πλοῖον ἐν ᾧ μετὰ τῶν ἠϊθέων ἔπλευσε καὶ πάλιν ἐσώθη, τὴν τριακόντορον, ἄχρι τῶν Δημητρίου τοῦ Φαληρέως χρόνων διεφύλαττον οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, τὰ μὲν παλαιὰ τῶν ξύλων ὑφαιροῦντες, ἄλλα δὲ ἐμβάλλοντες ἰσχυρὰ καὶ συμπηγνύντες οὕτως ὥστε καὶ τοῖς: φιλοσόφοις εἰς τὸν αὐξόμενον λόγον ἀμφιδοξούμενον παράδειγμα τὸ πλοῖον εἶναι, τῶν μὲν ὡς τὸ αὐτό, τῶν δὲ ὡς οὐ τὸ αὐτὸ διαμένοι λεγόντων.

8. Aristotle, Met. Λ.7, 1072a26–27, b3–4

9. Cf. Augustine, for example:

One does not approach God by moving across intervals of place, but by likeness or similarity, and one moves away from him by dissimilarity or unlikeness. (On the Trinity VII.12, Hill 235)

10. I Sent. d. 14, q. 1, a. 1.

11. John 10:11

12. Genesis 1:26

13. Plotinus describes the phenomenology of the ascent that consolidates these terms of selfhood:

We ought not even to say that he will see, but he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one.

14. Tertullian, Against Praxeas 5

15. Kühlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist, 1985