Eternity Week #4: On the Trinity
This is a long one, but worth it.
Introduction and Models
Yesterday, we conjured a magic box called “Eternity,” outside of our time, in which all things are self-existent. This by itself, however, is just a box. It does us little good unless we put something in it. Naturally, Christians put God in it. Or rather, from our perspective, God put His own blessed Self in it, thank you very much, and told us all about it once we were ready to have The Talk. And what He has revealed to us is, in the end, pretty complex. Before Christ, people already talked about Eternity plenty, but no-one had ever quite imagined the Trinity as such. As such, I won’t even try to build the argument from the ground up at all. Hopefully, the utility of the doctrine will become evident in time.
The model most all Christians know is the following: In the beginning, when all was null and void, God the Father created the universe. He was the first person of the Trinity. When humanity sinned against God, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to fix that somehow. He was the second person of the Trinity. Some of us listened to Him, and then some of us killed Him. After that, the Holy Spirit (2) and third person of the Trinity came to “dwell in the hearts” of those who had listened to Jesus and believed Him. They got superpowers! Some notice that the Holy Spirit also impregnated Mary with Jesus, thus mixing up the whole order-of-persons thing. Weird! Now, I portray this in a lighthearted spirit not because it is untrue. Everything here is pretty much straight up Christian doctrine. Even the superpowers. I portray it in simplistic, Sunday-School terms (and bad, meaning-free Sunday School, at that,) to assert that while the story above, without further explanation, is stupid, and I get that, it is also true. I cannot explain all of why today. But to start in, we hit up the A-Team of western Christian theology, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who both have very similar takes on the Trinity.
St. Augustine, in reflecting on himself, comes to three conclusions: 1) I Am. 2) I Know. 3) I Will. Without any of these, he would not be in any way himself. In his existence, he sees the image of the Father, the Creator and great I AM; in his knowledge, the image of the Son, the Revealer and Logos; and in his will, the image of the Spirit, the Comforter, the Inspirer. This is perhaps the most basic serviceable model of the Trinity I know. St. Thomas works from this model, but makes it perhaps a bit more comprehensible, and has to my mind a better definition of the Spirit. To Aquinas, God the Father is the I AM, that which simply Is, Christ is God’s eternal knowledge of Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the love which the Father and the Son have for one another. This is odd, that we consider being, knowledge, and love separate ‘persons’ (technically, the Greek “hypostasis” means something sort of like “personality." Still, odd.) There are two answers to this problem, one outside of time and one inside. This being Eternity Week, we’ll start outside.
Discussion of the Separation of Persons
There is a sense in which the boundless, all-powerful Source does not necessarily need to know Himself; thus His knowledge, even of Himself, is His choice, His ‘creation.’ But unlike Creation proper, which is not of God’s own being, and does not share in God’s perfection, Christ is a perfect and complete image of God’s own self. God chooses to know Himself perfectly, and because His image of Himself is perfect, it is so much like Him that it (He) is Him. When we look in a mirror, we see only a reflection, but God's vision of Himself is so perfect that it is instead a Person itself. God’s own Son; God of God, light of light. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. You see? The words mean something; they are not all mystery. But then a third thing happens; through God’s choice to know Himself, he recognizes His own perfection in both Persons, and love is born between them (1). Not being either of them, but being as perfect an expression of God's being as they are, this mutual love, the relationship between the eternal Father and His Son, is the Holy Spirit, God’s love for Himself. And through God’s choice to know Himself, and His choice to love Himself, He chooses also to create others, with whom to share Himself, and live in relationship. And that is where we come in.
For the in-time version, we must ponder a problem inherent in the human experience of the divine. God seems to us to be infinitely vast, utterly beyond our comprehension (so much so that agnostics say they can know nothing of Him, and materialists balk at the mention of Him.) But at times, God also seems to be just at our side, teaching and instructing us, showing us truths about Himself and the world He created (so much that fundamentalists have a great deal of trouble accepting that anyone could rationally question His existence, or even the specifics of their personal ‘revelation.’) And then again, on occasion our own hearts move in this mysterious direction, at once calming and forging us, assuring us, drawing us into some act or prayer we could not have imagined (so much so that Pantheists cannot imagine a God so far removed from the world as Theists imagine.) God is above us, beside us, and within us. And yet the God within us is not above us, the God beside us is not within us, and on and on. Until we stumble on the Trinity, this confuses us deeply. With it, it becomes quite clear.
The Father did create us; He is utterly beyond all that we might see. As Augustine writes, as he came to that moment of revelation, God was not in the sun, or in the sky, or in the earth or his heart or even in time itself, but all of these things pointed beyond themselves, shouting in unison and in joy, “He made us!” And yet our tiny minds reveal to us that He could have made many other things; the depths of His imagination are deeper than any sea. The son does reveal the father to us, through His knowledge of the father and His union. I will talk about the Incarnation later, but it is vital to understand that Jesus’ earthly life is only the pinnacle of His self-expression: the true language and Word of God is always with us. All that we have ever seen, heard, or felt was revealed to us by Christ (3); every true thing we have ever known was first His gift to us. He is always just by our side, our constant companion, surrounding us, whether we perceive His voice or only noise. And if we listen, He will teach us all we will learn of His Father, whom He loves. As to the Spirit, who else fills our heart with glee with every right exercise of our power, knowledge, and love, who else tugs our hearts to the good, and away from the evil, as surely as the earth holds us fast from the void? Who else binds us together in love with all the people, places, and things of God’s creation, filling them with life and person? God promised to pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, and a thousand or so years later, there was St. Francis, preaching the Word of God even to the animals of the forest, his heart full of Song. God has given us His own love for Himself, and so it is within us. All these things are true, in the three Persons of God.
Discussion of the Unity of Persons
We might still say, though, "yes, I see that they are three, but you people are always going on about how they are also one. I get that they’re all perfect, but are all perfect things necessarily the same thing?" The answer to that is a very difficult one, and for all my words, I don’t know that I can answer it. All that I can say without recourse to metaphor is what I said above. The Son, being a perfect image of God, IS God, but not His father, and the love between them is so perfectly representative of God’s will that it Is God, but not the Son or the Father.
I also have a bit of an illustration, to help. It’s one Justin Martyr says I can’t use, because it suggests that the persons of the Trinity are of different “substances,” and we simply can’t have that. However, Justin didn’t know the laws of conservation of energy, that mass and light and heat are all in the end the same thing some-crazy-how, so I think that now it’s okay. Could be wrong. Still, I always went for the worse part of valor, so why exercise discretion now? Anyway, we turn to the thing that most obviously symbolizes an eternal creator, revealer, and sustainer to us humans: that is, the sun. Now, you heard St. Augustine; I’m not saying the sun IS God, but rather that it is like Him, that it represents Him (4). If you go Manichaean on me, it won’t be on my dollar (6). Anyway, you may notice that the sun is really far away, and just enormous. The mass of the sun, its raw bulk, is so vast that it is really almost inconceivable to anyone who isn’t so used to the numbers that they’ve lost their sense of awe through practice. And yet there it is, plain as day. That’s like the Father. But the sun doesn’t just sit there. It glows. It emits light constantly. Only a tiny portion of its light actually escapes it; most is reabsorbed. What does escape, though, illuminates our entire world, and reveals the sun itself to us. That’s like the Son. And the sun is also really, really hot, so hot that it’s beaming light all over the place. The sun’s own heat doesn’t reach us exactly. It reaches across the void by radiation (light), but when it does, it warms and enlivens our whole world. That heat, that vital, moving energy, is very much like the Spirit (5).
Now, would the sun be the sun without mass? No, clearly not. Without light? Without heat? No, not really. When we say “the sun’s out,” we mainly mean “it’s bright and hot now,” not “a giant ball of gas is on my side of the planet.” “The sun” means to us that ball, sure, but it also means its light and its heat. All of them are the sun, and without any of them, the sun would not be itself. We cannot separate them, but nor can we say that they are the same as one another: mass is not light is not heat. They are all energy, all stuff that is, and share in some mysterious way a common substance. But to say that they are all the same is untrue. And to say that they are each really a completely different thing, and not one body at all, is also quite foolish. The sun (by this very simple description) is a relationship between three different forms of energy, which form one dynamic whole.
And that is, to the best of my power to explain, just about what the Trinity is about.
I likely won't post here for a few days, now; this was really my big, big goal, others were peripheral. And, unsurprisingly, I need to get stuff done. Still, be back soon; I hope to talk a bit about Creation, Incarnation, and theodicy soon. Feel free, by the way, to comment on old posts, anytime you like. They don't stop being interesting questions. Except, like, Huckabee. He could get old.
Notes
(1) This seems narcissistic to us, and for us, it would be. But if we were God, or, indeed, if we were saints, it would be only meet and right so to do.
(2) Many people believe the “Holy Spirit” (or “Holy Ghost”) is the resurrected spirit of the dead Jesus. Stop thinking this! It’s never been true, any more than angels have ever been dead humans. Christ, you see, Lives.
(3) Though He does stoop to represent the wills of others. The problem of pain is a real one, and we are not yet addressing it. For the moment, trust me: it is better to let Christ’s light shine on all, even evil, than to let evil sculpt its own form. The latter leads to utter, gaping madness. In this case, I really do know what I’m talking about here. I was one of the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, etc. Happily, I’m getting better, slowly but not-quite-surely-from-where-I’m-standing.
(4) Represent, Jesus! Word.
(5) I recognize that technically, this would make the Holy Spirit the second person of the Trinity, as heat first begets light, not the other way around. There’s a sense in which this is quite right: the Incarnational order is a bit different, with the Father begetting the Son of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. And it does make some sense that the immanent symbol reveals the immanent order, to me at any rate. This likely went right by most everyone who’s not, like, Jerry, and maybe a few other folks. Everyone else, don’t worry about it. It’s a metaphor. Take what works.
(6) Yes, pantheists, I realize that we were once part of the sun. However, in order to actually create us, it would have to be God, not an illustration of God. The sun is really big, God is infinitely big. The sun is really bright, God reveals all things. The sun (to personify brazenly) “made” us from a tiny piece of itself, God made us from the extreme limit of ‘a tiny piece,’ that is, nothing. Theology is all about limits; it is XTreme Thinking. Furthermore, God the Father is not like mass in that He is anything like physical matter, but rather in that he IS to a remarkable degree, and the most solidly, absolutely "real" thing we know is matter.
Introduction and Models
Yesterday, we conjured a magic box called “Eternity,” outside of our time, in which all things are self-existent. This by itself, however, is just a box. It does us little good unless we put something in it. Naturally, Christians put God in it. Or rather, from our perspective, God put His own blessed Self in it, thank you very much, and told us all about it once we were ready to have The Talk. And what He has revealed to us is, in the end, pretty complex. Before Christ, people already talked about Eternity plenty, but no-one had ever quite imagined the Trinity as such. As such, I won’t even try to build the argument from the ground up at all. Hopefully, the utility of the doctrine will become evident in time.
The model most all Christians know is the following: In the beginning, when all was null and void, God the Father created the universe. He was the first person of the Trinity. When humanity sinned against God, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to fix that somehow. He was the second person of the Trinity. Some of us listened to Him, and then some of us killed Him. After that, the Holy Spirit (2) and third person of the Trinity came to “dwell in the hearts” of those who had listened to Jesus and believed Him. They got superpowers! Some notice that the Holy Spirit also impregnated Mary with Jesus, thus mixing up the whole order-of-persons thing. Weird! Now, I portray this in a lighthearted spirit not because it is untrue. Everything here is pretty much straight up Christian doctrine. Even the superpowers. I portray it in simplistic, Sunday-School terms (and bad, meaning-free Sunday School, at that,) to assert that while the story above, without further explanation, is stupid, and I get that, it is also true. I cannot explain all of why today. But to start in, we hit up the A-Team of western Christian theology, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who both have very similar takes on the Trinity.
St. Augustine, in reflecting on himself, comes to three conclusions: 1) I Am. 2) I Know. 3) I Will. Without any of these, he would not be in any way himself. In his existence, he sees the image of the Father, the Creator and great I AM; in his knowledge, the image of the Son, the Revealer and Logos; and in his will, the image of the Spirit, the Comforter, the Inspirer. This is perhaps the most basic serviceable model of the Trinity I know. St. Thomas works from this model, but makes it perhaps a bit more comprehensible, and has to my mind a better definition of the Spirit. To Aquinas, God the Father is the I AM, that which simply Is, Christ is God’s eternal knowledge of Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the love which the Father and the Son have for one another. This is odd, that we consider being, knowledge, and love separate ‘persons’ (technically, the Greek “hypostasis” means something sort of like “personality." Still, odd.) There are two answers to this problem, one outside of time and one inside. This being Eternity Week, we’ll start outside.
Discussion of the Separation of Persons
There is a sense in which the boundless, all-powerful Source does not necessarily need to know Himself; thus His knowledge, even of Himself, is His choice, His ‘creation.’ But unlike Creation proper, which is not of God’s own being, and does not share in God’s perfection, Christ is a perfect and complete image of God’s own self. God chooses to know Himself perfectly, and because His image of Himself is perfect, it is so much like Him that it (He) is Him. When we look in a mirror, we see only a reflection, but God's vision of Himself is so perfect that it is instead a Person itself. God’s own Son; God of God, light of light. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. You see? The words mean something; they are not all mystery. But then a third thing happens; through God’s choice to know Himself, he recognizes His own perfection in both Persons, and love is born between them (1). Not being either of them, but being as perfect an expression of God's being as they are, this mutual love, the relationship between the eternal Father and His Son, is the Holy Spirit, God’s love for Himself. And through God’s choice to know Himself, and His choice to love Himself, He chooses also to create others, with whom to share Himself, and live in relationship. And that is where we come in.
For the in-time version, we must ponder a problem inherent in the human experience of the divine. God seems to us to be infinitely vast, utterly beyond our comprehension (so much so that agnostics say they can know nothing of Him, and materialists balk at the mention of Him.) But at times, God also seems to be just at our side, teaching and instructing us, showing us truths about Himself and the world He created (so much that fundamentalists have a great deal of trouble accepting that anyone could rationally question His existence, or even the specifics of their personal ‘revelation.’) And then again, on occasion our own hearts move in this mysterious direction, at once calming and forging us, assuring us, drawing us into some act or prayer we could not have imagined (so much so that Pantheists cannot imagine a God so far removed from the world as Theists imagine.) God is above us, beside us, and within us. And yet the God within us is not above us, the God beside us is not within us, and on and on. Until we stumble on the Trinity, this confuses us deeply. With it, it becomes quite clear.
The Father did create us; He is utterly beyond all that we might see. As Augustine writes, as he came to that moment of revelation, God was not in the sun, or in the sky, or in the earth or his heart or even in time itself, but all of these things pointed beyond themselves, shouting in unison and in joy, “He made us!” And yet our tiny minds reveal to us that He could have made many other things; the depths of His imagination are deeper than any sea. The son does reveal the father to us, through His knowledge of the father and His union. I will talk about the Incarnation later, but it is vital to understand that Jesus’ earthly life is only the pinnacle of His self-expression: the true language and Word of God is always with us. All that we have ever seen, heard, or felt was revealed to us by Christ (3); every true thing we have ever known was first His gift to us. He is always just by our side, our constant companion, surrounding us, whether we perceive His voice or only noise. And if we listen, He will teach us all we will learn of His Father, whom He loves. As to the Spirit, who else fills our heart with glee with every right exercise of our power, knowledge, and love, who else tugs our hearts to the good, and away from the evil, as surely as the earth holds us fast from the void? Who else binds us together in love with all the people, places, and things of God’s creation, filling them with life and person? God promised to pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, and a thousand or so years later, there was St. Francis, preaching the Word of God even to the animals of the forest, his heart full of Song. God has given us His own love for Himself, and so it is within us. All these things are true, in the three Persons of God.
Discussion of the Unity of Persons
We might still say, though, "yes, I see that they are three, but you people are always going on about how they are also one. I get that they’re all perfect, but are all perfect things necessarily the same thing?" The answer to that is a very difficult one, and for all my words, I don’t know that I can answer it. All that I can say without recourse to metaphor is what I said above. The Son, being a perfect image of God, IS God, but not His father, and the love between them is so perfectly representative of God’s will that it Is God, but not the Son or the Father.
I also have a bit of an illustration, to help. It’s one Justin Martyr says I can’t use, because it suggests that the persons of the Trinity are of different “substances,” and we simply can’t have that. However, Justin didn’t know the laws of conservation of energy, that mass and light and heat are all in the end the same thing some-crazy-how, so I think that now it’s okay. Could be wrong. Still, I always went for the worse part of valor, so why exercise discretion now? Anyway, we turn to the thing that most obviously symbolizes an eternal creator, revealer, and sustainer to us humans: that is, the sun. Now, you heard St. Augustine; I’m not saying the sun IS God, but rather that it is like Him, that it represents Him (4). If you go Manichaean on me, it won’t be on my dollar (6). Anyway, you may notice that the sun is really far away, and just enormous. The mass of the sun, its raw bulk, is so vast that it is really almost inconceivable to anyone who isn’t so used to the numbers that they’ve lost their sense of awe through practice. And yet there it is, plain as day. That’s like the Father. But the sun doesn’t just sit there. It glows. It emits light constantly. Only a tiny portion of its light actually escapes it; most is reabsorbed. What does escape, though, illuminates our entire world, and reveals the sun itself to us. That’s like the Son. And the sun is also really, really hot, so hot that it’s beaming light all over the place. The sun’s own heat doesn’t reach us exactly. It reaches across the void by radiation (light), but when it does, it warms and enlivens our whole world. That heat, that vital, moving energy, is very much like the Spirit (5).
Now, would the sun be the sun without mass? No, clearly not. Without light? Without heat? No, not really. When we say “the sun’s out,” we mainly mean “it’s bright and hot now,” not “a giant ball of gas is on my side of the planet.” “The sun” means to us that ball, sure, but it also means its light and its heat. All of them are the sun, and without any of them, the sun would not be itself. We cannot separate them, but nor can we say that they are the same as one another: mass is not light is not heat. They are all energy, all stuff that is, and share in some mysterious way a common substance. But to say that they are all the same is untrue. And to say that they are each really a completely different thing, and not one body at all, is also quite foolish. The sun (by this very simple description) is a relationship between three different forms of energy, which form one dynamic whole.
And that is, to the best of my power to explain, just about what the Trinity is about.
I likely won't post here for a few days, now; this was really my big, big goal, others were peripheral. And, unsurprisingly, I need to get stuff done. Still, be back soon; I hope to talk a bit about Creation, Incarnation, and theodicy soon. Feel free, by the way, to comment on old posts, anytime you like. They don't stop being interesting questions. Except, like, Huckabee. He could get old.
Notes
(1) This seems narcissistic to us, and for us, it would be. But if we were God, or, indeed, if we were saints, it would be only meet and right so to do.
(2) Many people believe the “Holy Spirit” (or “Holy Ghost”) is the resurrected spirit of the dead Jesus. Stop thinking this! It’s never been true, any more than angels have ever been dead humans. Christ, you see, Lives.
(3) Though He does stoop to represent the wills of others. The problem of pain is a real one, and we are not yet addressing it. For the moment, trust me: it is better to let Christ’s light shine on all, even evil, than to let evil sculpt its own form. The latter leads to utter, gaping madness. In this case, I really do know what I’m talking about here. I was one of the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, etc. Happily, I’m getting better, slowly but not-quite-surely-from-where-I’m-standing.
(4) Represent, Jesus! Word.
(5) I recognize that technically, this would make the Holy Spirit the second person of the Trinity, as heat first begets light, not the other way around. There’s a sense in which this is quite right: the Incarnational order is a bit different, with the Father begetting the Son of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. And it does make some sense that the immanent symbol reveals the immanent order, to me at any rate. This likely went right by most everyone who’s not, like, Jerry, and maybe a few other folks. Everyone else, don’t worry about it. It’s a metaphor. Take what works.
(6) Yes, pantheists, I realize that we were once part of the sun. However, in order to actually create us, it would have to be God, not an illustration of God. The sun is really big, God is infinitely big. The sun is really bright, God reveals all things. The sun (to personify brazenly) “made” us from a tiny piece of itself, God made us from the extreme limit of ‘a tiny piece,’ that is, nothing. Theology is all about limits; it is XTreme Thinking. Furthermore, God the Father is not like mass in that He is anything like physical matter, but rather in that he IS to a remarkable degree, and the most solidly, absolutely "real" thing we know is matter.