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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4432 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of the Trinity in Christian thought. Is it just a boring piece of theoretical theology, divorced from the lived reality of the Christian? Is there anything to be gained from meditating on the concept? And I think there is something to be gained, as follows:

In every moment of a man’s life he knows that there is an ultimate judge of his conduct, which is the higher-order faculty of mind that sees the days and months in sum. This higher order faculty is not accessible when we’re in the slogs of work and chores and cares. It requires our whole cognition and usually appears in a designated hour where we consider our life with full attention, but also appears before we sleep. We can call this the Father. For most of our hours in this life we do not access the Father, but instead we do our best to serve him, and this takes the form of the Son. The Father knows with certainty the values of patience, hard work, sacrifice, love, right attention, and has a vivid picture of our desired life. The Son, on the other hand, must attend with whole cognition to the specific instantiations of living. The mind being limited, it can never be both Father and Son. The Father may say that the grain must be harvested quickly to obtain a bountiful harvest; the Son focuses wholly on sowing the field, simply obeying the Father’s command.

The Spirit, then, the trickier element of the Trinity, is this relationship of obedience or love between the Son and the Father, emanating from both the Father and the Son.

Modern theologians might have us believe that the highly theoretical understanding of the Trinity could not be such an immediate allegorization and dramatization of our inner life, but I think this is in error.

Couldn’t you write a similar analogy for all sorts of schema?

An obvious choice would be thesis/antithesis/synthesis from the Greek dialectic. That’d even be a plausible influence on the early Christian tradition. Though…I’m not sure it was widely framed as tripartite until Hegel. It also leads to some perverse comparisons to dialectical materialism.

Freud’s id, ego, and superego are an even closer match. The set of worldly instincts, the moral authority, and the layer which mediates between them. I guess Freud was kind of copping from Plato’s logistikon, thymoeides, epithymetikon anyway.

Or consider the classic logic puzzle of the wolf, rabbit, and cabbage. As the puzzle-solvers, we are the Father, setting out a design to get all three across the river. Each item attends with whole cognition, such as it is, to its worldly role. Using a boat to get across, one item at a time, is the Father’s will expressed on the Son, and in that relationship is found the Holy Spirit.

In other words, I think it’s imposing your own pattern. That doesn’t mean you can’t gain something from meditating on it.

emanating

Something is telling me that this word, specifically, was central to a heresy or splinter group. But I can’t remember what.

Is it just a boring piece of theoretical theology, divorced from the lived reality of the Christian?

Yes, that's my position as a former Christian (and Orthodoxy is much more Trinitarian than American Protestantism). The Bible is fundamentally inconsistent about the nature of Jesus and his relationship with Jehovah. Arianism was an equally theologically valid doctrine.

I think you're approaching something close to the classical understanding. I'm going to quote from Dorothy Day's From Union Square to Rome, only because that is what I have read most recently and is easy to copy from (and she's quoting from someone else):

There are some paragraphs about the Holy Trinity which I read not long ago that point out an analogy between the soul and God. The soul is always one. It knows itself and loves itself. “I am conscious of myself, and it is this I that is conscious of this self, the I that is objectified to itself, and knows itself in itself. But once more, whist the principle that is the I is the principle that knows, the myself is the term that is known, and in virtue of this a distinction is established between I and myself, and this perception that I get of myself involves and implies a third term which is the love of I for self.

Whence result three imperfect but irreducible elements, co-existent in the undivided unity of my soul, three that are blended into one without becoming confused; one that radiates out into three without subdividing itself. Now in God there is the same law of activity and fecundity, but in the supreme degree of power and perfection. . . Although we are always capable of thinking and willing, we do not always exercise our faculties in practice, there are interruptions, moments when we feel powerless, when we are weary. A fly is sufficient to prevent a man thinking. In this we distinguish . . . and this is weakness . . . the capability to act and the action itself. In God this weakness does not exist. If we strive in vain to put into our thoughts the best of ourselves, or better still, if we labor, without succeeding, to make ourselves wholly and entirely the objective of our thoughts, to objectify ourselves in our thoughts . . . the Divine Spirit succeeds where we fail.” (Landrieux, Le Divin Méconnu.)

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