The Holy Trinity

I think it’s about time that we finally admit that the Triune Godhead is not found in the Bible, that we got it later than that. Especially because the evangelical heretics now taking over the Orthodox Church are pretty clearly Trinitarian, even with their view of the Bible as a sort of rule book.

    It is my belief that anything important (like the Trinity) can be looked at directly by any of us. That there is nothing really beyond our comprehension, and if anything is presented to us as that kind beyond-our-comprehension, our bullshit detectors should go off.  Academics may read different books about it than us, may use different language than us regular Joes, and may go in to greater detail than we do, but will not discover anything that really goes against the grain for us. I think this is why the great Romanian theologian, Fr. Dimitru Staniloe, always checked in with ordinary parishoners before he published anything.

    It seems like the Trinity is a thing like that. It seems to be something  of an embarrassment. We are told that it is simply a cross for the mind and we should not think of it too much. This triune God thing was unfortunately revealed to us, and because it is beyond our comprehension anyway, we just need to accept the revelation and then shut up. I believe this is untrue.

      When I was a student at St. Vladimir’s Seminary (one of the only such institutions of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the United States) some of us used to go periodically to the Roman Catholic  Seminary of Dunwoodie in the Bronx,  mainly for the gym and library. I also went to their chapel, when it was open. In the ceiling of it was a piece of art I’ve since seen many times. I think the labels were in Latin. It consisted of big circle with the word “God” in it.  This was encircled by a large band that had on it the words, “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” pretty equidistant from each other. Between each of those words, there was “is not.”  But then, from each of those three words on the outer band going up to the word, “God,” there was a single straight line, on which there was a label, “is.”  This just seemed to me yet another attempt to explain away the Trinity, and it didn’t work. It was just another effort to make the crazy dogma of the Trinity make sense. It didn’t do that.

    What do we see when look straight at the Trinity? Three gods? A three-part god? I, obviously, don’t think so.

    The very idea of Trinity comes from looking straight at God. Spiritual practice causes us to realize that our God is more interesting than monad. Monad always becomes tyrant. You need only to wait.

      OK, so if God is not the tyrannical monad, is any other number OK, as a way to think of God? No. Not any number. Two is also not OK. Two always becomes dichotomy, and dichotomy always becomes a struggle between two forces, with one of the sides becoming the oppressor. Just wait and see.

    The first number that avoids all that is three. No monad. No dichotomy. But no multitude either. Multitude would be Four and above. So we’re quite lucky to land on three, whether we know it or not. It is actually better to not know, or not concentrate, on anything. And St. Basil the Great, the great Trinitarian theologian, tells us not count three, as did the people who painted the ceiling at Dunwoodie.  I think that was his way of making sure we didn’t make too much of Three. And that we didn’t make an idol of it.

    The whole thing reminds me a lot of the Indra’s Net metaphor. An idea that comes from Indian Philosophy, but that later made it into Buddhism because it made a good deal of sense:  it’s about all of creation. All that is can be taken to be like a big net (you can picture a fishing net or a spiderweb) with an eye at every place the lines intersect and are tied.  Each of those eyes reflects every other eye, and the whole net itself. So you just will never know how big the net is (it’s  infinite) because the all is completely reflected in the specific. The words, “Far out, man” feel really appropriate.

    It turns out that “Far out, man,” seems appropriate to the confrontation with the Trinity. God is three-in-one, but we don’t “count” or make an idol of that three. That would be weird.