- 18 Nov 2013 06:20
#14331234
Probably the most mysterious doctrine in Christianity is that of the Trinity. No one seems to agree on what it means exactly, and many simply reject it as nonsense. Yet so much of early Christian history was defined by fierce battles over this doctrine. This was a mystery that no one seemed to be able to grasp, and yet many felt compelled to defend to the death. It all centered around the mystery of the figure of Jesus, and his nature as fully human and fully divine. Figures like Irenaeus made harsh denunciations of the Gnostics, who saw Jesus as fully divine and only pretending to be human, and the Arians, who saw him as the highest created being, but not divine. This "fully human, fully divine" paradox required a third term, which was found in the Holy Spirit, and yet there seems to be little agreement on what the Holy Spirit is. St. Augustine simply saw it as the love between the Father and Son, but this relationship hardly seems worthy of being personified as a "third person" of the Trinity. Modern feminist theologies have sought to conceptualize the Holy Spirit as the divine feminine, associating it with divine Sophia, or wisdom. There is good support for this, as the Holy Spirit is usually depicted as a dove, which is a traditionally feminine symbol. Furthermore, biblical descriptions of "spirit" seem to involve traditionally feminine attributes, such as care, mercy, love, etc. And yet, there seems to be more going on here. There is something about the number three that is mystically significant.
Karl Jaspers coined the term "Axial Age" to describe a period from around 800 to 200 B.C. in which several thinkers arose in both the East and West who laid the groundwork for the world religions we know today. These include Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu, Mahavira, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the great Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the authors of the Upanishads. Amid the myriad of views expressed by these thinkers, there was a common thread linking them together, described by Aldous Huxley as the "perennial philosophy." The perennial philosophy was essentially a binary system: good and evil, masculine and feminine, yin an yang, spirit and matter. There is also a sense of timelessness to these categories. The perennial philosophy is essential an atemporal worldview, where the passage of time is an illusion brought about by our finite existence, as opposed to the infinite reality that lay beyond the world of experience. The goal is to ascend our earthly bounds and seek the infinite unmanifest from which we have descended. The density of matter is contrasted with the lightness of spirit, so that as embodied, material beings, we are distant from spirit. Our bodies are a kind of prison, as it were.
Christianity absorbed much of this philosophy in the form of Neoplatonism, in which the manifest world emanates down from the perfection of spirit. However, this has never quite fit, and much of Christianity's turbulent history can be understood as a result of trying to fit a trinary system into a binary metaphysics. The deep intuition behind the Trinity was a powerful force trying to break itself free.
The early 20th century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff developed a system of thought based on what he saw as two universal laws: The Law of Seven and the Law of Three. The Law of Seven is beyond the scope of my focus here, but anyone interested is encouraged to investigate it further. The Law of Three is the fundamental principle of creativity. It is how all creation flows. The idea that when you have two opposing forces, a third term is needed to let the energy flow, which creates a fourth term in a new dimension. This should not be confused with the Hegelian dialectic, in which the third term (synthesis) is produced by the first and second (thesis and antithesis). Nor should the third term be thought of as a compromise between the first two. Don't think "red - yellow - orange." Think "red paint - yellow paint - paintbrush." No, the third term stands on equal footing with the first two, and it is by breaking the symmetry of the first two that creativity is allowed to flow. The Holy Spirit breaks the symmetry of God the Father and God the Son, and lets divine love flow outward as Agape.
The dynamic metaphysics of three, as opposed to the balanced metaphysics of two, is a metaphysics of becoming. In this cosmology, the density of matter does not mean distance from spirit, but rather a continual immanent unfolding of spirit. This is how God can "become flesh" without losing any of his divine essence. The God who was present in Jesus Christ is also present in the unfolding of history. This insight was intuited by Teilhard de Chardin, who saw in the progress of time a becoming of spirit through what he called the "law of complexity/consciousness," in which complexity of matter and expansion of consciousness went hand-in-hand. A Trinitarian God is one who reveals him/her/itself in history.
The influence of Eastern spirituality has led many people today to emphasize the importance "non-dual" awareness. The idea is to surpass the dual categories we have and see every thing as a pure mystical unity that transcends categories. But whereas this approach, coming from the perennial philosophy, solves the problem of the two by subtraction from two to one, the Trinity solves it by the addition of the third. The subtractive approach seeks to return us to some primordial unity, but the additive approach of Christianity takes us to a greater unity that lies ahead. This is non-dual Becoming rather than non-dual Being. This gives us a mysticism of participation rather than withdrawal. We partake in the becoming of God. If one reads the letters of St. Paul, one is confronted with a theology of participation. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Gal 2:20) We participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In fact, passages where he speaks of "faith in Christ" (Gr. Pistis Christos) might better be translated as "faithfulness of Christ," in which we participate. Imitatio dei -- "imitation of God" -- has long been a core doctrine of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. “God became man that man might become God,” said the early church father Athanasius. This theosis -- union with God -- has been the pursuit of Christian mystics throughout the centuries.
The corruption of the concept of the Trinity comes from Christianity's inheritance from the Hellenistic world of the Aristotelian concept of substance and the Platonic concept of emanation. These are two-dimensional frameworks that don't serve the emergence of an three-dimensional worldview. The phenomenon of creationism is perhaps one of Christianity's biggest embarrassments. This Neoplatonic worldview of permanent categories and changeless Being fails to grasp the intrinsically evolutionary character of the Trinity. But this is because Christians had long mistakenly understood the Trinity in terms of substance or "persons" when they should have been thinking in terms of process. By surpassing the Neoplatonic categories in which it has long been uncomfortably squeezed, Christianity can realize its own metaphysical genius and claim its destiny as the practice of participatory becoming with and through God.
Karl Jaspers coined the term "Axial Age" to describe a period from around 800 to 200 B.C. in which several thinkers arose in both the East and West who laid the groundwork for the world religions we know today. These include Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu, Mahavira, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the great Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the authors of the Upanishads. Amid the myriad of views expressed by these thinkers, there was a common thread linking them together, described by Aldous Huxley as the "perennial philosophy." The perennial philosophy was essentially a binary system: good and evil, masculine and feminine, yin an yang, spirit and matter. There is also a sense of timelessness to these categories. The perennial philosophy is essential an atemporal worldview, where the passage of time is an illusion brought about by our finite existence, as opposed to the infinite reality that lay beyond the world of experience. The goal is to ascend our earthly bounds and seek the infinite unmanifest from which we have descended. The density of matter is contrasted with the lightness of spirit, so that as embodied, material beings, we are distant from spirit. Our bodies are a kind of prison, as it were.
Christianity absorbed much of this philosophy in the form of Neoplatonism, in which the manifest world emanates down from the perfection of spirit. However, this has never quite fit, and much of Christianity's turbulent history can be understood as a result of trying to fit a trinary system into a binary metaphysics. The deep intuition behind the Trinity was a powerful force trying to break itself free.
The early 20th century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff developed a system of thought based on what he saw as two universal laws: The Law of Seven and the Law of Three. The Law of Seven is beyond the scope of my focus here, but anyone interested is encouraged to investigate it further. The Law of Three is the fundamental principle of creativity. It is how all creation flows. The idea that when you have two opposing forces, a third term is needed to let the energy flow, which creates a fourth term in a new dimension. This should not be confused with the Hegelian dialectic, in which the third term (synthesis) is produced by the first and second (thesis and antithesis). Nor should the third term be thought of as a compromise between the first two. Don't think "red - yellow - orange." Think "red paint - yellow paint - paintbrush." No, the third term stands on equal footing with the first two, and it is by breaking the symmetry of the first two that creativity is allowed to flow. The Holy Spirit breaks the symmetry of God the Father and God the Son, and lets divine love flow outward as Agape.
The dynamic metaphysics of three, as opposed to the balanced metaphysics of two, is a metaphysics of becoming. In this cosmology, the density of matter does not mean distance from spirit, but rather a continual immanent unfolding of spirit. This is how God can "become flesh" without losing any of his divine essence. The God who was present in Jesus Christ is also present in the unfolding of history. This insight was intuited by Teilhard de Chardin, who saw in the progress of time a becoming of spirit through what he called the "law of complexity/consciousness," in which complexity of matter and expansion of consciousness went hand-in-hand. A Trinitarian God is one who reveals him/her/itself in history.
The influence of Eastern spirituality has led many people today to emphasize the importance "non-dual" awareness. The idea is to surpass the dual categories we have and see every thing as a pure mystical unity that transcends categories. But whereas this approach, coming from the perennial philosophy, solves the problem of the two by subtraction from two to one, the Trinity solves it by the addition of the third. The subtractive approach seeks to return us to some primordial unity, but the additive approach of Christianity takes us to a greater unity that lies ahead. This is non-dual Becoming rather than non-dual Being. This gives us a mysticism of participation rather than withdrawal. We partake in the becoming of God. If one reads the letters of St. Paul, one is confronted with a theology of participation. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Gal 2:20) We participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In fact, passages where he speaks of "faith in Christ" (Gr. Pistis Christos) might better be translated as "faithfulness of Christ," in which we participate. Imitatio dei -- "imitation of God" -- has long been a core doctrine of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. “God became man that man might become God,” said the early church father Athanasius. This theosis -- union with God -- has been the pursuit of Christian mystics throughout the centuries.
The corruption of the concept of the Trinity comes from Christianity's inheritance from the Hellenistic world of the Aristotelian concept of substance and the Platonic concept of emanation. These are two-dimensional frameworks that don't serve the emergence of an three-dimensional worldview. The phenomenon of creationism is perhaps one of Christianity's biggest embarrassments. This Neoplatonic worldview of permanent categories and changeless Being fails to grasp the intrinsically evolutionary character of the Trinity. But this is because Christians had long mistakenly understood the Trinity in terms of substance or "persons" when they should have been thinking in terms of process. By surpassing the Neoplatonic categories in which it has long been uncomfortably squeezed, Christianity can realize its own metaphysical genius and claim its destiny as the practice of participatory becoming with and through God.
[ Forum Rules ][ Newbie Guide ][ Mission Statement ][ FAQ ]
- By ingliz
- By Fasces
- By wat0n
- By Puffer Fish