The Trinity: Paradox and Heresy

       In the oldest strata of the Old Testament, YHWH is a tribal god, one of many, and the earliest form of Jewish monotheism was the obligation to worship only him among others that existed. The rule against worshipping idols and foreign gods, strong in Exodus, is contradicted in post-migration stories, such as David's escape from Saul by substituting a teraphim or "household god "for himself in bed, showing that he owned a man-size idol (1 Samuel 19). Such idols were still around to be prohibited in Josiah's reforms centuries later (2 Kings 23:24), but by the time of the Second Temple, there emerged the idea of YHWH as an almighty world-creator. Eventually, monotheism dominated in Judaism, the idea of one supreme God for all nations.

       The change wasn't as radical as it sounds. Most ancient gods were simply persons with superpowers, and these persisted in traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as angels and devils. Monotheism merely asserts that these superheroes or villains are either divine agents or inferior foils. Traditional monotheism confirmed the existence and powers of the old gods but demoted them to devils: Baal became Beelzebub. Even the saints of Catholicism, like pagan deities, are (now) immortal and have supernatural powers to hear and respond to prayers. Monotheism allows plural gods (in the pagan sense of Satan, Saturn, and Santa) under one supreme power. So the Christian doctrine of a triune God need not be polytheistic as long as it assumes a single hand on the tiller of the world.

The orthodox Trinitarian doctrine is, of course, nowhere in the New Testament, but its raw materials are. There was little need for it in the gospels, which recount the life of Jesus in the flesh when he is visibly distinct from the Father. But when monotheistic early Christians began to worship the risen Christ, this was problematic unless he was identified with the Father. The relationship of the persons wasn't codified until the Council of Nicaea in 325. Meanwhile, various interpretations flourished. Adoptionism held that Jesus was the son of Joseph who was deified at his baptism. Arianism held that the Father was the original, unchanging God who created Christ--a secondary Logos who then created the world. This resembles Neoplatonism with its One in the highest heaven and Christ functioning as the Demiurge, the first of a series of "emanations" from the One. The doctrine makes a neat diagram, power flowing from heaven to earth through the archetypal man. It even makes scriptural sense--the "only-begotten son" implying a time of his creation--but the overall theology is polytheistic if a separate Christ is worshipped.

When I was growing up Baptist--listening to sermons and prayers, going to Sunday School and Training Union--the Trinity was a mystery to me, and not in the Roman Catholic sense. It was a nonsense word gathering dust in a corner. There was no call to analyze it, and my understanding was logical and heretical. A prayer naming Jesus addressed the foster-son of Joseph, the Galilean who had ascended into heaven and sat at the right hand of his real dad. Or he might be addressed as a flesh-and-blood rabbi centuries ago. In any case, he was separate from his dad, who was either a muscular graybeard on a matching throne or something like the afterglow of the Big Bang. The Holy Spirit (or Ghost) was mentioned as an inspiration but never prayed to. Jesus and the Father (the latter understood whenever "God" was intoned) were both prayed to, and "Lord" referenced them interchangeably. The Trinity explained this but defied explanation. It was as if the king and his son read each other's mail and always agreed--or the son always followed orders, as in his Gethsemane prayer (Matthew 26:39). In my youth, the two "persons" were distinct characters, not two-in-one, and and the flame-bird spirit was well off to the side.

When I converted to Catholicism in 1976, I read the traditional doctrine of the Trinity in the Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, which didn't make clear sense but was bracketed as a mystery. A year or two later I dug deeper into a scholarly treatment of patristic Christology, and was delighted by the complexity of early trinitarian formulations--especially Origen's (184-253), which follows Neoplatonic idea (akin to the Arian heresy) that, though the Trinity is One, it includes a chain of command. For Origen, though they are three-in-one, the Father is above the Son and the Son above the Spirit. From what I read of the Council of Nicaea called by the emperor Constantine in 325 CE, its authority is shaky, corrupted by politics. I see the elements of the Nicene creed as metaphors for inexpressibles, not like a chemistry formula, but am drawn to the formulations of Origen and the Arians, which cut the Gordian metaphor with an actual direction of affect. 

         The Trinitarian exegeses of Aquinas and other Roman theologians seem to hinge on distinctions without differences. The Modalistic heresy describes the Trinity as three modes of encountering a single Being, superimpositions of mortal attitudes on one presence. It's heretical because it denies the real, separate existence of the Son. Projected into systematic theology, this may create paradoxes, but so does the orthodox theology. As descriptions of subjective experience (cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher), unless you assume Godlike absolute knowledge of what is and isn't really separate, there is no difference here.

The orthodox description of the Trinity is, logically speaking, nonsense, which is to say it's a mystery: The Father, Son, and Spirit are not each other, each of them is God, and God is one. Math implodes. Latin theologians rationalize this with language analysis, like Bill Clinton explaining that "it depends on what the the meaning of the word is is," but Greek Christianity, I understand, is more interested in ritual and devotion than in diagrams. Following the lead of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the East tends to leaves the Trinity as an irrational object of contemplation, something like a Zen koan. Three that aren't three while being three--a little like one hand clapping. "Direct us aright," Dionysius prays to the Trinity, "to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence" (Mystic Theology 1.1). 

        Dionysius directs our attention beyond reason and language--beyond the earthbound images of a heavenly king, a resurrected rabbi, and a fiery bird--to Being described in terms of what It is not. The uncountable fourth term, the Super-Essential Godhead, is "a Super-Unity which is neither One nor Many and yet contains in an undifferentiated state that Numerical Principle which we can only grasp in its partial forms as Unity and Plurality" (Rolt, p. 6). The Godhead (It, not He, in Dionysius' mystical but still orthodox theology) exists in non-existence beyond math and the comprehensible world where human beings understand the Trinity as "three persons." John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815-877) argues that God is "neither unity nor trinity, but an incomprehensible somewhat which transcends them both" (Rolt, p. 209). Although this may express mystic experience, it clearly falls flat as a pastoral teaching: parishioners can't love and  pray to such a self-deconstructing abstraction. 

What provoked my Trinitarian ramble was Swami Prabhavana's and Christopher Isherwood's introduction to Crest-Jewel of Discrimination by Adi Shankara (788-820 CE), who consolidated the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. Basic to Vedanta is the idea that all of our ordinary experiences--including thoughts, ideas, sensations, and objects--are unreal. Of course we are really subject to the phenomenological world as bodies and minds (which are likewise unreal), but everything in that world is constantly changing and will ultimately cease to exist. Nothing changeable is real. The only unchanging fact of our experience is pure unattached consciousness that continues to exist without content even in deep sleep. "He is the eternal witness" (Shrimad Bhagavatam, p. 68). This eternal Self, the Atman, is the basis of personal ego but is remote from it. The Atman exists unchanging like the sun over its flickering reflection in the waters of the world of thoughts and sensations. The ego is slave to a mirage, but identification with the true Self  is "absolute existence, knowledge and bliss" (Shankara, p. 14). The only realities are the Atman and the Brahman--a transcendent God identical in non-duality to the Atman. All is One. Om.

The newborn ego instinctively claims separate existence for itself (a sort of Hindu Original Sin) and falls into the illusion of duality, a false conflict between self and Other. We cling to self-importance as if it were eternal, well aware that this is absurd in the context of the greater world but unable to escape this delusion--a pattern I discussed earlier as absurdity. Under the spell of Maya, the world of duality, we "can't get no satisfaction" and are trapped in cycles of discontent, death, and rebirth. So deluded, we can achieve happiness only by realizing (not just as belief, but as direct experience) that the ego and all it is attached to are illusions. The Atman is inseparable from God. The immanent and the transcendent are one eternal Being. Such an experience, typically achieved with an enlightened master, does not destroy an enlightened one's ability to function in the world (Shankara founded monasteries after his enlightenment) but is supposed to confer extraordinary clarity and freedom, the ability to act unconditioned by ego.

As a teenage Christian, I disliked the personal God I read about--the cruel and narcissistic patriarch of the Old Testament. And he became, if possible, more intransigent and bloodthirsty in the Penal Substitution doctrine of atonement, where He lacks either the power or the will to forgive the children of Adam (I don't know which alternative is worse) except by a psychodrama of staging the suicidal slaughter of Himself-as-Human. I never lost love for Jesus of Nazareth, but he obviously had a concept of the Father different from--almost diametrically opposed to--the heart-hardening angry war-god of Genesis and Exodus. Jesus projects an Abba worthy of love precisely because He is less personal, a deity lacking personal vices such tribalism, intolerance, jealousy, anger, and mood swings. 

So it was with relief that (as a naive discouraged Baptist) I discovered in Vedanta a theology that paralleled and elucidated Christianity without bronze-age brutality. I found it in the Prabhavananda-Isherwood translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Isherwood's monumental if uneven anthology, Vedanta for the Western World (1946). These two books argue an essential unity of mainstream religions under superficial differences. In them, the Christian call for universal love and dying into divine rebirth makes sense as turning from ego to the universal Self, "one in being with the Father," a process grounded not in doctrine, but in experience. These books--read, re-read, and stacked within an arm's length of my leather recliner sixty years later--resuscitated religion for me in 1958 and opened a path toward a Christianity free of credulous ego-service. I have since learned that I am not alone, that not only Pseudo-Dionysius, but even Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas rejected the anthropomorphic God of my Baptist education.

Still impressed by the syncretism of Vedanta, I read this week new parallels between it and Trinitarian Christianity in the Prabhavananda-Isherwood introduction to Shankara's Jewel Crest. Given that statements about God are metaphorical gestures, the parallels are surprisingly exact and (especially interesting to me) address the paradox of a changeless but personal God.

In Shankara's theology, a necessary cause of the phenomenological world (Maya) is God (Brahman) because dualistic world-appearance exists by being projected onto a screen of prior unitive being. (At a retreat at Yogaville, I heard a sermon comparing life to a film in which we're actors.) "Brahman is the cause, Maya the effect. Yet Brahman cannot be said to have transformed itself into the world, or to have created it, since absolute Reality is, by definition, incapable of temporal action or change" (Sankara, p. 17). A God that changes is a god that can cease to exist: not ultimately real. So the name Ishwara is given to the concept of a mutable interface between the immutable God and Maya. Ishwara is Brahman, the One, viewed from inside Maya: God seen through the lens of dualism, the Yahweh-like personal creator and ruler of the universe. 

This yields the paradox that, even if a fully enlightened person may merge with God because the eternal true Self is one substance with Brahman; yet the grasping, dualistic ego-self is a helpless plaything of Ishwara, the creator of the dualistic world. I find helpful Shankara's theology of a changeless impersonal God alongside a mutable personal one who is real in the sense that the earth is, which is all that most of us can relate to. Prabhavananda teaches in his introduction to Shankara that worship of God-as-person is commendable if it is the best we can understand. It can create a saint. It purifies the soul and leads to the threshold of escape from Maya but no farther (Shankara, p. 19). Shankara's construct overlaps nicely with the paradox of One who is plural. The Old Testament's tribal war-god becomes an embattled tribe's self-projection--a projection more distorted than mine (to my mind anyway) but equally subjective.

Works Cited

Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. Introduction of Aldous Huxley. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press, 1944.

Dionysius the Areopagite. Works. Translated by John Parker. James Parker, 1897.

Rolt, C. E. Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. SPCK, 1920.

Shankara. Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Translated and Introduced by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press 1947.

Shrimad Bhagavatam: The Wisdom of God. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda. Sri Ramakrishna Math, 2018.

Isherwood, Christopher, editor. Vedanta for the Western World. Vedanta Press, 1946.