The Case for God (22 page)

Trinity was not unlike a mandala, the icon of concentric circles that Buddhists visualize in meditation to find within themselves an ineffable “center” that pulls the scattered aspects of their being into harmony. Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine. It is probably because most Western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.

The
dogma
of Trinity also symbolized the
kenosis
that Christians glimpsed at the heart of being. Each persona of the Trinity defers to the others; none is sufficient unto itself. It is, perhaps, easier to express this in a pictorial image. In Orthodox Christianity, the icon has a
dogmatic
function that expresses the inner truth of a doctrine, and a great icon can have the same status as scripture.
⁴⁴
One of the most famous icons of all time is
The Old Testament Trinity
by the fifteenth-century Russian painter Alexander Rublev, which has become an archetypal image of the divine in the Orthodox world.
⁴⁵
It is based on the story of Abraham and the three strangers, whom Rublev depicts as angels, messengers of the unknowable God. Each represents one of the Trinitarian “persons;” they look interchangeable and can be identified only by their symbolically colored garments and the emblem behind each one. Abraham’s table has become an altar, and the elaborate meal he prepared has been reduced to the Eucharistic cup. The three angels sit in a circle, emblem of perfection and infinity, and the viewer is positioned on the empty side of the table. Immediately Rublev suggests that Christians can experience the truth of the Trinity in the Eucharistic liturgy, in communion with God and one another, and—recalling the Genesis story—in a life of compassion. The central angel representing the Son immediately attracts our attention, yet he does not return our gaze but looks toward the Father, the angel on his right. Instead of returning his regard, the
Father directs his attention to the figure at the right of the painting, whose gaze is directed within. We are thus drawn into the perpetual circling motion described by Gregory of Nazianzus. This is not an overbearing deity, demanding exclusive loyalty and total attention to himself. We meet none of the
prosopoi
head-on; each refers us to the other in eternal personal dispossession.

There is no selfhood in the Trinity.
⁴⁶
Instead there is silence and
kenosis
. The Father, the ground of being, empties itself of all that it is and transmits it to the Son, giving up everything, even the possibility of expressing itself in another Word. Once that Word has been spoken, the Father no longer has an “I” and remains forever silent and unknowable. There is nothing that we can say about the Father, since the only God we know is the Son. At the very source of being is the speechless “nothingness” of Brahman, Dao, and Nirvana, because the Father is not another being and resembles nothing in our mundane experience. The Father confounds all our notions of personality and, since the Father is presented in the New Testament as the end of the Christian quest, this becomes a journey to no place, no thing, and no one. In the same way, the Son, our only access to the divine, is merely an
eikon
of the ultimate reality, which remains, as the Upanishads insisted, “ungraspable.” Like any symbol, the Son points beyond itself to the Father, while the Spirit is simply the atman of the Father and the “we” between Father and Son. We cannot pray
to
the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included.

The Christians of Western Europe arrived at a similar understanding of the Trinity by a more psychological route, charted by Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa.
⁴⁷
Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine had experienced a restless dissatisfaction that drove him from one
philosophia
to another. He tried materialism, hedonism, and Manichaeism (a Gnostic Christian sect) before he discovered Neoplatonism, which burst upon him, he recalled later, in a blaze of light and saved him from despair. Like his contemporaries, Augustine was appalled by the instability of the material world, which seemed to tremble on the brink of nothingness. At first he fought shy of Christianity. He found the idea of the incarnation offensive and was disappointed by the literary quality of the Bible. But his reading of Paul and the counsel of Ambrose, the saintly bishop of Milan (339–97), led to a dramatic conversion when
“the light of steadfast trust poured into my heart, and all the shadows of hesitation fled away.”
⁴⁸
Apart from Saint Paul, no other Western theologian has been more influential than Augustine in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity. We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity because of his
Confessions
, a memoir that revealed his fascination with the working of the human mind that is also evident in his treatise
On the Trinity
.

Augustine fully understood the implications of the new creation doctrine that had rendered God unknowable. In one of the most famous passages of
The Confessions
, he made it clear that the study of the natural world could not give us information about God:

God was “within” but Augustine could not find him because he was “outside himself” (
foris)
. As long as he confined his quest to the external world, he remained trapped in the fragile mutability that so disturbed him.
⁵⁰
When he questioned the physical world about God, the earth, the sea, the sky, and the heavenly bodies all replied, “I am not he, but it is he that made me.”
⁵¹
But when he asked, “What, then, do I love in loving my God?”
⁵²
Augustine knew that, like the Upanishadic sages, he could only answer,
“neti… neti”:

But God was all these things “to my inner man. There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt. … This is what I love in loving my God.”
⁵⁴

Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an
eikon
within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype. If we looked within, we would discover a triad in our minds in the faculties of memory
(memoria)
, understanding
(intellectus)
, and will or love
(voluntas
) that gave us an insight into the triune life of God. Augustine was fascinated by memory. It was far more than the faculty of recollection but comprised the whole mind, conscious and unconscious, and was the source of our mental life in the same way as the Father was the ground of being. When he contemplated
memoria
, Augustine was filled with awe: “It is something to be shuddered at, my God, a deep and endless multiplicity.”

Memory gave us intimations of infinity, but to encounter the divine, it had to strain beyond itself to the
intellectus
, the place where the soul could encounter God in deepest intimacy.

When Augustine spoke of “intellect,” he meant something different from a modern intellectual.
Intellectus
was not simply the faculty of logic, calculation, and argument.
⁵⁶
In the ancient world, people saw “reason” as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our powers of discursive rationality
(ratio
) and on the other by
intellectus
, a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called
buddhi
. So intellect was higher than reason, but without it we would not be able to reason at all. Left to itself, the human mind was incapable of looking dispassionately at the mutable beings of our world and making any kind of valid judgment about them, because it was itself fraught with impermanence and change. Augustine had only been able to recognize the inconstancy and impermanence of the world that had so troubled him before his conversion, because the Platonists told him that he had within him an innate standard of stability, a light within, “unchangeable
and true that was above my changeable mind.”
⁵⁷
There was, therefore, a realm in the psyche where the mind was able to reach beyond itself. That was the intellect, the mind’s
acies
, its “cutting edge,”
⁵⁸
and
scintilla
(“spark”).
⁵⁹

So when Augustine looked into the depths of his mind, he saw that it was modeled on the Trinity, the archetype of all being. In the human mind, memory generates the intellect, as the Father begets a Word that expresses the Father’s essential nature. In the human mind, the intellect seeks out and loves the self it finds in the caverns of the memory that generated it, just as memory seeks out and loves the self-knowledge encapsulated in the intellect. This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves.
⁶⁰

For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself.
⁶¹
In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any
mythos
, it would remain incredible.

Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries
and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year.

This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself. It was experienced most acutely in the sexual act, when our reasoning powers are swamped by passion, God is forgotten, and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.

Even though the Greeks found his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve far too literal, Augustine was no die-hard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously, and his “principle of accommodation” would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period. God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it.
⁶²
One of the psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall.
⁶³
It would be absurd to interpret this text literally. God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today a text like this must be interpreted differently. Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.
⁶⁴
And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible. People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with
their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor.
⁶⁵
The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it “establish the reign of charity,” and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.
⁶⁶