Anti-Theology and Inhumanism
Trinity Sunday is always that Sunday which makes theologically literate people cringe. Some people used to call it ‘Heresy Sunday’ or something similar, because so many Priests and Deacons seemed unable to articulate in a convincing, cogent way the Supreme Dogma of the Christian Faith.
In an effort to mask their ignorance, many preachers and teachers have wrapped the dogma in conceptual mist, overextending the power of the word ‘mystery’, which means something which is beyond the human intellect’s capacity to fully understand, yet not beyond our ability to know. Therein lies a key difference: very many of the Church’s most sublime mysteries are beyond the grasp of the unaided reason. They are not, however, beyond the reach of reason aided by faith, and the content of the faith, which we call Divine Revelation.
What has resulted, unfortunately, is that it seems almost universally, the knowledge of the Holy Trinity for much of the faithful has suffered a serious blow. Most of the world’s Christians make the Sign of the Cross or pay lip service to the idea, but very many hang their spiritual hats on a “personal relationship with Jesus” or cling to a very anthropomorphic idea of God, which has a dangerous tendency to deflate the mystery of the Divine Nature and bring him down to purely human terms.
Such a god, one completely understood by humanity, and one who primarily is a caregiver for human needs and neuroses, is ultimately, to borrow from St. Augustine, not God at all. The Dogma of the Holy Trinity saves us from such an error, by reminding us that God in his nature is so sublime and transcendent, that the only way we could ever hope to know him in his nature, is if he communicated himself to us. The God of so-called ‘Classical Theism’ is a juggernaut in the philosophical, theological and mystical writings. No Christian in history has ever went into ecstasy over the god of the prosperity and wealth Gospel. No martyr has ever been offered his or her life out of devotion to a sort-of bearded man in the sky. The God we worship is higher our highest thought and deeper than our deepest longing.
When people, in theory or in practice, worship a false or attenuated god, in a sort of Trinity-lite or casual Adoptionism, it makes them extremely vulnerable targets to atheistic arguments against what they think to be”divinity”. The Trinitarian God writ large is one of the greatest antidotes to cultural and propositional atheism, because it establishes all in one the Divine Attributes, like his eternity, aseity, simplicity, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, benevolence, etc. Such a God is so transcendent, he even transcends the categories we have for created beings. He is completely “other”, yet we see that he is also a community of persons, whose love then goes out into the created order. God did not desire only to love himself; (although he would be perfectly blessed in so doing, having need of nothing) he wished to communicate his love to contingent creatures, who would then find their blessedness in him. This is one of the surest routes to humility, charity and gratitude I know: to know that I am made from nothing but for the loving grace of God, but that I am made for love, both for and from him and for and from my neighbor, and that in the face of that overwhelming destiny, it is easy to rejoice, and give thanks.
As the the understanding and appreciation of the Dogma of the Holy Trinity continues to decline among Christians, and knowledge of it recedes from the popular consciousness, it is predictable that many evils will arise in the world. If we take for granted that God created man in his own image and likeness, then it seems to follow necessarily that to deny God or his attributes is ultimately to deny something about Humanity by analogy.
The human person as we know him is contingent being, contingent mind/reason, and contingent love. God is necessary and unlimited being, mind, and love. To recap, when I say contingent, I mean this in the philosophical sense. A contingent being is a being whose existence is dependent on another. Therefore, to say we are contingent being, reason and love, is to say that none of us exist, think, and love in a vacuum: we need God on some level for these things.
The person who denies the contingency of the human person, whose fons et origo (source and origin) is found in the creative act of God, will ultimately begin to espouse two errors. Firstly, humankind will be tempted to a hubris and self-exaltation worthy of Babel. In fact, that is one of the first results presented by the inspired author of Genesis: a society arises that so rejects the Fatherhood and Divinity of God, that they begin to believe themselves gods. Mankind’s knowledge and appreciation of his own limitations is one of the primary guardians of his dignity. We were not made for unlimited power, but for unlimited love. The second error would be, in the face of the experiential unknowns both at the beginning and end of the subjective human experience, to embrace a universal nihilism or apatheism. Like in the Theater of the Absurd, humankind in this vision is simply a breath, with an anonymous womb giving birth over an open grave. To reject the Fatherhood of God and the contingency is man is to open the doors wide to self-deification, or to suicide.
The second Divine Person, that of the Word, made Flesh in the Incarnation, is the one through whom we are told God the Father made the universe. The Son of God is thus understood to be the Infinite Wisdom or Mind of God. Everything we take for granted in the universe, with its natural rhythms and laws, as well as its captivating beauty, are fruits of this Divine Intellect. We as contingent intellects have a role in discovering more and more about this universe God has made, and so opens the door to all the sciences, empirical and non-empirical. To accept the Divinity of the Word is to accept a world which makes sense, and is not accidental, in the common use of the term.
If a person implicitly or explicitly denies the co-eternal existence of the Word, such a person in the course of time may find his or herself fighting a nagging sense of the seeming absurdity of life. History, both personal and universal, cannot be seen to have a providential order under this understanding. The glory of the Scientific Method is simply a mirage. In this paradigm, the God of Revelation did not bring order to primordial chaos, but merely covered it with papier-mache. Without a grounded idea that God made the created order with a definite purpose, this opens the door to the idea that the created order basically has no purpose at all. We can use and abuse nature as we wish to whatever ends we wish. We can even take leave of our senses, by calling men women, and women men, regardless of what the objective genetic sciences tell us. We can take non-essential qualities of humanity, like one’s sexual proclivities, and make them essential to one’s identity. Then, we can take what is essential to our humanity, like the inviolable dignity of human life, and make that optional. To deny the Word, the λογος (reason) of God, is to reopen the gates to chaos. By denying Divine Reason, Human Reason becomes utterly compromised.
The Third Divine person, that of the Holy Spirit, is classically envisioned as the Love of the Father of the Son, the personal expression of their communion. It is in the Spirit that the Church receives her Unity, and so goes out into the world.
In an analogous way, mankind in the Spirit’s image is also a being meant for love and relationship: he is meant for unity and for joy in that context. This unity and love radiates out from God’s love for the individual, and so forth into the wider world. To illustrate this, I love to look at the famous Holy Spirit window, made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the back of St. Peter’s Basilica. It glows like an orb of fire when the sun hits it, and around it are the figures of many men and angels swirling around the Spirit, arms stretched out toward him. It is an apt image of how the love of the Trinity, most fittingly described in the person of the Holy Spirit, is the ‘center of gravity’ of the soul, and attracts each person, like a river flows to an ocean. However, we as fallen mortal creatures with contingent wills have the power to resist this pull, and so fall into sin and grief.
To deny the Holy Spirit is to deny that humankind is created for love and for bliss. If the Holy Spirit is not given a ready temple in the human heart, what happens? A person falls prey to false absolutes, and to deep sadness. Money, power, pleasure, honor, popularity are all ephemeral and deceptive. They cannot by their nature satisfy the human heart. A person can also fall into the trap of acedia, which is the spiritual malady of sadness in regard to spiritual goods with ought to bring delight and joy.
We see, then, how a superficial understanding or denial of the Holy Trinity, whether in theory or in practice, not only defaces our understanding of God, it threatens our understanding of ourselves. As the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes reminds us so strongly, without the creator, the creature would disappear (GS, 36).
Christians everywhere should dedicate time to strengthening their understanding of the Holy Trinity. That takes time and dedication, but it is extremely empowering and illuminating. I confess when I do the same, it even gives me a certain thrill. To think that I am created for immortality, truth, reason, love, and bliss: what an invitation! And what an antidote to deceptive ideologies this is! What a guarantor of the precious and imperiled understanding of what constitutes human dignity!
Throughout history, Christians would riot and brawl in public over these fundamental questions of Trinitarian Theology and Christology. In some places, these movements caused even political and civic upheavals which still influence us today.
One of the most interesting vignettes to explain the passion with which Christian believers once revered the Holy Trinity is the Russian “Old Believers” schism. In the 17th century, Patriach Nikon of Moscow tried to reform the Liturgy in the Russian Empire by switching the spelling of the Kyrie in the Divine Liturgy, along with other elements. Most dramatically, he tried to change the manner in which Eastern Christians held their hands when making the Sign of the Cross. Most non-Latin Christians hold the five fingers of their right hand in some combination of twos and threes when making the Sign of the Cross: two joined fingers represent the Human and Divine Natures of Christ, and the other three joined fingers represent the Three Divine Persons.
The Reforms of the Patriarch Nikon, which changed things which I think most Western Christians would consider trivial, started a schism within Russian Orthodoxy. Most famously, the Old Believer (that is, one who held to the old ways before Nikon) nun Feodosia Morozova, who insisted that the new ways were a threat to the faith, defiantly raises her hand in the traditional gesture in Vasily Surikov’s great painting, as she was arrested and taken away to prison for her resistance to the reforms. Even though she may have been extreme in her methods, she was still right in understanding the importance of the Holy Trinity to the Christian.
The Holy Trinity is not an optional or unimportant dogma. All devout Christians know this. While Christians probably should not riot over how one exactly makes the Sign of the Cross, all Christians should be deeply interested in growing in their knowledge and love of the same Trinity with whom they wish to spend eternity. In so resisting an Anti-Theological conception of the Divine Nature, we will also resist the new ‘Anti-Humanisms’ which are growing like noxious blossoms all around the world.
We were made for life, truth and love. To be more Trinitarian creatures, let us dedicate ourselves afresh to the same.
