Medieval Christian Theology: Trinity in Unity
A deep paradox inhabits and enlivens Christian theology. The same single, unified God that is and encompasses Being and Goodness and Truth and Beauty is also, at the same time and without any infringement upon his utter unity, not only One but Three—specifically Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At the heart of the mystery of divine unity, then, lies an equally mysterious plurality, a divine Trinity, or, as some theologians (like Richard of St. Victor) would insist, a set of relationships, the energy of divine love circulating among and through these three divine Persons. The doctrine of the Trinity is counterintuitive and, indeed, rather confounding, but the early Church valued the fact that the concept maintained a certain mysterious perplexity about the divine while at the same time making the best sense of the many potentially contradictory statements made about Jesus (and often by Jesus) in the New Testament regarding his identity and his unique relationship with God. On the one hand, Jesus, whom the Gospels identify as the Son of God, seems distinct from God. He leads a human life, dies an agonizing and humiliating human death, and urges his followers to pray to God the Father. On the other hand, the Gospel of John most explicitly, and other texts of the New Testament more indirectly, claim that Jesus is also somehow coeternal with, or equal to God; according to John, he is the "Word" of God, who assumed human flesh. One of the earliest Christian confessional statements, dating from at least the mid-first century, captures the paradox succinctly: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” The word “Lord” here (Greek Kurios, Latin Dominus) was the standard translation of the Old Testament name
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"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." |
of God, YHWH. Somehow, the transcendent God who had created the world, made covenants with Abraham and Moses, and delivered the Hebrews from Egypt was identical with Jesus of Nazareth, the first-century Galilean rabbi who preached a message of peace, love, and the forgiveness of sins, and who was crucified in Jerusalem and rose from the dead.
It was the extraordinary collective achievement of the early Church Fathers over the first centuries of Christianity to have clarified and refined the doctrine of the Trinity, which was ratified at the 325 Council of Nicaea (despite considerable political pressure from Emperor Constantine, an Arian, to adopt a non-Trinitarian position). Borrowing terms from Greek Neoplatonic philosophy, the teaching of Nicaea holds that God is three Persons (hypostases) but one Substance (ousia). The three Persons are each distinct from the other, but also fully identical with "God."
The doctrine of the Trinity becomes clearer when one takes note of what it is not saying, of the positions it is working against. Unlike Arianism, Trinitarianism sees Jesus Christ as fully identical with God the Father, rather than as a subordinate semi-deity. On the other hand, Trinitarianism is also not tritheism: it does not involve worship of three separate gods, nor does it aim at smuggling polytheism back into an original Hebraic monotheism. It is also not what is sometimes called modalism (a position espoused by the so-called Sabellian heresy of the third and fourth centuries): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not simply three different modes of the same one God—as a person, for example, |
could be a sister and a mother and an architect all at the same time—but three independent agencies who all constitute the same essential divine Being.
Although it was usually entirely appropriate to think of God simply as God, early and medieval Christians often did parcel out many of the roles and manifestations of God among the three Persons of the Trinity. To the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, they attributed aspects of God as the ultimate originary principle, the creator of the world, the ineffable Godhead, the ground of Being, the source of all notions of goodness, truth, and beauty, and of all order in the universe, and the supreme image of royal and sacral authority. They identified the Second Person of the Trinity with the divine Logos, the eternal Word (or Thought, or Wisdom) of God, who entered time and space in a physical body, in first-century Palestine, as Jesus of Nazareth, who was recognized by his followers as the Christ or Messiah, who after a three-year public ministry was executed under the authority of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and who was resurrected from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and was expected to return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. It was this Second Person, Jesus Christ, who was also especially recognized as being present, in body and blood, in the bread and wine of the sacrament of the Eucharist. |
And if Jesus as the Son of God was begotten by God the Father, the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, was held to proceed from the Father and the Son, a manifestation of the divine love and power exchanged between them. Beyond this, the Holy Spirit was perhaps conceived a bit more inchoately, though it was associated with many specific biblical moments: with the conception of Jesus, where it miraculously effects Mary’s impregnation; with the baptism of Jesus, where it appears in the form of a dove; and with the manifestation to the Apostles in Acts 2, where, appearing as tongues of fire, it bestows spiritual gifts. The Holy Spirit was also believed to lie behind the voices of all true prophets, and was sometimes (especially by the twelfth-century Platonists) even thought of as the animating life of the cosmos.
The doctrine of the Trinity was a cornerstone of early and medieval Christian theology (as it is for most Christian theologies today), even if it defied full rational understanding, and even if the typical believer, though |
aware of it, could probably barely explicate it. Augustine, in his voluminous treatise On the Trinity, takes note of this problem and offers many potentially useful analogies. The Trinity, he suggests, is like the sun: both radiance and heat and a physical object that moves across the sky. Or the Trinity is like the human mind (which was, after all, made in God’s image), whose capacities include perception and will and memory, the three of which are clearly distinct but also cannot be easily disentangled. Or, even better, it is like love itself: a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love shared between them. But even Augustine admitted that these are all mere analogies and cannot definitively articulate the divine mystery of Threeness in Oneness. Aquinas, likewise, concludes that “It is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason” (Summa Theologiae I.32.1). Perhaps it is the poet and not the philosopher who captures the paradox in its sheer clarity more effectively:
Quell’Uno e Due e Tre che sempre vive,
E regna sempre in Tre e Due e Uno,
Non circonscritto, e tutto circonscrive …
[That ever-living One and Two and Three
Who reigns forever in Three and Two and One,
Uncircumscribed, yet circumscribing all …]
(Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XIV.28-30)
Dante’s lines here gesture at the fact that beneath the mathematical impossibility of the doctrine of the Trinity lies a deeper and truer ontological certainty. Yet, tellingly, as the pilgrim experiences at the end of Paradiso, full comprehension of the Triune God comes only as a flash of intuition and not as a reasoned argument.
The Trinitarian position became the signal doctrine of the increasingly centralized and powerful Catholic orthodoxy of the fourth and fifth centuries, and it remained unquestioned in Western Christendom until well after the Protestant Reformation. It was formulated in hopes of avoiding the notion that Jesus Christ was somehow inferior to God the Father. Seeing him as less divine, or semi-divine (as the Arians did), or even as a mere super-human, would make his sacrifice on the Cross less efficacious, less than a full mediation between God and humanity. Conversely, the opposite position of conflating the Three Persons of the Trinity into a single, undifferentiated Godhead meant that the suffering of Christ upon the Cross was at some level not real, as it was believed that God in his abstract divinity could not truly suffer; if the Passion was not real, then the salvation effected by Christ was also not real. The Trinitarian solution, however, allowed that God could both remain the simple, transcendent, impassible Godhead outside of time and space, while also being a fully embodied and suffering human being, able somehow to mediate the distance between the finite and infinite, between the human and the divine: God could be both utterly beyond us, yet also beside us (as Christ) and within us, all at the same time. The complexities of this dynamic were addressed by a Christian teaching no less vital than the formulation of the Triune God: the doctrine of the Incarnation.
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Further Reading
- Dante Alighieri, Paradiso: A Verse Translation, trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (Doubleday, 2007)
- Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, trans. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (The Aquinas Institute, 2012)
- Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, 2nd ed., trans. Edmund Hill (New City Press, 2012)
- Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- John Behr, The Nicene Faith (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2004)
- Boethius, "On the Trinity," in Theological Tractates /The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart et al. (Harvard University Press, 1973)
- Oleg V. Bychkov, "What Does Beauty Have To Do with the Trinity? From Augustine to Duns Scotus," Franciscan Studies 66 (2008): 197-212
- Phillip Cary, "Historical Perspectives on Trinitarian Doctrine," Religious and Theological Studies Fellowship Bulletin 9 (1995): 2-9.
- Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity' (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in the Rhineland Circa 1300 (Yale University Press, 1990)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart (Paulist Press, 1990)
- Julian of Norwich, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise N. Baker (W. W. Norton, 2005)
- J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (Harper & Row, 1978)
- Bernard Lonergan, The Way to Nicea (Dartman, Longman & Todd, 1982)
- Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwehove, An Introduction to the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2011)