Less an Introduction Than Yet Another Excuse
This is the third installment of my rambling and quite possibly heretical attempt to reconcile Trinitarian theology with string theory. It’s taken me two years to get to this point, which is not entirely my fault…but mostly. At this rate I will never catch up to the voluminous output of the Early Church Fathers and Doctors, but then a lot of them had secretaries and stenographers. I have a 10 year old laptop, an open-source word processor, and I’m not as likely to be put to death or exiled for my flights of theological fancy. Even so, the very thought of being tortured by Tomás de Torquemada, that most notorious Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition and primary designer of the modern bicycle seat, and subsequently burned at the stake for my sloppy logic and leaps of misguided faith has given me serious pause. Please accept my heartfelt apology.
I don’t know who’s supposed to be whom here. I do have to wonder what these fellows really looked like, don’t you? and what they wore when they weren’t being painted years after they’d died by someone who never saw them in the flesh. Even so, just based on this one image, I’d find it difficult to argue with them, and I’ve argued with Stephen Hawking (although to be honest, he didn’t know it at the time.)
Scholastic Theology (the Church Fathers)
I don’t really need the Church Fathers, those august and prolific thinkers of yore, to advance my theories here, but I find them useful in cementing, if only in my own mind, the ideas about the Trinity, it’s Persons, and their functions and relationships that I have gleaned from pulpits, Scripture, and my formal education.
I should point out that the gilded flock of luminaries pictured above all wrote when brevity had yet to establish itself as the soul of wit. Logic and conventional wisdom has it that life was much harder in antiquity, and large chunks of time were necessarily devoted to the mundane chores required to stay alive. Who then had any time to write? Well, these guys apparently because write they did…ceaselessly. Nice work, if you can get it.
Origen of Alexandria
Origen of Alexandria (185-253,) widely regarded as a mainstay of Christian orthodoxy and the greatest of all Christian teachers during his lifetime and for several centuries thereafter, was eventually declared a heretic by the Synod of Constantinople in 543 and the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Emperor Justinian ordered all of Origen’s books to be burned. The great irony here is that Origen was found to be a heretic 300 years after his death based on the teachings of his followers rather than on his own writings, and literal volumes of creative original thought and analysis were thus lost to history. Fuck the book burners of every stripe.
Origen ran several important schools of theological and philosophical thought, and being on the cutting edge of intellectual progress of his times, endured his share of controversy and criticism. He wrote so many tracts and books, between 2,000 and 6,000 by some estimates, that not all of them could be consigned to the flames in spite of Justinian’s edict. This is great good fortune for those of us who delight in messing about in lofty thoughts that would be well beyond us without reference to the mental giants of the past.
Harriet Baber, writing in The Guardian in 2010, quipped, “Origen was on the cutting edge of Hellenistic philosophy, characterised by speculative metaphysics, mysticism and plain flakiness.” I like to think that this is very near where my own intellectual character resides, especially in the flakiness. Perhaps you will agree. It’s not much of a leap, and I certainly won’t object.
Origen begins On First Principles with the Father Creator, but it’s not until he gets to the Son that he gets truly creative and eloquent:
For the Son is the Word, and therefore we are not to understand that anything in Him is cognisable by the senses. He is wisdom, and in wisdom there can be no suspicion of anything corporeal. He is the true light, which enlightens every man that cometh into this world; but He has nothing in common with the light of this sun. Our Saviour, therefore, is the image of the invisible God, inasmuch as compared with the Father Himself He is the truth: and as compared with us, to whom He reveals the Father, He is the image by which we come to the knowledge of the Father, whom no one knows save the Son, and he to whom the Son is pleased to reveal Him. And the method of revealing Him is through the understanding. For He by whom the Son Himself is understood, understands, as a consequence, the Father also, according to His own words: “He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father also.”
Origen, On First Principles, Chapter II “On Christ,” 6.
This passage firmly establishes that Christ is in fact “The Word,” and that the Word reveals to creation the image of the Father. Building on his theme, Origen goes on to explain how the Word is the Wisdom of God by reference to Solomon, and that Wisdom is the breath of the power of God, which I take to mean that the power of God is made manifest by the breath or Spirit of God to form the Word.
Let us see now what is the meaning of the expression which is found in the Wisdom of Solomon, where it is said of Wisdom that “it is a kind of breath of the power of God, and the purest efflux of the glory of the Omnipotent, and the splendour of eternal light, and the spotless mirror of the working or power of God, and the image of His goodness.” These, then, are the definitions which he gives of God, pointing out by each one of them certain attributes which belong to the Wisdom of God, calling wisdom the power, and the glory, and the everlasting light, and the working, and the goodness of God…but, with all propriety, he says that wisdom is the breath of the power of God.
God the Father is omnipotent, because He has power over all things, i.e., over heaven and earth, sun, moon, and stars, and all things in them. And He exercises His power over them by means of His Word, because at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, both of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth. And if every knee is bent to Jesus, then, without doubt, it is Jesus to whom all things are subject, and He it is who exercises power over all things, and through whom all things are subject to the Father; for through wisdom, i.e., by word and reason, not by force and necessity, are all things subject. And therefore His glory consists in this very thing, that He possesses all things, and this is the purest and most limpid glory of omnipotence, that by reason and wisdom, not by force and necessity, all things are subject.
Origen, On First Principles, Chapter II “On Christ,” 9-10. (Emphasis is mine simply because I think this is a beautiful truth that merits attention.)
Next, we turn our attention to the Third Person of the Trinity, The Holy Spirit.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) led a full and lusty life before his mother’s prayers were finally heard on high causing him to renounce the finer things of life on Earth in favor of the more esoteric things of Heaven. Now maybe it was remorse for his past sins and maybe it was a genuine attunement to the heavenly, but Augustine is almost singlehandedly responsible for a great many things that average folk don’t care for about the Church today. “Too many rules,” as one of my neighbors used to say, most of which by her estimation are nobody’s business but our own.
But Augustine is also the author of some truly genius theological concepts, among them his idea of the Trinity. He no doubt had access to the writings of Origen and others who began the theological and philosophical investigations into the existence and nature of the Holy Trinity, but he added refinements of his own that have stood the tests of time and critique. In a nutshell:
…according to the Scriptures, this doctrine, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit intimate a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality; and therefore that they are not three Gods, but one God: although the Father has begotten the Son, and so He who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and so He who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, Himself also co-equal with the Father and the Son, and pertaining to the unity of the Trinity.
Augustine, On the Trinity, Book I
Clearly I need more stuff on the Holy Spirit. My working hypothesis in comparing the inner workings of the Trinity to String Theory as the substantive base of everything that is depends on a clarified role for the Holy Spirit that gives Him more autonomy and authority than He seems to get from generally accepted theological concepts. This is where I risk straying into heretical speculations, which I wish to avoid if at all possible. Origen and Augustine are clear on the position of the Holy Spirit, but neither is quite as succinct when it comes to His function. That is to say, neither has anything to say on the matter that fits nicely into my hypothesis. I know we live in a post truth society where fact checking is mostly regarded as a waste of time, but as a person still of some faith, I am loathe to just make shit up. After all, I left the Republican party for a reason.
This may not be helpful in your quest to avoid heresy, but the best book I’ve read on the Holy Spirit is Forgotten God by evangelical pastor Francis Chan. Looking forward to seeing what you can find that’s within the Catholic tradition.