Steve Watson

Three Thoughts on the Trinity

1. Powers aren’t Persons

The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that appears from time to time in the Old Testament. The Jewish sects that continued after the split with Christianity spoke of the Shekinah, for example, which is an important concept in the Kabbalistic ideology, and the Parousia was also originally something of that sort. One could also mention the Zoroastrian – really, the Old Persian – idea of Farr, as a kind of halo of mana surrounding a powerful/charismatic being. It’s a mystery, however, why the HS had to be hypothesised as a person of the trinity: what does it do that an angel couldn’t do, for example; and what does the New Testament say about it that makes it necessarily an independent aspect of God? The evidence for its function is really no more than the authors of the gospels saying that the spirit of God did such and such, or God did such and such by means of His spirit. All that is no more requiring of hypostatization than the claims that God’s power is great or He did whatever by His power. Why isn’t there a 4^th person: the Holy Power? The Old Testament and the Jews took this view of those passages: the ruach elohim was not supposed by them to be a thing in itself, but just a quality of God.

2. Don’t Blame the Platonists

The Christian debate over a Trinity occurred in a classical world which had already largely concluded that if there was going to be a connection between an ultimate abstract Good/Beauty/… entity and the everyday world of material stuff, there would have to be something like a logical/ontological derivation of the latter from the former – otherwise the natures of the two kinds of thing are so dissimilar that no relationship is possible. Neopythagoreans, Middle Platonists, and then Neoplatonists had come to the further conclusion that the form of relationship that would work would be some sort of emanation that created things increasingly distant and distinct from the ultimate, but the most popular forms of this at the relevant period made the highest emanations form a kind of trinity with the One of Intellect or Logos and a so-called World Soul. It was this structure, with the accompanying hierarchy of beings – though not the particular role-occupants – that seems to have been adopted by the Christians. The Gnostics did it somewhat more transparently with their emanations of Barbelo and Christ, but neither for the orthodox nor the unorthodox Christians was the trinity justified by metaphysical arguments of possibility. There really doesn’t seem to be any need for that sort of hierarchical creative/coming-into-being structure if they had already decided upon a creator God who could just make the world.

3. Where are the Women?

If there was a felt need to complete the Godhead, it’s a mystery why this didn’t result in a feminine principle. The pagans of the period, to whom the early church was advertising and from whose ranks the later converts were drawn and in whose culture the church grew to its strength were very familiar with Divine females, so why didn’t that result in the obvious concept of a consort for God? It’s not as if the Jewish God had not historically been known to have taken a wife: the ‘Asherah’ is still symbolically present in the Jewish Temple, so the idea was still present even in that time. Amongst the (Christian) Gnostics the figure of Sophia, who was one of the emanations of the Godhead and played a fundamental role in the Creation, was perhaps the fruit of such a cultural and psychological longing for the feminine, but she was very much a subordinate figure in Gnosticism, and in fact, rather opposed to the will of God than enacting a consummation. The figure of Mary was emphasized in later – much later – Christianity as a fulfilment, but she was of course not even partially Divine but only a pure woman and later again conceived as conceived without Sin.