THE ATOM OF DIVINITY

Andrei Rublev, icon of the Trinity (1425), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I almost always celebrate Trinity Sunday by showing Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the three Persons sitting round a table, because it is so hauntingly beautiful and also because it corrects one of modern theology’s common faults – a tendency to speak of the Spiritus Sanctus as the relation of love between the Father and the Son. A relation cannot be a person; not even a Person. (Socinius is dead.)

However, one should never simplify the Trinity: it is perhaps the faith’s greatest intellectual mystery. There is an admirable brief outline of its dogmatic history on the Christian History blog, yet it too discusses essentially the Father and the Son, and the relation between the two, but not the Holy Spirit. Let’s try and shed a little glim of light.

First: how can “God” be both One and Three? This is easier for us to understand than it was for our forefathers. We know that what appears like a stable molecule – and is a stable molecule – is also composed of a number of rapidly spinning atoms, and breaking those down reveals protons and electrons. I am not trying to establish an analogy here with the Trinity: merely suggesting that we understand better than previous ages how something can be simultaneously single and multiple.

Tertullian, the first great Church Father to work on the Trinity and defend it against the Arians, explains that when in working through a problem you discuss it with yourself, the ‘other voice’ in your mind is as it were a second person. It is a Logos; and if you are God, it is the Logos. And at some point that Logos may ‘proceed from’ the Father and take on its form as a second Person: the Son. Who is ‘begotten not made’ because no foreign substance is involved from which he would have been made.

The Spirit of God is there from the beginning: it is the Spirit that ‘brooded over the waters’. The Spirit, says one explanation, has a sovereign will comparable to the other Persons; he is free and not, to humans, predictable; he works on humans and creates, in them his own works – he creates, he guides, he strengthens, he advocates, he inspires, he teaches.

So today we celebrate the Ultimate Molecule, or Atom: the Holy Trinity. What holds it together is the Ultimate Energy: Love. This is one atom that cannot be split, though it can communicate its energy, and does so freely, generously and unendingly. We cannot even contemplate the Trinity without the concept of Love.

The Father, who created and creates the entire Universe; the Son, who is the Father’s Other-yet-not, and whose joy it is to do the Father’s will; the Son who came to us, who became for us fully human (Yeshua bar-Yosef of Nazareth with a saw in one hand and a scroll in the other) and died in order that we might be taken back into the divine relation of Love; and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener, who remains with us always and is always as near as skin, always available, always ready to listen and to help.

What richness, what glory. Where else, said Moses to his people, can you find such a God?