It seems odd to say that one loves the Trinity. One appears to be loving a concept: the name comes from Latin trinitas, ‘tripleness’. An ancient and fairly universal concept: human ideas are known often to take a triple form: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness; Children, Kitchen, Church (Nazi Germany); Work, Family, Fatherland (Fascist France).
The idea that the Deity should take a triple form is scandalous to both Jews and Muslims, who see it as the thin end of the polytheist wedge. And yet a Christian can repeat, with fervour and sincerity equal to theirs, the Shema Israel or the Allahu Aqbar. For the Christian God is One God, in no way connected to Greek or Hindu polytheism. But: he is One God in Three Persons, and this (to quote Shakespeare in Love) is a mystery. The Father is a Person and the Son is a Person; the Father is not the Son, neither is the Son the Father; and yet the Father and the Son are One God. The Holy Ghost (from Germanic geist = spirit) is not the Father, nor is the Son; but he and they together are One God.
The Trinity, therefore, is almost impossible to visualise. The finest attempt to do so is that by the Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 – c. 1430), who painted three human-like figures (properly sexless, in spite of a tasteless modern feminist caricature) seated at a low table with a chalice, the whole forming a triangle perfectly centred within a circle.
The three aspects of the Trinity are so important that traditional theology sees them as Persons. The Father is the Creator who loves his creatures and longs to be loved by them in return. The Son is the Redeemer who with the currency of his own life buys back the creatures from the Devil’s pawnshop window, so that they may go back to returning the Father’s love. The Spirit is that love that passes all understanding, so vast that he too is a Person, in fact the Person who is right here with us, always accessible, always ready to save us in the nick of time.
The philosophic psychologist Carl Gustav Jung found the concept of a triangle inherently unstable, and felt that the Catholic Church had solved that instability by seeing the Virgin Mary as a fourth Person, thus incorporating both sexes and creating a stable quartet.
The Anglican communion, while venerating Mary, is happy with an isosceles triangle’s stability and sees its trinitas as deeply adequate to the human condition. Indeed, it may sometimes create, only half playfully, a trinitas trinitarum, a trinity of trinities, as in this brief and flawless poem by the Anglican saint George Herbert:
Trinity Sunday
Lord, who hast form’d mee out of mudd,
And hast redeem’d me through thy blood,
And snctified me to do good,
Purge all my sins done heretofore;
For I confess my heavy score,
And I will strive to sinne no more.
Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in mee,
With faith, with hope, with charitie;
That I may runne, rise, rest with thee.
Three sections of three lines each; the first two showing one aspect of the Triune God in each line, while the third has three lines each of three elements. In the first section, the Trinity is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier; in the second, the redemption shows its elements of purgation (cleansing) following confession and followed by the firm intention not to repeat the faults; and in the third section the heart prays to be enriched with faith so that it may run with God; the mouth prays to be enriched with hope so that it may en-courage those in despair to rise; and the hands pray to be enriched with charity so that they may give richly and generously, after which (and only after which) they, and we, may rest.
The Trinity is a mystery; but when it is experienced and joyfully accepted, it allows us to live daily in a transparent cloud of wonder.
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