A Meditation on the Trinity

The Trinity is confusing. All of the talk of three in one and one being three and separate parts of an indivisible whole seem like game jargon to the uninitiated. I cannot lay claim to being able to know the Trinity from scripture. Instead, I hope to gain some form of knowledge by putting different understandings of the Trinity in dialogue. In doing so, perhaps a different and personal understanding will emerge. I will be examining today Anselm’s “Proslogion” and the third part of the first book of Hugh of Saint Victor’s On the Sacraments. With the aid of these two medieval minds, I will be examining the nature of the medieval Trinity and how it can be applied in modern thought.

Before delving into the what it means for God to be of three parts, first I want to clarify what we should take God to mean. Anselm delivers us a definition near the beginning of his Proslogion: “God is whatever it is better to be than not be; he exists in himself alone; and he creates everything else to of nothing” (Anselm, 247). This does not seem to be a particularly clear or useful definition. All it claims is that God is the summation all best things, and does not comment on what that means. Hugh of Saint Victor offers a complementary understanding that supports and broadens Anselm’s claim. In it he writes, “that He whom that began which was not always, never began but always was” (Hugh, 44). Or as a negative definition, “all that is mutable must at some point not have been” (Hugh, 44). Hugh’s definition is that God is what is unchanging and eternal. Paired together with Anselm’s, the meaning of God becomes that one who is surpassed by none in all good things, unchanging and eternal. The divine being exists alone as the perfect and total being for all time, nothing within its creation can compare to it, everything outside of creation has always been unified with it.

How could there be three unchanging and unsurpassable beings? Let us turn to how Hugh holds that we can even see God, through “the rational mind, because this indeed was man’s first and principal mirror for contemplating truth” (Hugh, 43). Hugh holds that the rational mind has two ways to understand itself: through its own knowledge that it exists, and its place in the world around it.  As a mirror of the Trinity, this relationship is advanced through Anselm’s claim to God that “you are everywhere, so you must be here” (Anselm, 240). For the mind, recognition is that the interior is self, but the exterior is different. For the Trinity, the interior is as self as the exterior. God cannot be contained, and so God perceives itself internally and externally itself in creation. In this aspect a pure, complete, and perfect being can be shown as two separate entities while necessarily being the same. Knowledge of the self in one, being the Father, and knowledge of the creation which is also the self in the other, being the Son. 

I’d like to stay for a bit on the idea of God being all of its own creation. By this, I do not mean that God created itself. Instead, we should examine why it is necessarily true that God must exist within its creation. As God is unlimited by time, it follows that God is also unlimited in space. Anselm phrases this much more elegantly in saying “that is truly unlimited which is everywhere at once; and this is understood to be true of you alone” (Anselm, 254). Creation has natural barriers for the creatures within it, but the divine being supersedes these by the nature of its existence. Hugh writes to support this in claiming that God cannot be contained by limit or boundary and cannot be circumscribed (Hugh, 49). Why does this matter? Well, it means that there is not a creator/created hierarchy between the Father and the Son. The impulse of creation does not result in the appearance of a new or lesser entity, but of the expression of the Son gained from the understanding of the rational mind.

The third part of the trinity springs into existence from the relationship between the previous two. The third part, referred to as the Holy Spirit, exists out of the love the previous two have for each other. This is what Hugh means when he writes “so the Holy Spirit is the gift of God, because He is the gift of the Father and the Son” (Hugh, 52). The Father and Son love each other, a love from being to creation. However, while love between mortals can magnify their virtues, nothing can magnify God, since the divine being is always perfect. So, how does this love exist? According to Anselm, “God the Father, you are this good; this good is your word, that is your Son; for in the word you yourself utter, there can be nothing other than yourself… this is the one love between you and your Son—the Holy Spirit—which proceeds from you both” (Anselm, 262). The love is not separate from the Father and the Son, it is united with them. The Trinity is thus relational: The Father and Son love each other, and the Holy Spirit is the bond between them. 

The exercise above was personal, meant to improve my own understanding of the Trinity through writing and contemplation. For those who have subjected themselves to my selfish writing, I hope you have learned something from this examination of the Trinity as a relationship. In it, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist before time, none having created the other. The Father acts as the desire, the Son the effort, and the Holy Spirit the awe from the result of the project that is creation. It is in this way that an all-powerful being can be both three and one: when one mind considers the things that are distinct and peculiar in the Trinity, it finds three things and confesses three persons. But when it begins to note what is the same to the three, one thing is discovered” (Hugh, 52). I find the image of the Father and Son’s love depicted as the Holy Spirit as an image that explains Trinity. When one examines the relationships, each appears separate, but when one considers all three, they appear as one. To me, this is a satisfactory answer to the complicated issue of the Trinity, but it is not a total one. After all, “God is so great it is impossible to think of it, this is his luminousness… also, it is the great mystery of God” (Anselm, 258).

If you feel inclined to share, put your personal understandings of Trinity in the comments below, or ask question to clarify my own lacking understanding.

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Peter Hillary