Ya Gotta Wonder

Ya gotta wonder if the Trinity is the model for self-awareness, or if self-awareness is the model for the Trinity.

Tags: self-awareness, trinity

On the Trail of Bliss

So I’m reading Mysticism, Sacred and Profane by Robert Charles Zaehner, trying to figure out mysticism in general relates to beatitudo, the Aquinas version of happiness.

Zaeher says there’s three types of mystical experiences, all of which involve a transcending of time and space in which an infinite mode of existence is actually experienced. The person who has had the experience feels it was “something of tremendous significance beside which the ordinary world is a shadow of a shadow. The experience seems overwhelmingly real; its authority will not be denied.”

The first is Nature mysticism: you lose yourself in nature and actually become it; you become the thing you’re looking at. You and the world become one; “Your Not-self becomes the thing’s Not-self.”

The second is Monist mysticism, where instead of losing yourself in nature you lose yourself in yourself. The outside world has no true existence in and of itself; the soul is isolated from all that is not itself.

In both of these types of mysticism, the result is a oneness, either with nature where the self disappears, or with the self where nature disappears.

In the third type of mysticism, which Zaehner calls Theistic mysticism, the end-point is different. Instead of one entity (either nature or the soul), there are two entities, you and God, and there is love. In this type of mysticism, the soul remains a distinct entity and feels itself united to God by love. So instead of one, we have three: God, soul, and love.

Hmmm. Beginning to sound familiar: God, consciousness, love, as in the Augustine / Aquinas concept of the Trinity. Or as in the Hindu concept Sat-cit-ananda, which means existence, consciousness, and bliss. (Per wikipedia, the expression is used in yoga and other schools of Indian philosophy to describe the nature of Brahman as experienced by a fully liberated yogi.). Or as Zaehner says, “The mystic is engaged in realizing himself as his own final cause. To reunite with him in that particular mode of love which only a creature can have for its creator. One liberated while still alive, in a state of beatitude.”

Maybe Christians didn’t invent the Trinity after all.

Tags: bliss, mysticism, trinity

The real mystery of the Trinity

The real mystery of the trinity is that hardly anyone explains the concept using the thought of two of the best minds in the Catholic tradition – the A Team of Augustine and Aquinas. Theirs is the only explanation I’ve ever read that makes any degree of sense.

Here’s their take on the Trinity.

Think about how you know yourself and how you feel about yourself. First of all, there is you. And because you are self-aware, you form a concept of yourself, which you can come to know. This causes you to have a relationship with yourself, between the two end-points of self and self-knowledge. Your self-knowledge is distinct from you but is definitely a part of you (and you could even say it proceeds from you). In humans, self-knowledge usually evolves in childhood when we reach the age of reason, somewhere around first or second grade (e.g., Lizzie, six years old, saying: “Mom, why do I have to be a separate person?”). So each of us, being self-aware, has a relationship of knowledge between ourselves and the concept we have of ourselves. And the two end-points of that relationship (self and self-knowledge) also have a relationship of varying degrees of love or hate: we either hate ourselves, or are rather pleased with ourselves, or are somewhere in the middle.

Aquinas and St. Augustine think that the Trinity reflects the same sort of relationship of self-knowledge and love going on in God. God the Father represents God. Proceeding from God is God’s concept of himself, or his self-knowledge; the self-knowledge of God is what Aquinas thinks of as God the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the relationship of love between God’s self-knowledge and God.

Tags: trinity