GOD IS NOT A MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM
The Trinity and the limits of rational thought
Knowing God by Participation
In a society and culture which prizes rationalism more than most other values, believing in God has never come easily. But believing in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been particularly difficult.
This opportunity in the Church’s liturgical year allows us to remind ourselves, as well as talk to the people we live amongst, in a different register; to see if they can make the shift away from the grip rational thinking has on us, and allow us to access the needs of the heart which are seldom satisfied.
Whenever you talk about the Holy Trinity, you find yourself reminded that three into one doesn’t go. People find it very difficult to get beyond the reflex of thinking mathematically. Number comes more easily than relationship.
But part of the problem comes from living in the Christian West. The Christian East has a different way of looking at things.
So, for example, in the Christian West we might ask the question in our rationalistic society:
What is God?
What is God like?
In Eastern or Orthodox Christian culture, the question is usually framed rather differently and has more to do with:
How can we participate in God?
How can we know God with more of us than just our brain?
It’s not as if we have been completely shielded from that in the West. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing (1370–1390) wrote about this with great insight when he said:
“God may well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he may be grasped and held; by thought, never.”
The valiant, overconfident empirical atheists of our culture find it very difficult to imagine that anything which escapes the octopus-like power of their minds could have a reality greater than their own intelligence.
But the author of The Cloud of Unknowing knew that there was always a problem with thinking about God.
It’s not difficult to explain. The moment you think about God, you’ve made Him your creature. He, as a thought, has been made by your brain; He has been captured by the contours of your mind. In other words, the instant we think about Him, He is no longer God. He becomes an idol.
We should have been suspicious when we discovered that the way we love is different from the way we solve mathematical puzzles. How many times have we been told that God is love and not a mathematical puzzle?
Love is always beyond the remit of our rationality.
The Refinement of the One and the Many
If we conceive God’s monotheism as being like the number one, then we immediately make God an object of power rather than relationship.
One is alone.
One is isolated.
But what if God was single and plural at the same time in some kind of quantum theology?
What if God is not an object so much as a single unified relationship?
We found ourselves talking about God as three and one, and one and three, because there have been three dimensions to our experience of God.
We have experienced God as Creator, and then discovered that the Creator entered His own time and space as the Logos. Suddenly God was now relationally Father and Son, Creator and Logos.
Then we discovered that there was some form of intentionally personal dynamic between them, amounting to a third who was one in being but different in function. We discovered the Holy Spirit, and suddenly we had one God in three Persons.
This is difficult to explain to somebody who wants to capture God with their mind, but very easy for someone who wants to participate in the life of God made accessible through an encounter with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
On the Feast of the Holy Trinity we ought to give some more thought to the way we encounter God rather than the way in which we try to trap Him with our rationality.
Being as Communion
The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas wrote very helpfully about the Holy Trinity using the phrase:
“Being as communion.”
It is a powerful phrase, but it takes some unpacking.
It tells us about the limitations of the intellect.
Analysis separates; love unites.
Concepts distinguish themselves from one another; communion joins together.
Definitions create boundaries in order to distinguish, but the Holy Spirit is not limited by boundaries.
The great deformation of Christian faith is to talk of God as an it instead of a He, or as a Person. Talking of God as it reduces Him back to the captive status of an object.
But calling out to Him as Father puts us back into a relationship, and suddenly we know with the heart rather than with the mind.
Yet once again we cannot know God the Father without having encountered Jesus, our friend and brother, who introduces us to God not as an object but as His Father, and therefore our Father.
The quality of love that flows between us is given to us by the Holy Spirit.
For this is exactly where St Paul talks about the Spirit within us crying out:
“Abba, Father.”
Daddy. Father.
A language of utmost intimacy.
This is not a concept. It is an experience birthed by the Spirit.
To know the God that Jesus introduced us to is to find ourselves lying in the arms of the Father who created us, brought there hand in hand by His true Son, equal in being though different in Person, and held in the electricity that knows us and loves us that we call the Holy Spirit.
Participation Rather than Comprehension
What is it that the Christian East offers to rebalance our culture?
It reminds us that we get to know God better by participation than by thinking.
In fact, it could be that trying merely to think about God is one of the worst things we can do, because it is one of the ways of relating to Him that runs out of road the quickest.
So what would it mean to participate in God?
There are four ways of participating in God that are particularly common throughout the Christian tradition.
If we want to know God, we have to engage in them in some pattern or another.
They are:
Prayer
Liturgy
Ethics
Beauty
We might add one more:
Suffering
Prayer
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, it wasn’t because they heard Him using formulas of spirituality. It was because they saw something of the intense mystery of His relationship with the Father and wanted to be drawn into it.
So praying becomes a participation in Jesus’ relationship with the Father.
This is exactly what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing was talking about when he reminded us that love is a language of participation and not thought.
One of the remarkable things about prayer is that it is as much something that is done to us as something that we do.
We step into it and let it happen to us quite as much as creating it.
We certainly do something by beginning it. But it swiftly moves from doing into being; from starting into resting; or bathing, or swimming, or sinking, or immersing, or breathing, or adoring.
If we do not participate in God by praying, knowing God never happens.
