I'd be surprised to hear Catholics have embraces Spinoza.

I'd be surprised to hear Catholics have embraces Spinoza. — Banno

Christianity is built on Neoplatonism. They believed God is everything.

The basic idea was that God is everything. That's what Plotinus believed. — frank

No. Three persons who each are God, is one God. That’s unique information.

No. Three persons who each are God, is one God. That’s unique information. — Fire Ologist

I was talking about Plotinus.

They believed God is everything. — frank

In the sense that God is everything - God is the “in” and “with” of all things.
But in the sense that each separate thing is separate from each other (like this rock and that drink), each separate thing is not God and God is not that thing.

So, confounding the analytics, God and his creation both get to have it both ways.
First, God is everything so we are ultimately somewhere in The One, and second, I, for a time, am NOT God and he is not me

That’s where the cross comes in. I am separated and yet I can remain in Him and he in me.

We become like Gods, like Jesus is God……..

So now here’s the analytic side of it. @Leontiskos does the above make sense to you? It’s not expressly dogma, or from someone else - just my attempt to speak about the Trinity and how is see it. Where is there blatant error and where is it correct?

I think you, @Leontiskos can check my math and see coherence with the basic doctrines in some of the above, see the logic of it.

(And you made a distinction between God as a category of being and God as the living being we know as God. And you talked of “the God” versus “God”. These are all necessary distinctions, but I think it can confuse this further. Meaning, I follow you, but I could see someone misconstruing that you are saying there is more than one God.).

I was talking about Plotinus. — frank

I thought you were showing other places like Plotinus were the source of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus Christ’s words and deeds are a better source.

Word was God. (Father)
word with God. (Son)
These are the same word. (Same Spirit in each.)

These are more pieces to say what Trinity is, and where it comes from, and what the idea reflects.

What is a person?

Do I call myself a person? Do any of us call ourselves people?

I just said “I call myself.” But “I call myself” sounds like two people.

And now that I am talking about what I just said (analytics), I’ve drawn a third person view, on me thinking to say “I call myself a person.”

@Leontiskos

Language itself is tied up in my being a person (Davidson) (and what I’m saying regardless of if it’s like what Davidson is after). And the minute there is language, like the minute there is a person, we, in reflection, take third person views and first person views, we multiply our sense of “self” even though alone, just to think at all.

Each one of us, is like a Trinity.

A mind is like a community of sorts, in order to reflect, to have a mind, and a language.

To know, and to give, and to love, and know that you are loved…

The real personal stuff of life.. Requires a layered activity within ourselves.

The word was with God and the word was God.
The logic of the Trinity is like the logic of being a reflecting thing, a person.

Added:

‘God is your being, but you are not His’ — Wayfarer

This discussion is tied with a discussion of being.
(Now that I havent really cleared anything up, let’s discuss the being and becoming of it all. :razz:

First, God is everything so we are ultimately somewhere in The One, and second, I, for a time, am NOT God and he is not me — Fire Ologist

A quote attributed to Meister Eckhart: ‘God is your being, but you are not His’.

They’d have to be Jesuit :lol:

Jesuit — Wayfarer

:wink:
The Jesuits are a way to keep the smart people in the Church.

Are you familiar with the amazing feats of Matteo Ricci in China? Who, on the occasion of his return to Europe, was hosted at an Imperial Banquet, at which, when toasted, he stood and extemporised Chinese poetry as a gesture of gratitude? Or Ippolito Desideri who made it to Lhasa in 1716 and mastered Tibetan? Both amazing men. Anyway, side issue. But more than one Jesuit has thoroughly impressed me.

oh yea indeed. I’ve spent time with one or two.

Fine. The use of Logos tells that it's related to Plato, the Stoics, and Philo. The basic idea was that God is everything. That's what Plotinus believed. I'm happy to give you the victory over sorting out what Catholics believe. — frank

Okay, well thanks for that. Logos was a philosophical term of art, but it was also a common linguistic term. Both are probably at play in John's prologue.

The basic idea was that God is everything. — frank

Not for any of the figures you mention (i.e. pantheism).

I'm glad you concede that Catholics do not fall into the transitive problem. More generally, I would say that in an anthropological sense it is mistaken to attribute extremely simplistic mistakes to millennia-old traditions. Millennia-old traditions do not make extremely simplistic mistakes, such as failing to recognize the law of identity or transitivity, and this includes all sorts of religions and traditions. This is because 1) just because someone lived before the 21st century does not make them dumb; 2) adherents of a tradition will tend to scrutinize their tradition more thoroughly than outsiders given that they think about the issues more seriously; and 3) when you have the input of billions of people over thousands of years, extremely simplistic mistakes do not survive. It is this remarkable underestimation of millennia-old traditions that I find especially problematic.

They believed God is everything. — frank

In the sense that God is everything - God is the “in” and “with” of all things.
But in the sense that each separate thing is separate from each other (like this rock and that drink), each separate thing is not God and God is not that thing. — Fire Ologist

Right. So to take a group like the Stoics, the Logos is seen to order all things without remainder, but what is at stake is not an ontological thesis. Logos-providence does not entail pantheism.

So now here’s the analytic side of it. Leontiskos does the above make sense to you? It’s not expressly dogma, or from someone else - just my attempt to speak about the Trinity and how is see it. Where is there blatant error and where is it correct?

I think you, @Leontiskos can check my math and see coherence with the basic doctrines in some of the above, see the logic of it. — Fire Ologist

I think the general thrust is correct. The traditional Christian metaphysics of the God-world relation tends to be participatory rather than a matter of identification. God does things like create, sustain, and guide creation, but he is not himself creation. An ontological creator-creation distinction is maintained in traditional Christianity.

(And you made a distinction between God as a category of being and God as the living being we know as God. And you talked of “the God” versus “God”. These are all necessary distinctions, but I think it can confuse this further. Meaning, I follow you, but I could see someone misconstruing that you are saying there is more than one God.). — Fire Ologist

To simplify the whole question, because the ancient Greek texts did not have the uppercase-lowercase distinction, and they did not have indefinite articles, therefore they were unable to linguistically represent 'God' in the way that we commonly do today. But there are pros and cons. One of the cons of our own idiom is that although everyone uses the term 'God', it is not at all clear when the term is being used with any clear sense.

What is a person? — Fire Ologist

:up:

Aquinas sees this as the preliminary question to the whole discussion.

So now here’s the analytic side of it. Leontiskos does the above make sense to you? It’s not expressly dogma, or from someone else - just my attempt to speak about the Trinity and how is see it. Where is there blatant error and where is it correct?

I think you, Leontiskos can check my math and see coherence with the basic doctrines in some of the above, see the logic of it.
— Fire Ologist

I think the general thrust is correct. — Leontiskos

The only way for me to be correct about my own interpretations/applications of the Trinity, and for you to confirm the general thrust, is if there was a coherent logic to the Trinity.

So another person who simply concludes the Trinity is as nonsensical as a square-circle, can’t be seeing the difference between Trinity and a square-circle. And further, can’t see the logic of the Trinity that enabled you to check my math.

I would think this would be mildly intriguing to an analytics first proponent.

What is a person?
— Fire Ologist

:up:

Aquinas sees this as the preliminary question to the whole discussion. — Leontiskos

How did I end up analogizing the Trinity to a single human person, and it jibes with Aquinas, but I didn’t go to Aquinas? Incoherence in the notion of a ‘Trinity’ would make this an utter accident.

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer

Spot on. Apparently this has been explained quite a few times throughout the thread. :up:

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer

Do you mind elaborating on what you mean by essence?

The comment was in reference to the difference between numerical identity and two entities of the same kind. 'Essence' is 'what is essential to the being', from the Latin 'esse' 'to be'. So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men.

This also ties into the aphorism I quoted from Meister Eckhardt (whom we will recall was a 13th c Dominican friat and preacher whose sermons are still in print.)

God is your being, but you are not HIs

The rationale for this is that God is not a being, but Being. Therefore, our being or actual existence is not other than God - our ground or real nature is rooted in the divine. As Eckhardt said in one of his sermons, "The ground of my soul and the ground of God are one ground." This is the non-dualistic heart of his teaching.

"but you are not his [being]": we are a created entity (which is original meaning of 'creature'), an instance of Being, we ourselves are not God. So this is another illustration of 'both is and is not' that is seen in the Shield of Faith. So the God is the 'three persons' of the Trinity, but each of them is not God.

Perhaps it was more a narrative that "one can become aware of a deep Truth" about the nature of being, and being the truth - its so convincing, so potent and so paradigm-shifting that one can understand that telling it/"Spreading it" will lead to a lot of belief and conversely a lot of rejection. And that likely that rejection derives from such deeply entrenched values that the knower/teller is acutely aware that it will lead to their death by assasination or martyrdom (perhaps some see that as prophecy) but others see it maybe more as a natural conclusion when considering the human condition (ie. that there exists some people who would sooner murder than hear something profoundly true about reality). And that is what gets exaggerated into God-like heroism and founds new religions.

Are you happy with that explanation of "essence"?

I'm not.

'Essence' is 'what is essential to the being', from the Latin 'esse' 'to be'. So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer

Right. So if we stumbled upon an organism, we might wonder whether it is human. We might come to decide, "This thing is of the same nature as John Doe (and is therefore human)."

The genesis of Trinitarian theology is the same. Folks were wondering what Jesus is. The Council of Nicea came to decide, "The Son is consubstantial with the Father (and is therefore divine)."

How did I end up analogizing the Trinity to a single human person, and it jibes with Aquinas, but I didn’t go to Aquinas? Incoherence in the notion of a ‘Trinity’ would make this an utter accident. — Fire Ologist

Yes, and what's interesting here is that the development of the concept of personhood had a great deal to do with Trinitarian theology. The precision that we now have around the word "person" did not exist in the 4th century. Theater and Trinitarian thought were two of the principle ways that the concept was developed.

There is a similar way in which someone might think that a cardinal (bird) looks like a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or that cappuccino looks like a Capuchin's habit. In fact the bird and the coffee were named after Cardinals and Capuchins, and so the causality is reversed.

This all helps give the lie to the idea that religious thinking is somehow private or irrelevant. Religious thinking forms the basis for much of our current thought and language.

@Count Timothy von Icarus already explained why that isn't the Christian view, here

I don't think either of you are Catholic, though, so you don't have to worry about the consequences of heresy. :wink:

Much of the confusion here seems the result of an over dependence on syllogistic logic, which cannot deal adequately with relations.

I'm not Catholic, but I am trying to portray what I think they would say. The Count has been scarce the last few days but I acknowledge that he has far greater knowledge of this than I do.

Much of the confusion here seems the result of an over dependence on syllogistic logic, which cannot deal adequately with relations. — Banno

It occured to me after describing the 'both is and is not' meaning of the aphorism I quoted, that this communicates the sense in which the divine nature transcends logic. Aristotelian logic assumes the law of non-contradiction, which states that something cannot be both A and not A at the same time and in the same respect. In this perspective, paradoxes are flaws or errors.

However some religious teachings exhibit paradox not as a logical error, but as an insight to higher logic. The "both is and is not" language communicates that the subject is beyond the limitations of human reason. (I have encountered a scholarly article on Buddhist logic which echoes this, The Logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A.)

'Foolishness to the Greeks', indeed.

I'm not Catholic, but I am trying to portray what I think they would say. The Count has been scarce the last few days but I acknowledge that he has far greater knowledge of this than I do. — Wayfarer

He knows more than either of us, but I've known since childhood that Catholics don't believe that God is category that the hypostases belong to. The Trinity is supposed to be beyond human understanding. All we do is contact it through analogies. When Augustine used the words essence and persons, he didn't mean for you to bring God down to earth and sort it out the way you sort out a crowd of persons.

Again, I'll leave such stuff to the theists and mysterians to deal with.

But I think what I've said in the above posts acknowledges all of that. I said:

So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer

Although now I've read that entry of Timothy's, I understand better the signficance of the term 'participate'.

Mystics, not mysterians. Different things.

I prefer Mysterians, with whom you have much in common.

But I think what I've said in the above posts acknowledges all of that. I said:

So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer

That's not how the Trinity works. I don't think that message is going to get through to you, so peace, buddy.

So when you've got nothing substantial to add, you'll try condescending or sarcasm or ad homs, right? Rather than actually trying to engage in a conversation? It does make me wonder if I should bother interacting with you.

Always sounded like a band name to me.

Although looking at the original post again, it's plain the entire purpose is debunking Christianity, so I should have kept out of it, and will now.