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. — Wayfarer

It's just that you're going to give the same wrong account over and over. One can avoid frustration by walking away. :up:

One could also engage in a conversation about what, precisely, is the error, but then, it's a lot easier to make snide remarks, isn't it.

Puts me in mind of Captain Scarlet...

Ok. One last time. If you say the same wrong thing again, we'll just go our separate ways with no hard feelings, ok?

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

In this analogy, man is a category that two people are in. If you say Luke is a man, you are predicating. Luke is the subject, and man is the predicate. You're identifying a higher category, of which Luke is a part.

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. If this sounds like a mystical multiplicity, that's because it is.

Eckhart would have understood this because his views were Neoplatonic, which is one of the sources for the Trinity.

Yep. The danger for the Catholic is polytheism.

Banno is one of the things that is a man, so is Bob and so is Frank. Three different things that are all men.

So Jesus is one of the things that is god, and the holy spirit is another, and the father, another. Three different things that are all god.

So Jesus is one of the things that is god, and the holy spirit is another, and the father, another. THree different things that are all god. — Banno

Right.

Thank you for the explanation, I see your point.

But surely describing the persons of the Trinity as ‘things’ is even greater error than was mine.

But surely describing the persons of the Trinity as ‘things’ is even greater error than was mine. — Wayfarer

Augustine came up with the word "persons.". He didn't mean for that to be taken literally.

As a matter of fact, ‘person’ was derived from ‘personae’, the masks worn by actors in Greek drama. Regardless, surely Christians of any school or sect must recognize the distinction between persons and things must they not?

As a matter of fact, ‘person’ was derived from ‘personae’, the masks worn by actors in Greek drama — Wayfarer

I meant that Augustine came up with the use of "person" to talk about the hypostases.

Regardless, surely Christians of any school or sect must recognize the distinction between persons and things must they not? — Wayfarer

I guess so. If you asked an ancient Westerner what makes apples fall to the ground, they would say "God."

Whether the Westerner in question was thinking of God as a person or not depends on the place and time.

Christianity is the most ideologically dynamic of all the global religions because it's a fusion of several different sets of cultural outlooks and values. It contains directly conflicting views, and for a while this allowed it to act as fertile ground for intellectual exploration. It's far from a simplistic religion of a bearded man in the sky.

Three persons, one substance.

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder.

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder. — Banno

Sounds about right.

Well aware of all that. Nevertheless, I maintain that the distinction between beings and things is fundamental to Christianity as it must be to other religious traditions. To regard beings as things is to de-personalise or objectify them. It's far more insidious, and much more common, than mistakes about Scholastic terminology.

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder. — Banno

Bernardo Kastrup makes the case that all individual minds are dissociated identities of a single intelligence. Alan Watts says something very similar in The Supreme Identity - that individual beings are simply projections of the one intelligence who has become so entangled in the game of life so as to forget their real identity. So it may not be an unreasonable analogy.

That's not how the Trinity works. — frank

How does the Trinity work? :lol:

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder. — Banno

How is something like “disassocistive identity disorder” even possible to imagine as a coherent thing? What creature can make that category and what creature might live it!?

You are so full of shit sometimes.

And sounds about right.

Can’t help yourselves.

Now you annoyed @Wayfarer enough to want out.

Banno is one of the things that is a man, so is Bob and so is Frank. Three different things that are all men.

So Jesus is one of the things that is god, and the holy spirit is another, and the father, another. Three different things that are all god. — Banno

Men is plural. God isn’t.

You must do better.

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. If this sounds like a mystical multiplicity, that's because it is. — frank

No. Actually they are both predicating and identifying. That’s part of the uniqueness of God being three persons.

I know you don’t understand.

The father is a god. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is father son and spirit. Identity.

Or, the son is a god. True statement. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is three persons. True statement of identity.

Etc………

You almost have it now? It’s actually easy to show you you are wrong about it, once you have it. It’s a “mystery” to me how you can’t see it sometimes.

Neither explanation is particularly clear nor cogent. Also, if they were right then the Trinity is superfluous, anyway. We might hope that a good explanation should decrease the degree of mystery, not multiply it.

How is something like “disassocistive identity disorder” even possible to imagine as a coherent thing? — Fire Ologist

Take it up with DSM-5. Are they also full of shit?

Are they also full of shit? — Banno

Im talking about you comparing God to a mental patient. And you, totally incurious about personhood and its disorders and explanations.

Suit yourself. Multiple persons sharing one being does sound a bit mad...

Added: Googling "Multiple persons sharing one being" returns DID. Googling "God: Multiple persons sharing one being" returns the Trinity. Don't shoot the messenger.

4. When one is offended by another person, whose fault is that feeling of offense? The hurling of insults is certainly the fault of the one hurling insults, but the feeling of offense, who is responsible for that? — Fire Ologist

How is something like “disassocistive identity disorder” even possible to imagine as a coherent thing? — Fire Ologist

Bernardo Kastrup points to a 2014 fMRI study of subjects diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. In one striking case, a dissociated personality who believed herself to be blind showed no neural activity in the brain’s visual cortex—yet the same subject, when embodying another personality, displayed normal activity in that region.

Kastrup uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls “mind at large.” Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individuals—when, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways.

This is a metaphor that sits comfortably in Vedanta. Swami Sarvapriyananda of the New York Vedanta Society (with whom Kastrup dialogues from time to time) sees it as another way of expressing the teaching that ātman (the true Self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality) are one. In this light, Vedanta would say that, in a sense, we are all “mental patients” so long as we identify with the ego and remain ignorant of the Self.

Enough for the excursion. Back to class now, everyone.

in a sense, we are all “mental patients” so long as we identify with the ego and remain ignorant of the Self. — Wayfarer

Sure, we are the metal patients maybe because of our disassociation between Atman and Brahmin.

metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls “mind at large.” Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individuals—when, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways. — Wayfarer

Good stuff.

↪frank 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

One (rather limited) way of approaching the Trinity is as a mean between the extreme of a strong emphasis on the persons (which moves in the direction of polytheism) and the extreme of a strong emphasis on the unification of the divine nature (which moves in the direction of emphasizing the divine nature at the expense of the personal distinctions).

So on this scheme we're sailing down a river where the north shore is polytheism, the south shore is ousia-overemphasis, and we want to stay in the middle of the river and avoid crashing into either shore. As with all areas of subtle philosophy, overcorrection is a constant danger.

Banno presented " an unlikely strawman that very little attention is [historically] paid to the idea at all." You responded by pointing to the idea that "is God" is indicating the predication of a nature, and that is definitely the right response to Banno's odd transitivity argument. You gave an example of two men who participate in the form of 'man' (human), which is also a helpful illustration. The quibble against your example is that the persons of the Trinity are not separated from each other in the way that human persons are separated from each other, and that if for some reason we take your example to be identical to the Trinity, then it fails: it veers too close to the north shore. This objection is intelligible, but I don't see any reason to assume that you were offering the example as something more than an analogy.

(Another way of viewing that objection is as a utilization of Euthyphro-like reasoning against the reification of the ousia.)

The danger for the Catholic is polytheism. — Banno

No, Catholicism (and Western Christianity in general) has always veered closer to the south shore. Polytheism is the danger for Eastern Christianity.

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. — frank

No, this is not right. I would go back to my posts where I quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We can say that the Father is God (in the Triune sense), but by that we include the Son and the Spirit with the Father, for they are never apart (except notionally, in the single notional case where an exclusive relation of origin is being considered). More commonly, we would say that the Father is divine (and this is a matter of ousia).

Regarding my post to you about John 1:1, there is an ancient sense in which "God" ("the god") is used hypostatically to refer to the Father, but the semantics of the hypostatic use and the Triune use are distinct.

Christianity is the most ideologically dynamic of all the global religions because it's a fusion of several different sets of cultural outlooks and values. — frank

Perhaps this is most true of Christianity given its geographic sprawl, but it is also true of many other religions to a lesser extent.

Kastrup uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls “mind at large.” Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individuals—when, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways. — Wayfarer

In a more individual way Trinitarian thought is often applied analogously to psychological health. When the various aspects of one's personality become dissociated, one becomes mad, corrupt, divided, schizophrenic, etc. When the various aspects of one's personality enter into a symbiotic and fruitful union, one achieves psychological health. Monomania would be the case where only one aspect of one's personality is allowed to continue existing.

Googling "God: Multiple persons sharing one being" returns the Trinity. — Banno

Is that really a surprise?

Banno is a case in point for the future in which LLM-based arguments become synonymous with a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy bias. What Narcissus would have given for an LLM to reflect back to him his own prejudices!

The Trinity is absolutely affirmed as mysterious and beyond reason (super rational); it is not affirmed as contradictory and irrational (in a sense, beneath or bereft of reason). God does not have an essence or nature in the way creatures do. Creaturely essences are necessarily a limitation on being (which is what allows a finite mind to possess their form), whereas God's essence is existence itself. Hence, "hypostasis" and "ousia" are applied differently (God is not a genus). Nevertheless, they are not wholly equivocal terms either. God, as first cause, is the exemplar of all things, and so also of fullness of the terms of finite being. This is why Eastern Christianity often speaks of progress in the spiritual life as being what makes someone more fully a person, because the fullness of "person" is measured by the persons of the Trinity, not human persons. To be "dead in sin," and a "slave to sin," beset by the "civil war in the soul" of Romans 7 and The Republic is to be less a person, more a mere jumble of external causes. Indeed, to be irrational is to be less fully anything at all.

One way to conceive this is to recall that in classical metaphysics human logos is a participation in Divine Logos. In the great chain of being, it is the very bottom, the material, that tapers off in multiplicity and irrationality, and essentially, nothingness. The source, by contrast, is the fullness of rationality. God is, using the Dionysian language common to the East, "superessential" and "super rational." Man, as a "middle being," is not the measure of reason. Human systems and speech are not their own ground, because man is not his own ground.

Indeed, the whole ordering of epithumia and thymos to logos is justified (logos has property authority) because it is radically open and always beyond itself, and so capable of transcending its own finitude. In the East, the nous is even often considered as wholly discrete from discursive dianoia.

So, to your later questions, the example of multiple people sharing human nature, but not being the same person is apt, to the extent that it shows how many people participate in one nature. Nonetheless, we would not say that the Father or Spirit participates in the Divine Nature the way finite things participate in their essences. God is what is participated in. The persons subsist rather, possessing the essence in total fullness, without derivative participation. They are defined (for us) by relations of origin ("begotten," "procession"). The Eastern view is not dissimilar, their tropoi hyparxeos (modes of being) is sometimes translated as "manner of subsistence." By contrast, finite men are generally considered to be individuated by their matter, but God is pure act (or even the individuating principle for creatures is their "act of existence," God is one actuality, existence itself).

Now, if all language about the God was entirely equivocal, one could say nothing meaningful about God at all. Hence, the claim that terms like ousia and hypostasis have absolutely no applicability to God would be extremely problematic for someone defending orthodoxy, because it would mean that even revelation wouldn't apply to God. But when Catholics claim that "natural reason" cannot discover the Trinity, they mean, "just human reason and common empirical experience." They don't mean that we cannot know anything even with the testimony of the Scriptures, tradition, and saints. Personally, I find the Catholic nature/supernature, natural reason/revelation dichotomies somewhat unhelpful, and they are a later development. Eastern Christianity tends to make no such distinction here on the ground that Adam's natural state was "little less than a god," (Psalm 8), and his telos diefication, whereas the fallen state is itself what is "unnatural." The understanding of the Trinity is utterly beyond man inasmuch as the Divine Essence is unknowable precisely because it is infinite (and not merely inexhaustible for man, as finite essences are). Any finite reckoning of the infinite is always only encapsulates an vanishing share that approaches zero.

Man can, however, know God through God's energies and creation (including revelation). And so there is a sense in which the Trinity can be known more fully, through these (filtered through an analogy of proper proportion). But it is not by dianoia but rather by the unclouding of nous and its conformity with God (through the "heart," the "eye of the nous"). That is, one reaches theoria, a knowledge of God through creatures, through praxis (the spiritual life, ascetic labors, the sacraments, etc.), and beyond theoria lies theology, which is given by God to the saints. As Evagrius famously puts it: "If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian." Or as Saint Maximus adds: "theology without prayer is the theology of demons."

The Patristics make the essence/energies distinction so it's in Catholic thought to some degree, although the East extends it to a much greater degree with Saint Gregory Palamas, seeing the divine union of Catholic "infused contemplation," as contact with the divine energies (often through a transfigured body). Again, I'm not sure if differences here are as great as they might first seem. Has Palamas encountered Bonaventure instead of the Western transplants he fought with they might have gotten on quite well.

Which is all to say that there is a very key distinction between "grasping the Divine Nature as finite natures" and any experience of God that is informative. You have to recall the very high standard out of "knowledge" in Greek thought. We are absolutely not talking about the form of God existing in the intellect. But we're also not saying there is no experience, such that affirming sacred doctrine is just a sort of contentless affirmation (we could consider here the very experiential writings of Saint Simeon the New Theologian of Saint Bonaventure's Mind's Journey Into God).

The prescriptions of praxis are actually incredibly broad though. One does not understand creatures without the Creator either. One might apply reason instrumentally to "problem solving," and yet this will only compound vice and suffering without the spiritual life. Wholly instrumental analytic reason is in a sense diabolical (in both its original and current sense).

Eckhart would have understood this because his views were Neoplatonic, which is one of the sources for the Trinity.

Not really, or at least not without many important caveats. The Trinity appears in Origen and others (although not in its mature Capaddocian formulation) but Origen is an older contemporary of Plotinus in Alexandria. For a long time, people spoke matter of factly about a sort of one way influence between Neoplatonism and Christianity, but this has largely been revised in scholarship because it makes no sense given the temporal ordering. That is, scholars were following the order of Saint Augustine's biography, and not the order of intellectual development in Alexandria where the Gnostics, Philo, Origen, Clement, etc. are prior to Plotinus and influencing his milieu.

Plotinus writes a tract against the Gnostics but that doesn't change the fact that his thought might well be seen as repaganized and abstracted Jewish/Christian Platonism from his city, with particular influence seeming to come from the Gnostics and their system of emanations. He mocks them, but no doubt they would have simply dismissed much of the criticism as a facile, surface level understanding built up into a straw man. But he probably felt the need to attack the Gnostics precisely because of the similarities and their ability to draw the same audience.

Nevertheless, the Plotinian hypostases cannot be mapped to the Trinity (although a few did try) precisely because they are organized hierarchically. There is an unfortunate tendency in philosophy thought to equivocate between the Pagan "Neoplatonism" of Plotinus and his descendants and "Neoplatonism" more broadly, covering the "Golden Age" Islamic thinkers and figures like Saint Thomas or Eriugena, which makes it seem like the one is simply a reskinned version of the other, which is not the case.



Tertullian introduces persona as a legal/theatrical metaphor. But the language of hypostases (which is arguably poorly rendered as "persons") goes back at least as far as Origen. Arguably, the original metaphor is deficient in that it suggests modalism, but it is reworked a great deal. All the terms become quite technical.

98% of Christian denominations accept the Trinity from a doctrinal point of view, yet only 16% of Christians actually accept it.

I wouldn't put much stock in that. Even if I was prepared to ignore all my personal experiences at a variety of churches for a survey that includes no descriptions of its methods, there is something very suspicious about the large variances between 30-somethings and 20-somethings. Do we really have good reasons to think 20 year olds are much more likely to believe in "the God of the Bible" than their older siblings, but then much less likely to believe in the Holy Spirit? Is there really a substantial minority of practicing Christians who don't believe in Christ and yet attend traditional Christian services?

Somehow I doubt it. The generational variances in particular seem like noise or error.

See, here it is again. This should be intriguing to an analytics first philosopher.

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that.
— frank

No, this is not right. I would go back to my posts where I quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We can say that the Father is God (in the Triune sense), but by that we include the Son and the Spirit with the Father, for they are never apart — Leontiskos

I said this:

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category ….
— frank

No. Actually they are both predicating and identifying. That’s part of the uniqueness of God being three persons.

The father is a god. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is father son and spirit. Identity.

Or, the son is a god. True statement. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is three persons. True statement of identity.

Etc……… — Fire Ologist

Here is the question for the analytic mind who thinks the Trinity is just an incoherent idea, and contains too many contradictions:

How are me and Leon identifying the same flaws in @frank reasoning about the Trinity, and able to put into totally different explanations, different words, our reasoning and logic as to why and how Frank blew it? How are our separately developed explanations reflective of the same reasoning and conclusions? How did we both see franks flaw?

That must mean there is something objective and particular about the concept of the Trinity (besides dogma and what someone else says about it.). Leon and I each separately worked out and expressed the same conclusion in our own ways. That requires logic and facts, sorted from franks illogic and wrong facts. About the Trinity.

So @Banno and frank, how is that possible?

The OP asked for an explanation of the Christian Narrative.
Then Frank admitted (by his actions) he didn’t think such explanation was even possible.
What Leon and I just did is evidence that there is a logic and reasoning going on that therefore might allow for an explanation of the Christian narrative.

So @frank, was your OP in earnest?

Good to see you back.

Not really, or at least not without many important caveats. The Trinity appears in Origen and others (although not in its mature Capaddocian formulation) but Origen is an older contemporary of Plotinus in Alexandria. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK. Just Platonism, then.

Origen begins his treatise On First Principles by establishing, in typical Platonic fashion, a divine hierarchical triad; but instead of calling these principles by typical Platonic terms like monad, dyad, and world-soul, he calls them “Father,” “Christ,” and “Holy Spirit,” though he does describe these principles using Platonic language. The first of these principles, the Father, is a perfect unity, complete unto Himself, and without body – a purely spiritual mind. Since God the Father is, for Origen, “personal and active,” it follows that there existed with Him, always, an entity upon which to exercise His intellectual activity. This entity is Christ the Son, the Logos, or Wisdom (Sophia), of God, the first emanation of the Father, corresponding to Numenius’ “second god,” as we have seen above (section 2). The third and last principle of the divine triad is the Holy Spirit, who “proceeds from the Son and is related to Him as the Son is related to the Father” — IEP

Ok.

Personally, I find the Catholic nature/supernature, natural reason/revelation dichotomies somewhat unhelpful, and they are a later development. Eastern Christianity tends to make no such distinction here on the ground that Adam's natural state was "little less than a god," — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. But you can't make an apology for the Catholic view by referring to Eastern Orthodox. Let's just leave it at this: on it's face, the Catholic Trinity appears to be contradictory. Catholics are aware of this, but deny that it's a contradiction, because the truth is beyond human comprehension. If we were enlightened, we would see that it's not a contradiction.