aTrinity Sunday 2021
Deut 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28: 16-20
If I were to ask you “Have you read Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lamda?” you would no doubt reply “Of course I have. I dip into it every day, but it has nothing to do with the Trinity: you might as well ask about Plato’s Demiurge, or his Theory of Forms.” In replying thus, you would, of course, be quite right.
The speculations of the great ancient philosophers have no direct bearing on our understanding of God. Nevertheless, they do show us how people have always struggled to form some concept of God, while at the same time demonstrating how difficult this is.
Those of you who were spared in your youth from grappling with the complexities of Plato and Aristotle may feel that you have much for which to be grateful. To fathom the mysterious analogies of Plato’s sun, divided line, and cave, is difficult enough in English: to have to face it in the original Greek is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat.
This week, it will be half a century since I sat my Finals paper on the theology of Plato and Aristotle, and a year more since I attempted to deconstruct the Theory of Forms, translating gobbets (where on earth does that term come from, I wonder?) and struggling to distinguish the deuteros plous from the protos plous, yet the very mention of such things still has the power to reduce me to a gibbering wreck.
Giants of the ancient world, these two philosophers were attempting to guide their contemporaries to a less crude understanding of reality than was provided by the pantheon of Olympian gods, constantly quarrelling among themselves, and frequently interfering in human affairs to suit their own ends. The result of their efforts was to discredit the notion of a multiplicity of personalised gods in favour of philosophical concepts lacking all human characteristics. (Plato’s Demiurge does have some elements of personality, but it is questionable how seriously the author took him.)
Thus, in Plato we are led to a more or less abstract concept of ideal goodness, whilst Aristotle gives us the Unmoved Mover, whose “thinking is a thinking of thinking”, a being represented by a perfect circle, totally self-absorbed, whose thoughts nonetheless move the universe.
Does any of this have anything to do with today’s feast? Well, both Plato and Aristotle have exercised a powerful influence on Christian thinkers through the ages. Both Platonists and Aristotelians have contributed to our understanding of God.
Like Plato, we see God as ideal goodness and infinite perfection: with Aristotle, we recognise that God is self-sufficient, needing nothing beyond Himself, not moved by, or dependent on, anything.
Where these mighty Greeks fall short is in failing to recognise relationship as an essential element in God’s nature. Plato’s Form of the Good is, to all intents and purposes, abstract: Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is a totally solitary being.
Christianity alone sees God as thoroughly involved in relationship, both in and beyond Himself. There is one God, but God’s very being is expressed in relationship, the Father eternally loving and begetting the Son, who eternally loves the Father, their love being so intense as to be a person, the Holy Spirit. Likewise, that love is so deep that it spills over into Creation, and into human beings as the pinnacle of that Creation.
There is a Christian symbol which carries echoes of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. God is sometimes represented by a circle with spokes and a hub. The hub is inscribed “Deus” (God) whilst at points on the perimeter are “Pater” (Father) “Filius” (Son) and “Spiritus Sanctus” (Holy Spirit). On the sections of the rim joining these three points is written three times “non est”. The Father is not the Son, and neither of them is the Holy Spirit, but from each of them is a spoke joining them to the hub (God) and inscribed “est”. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.
Relationship, community is the essence of God. As children of God, we must have it as our essence too: relationship, community, with God, and with one another.
