With the permission of Mr. Kant, who considered it irrational, I maintain that, even if the Trinity was not true, the intuition of a ternary unit as the ultimate key to being is one of the most brilliant things that has appeared in human history. Let’s see.
The Trinity is a clarification of the New Testament phrase: God is love. He means that the foundation and ultimate reason for everything is not a kind of absolute solitude but a mystery of infinite communication and infinite love.
Ricardo de San VÃctor explains that if God is Love, love needs someone equal to Him who is worthy of that love and who can be loved in a way worthy of Him (love is not the same as mercy: it is born of Him, but addresses someone inferior and unworthy of that love). Furthermore: when two equals love each other, they claim something external to them and common to both that unites them in an even more intense way (in human experience, the child can be a glimpse of that; as well as that definition that love does not consist of looking at each other, but looking both together towards an external goal).
Here is what our poor language calls the “Word” of God and the “Spirit” of God. From there another analogy may arise, not a communal one, but an individual one; and it shows us that the greatest unity is the one that contains some plurality: life and love are the ultimate dimensions of our being. But a life to the full implies the awareness that one lives and the joy derived from that living. Full love also supposes the awareness that one is loved and the joy of that awareness of love. That joy inseparably unites our love and our awareness of loving.
That human experience is so true that it could have arisen outside of Christianity. Hinduism (which some describe as the most monistic religion) coined the expression “Sat-Cit-Ananda” (being, awareness of being and joy of being). Once again the hint that the greatest unity is not some kind of empty identity, but rather includes some plurality.
Thus it is understood that the great Christian mystics have always been deeply Trinitarian even in times when theology had reduced the mystery of the Trinity to a kind of irrational mathematics. In addition, this forces us to redo the vision of the human being of our modernity, which made the mistake of a gross and deformed individualism: to be a human person is not to be a mere individual but to be a community individual. The Trinity is thus the most opposite of the capitalist worldview: capitalist freedom is the denial of love. Marx intuited something of this when he (before getting into economics!) He defined man as a “generic being”, but he did not know how to integrate the individual into that generic being. And the community became for Marx a nominal freedom only.
If things are like this, the announcement of the Trinity is excellent news for us: the foundation and ultimate reason for everything is an infinite love that places us in a framework of hope and optimism, more radical than all the negative experiences of our lives. lives, daughters of our limitation and that, as Jesus said, the road that leads there is a “narrow path” and not a comfortable highway.
All of this is beyond our reason. But with a certain irony, I would like to say that reason itself shows us its own improvement, precisely in the field that would seem the most rational: mathematics. Look for the square root of two: it is a non-existent, irrational number. The greatest access to it is obtained by dividing the hypotenuse of a triangle by one of the legs, but even so, if you square the result of that division, it will not give exactly two either. However, this nonexistent number works in practical calculations and allows us to solve some technical problems: as if reason told us that there is something that escapes it but it is not necessarily false because it can work well (as the mathematician Pascal already intuited).
What can spring from there is the warning and understanding of the extent to which we can falsify God. We’ll see him another Sunday.
