When I first became a churchgoer, the Church of England still used Cranmer’s prayer book. On most Sundays, the Nicene Creed was recited at Holy Communion, between the sermon and the collection hymn. But on Trinity Sunday, it was replaced by the Athanasian Creed. I think that this less a creed, more an attempt by Athanasius to set boundaries around the doctrine of the Trinity. It certainly does not constitute an explanation. Basically it asserts with mind-numbing repetition that both the threeness and the oneness of God are real, meaning (I suppose) that any purported explanation or exposition which violates these criteria can be ruled out. It culminates in the genuinely amusing statement: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible, but there are not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible.” And so say all of us!
After the end of the service, there was always an unusually long queue at the door, not so much to congratulate the priest on his (fairly innocuous) trinitarian sermon, but to ask if he could explain the Athanasian creed to them, since apparently you had to believe it to be saved, and how could they believe it if they didn’t understand what it said? I’m told that Anglican Priests used to dread Trinity Sunday.
There’s an old Christian joke that no one can say anything about the Holy Trinity without falling into heresy of some kind. So anyone who reads what follows should treat it as a speculation, a jeu d’esprit. Don’t take it too seriously!
As I move through the world, I often seem to myself to be like the operator of a cine-camera continuously filming the things around me. But the film never includes that operator. She remains behind the camera, invisible. What I mean is this:
I think, I feel, I decide, I act... Every day I do these things but I am never able to catch myself doing any of them. If I try to do that by, as it were, moving the camera backward a bit, I can see a whole new tranche of things which constitute the inside of my mind: thoughts, feelings, mental images, memories, and so forth. They are now available for my inspection just like the objects and people in the outside world. But I still do not see “I”. When the camera moved back, its operator deftly moved back with it and is still out of sight. Instead of “I”, I see this thing that I call “me”.
“Me” is simply another idea that I have, part of the content of my inner world, basically no different from anything else that I find there. It is “I”s self-portrait but it’s an inaccurate portrait for two reasons:
”O wad some power the giftie gie us
tae see oorsel’s as ithers see us!”
Now if you believe that God is also conscious, logically He should have a view of Himself. He should have an “I” and a “me” just as we do. For in what sense am I conscious if I am not aware of myself being conscious? But God is always described as being perfect and omniscient, so (again logically) his “me” ought to be a complete and perfect image of his ”I”, not the poor and inadequate one that is the best we can provide for ourselves. Which surely means that God’s built-in self-portrait must be everything that God himself is. It too must be a person capable of doing everything that the original does.
Although the terms “Father” and “Son” are commonly used to refer to the first two persons of the Trinity, the Bible does give us other metaphors for the same divine relationship: speaker and word, original and image, light source and light. It is surely unscriptural not to make use of what scripture has provided. In particular the metaphor of original and image is very close to what I have been describing as “I” and “me”.
How then does God relate to this other Person, the eternal and coequal “Me” that His eternal “I” has generated? Logically on beholding the perfect image of His own perfection, He should experience overwhelming love for it. Admittedly self-admiration is generally considered to be a bad thing. We even have a specific word for it nowadays, narcissism, and nobody likes a narcissist. But narcissism in humans is obnoxious because narcissists are clearly deluded. No human being is as perfect and deserving of praise as the narcissist thinks he is.
Jesus said that you should love your neighbour as yourself (Mt 19 v.19). Like much that he said, it was not an original idea; he was quoting from the Book of Leviticus (Lev 19 v.18). What is not always noticed is that this commandment requires you to start off by loving yourself. Otherwise the love you have to offer your neighbour will not be very great. Indeed it has often been noticed by psychotherapists that people who have a very low self-image are usually not capable of loving anyone. At the very least, a healthy self-love requires a belief in the importance of one’s own survival and a desire for those things that make it possible for us to flourish. Combine this with the requirement to love your neighbour in the same way, and you have the Golden Rule: “Whatever things you want others to do for you, you must do for them.”
But there are quite familiar types of love that go beyond this. A mother who sacrifices her time and energy to raise her child, a soldier who gives his life for his country, or a saint dedicating his or her life to God, are all going above and beyond what is required by the second commandment. This type of love (C.S. Lewis called it gift love) involves a belief that the object of your love is actually more precious and important than you are. Lovers (i.e.people who are “in” love) typically feel like this about their beloved. Sadly they are often mistaken, and most of us know someone (usually a woman) who has sacrificed and is still sacrificing her happiness for another person who is simply not worth it by any objective measure.