The second, or speculative division of the work, is that which will be most foreign to the thinking of some trinitarians. In it they will find what seems to them to be a philosophy, rather than an interpretation of the word of God. We shall, therefore, in this introductory essay, specify some of the advantages, as it seems to us, of the general method of defending and illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity employed by Augustin and the patristic Trinitarians.
1. Fuller justice is done to Scripture by this method. Revelation denominates the first trinitarian person the Father, the second the Son, the third the Spirit. These terms are literal, not metaphorical; because the relations denoted by them are eternally in the essence. Scripture clearly teaches that the Father is such from eternity. Consequently, "paternity" (implied in the name Father) can no more be ascribed to the first person of the Godhead in a figurative sense, than eternity can be. For a person that is a father must be so in relation to a son. No son, no father. Consequently, an eternal Father implies an eternal Son. And the same reasoning holds true of the relation of the Father and Son to the Spirit. The terms Father, Son, and Spirit, in the baptismal formula and the apostolic benediction, must designate primary and eternal distinctions. The rite that initiates into the kingdom of God, certainly would not be administered in three names that denote only assumed and temporal relations of God; nor would blessings for time and eternity be invoked from God under such secondary names.
Hence, these trinal names given to God in the baptismal formula and the apostolic benediction, actually force upon the trinitarian theologian, the ideas of paternity, generation, filiation, spiration, and procession. He cannot reflect upon the implication of these names without forming these ideas, and finding himself necessitated to concede their literal validity and objective reality. He cannot say that the first person is the Father, and then deny that he "begets." He cannot say that the second person is the Son, and then deny that he is "begotten." He cannot say that the third person is the Spirit, and then deny that he "proceeds" by "spiration" (spiritus quia spiratus) from the Father and Son. When therefore Augustin, like the primitive fathers generally, endeavors to illustrate this eternal, necessary, and constitutional energizing and activity (opera ad intra) in the Divine Essence, whereby the Son issues from the Father and the Spirit from Father and Son, by the emanation of sunbeam from sun, light from light, river from fountain, thought from mind, word from thought--when the ternaries from nature and the human mind are introduced to elucidate the Trinity--nothing more is done than when by other well-known and commonly adopted analogies the Divine unity, or omniscence, or omnipresence, is sought to be illustrated. There is no analogy taken from the finite that will clear up the mystery of the infinite--whether it be the mystery of the eternity of God, or that of his trinity. But, at the same time, by the use of these analogies the mind is kept close up to the Biblical term or statement, and is not allowed to content itself with only a half-way understanding of it. Such a method brings thoroughness and clearness into the interpretation of the Word of God.
2. A second advantage in this method is, that it shows the doctrine of the Trinity to be inseparable from that of the Unity of God. The Deistical conception of the Divine unity is wholly different from the Christian. The former is that of natural religion, formed by the unassisted human mind in its reflection upon the Supreme Being. The latter is that of revealed religion, given to the human mind by inspiration. The Deistical unity is mere singleness. The Christian unity is a trinality. The former is a unit. The latter a true unity, and union. The former is meagre, having few contents. The latter is a plenitude--what St. Paul denominates "the fullness of the Godhead" (pleroma tes theotetos). Coloss. i. 9.
It follows, consequently, that the Divine unity cannot be discussed by itself without reference to trinality, as the Deist and the Socinian endeavor to do. [5] Trinality belongs as necessarily and intrinsically to the Divine unity as eternity does to the Divine essence. "If," says Athanasius (Oration I. 17) "there was not a Blessed Trinity from eternity, but only a unity existed first, which at length became a Trinity, it follows that the Holy Trinity must have been at one time imperfect, and at another time entire: imperfect until the Son came to be created, as the Arians maintain, and then entire afterwards." If we follow the teachings of Revelation, and adopt the revealed idea of God, we may not discuss mere and simple unity, nor mere and simple trinality; but we must discuss unity in trinality, and trinality in unity. We may not think of a monad which originally, and in the order either of nature or of time, is not trinal, but becomes so. The instant there is a monad, there is a triad; the instant there is a unity, there are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Christian Trinity is not that of Sabellius: namely, an original untrinal monad that subsequently, in the order of nature if not of time, becomes a triad; whereby four factors are introduced into the problem. God is not one and three, but one in three. There is no primary monad, as such, and without trinality, to which the three distinctions are secondary adjuncts. The monad, or essence, never exists in and by itself as untrinalized, as in the Sabellian scheme. It exists only as in the three Persons; only as trinalized. The Essence, consequently, is not prior to the Persons, either in the order of nature or of time, nor subsequent to them, but simultaneously and eternally in and with them.
The Primitive church took this ground with confidence. Unity and trinality were inseparable in their view. The term God meant for them the Trinity. A "theologian," in their nomenclature, was a trinitarian. They called the Apostle John ho theologos, because he was enlightened by the Holy Spirit to make fuller disclosures, in the preface to his Gospel, concerning the deity of the Logos and the doctrine of the Trinity, than were the other evangelists. And they gave the same epithet to Gregory Nazianzum, because of the acumen and insight of his trinitarian treatises. This work of Augustin adopts the same position, and defends it with an ability second to none.
3. A third advantage of this method of illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity is, that it goes to show that the personality of God depends upon the trinality of the Divine Essence--that if there are no interior distinctions in the Infinite Being, he cannot be self-contemplative, self-cognitive, or self-communing.
This is an important and valuable feature of the method in question, when viewed in its bearing upon the modern assertion that an Infinite Being cannot be personal. This treatise of Augustin does not develope the problem upon this point, but it leads to it. In illustrating the Trinity by the ternaries in nature, and especially in the human mind, he aims only to show that trinality of a certain kind does not conflict with unity of a certain kind. Memory, understanding, and will are three faculties, yet one soul. Augustin is content with elucidating the Divine unity by such illustrations. The elucidation of the Divine personality by them, was not attempted in his day nor in the Mediæval and Reformation churches. The conflict with pantheism forced this point upon the attention of the Modern church.
At the same time, these Christian fathers who took the problem of the Trinity into the centre of the Divine essence, and endeavored to show its necessary grounds there, prepared the way for showing, by the same method, that trinality is not only consistent with personality, but is actually indispensable to it. In a brief essay like this, only the briefest hints can be indicated.
If God is personal, he is self-conscious. Self-consciousness is, (1), the power which a rational spirit, or mind, has of making itself its own object; and, (2), of knowing that it has done so. If the first step is taken, and not the second, there is no self-consciousness. For the subject would not know that the object is the self. And the second step cannot be taken, if the first has not been. These two acts of a rational spirit, or mind, involve three distinctions in it, or three modes of it. The whole mind as a subject contemplates the very same whole mind as an object. Here are two distinctions, or modes of one mind. And the very same whole mind perceives that the contemplating subject and the contemplated object are one and the same essence or being. Here are three modes of one mind, each distinct from the others, yet all three going to make up the one self-conscious spirit. Unless there were these three distinctions, there would be no self-knowledge. Mere singleness, a mere subject without an object, is incompatible with self-consciousness.
In denying distinctions in the Divine Essence, while asserting its personality, Deism, with Socinianism and Mohammedanism, contends that God can be self-knowing and self-communing as a single subject without an object. The controversy, consequently, is as much between the deist and the psychologist, as it is between him and the trinitarian. It is as much a question whether his view of personality and self-consciousness is correct, as whether his interpretation of Scripture is. For the dispute involves the necessary conditions of personality. If a true psychology does not require trinality in a spiritual essence in order to its own self-contemplation, and self-knowledge, and self-communion, then the deist is correct; but if it does, then he is in error. That the study of self-consciousness in modern metaphysics has favored trinitarianism, is unquestionable. Even the spurious trinitarianism which has grown up in the schools of the later pantheism goes to show, that a trinal constitution is requisite in an essence, in order to explain self-consciousness, and that absolute singleness, or the absence of all interior distinctions, renders the problem insoluble. [6]
But the authority of Scripture is higher than that of psychology, and settles the matter. Revelation unquestionably discloses a deity who is "blessed forever;" whose blessedness is independent of the universe which he has made from nonentity, and who must therefore find all the conditions of blessedness within himself alone. He is blessed from eternity, in his own self-contemplation and self-communion. He does not need the universe in order that he may have an object which he can know, which he can love, and over which he can rejoice. "The Father knoweth the Son," from all eternity (Matt. xi. 27); and "loveth the Son," from all eternity (John iii. 35); and "glorifieth the Son," from all eternity (John xvii. 5). Prior to creation, the Eternal Wisdom "was by Him as one brought up with Him, and was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him" (Prov. viii. 30); and the Eternal Word "was in the beginning with God" (John i. 2); and "the Only Begotten Son (or God Only Begotten, as the uncials read) was eternally in the bosom of the Father" (John i. 18).
Here is society within the Essence, and wholly independent of the universe; and communion and blessedness resulting therefrom. But this is impossible to an essence without personal distinctions. Not the singular Unit of the deist, but the plural Unity of the trinitarian, explains this. A subject without an object could not know. What is there to be known? Could not love. What is there to be loved? Could not rejoice. What is there to rejoice over? And the object cannot be the universe. The infinite and eternal object of God's infinite and eternal knowledge, love, and joy, cannot be his creation: because this is neither eternal, nor infinite. There was a time when the universe was not; and if God's self-consciousness and blessedness depends upon the universe, there was a time when God was neither self-conscious nor blessed. The objective God for the subjective God must, therefore, be very God of very God, begotten not made, the eternal Son of the eternal Father.
The same line of reasoning applies to the third trinitarian person, but there is no need of going through with it. The history of opinion shows, that if the first two eternal distinctions are conceded, there is no denial of the reality and eternity of the third. [7]
The analogue derived from the nature of finite personality and self-consciousness has one great advantage--namely, that it illustrates the independence of the Divine personality and self-consciousness. The later pantheism (not the earlier of Spinoza) constructs a kind of trinity, but it is dependent upon the universe. God distinguishes Himself from the world, and thereby finds the object required for the subject. But this implies either that the world is eternal, or else, that God is not eternally self-conscious. The Christian trinitarianism, on the contrary, finds all the media and conditions of self-consciousness within the Divine Essence. God distinguishes himself from himself, not from the universe. The eternal Father beholds himself in the eternal Son, his alter ego, the "express image of his own person" (Heb. i. 3). God does not struggle gradually into self-consciousness, as in the Hegelian scheme, by the help of the universe. Before that universe was in existence, and in the solitude of his own eternity and self-sufficiency, he had within his own essence all the media and conditions of self-consciousness. And after the worlds were called into being, the Divine personality remained the same immutable and infinite self-knowledge, unaffected by anything in his handiwork.