The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  For thought cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning. Let your thought travel ever so far backward you cannot get beyond the was, and however you may strain and strive to see what is beyond the Son, you will find it impossible to get back further than the beginning?34

  What lies behind or beyond the universe is inconceivable to us. When we try to think of its “Creator” our minds simply seize up. But we could see signs and traces of God in our world. Reviving Philo’s distinction between God’s essential nature (ousia) and his “activities” (energeiai) in the world, Basil insisted that we could never know God’s ousia; indeed, we should not even speak of it. Silence alone is appropriate for what lies beyond words. But we could form an idea about the divine “energies” that have, as it were, translated the ineffable God into a human idiom: the incarnate Word and the immanent divine presence within us that scripture calls the Holy Spirit.35

  To show Christians that Father, Son, and Spirit were not three distinct “Gods,” Basil formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. At first Christians thought that Jesus, the incarnate Logos, and the Holy Spirit were two separate divine beings. But Paul had explained that they were one and the same: “This Lord is the Spirit.”36 Because they were divine forces, Logos and Spirit were not finite or discrete like the beings of our ordinary experience. Over time Christians realized that because the divine energies they experienced in the rituals and practices of the church were indefinable and illimitable, “Logos” and “Spirit” must refer to the same divine power. God was not the sort of being that was defined by number or extension, so Father, Son, and Spirit were not three separate “gods.” Pagans thought of their “gods” as members of the cosmos, with separate personalities and functions, but the Christian God was not that sort of being. When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.”37 We think of the beings we know as single items or collections of different items. But God is not like that. Again, the absolute ineffability of the divine was the key to understanding the Trinity. The reason the Trinity is not a logical or numerical absurdity is because God is not a being that can be restricted to such human categories as number.

  The Trinity has been very puzzling to Western Christians, but it has been central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality.38 In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a mythos, because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos, and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience.39 The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being.

  When they presented the Trinity to their new converts after the initiation of baptism, the three Cappadocians distinguished between the ousia of a thing, its inner nature, which made it what it was, and its hypostases, its external qualities. Each one of us has an ousia that we find very difficult to pin down but that we know to be the irreducible essence of our personality. It is what makes us the person we are, but it is very difficult to define. We try to express this ousia to the outside world in various hypostases—our work, offspring, possessions, clothes, facial expressions, and mannerisms, which can give outsiders only a partial knowledge of our inner, essential nature. Language is a very common hypostasis: my words are distinctively my own, but they are not the whole of me; they nearly always leave something unsaid. So in God there was, as it were, a single, divine self-consciousness that remained unknowable, unnameable, and unspeakable. But Christians had experienced this ineffability in hypostases that had translated it into something more accessible to limited, sense-bound, time-bound human beings. The Cappadocians sometimes substituted the term prosopon (“face,” “mask”) for hypostasis; the word also meant a facial expression or a role that an actor had chosen to play. When prosopon was translated into Latin, it became persona, the “mask” used by an actor that enabled the audience to recognize his character and contained a sound-enhancing device that made him audible.

  But nobody was required to “believe” this as a divine fact. The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a musterion because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine. Basil always distinguished between the kerygma of the Church (its public message) and its dogma, the inner meaning of the kerygma, which could be grasped only after long immersion in liturgical prayer.41 The Trinity was a prime example of dogma, a truth that brought us up against the limits of language but could be suggested by the symbolic gestures of the liturgy and the silent practice of hesychia. The initiation consisted of a spiritual exercise that was explained to new mystai after their baptism in a liturgical context. They were instructed to keep their minds in continuous motion, swinging back and forth between the One and the Three. This mental discipline would enable them gradually to experience within themselves the inner balance of the threefold mind.42 Gregory of Nazianzus explained the kind of ekstasis this produced:

  No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I see the Three together, I see but one Torch, and cannot divine or measure the undivided light.43

  Trinity was not unlike a mandala, the icon of concentric circles that Buddhists visualize in meditation to find within themselves an ineffable “center” that pulls the scattered aspects of their being into harmony. Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine. It is probably because most Western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.

  The dogma of Trinity also symbolized the kenosis that Christians glimpsed at the heart of being. Each persona of the Trinity defers to the others; none is sufficient unto itself. It is, perhaps, easier to express this in a pictorial image. In Orthodox Christianity, the icon has a dogmatic function that expresses the inner truth of a doctrine, and a great icon can have the same status as scripture.44 One of the most famous icons of all time is The Old Testament Trinity by the fifteenth-century Russian painter Alexander Rublev, which has become an archetypal image of the divine in the Orthodox world.45 It is based on the story of Abraham and the three strangers, whom Rublev depicts as angels, messengers of the unknowable God. Each represents one of the Trinitarian “persons;” they look interchangeable and can be identified only by their symbolically colored garments and the emblem behind each one. Abraham’s table has become an altar, and the elaborate meal he prepared has been reduced to the Eucharistic cup. The three angels sit in a circle, emblem of perfection and infinity, and the viewer is positioned on the empty side of the table. Immediately Rublev suggests that Christians can experience the truth of the Trinity in the Eucharistic liturgy, in communion with God and one another, and—recalling the Genes
is story—in a life of compassion. The central angel representing the Son immediately attracts our attention, yet he does not return our gaze but looks toward the Father, the angel on his right. Instead of returning his regard, the Father directs his attention to the figure at the right of the painting, whose gaze is directed within. We are thus drawn into the perpetual circling motion described by Gregory of Nazianzus. This is not an overbearing deity, demanding exclusive loyalty and total attention to himself. We meet none of the prosopoi head-on; each refers us to the other in eternal personal dispossession.

  There is no selfhood in the Trinity.46 Instead there is silence and kenosis. The Father, the ground of being, empties itself of all that it is and transmits it to the Son, giving up everything, even the possibility of expressing itself in another Word. Once that Word has been spoken, the Father no longer has an “I” and remains forever silent and unknowable. There is nothing that we can say about the Father, since the only God we know is the Son. At the very source of being is the speechless “nothingness” of Brahman, Dao, and Nirvana, because the Father is not another being and resembles nothing in our mundane experience. The Father confounds all our notions of personality and, since the Father is presented in the New Testament as the end of the Christian quest, this becomes a journey to no place, no thing, and no one. In the same way, the Son, our only access to the divine, is merely an eikon of the ultimate reality, which remains, as the Upanishads insisted, “ungraspable.” Like any symbol, the Son points beyond itself to the Father, while the Spirit is simply the atman of the Father and the “we” between Father and Son. We cannot pray to the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included.

  The Christians of Western Europe arrived at a similar understanding of the Trinity by a more psychological route, charted by Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa.47 Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine had experienced a restless dissatisfaction that drove him from one philosophia to another. He tried materialism, hedonism, and Manichaeism (a Gnostic Christian sect) before he discovered Neoplatonism, which burst upon him, he recalled later, in a blaze of light and saved him from despair. Like his contemporaries, Augustine was appalled by the instability of the material world, which seemed to tremble on the brink of nothingness. At first he fought shy of Christianity. He found the idea of the incarnation offensive and was disappointed by the literary quality of the Bible. But his reading of Paul and the counsel of Ambrose, the saintly bishop of Milan (339–97), led to a dramatic conversion when “the light of steadfast trust poured into my heart, and all the shadows of hesitation fled away.”48 Apart from Saint Paul, no other Western theologian has been more influential than Augustine in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity. We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity because of his Confessions, a memoir that revealed his fascination with the working of the human mind that is also evident in his treatise On the Trinity.

  Augustine fully understood the implications of the new creation doctrine that had rendered God unknowable. In one of the most famous passages of The Confessions, he made it clear that the study of the natural world could not give us information about God:

  Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I was without [foris]; and there I sought you, plunging unformed as I was into the fair things that you have formed and made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by the things that would not have been, were they not in you.49

  God was “within” but Augustine could not find him because he was “outside himself” (foris). As long as he confined his quest to the external world, he remained trapped in the fragile mutability that so disturbed him.50 When he questioned the physical world about God, the earth, the sea, the sky, and the heavenly bodies all replied, “I am not he, but it is he that made me.”51 But when he asked, “What, then, do I love in loving my God?”52 Augustine knew that, like the Upanishadic sages, he could only answer, “neti… neti”:

  No physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiancy of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine; no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can conceive corporal embrace.53

  But God was all these things “to my inner man. There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt. … This is what I love in loving my God.”54

  Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an eikon within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype. If we looked within, we would discover a triad in our minds in the faculties of memory (memoria), understanding (intellectus), and will or love (voluntas) that gave us an insight into the triune life of God. Augustine was fascinated by memory. It was far more than the faculty of recollection but comprised the whole mind, conscious and unconscious, and was the source of our mental life in the same way as the Father was the ground of being. When he contemplated memoria, Augustine was filled with awe: “It is something to be shuddered at, my God, a deep and endless multiplicity.”

  What, then, am I, my God? What manner of creature am I? A life unconstant, manifold and utterly unmeasured. In the countless fields and grots and caverns of my memory, full beyond counting with countless kinds of things … I range, flitting this way and that. I go as deep in as I can, and nowhere is there an end; such is the force of memory. Such is the force of life in a man that lives this mortal life!55

  Memory gave us intimations of infinity, but to encounter the divine, it had to strain beyond itself to the intellectus, the place where the soul could encounter God in deepest intimacy.

  When Augustine spoke of “intellect,” he meant something different from a modern intellectual. Intellectus was not simply the faculty of logic, calculation, and argument.56 In the ancient world, people saw “reason” as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our powers of discursive rationality (ratio) and on the other by intellectus, a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called buddhi. So intellect was higher than reason, but without it we would not be able to reason at all. Left to itself, the human mind was incapable of looking dispassionately at the mutable beings of our world and making any kind of valid judgment about them, because it was itself fraught with impermanence and change. Augustine had only been able to recognize the inconstancy and impermanence of the world that had so troubled him before his conversion, because the Platonists told him that he had within him an innate standard of stability, a light within, “unchangeable and true that was above my changeable mind.”57 There was, therefore, a realm in the psyche where the mind was able to reach beyond itself. That was the intellect, the mind’s acies, its “cutting edge,”58 and scintilla (“spark”).59

  So when Augustine looked into the depths of his mind, he saw that it was modeled on the Trinity, the archetype of all being. In the human mind, memory generates the intellect, as the Father begets a Word that expresses the Father’s essential nature. In the human mind, the intellect seeks out and loves the self it finds in the caverns of the memory that generated it, just as memory seeks out and loves the self-knowledge encapsulated in the intellect. This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves.60

  For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself.61 In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word
for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any mythos, it would remain incredible.

  Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year.

  This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself. It was experienced most acutely in the sexual act, when our reasoning powers are swamped by passion, God is forgotten, and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.