by Richard Rohr
Atomic Bonds
As I have expressed, this divine dance takes on a centripetal force, pulling the energy in, but then it becomes this centrifugal force, moving the energy out—and that is our universe: everything; no exceptions.
Everything came forth from this divine dance, and our new appreciation of Trinity is giving us a new grounding for interfaith understanding. It’s giving us a marvelous new basis for appreciating how this mystery is embedded as the code: not just in our religious constructs, but in everything that exists.
If there is only one God, and if there is one pattern to this God, then the wonderful thing is that we can expect to find that pattern everywhere. I believe one reason so many theologians are interested in Trinity right now is that we’re finding quantum physics, biology, and cosmology are finally at a level of development that our understanding of everything from atoms to galaxies to organisms is affirming, confirming, and allowing us to use the old Trinitarian language, and now with a whole new level of appreciation.
A whole new level of, “My God! It just might be true!”
Imagine this: the deepest intuitions of our poets and mystics and Holy Writ are aligning with findings on the leading edges of science and empirical discovery. When inner and outer worlds converge like this, something beautiful is afoot—the reversal of a centuries-long lovers’ quarrel between science and spirituality, mind and heart.
What physicists and contemplatives alike are confirming is that the foundational nature of reality is relational; everything is in relationship with everything else. As a central Christian mystery, we’ve been saying this from the very beginning while still utterly failing to grasp its meaning.
Even though, as confessional Christians, none of us would have denied the Trinitarian mystery, in essence we did. As described earlier, for all practical purposes, those of us raised Christian grew up with a monarchical God, a Pharaoh sitting at the top of a great pyramid. Right?
We grew up as functioning monarchists…while the revolution of Trinity remained humbly hidden in plain sight.
“Oh yeah, I know God is three persons, but what does that really mean?”
We reduced divine function and flow to a largely mathematical problem. What the mystics helped me understand became key for me: let go of starting with the One and then by some impossible sleight-of-hand, some legerdemain, trying to make God into Three.
No. Start with the Three and know that this is the only nature of the One.
Start with the mystery of relationship and relatedness; this is where the power is! It’s exactly what the atomic scientists and astrophysicists are telling us today.
Creator and Destroyer of Worlds
Not thirty minutes from where I live in Albuquerque is the National Atomic Museum. Of the four atomic bombs that were created at Los Alamos, we dropped one just south of Albuquerque on July 16, 1945. We dropped a second one on Hiroshima, and a third one on Nagasaki. The casing of the fourth one is still right here in town. That brings this whole mystery so close to home for me—literally.
Isn’t it telling, and more than interesting, that the basic building block of our entire physical universe is what we call the atom? And the atom is most simply understood as the orbiting structure of three particles—proton, electron, and neutron—in constant interplay with one another.
The further irony is that Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atom bomb,” named the final stage and site of its New Mexico detonation Trinity. He later said that although this clear choice of name was not completely conscious to him, it was probably inspired by John Donne’s metaphysical poem “Holy Sonnet #14.”
Donne’s meditation here invokes a kind of trinity—but is it the Trinity that we’ve been exploring? I’m not sure the answer is completely clear. This is a poem I find, in places, both beautiful and disturbing:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.81
Such contrasting images!
As one museum dedicated to science and art noted in their reflection piece about the Trinity test site,
“Holy Sonnet #14” [begins,] “Batter my heart, three-personed God….” In that sonnet, the speaker addresses God directly and strong paradoxical emotions surface, all in the context of an extended warlike metaphor. Coursing through the poetry is violent imagery (“batter my heart,” “overthrow me,” “break, blow, burn…”) paired with pleas to be healed and renewed (“seek to mend,” “make me new”), evoking a sense of struggle, an internal war.82
When Oppenheimer was creating his bomb at Los Alamos, we were at war—as we often are. And it seems that he himself was locked in an internal battle—hoping that an instrument of death-dealing could somehow bring life; that an army, prepared to usurp towns themselves and inflict martial law on United States citizens, if necessary, could bring peace at home and abroad by their powers of annihilation.83
Perhaps the most audacious contradiction of all is Oppenheimer’s embrace of a kind of shadow trinity as the very name of his test site. I cannot help but recall the dark places where Christianity, under the influence of empire, has lost its way. When not ignoring Trinity altogether, we’ve instead debased our telling of this Three-in-One as a command-and-control caricature: distinct from the biblical Trinity or mystical Trinity, this is a hierarchical delegation where a single-minded father-ruler demands that an expediently-dispatched son use immense power (or force) to batter and break humanity.
Tragically, this is the vision of God that wins out all too often. And—from abusive relationships to the creation of astonishing weapons of mass destruction—this vision has consequences.
Oppenheimer wasn’t blind to these consequences. It seems he feared that in breaking open the atom, they enacted an undoing or reversal of trinity, destabilizing the tripartite atom and disrupting the source code of reality. It’s no wonder that, upon iitnessing its awful first blast, he immediately invoked the Hindu deity Vishnu, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”84
Our imaginations, applied to worlds “above” and “below,” can be used for such potent life and death.85 This is part of the mystery of freedom that God grants us. This particular mystery of exploding power, as atomic scientists have told me, is not found in the protons. It’s not found in the electrons, or neutrons either.
Believe it or not, the explosive power is found in the interaction between them. It’s called nuclear power, and it can change everything.
Does this put the Trinity in perspective for you? We’re not talking gobbledygook in trying to describe the Triune mystery, though you can be forgiven if you think it sounds like that, especially in my struggling formulations. Theologians and contemplatives describing the Three-in-One dance are not unlike physicists describing the mystery of atomic energy: they say it’s not only stranger than it sounds, it’s even stranger than we can normally understand.86
The Perennial Tradition has often said, “As above, so below.” (The Perennial Tradition gathers traits common in the world’s wisdom lineages.) “God in his heaven” directly impacts things “here on earth below.” We see echoes of this reciprocal language even in the
Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”87 If we update this language for the quantum era—moving from the “Great Chain of Being” to the “Nested Holarchy of Being,” as the philosopher Ken Wilber puts it,88 we can rightly speak of As within, so without. If all reality is a holon and has a fractal character, as physicists are also telling us, then each part contains and mirrors the whole. If the cosmos as we know it originates from a “big bang”—from a “Let there be”—that means that one point just explodes with life and gives birth to the many lives.
When does this many cease to be one?
When did this one ever not contain the many?
Never! This is what the relational pattern of the universe is teaching us, from Godhead to geochemistry and everything in between.
The shape of the cosmos—quasar to quark—is triune.
How do we practice this presence—of reality? Scientists and mystics alike will tell us: Be present! Experiment! Stay curious. This is Contemplation 101. Let go of what you “think” is your intelligence center—because what you think is your intelligence cannot understand the atom, cannot understand the galaxies, and cannot understand what is birthing and animating all existence.
This momentous truth can occasionally be caught but not easily taught.
We’re standing in the middle of an awesome mystery—life itself!—and the only appropriate response before this mystery is humility. If we’re resolved that this is where we want to go—into the mystery, not to hold God and reality but to let God and reality hold us—then I think religion is finally in its proper and appropriate place.
Aristotle and Boethius: The Price of an Invading Noun
When we built on Aristotle’s belief that substance is a higher and preferred category than relationship (to put it another way, that nouns are better than verbs), we inherited an absolutely non-Trinitarian notion of the human person that was autonomous, static, and without a metaphysical capacity for union with our own beings, much less the divine nature of God.89 In this metaphysically hamstrung version of reality, we were not created in “the image and likeness of God,” after all!
We have spent two thousand years of ineffective spirituality trying to overcome this foundational incompatibility between divinity and humanity, as reflected in everything from dense systematic tomes to awkwardly-intrusive “evangelism” tracts proposing unbridgeable gulfs, their medium and message the antithesis of relationship.
Although Jesus broke through and gave us the truth theologically, we have not grounded it theologically. We did not have an underlying philosophy (and thus anthropology) to back up relational belonging and mutual participation as anything more than soft sentiment or a pious hope.
Boethius (480–524), whose Consolations of Philosophy had great influence throughout the entire medieval period, acted as a sort of bridge between classical Western culture and Christianity. He defined the human being as “an individual substance of a rational nature,” and in some ways this definition has persisted to this day. There is no evidence Boethius was influenced by the doctrine of the Trinity, and it shows.
What thus won out in our entire Western anthropology was human individuality and human rationality, instead of foundational relationality and an honoring of the intuitive nature of the human person, which is healthy religion’s natural habitat. A Trinitarian theology would have told us that human personhood is a subsistent relation at its core, generating, in fact, relationships of unconditional love with the same standing as the persons of the Trinity. This is precisely the best description of what we mean when we quote Genesis to say that we are created “in the image and likeness of God.” But we did not build on this Trinitarian grounding.
The fallout of privileging “substance” over relationship is difficult to overestimate. The entire subsequent tradition had a very hard time giving any solid, inherent foundation to the meaning of divine union, holiness, salvation, or even incarnation. This is a huge price to pay; the consequence is an eviscerated Christian theology, a hollowed-out shell known for little else than a soft and sentiment-laden worldview.
Scotus and Merton: Time to Re-verb
In order to be vital, we must be able to demonstrate a metaphysical core for Christian spirituality and holiness—not merely a behavioral, psychological, or moral one. A Trinitarian metaphysic provides just such a vibrant and inherent core. Trinity is and must be our stable, rooted identity that does not come and go, rise and fall. This is the rock of salvation.
And of course, it’s so interesting that this stable root is rather perfectly mirrored in the three particles of every atom orbiting and cycling around one another—the basic physical building block of the universe. What happens if these atoms are intentionally destabilized? Precisely a bomb of death and destruction.
In many permutations that have led us to modern individualism, most Christians still have retained a more “pagan” understanding of the human person, almost totally reversing the original Trinitarian use of the word person—as one who is a dynamic sounding-through—to an autonomous self that, at the end of the day, is kin to nothing.
What would it look like to rebuild on a Trinitarian metaphysic and recreate a truly human full personhood?
It would start by recognizing that each person is created by God as unique and irreplaceable—one to whom God has transferred and communicated God’s divine image in relationship, and who can, in turn, communicate and reflect that image to other created beings. Each and every one of us. Merton discovered this solid grounding in a Trinitarian and “personalist” philosophy and theology in the work of a thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher-theologian, John Duns Scotus. A deep-dive into Scotus allowed Merton to move to the heights of contemplative awareness. Most do not get to enjoy this core; salvation and holiness become just a wish, a hope, at best a verbal affirmation that “I and the Father are one.” But all too often—in contemporary religion and spirituality alike—we have no basis in consistent, fleshed-out thinking to really believe this.
Thus the vast majority of Christians have not been able to overcome the gap between Divine Personhood and human personhood. It largely became a matter of trying to overcome it by a magical notion of sacraments if you were Catholic or Orthodox, or a transactional notion of “strong belief” or moral behavior if you were Protestant. But in either case, there was no inherent capacity for divine union that could be evoked and built upon in our very soul. Thus, it was consistently a very unstable core for most Christians, often degenerated into a kind of make-believe, if we’re honest.
The Perfect Freedom of God
This solid core of a soul, entirely relationally created, is fully known and fully loved only in God—and even as God, as daring as this sounds.
To put it concretely, we are included in the self-knowledge and self-love of God from the very beginning. Read this stirring, ancient apostolic letter (lightly paraphrased), as if for the first time, and know this is not just my idea:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love.
God destined us for adoption as holy children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of the divine will, to the praise of the glorious grace that God freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
In Christ we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us.
With all wisdom and insight, God has made known to us the mystery of the divine will, according to God’s good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.
In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of the One
who accomplishes all things according to Divine counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.
In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of Divine glory.90
Personhood is not a static notion, but an entirely dynamic and relational one (per sonare) that is shared between the divine persons and all human persons—by reason and gift of their creation. Not by reason of any later joining, realizations, sacraments, or affirmations, although these are needed and often profoundly help us return to our original identity in God.
All human personhood implies a process of coming to be in love!
Sin is every refusal to move in the direction of our deepest identity as love.
Any definition of the person as a substance instead of a relationship tends to leave out the movement, growth, and mutual mirroring that moves us forth in existence.
Selfhood is thus always hidden in a promising darkness, an opaque revelation that we can slowly allow, trust, and lend ourselves to. This is the core of faith.
Based on Scotus’s notion of the perfect freedom of God, God initially knows and loves all possible “creatables” (creabilia) in Godself—which we Christians would call the Son, the Christ, the Logos—the Pattern that holds everything in potential and in essence.
But then, by a free act, God chooses some of these to come forth into existence as a this (person)!
God freely selects which of the possibilities come into existence, according to Scotus; this is God’s most perfect and free act of love, without any compulsion or sin problem to solve.
Thus, just like the Trinity, we are not a substance, but a relationship.
Always in the process of being loved and passing along love.
God knows and loves us before God wills us, and God’s free-willing of us is Trinity’s further act of unique subsistent relationship with us. We are loved into being, because love can only exist inside of freedom. This first, perfect, and totally free act of love is that God gratuitously chooses us to exist.