Yesterday we tossed out the half-baked idea that the principle of our peculiar capacity for insight might be anchored and mirrored all the way up and into the Godhead.
This goes back to another brainwave, that anything we can do God can both do and do better -- especially the things that define us as human such as freedom, rationality, intersubjectivity, creativity, beauty, et al.
Now clearly, in all of creation human beings and human beings alone have this immaterial capacity for insight, to "see within."
From the human perspective, one of the effects of the Incarnation is to provide man with insight into who he is (the Image) and what he could be (the Likeness). And not just in a good way, because it also reveals man to be a deicidal maniac, and it doesn’t get worse than that. But that's the result of a privation, and we're talking about the upside:
Christ reveals to us, and we see in Christ, that perfect “image of God” after which we are fashioned, and which attracts us like a magnet.
Here Clément is speaking of the Divine Attractor at the toppermost of the vertical spectrum, and toward which this hierarchy is ordered; obviously there can be no hierarchy without a final term, otherwise our telovator not only doesn’t go to the top floor, but everything collapses to the basement, thereby forever swaddling us in absurdity and tenure.
All of this is orthodox, more or less. That Christ provides man with ultimate insight into both himself and God is not contested. The question is whether the Son is the “insight” of the Father, and that sounds suspect. Half-baked. However, I do vaguely recall some of the early Fathers saying something similar. I can’t remember details, but I do know where to find them.
First of all, God goes to a great deal of trouble to correct possible misinterpretations of monotheism. For example, it is not to be confused with monism, to say nothing of pantheism (which is still one God), nor an impersonal acosmism (also one God, but with no one there to know him).
Christianity doesn't deny this mere oneness, but goes beyond or perhaps “inside” it to reveal “a mysterious exchange at the heart of the Deity”:
In God himself the One does not exclude the Other, it includes it. The Unity of God… is not solitude enclosed in itself, but rather fullness of communion. And thereby the source of all communion (emphasis mine).
The reason I emphasize that last part is to highlight what I said above about anything we can do God doing better, in this case intersubjectivity. Like the insight to which it is related, intersubjectivity is one of our most mysterious capacities, so it is not a big leap for me to accept the idea that it may be traced all the way up into the Godhead.
As I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter how intelligent a creature is, for if we aren’t intersubjective we aren’t human. You could say it is the crack where the divinity gets in.
Which also highlights the ontological centrality of love in all of this, for knowledge always rides shotgun with love. Put conversely, a thinker not in love with Truth is a menace to society at best, a monster or demon at worst. More generally, "intellect minus truth" is at once unthinkable and a pathway to worldly success.
Now, one of the reasons I blog is to find out what I think. Maybe God does something similar, only from all eternity. For "the Son"
is called Logos (Word) because he is, in relation to the Father, what the word is to the mind… The Son makes known the nature of the Father quickly and easily, because everything begotten is an unspoken definition of the one who begot it (Gregory Nazianen).
So, we humans can gain insight in time, but God is eternal insight itself: insight into himself, or rather, his Other, as alluded to above.
But this eternal insight proceeds in two directions: if the Son is the Father’s insight, the Father is the Son’s, both in the Holy Spirit (and vice versa):
only the Son knows the Father as the Father knows the Son, and as they are known by the Holy Spirit….
Indeed, these Three who are only One know themselves, and are known by one another.
So, lots of insight to go 'round.
Back to our intersubjectivity: it arises in the context of early attachments, and represents the interior bond between people, or the “bridge” between subjects.
What about God? The Spirit is said to be the “bond of the Son and the Father” and “is himself a Person,” for “nothing in God can be impersonal.”
This suggests that a dualism in God is simultaneously not enough and too much, for a third term is required to avoid a static or closed dualism. Down here we know dualism is a nonstarter, just as is monism. Nevertheless, our Finest Minds generally pick one or the other as a first principle, when a third option is literally staring us in the face. Boo!
In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton highlight the importance of establishing a strict monotheism before the revelation of the Trinity, otherwise man would misinterpret it and descend back into polytheism:
It would actually have been dangerous openly to proclaim the Son while the divinity of the Father was not fully acknowledged, and then, before the divinity of the Son was accepted, to add as it were the extra burden of the Holy Spirit (Clément).
Obviously, people still have difficulty wrapping their minds around this, but it’s kind of important, nor does it help to simply characterize it as an impenetrable Mystery. It’s a Mystery alright, but a Mystery is a translucent window, not an opaque wall.
What does this trinitarian mystery tell us about the world? Well, it
constitutes the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the Unity. From the Trinity comes all unification and all differentiation.
In case you were wondering about all this unity and diversity and how they relate. Which is only the first question of philosophy.
Father beyond us, Son with us, Holy Spirit in us. Each of these prepositions signifies a relation, and now we’re really getting somewhere, because God doesn’t so much “have” relations but is relation as such, i.e., irreducible substance-in-relation.
In short, there was no time that God was not in relation, and no relation that doesn’t share the underlying substance.
Reducing this to a single Word, I suppose we could say love, or that Lover-Beloved-Love are as inseparable as Knower-Known-Knowledge.
Okay, but what about God’s insight? Hmm. What is a moment of insight but a sudden ah-ha experience, as when we get the joke? Best I can do:
In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us (Eckhart).
In case you were wondering where humor comes from -- another one of those inexplicable human capacities that God can do better.
(All passages except that last one taken from the Coon Classic The Roots of Christian Mysticism, by Olivier Clément https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Christian-Mysticism-Patristic-Commentary/dp/1565484851/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TC0P441Y7FGD&keywords=olivier+clement&qid=1672261617&s=books&sprefix=olivier%2520clement%2Cstripbooks%2C149&sr=1-1.)
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