The Patterned Transrationality of the Trinity

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I'm reading this 400 page book on the Trinity called  Catholic Dogmatic Theology: A Synthesis, by Jean-Herve Nicolas.

I'm about three-fourths of the way through, and it is a good illustration of what happens when you try to analyze with the "left brain" what can really only be approached via the "right." 

(I put these in quotes for reasons alluded to yesterday, because any neurology is a function of ontology, AKA the real nature of things, which is to say, vertical & horizontal, celestial & terrestrial, transcendent & immanent, time & eternity, Hope & Crosby, boxers & briefs, et al.)

Two words: boxer briefs.

Correct you are, my discarnate friend. In short, we must never forget that the so-called complementarity principle applies to much more than wave-particle.

Wavicle.

Thaaat's right, Pedro. Thinking of the Godhead as a wavicle solves so many problems that truly, I want to slap my mama.

Say, can you do that for me? She hasn't been here for 30 years.

Sure, right after I kick Stalin in the nuts.

I don't usually prepare for a post, but last night I reviewed an essay by Norris Clarke called To Be Is to Be Substance-in-Relation, because this guy not only speaks for me, but is decidedly my kind of guy. Again, his approach solves so many theological conundrums with just a little tweak of the neuro-pneumatology. 

It also makes me wonder if the same idea is expressed differently in Bomford's The The Symmetry of God. Let us check, and even see if we might synthesize the two into a mega-complementarity. 

No index, so I'll have to flip. Ah, here we go: there's something on p. 128. Let's hope it fulfills expectations.

He notes that a raw description of the Trinity is "profoundly paradoxical," because how can one be three and vice versa? Anyone with a bare acquaintance with the everyday asymmetrical reasoning of Aristotle will rightly say, Nah brah, that is repugnant to logic.

Yes, but strange things are afoot in the Godhead, which calls for a strange logic:

Ontology failed to make rational what the doctrine of the Trinity asserted, that there could be absolutely and completely one, and yet be distinctly, also, three.  

Symmetric logic, however, has no difficulty with this problem whatever: indeed it is apt to impose such "amalgamations," even when the factual evidence denies it (emphasis mine).

What he means is that since humans by nature have access to a complementary form of logic, there will be a sense in which we cannot help seeing God in a trinitarian way (not necessarily literally, more on which later).

I was thinking last night that there are some additional conceptual tools that can help us penetrate the Trinity; we've mentioned complementarity and the bi-logic of symmetry + asymmetry, to which I would add intersubjectivity and fractal geometry. 

Regarding the former, note that in the immanent Trinity, 

Each person wholly indwells each other, and each is indwelt by each other. Thus between each pair within the Trinity the symmetric law of reflection is dominant, save only for "begetting" and "proceeding" [and begotten].

To say that each indwells the other is to say irreducible intersubjectivity. And to ask how God could be intersubjective is the wrong question, brah. 

Rather, how could he not be? For 1) human beings are irreducibly intersubjective or they are not human beings, 2) intersubjectivity is a perfection, not a privation, 3) man is the I. and L. of the Creator, so 4) this perfection must be eminently present in him.

As for the patterned transrationality of fractals, a thousand pictures are worth more than a single post, that last one even suggesting Incarnation or something (e.g., God's energies):