The Trinity in a Notshall

Another cold opening: 

The Son and Spirit must be "something different" from the Father, and the Father/Principle would not be perfect "if it did not, of itself, produce the terms that as terms are different from it" (Leithart).

 In a notshall,

"not" is essential to the life of God and our speaking of it, for the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. "Not" marks the "interval," the nonspatial but absolute distance between person and person" (emboldenment mine).

The Absolute includes this "absolute distance"? YES, and this distance facilitates the absolute relationship between the Persons, or the eternally en-thusiastic YES they share with one another:

This absolute difference is simultaneously an absolute intimacy of mutual perichoretic indwelling, but the perichoretic communion depends on the absolute difference, since an undifferentiated God is merely a union and not a com-union at all.

Not even a union, just a monistic blob with no possibility of blabbing between persons. Three's company but one's a cloud. Of eternally silent unknowability.

Monism is an attitude that violates half of the experience.

Or, two thirds, to be precise. But even then, it seems to me that experience has to be "of" something -- or someone -- that is not itself.

And as we said yesterday about the principle of time being found in the Trinity,

God begins as Father, moves as Son, completes as Spirit; God exists as "past," as "present," as "future" (Leithart, emphasis mine).

This is the eternal pattern, the AlphOmega of temporal creation; and why, as the Aphorist says,

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.

Leithart continues:

For just this reason and this reason only, the Creator is capable of creating while remaining entirely and utterly himself.... 

Just as the Father eternally gives himself wholly to the Son, so the Trinity eternally gives up having an exclusive hold on the divine property of existence, calling creatures to exist.

 And Here We Are. "Creation's history is"

"nothing other than the created image, extended in space and time, of that nothing/all of the love which in God the Trinity is the Word/Son of the Father..." (Piero Coda, in Leithart). 

 Nothing/All? We've gone this far. Why not?

nothing because he [the Son] receives his being from the love of the Father; all because the infinite fullness of the Father is fully reflected and expressed in him (ibid.).

 Expressed in another orthoparadoxical notshall,

The nothingness of love is the trinitarian grammar with which the book of creation is written (ibid.).

 That smells fumiliar:

The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide its proper syntax.

Let's sink into the abstract Now. What is it without a concrete relation to past and future?

The life of the triune God is not a "sheer point of presence" but "a life among persons" that is "constituted in a structure of relations" (ibid.).

Not a lifeless blob but endless blab. And to threepeat,

in God is a "'past and 'future,' which is identical with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit" (ibid.).

The teleological structure of time is built into the cake of being, and I am tempted to ask this guy if I can buy some pot from him.

We, of course, are "stretched between memory and desire" -- d'oh! -- or "between past and future on the knife-edge 'nothing' of the present moment.... Time is a dimension of our experiencing anything at all." It is

an objective, "architectural" feature of the world because it is the distension of the eternal Trinity in time.

With all due respect, Plato is wrong: "Time is not a moving image of motionless eternity," rather

Created time is a moving image of the dynamic, structured, infinitely mobile life of the Father who begets the Son, from whom the Spirit proceeds. It moves because it shares the infinitely mobile life of God (emphasis mine).

It is irreversible because it hurtles higgledy piggledy toward its own eternal fulfillment in God, or "is enclosed within the irreversible eternal ordered life of the Trinity." As Petey once whimsically put it in plain unglish,

light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow and falls in love with the productions of time. And thank-you, we said, thanking the man for this undertaking of mortality, for our daily lessons in evanescence, for this manifestivus for the restavus! 

Or in plain English, 

We live, move, and have being in time because we live, move, and have our being in the God who is Beginning, Middle, and End.... All that moves in time dances in the steps of the temporally ordered communion of Father, Son, and Spirit..., as the whence and wither of created time mirror and share the eternal life of God. 

And we're back to music. Leithart writes of the "music of spacetime," and  of how in Genesis "time is radically anti-presentist: "the Creator is to the creation as singer to a song. And there is no ongoing song except as the singer continues to sing.... the rhythm of created time is the rhythm of triune life."

Rhythm and Deus? In another book by Leithart called Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature, he writes of how

the present moment, like a musical note, is what it is because of what has gone before and is in turn shaped by what comes after, so that every present contains within itself traces of the past and seeds of the future.

A voice in my head is singing: There once was a note pure and easy / Playing so free like a breath rippling by. Play us out, Petey: