Trinity as Ontology — A Diagram

In Honest to God I offer an ontological interpretation of the Trinity. Ontology is the philosophical category concerned with being or existence. I suggest that the Trinity can be seen as a model of the process of creation. I suggest that the Creator (God) represents the source of being, that the Christ represents the whole of Creation (all that has being), and that the Holy Spirit represents the interaction (Love) between the two. This is about things coming into being from nothingness (mystery, God) and eventually flowing back into that nothingness. I did not include a diagram of this in the book. Here is what I have come up with now.

Note that there is a line-for-line correspondence between the left and right columns (parent-child, creator-creation, one-many, etc.), which indicate some polarities (sets of opposites) in the dynamic between nonbeing and being. The center column characterizes the dynamic of nonbeing-being without correspondence to the specific polarities of the outer columns.

This is not just a clever conceptual construction. It is rooted in mystical insight and experience across religious traditions. Within material existence (being), we experience ourselves to be separate and distinct from all other beings, but, in deep mystical experience, we come to identify completely with the infinite and eternal as a unity that encompasses all things. The relationship of these two poles of identity (separation and unity) is experienced as something ineffable that many mystics have called love. Here the word love points far beyond the infatuation of romantic love while picking up on the connectional and relational aspects of that more familiar experience of love.

This interpretation in no way exhausts the meanings of the doctrine of the Trinity.

© Copyright 2024 John Speers