Inspiration
We begin the Creed by saying, “I believe
in one God,” but then at once we go on to say much more than this. We go on to state that God is Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. There is in God
something analogous to “society”. He
is not a single person, loving himself alone, nor a self-contained monad or
“The One”. He is triunity: three
equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing
movement of mutual love.
Why believe that God is three? Is it not easier to believe simply in the
divine unity, as the Jews and the Mohammedans do? Certainly it is easier. The doctrine of the Trinity stands before
us as a challenge. It is, in
Vladimir Lossky’s words, “ a cross for human ways
of thought”, and it requires from us a radical act of metanoia--not merely a gesture of formal assent, but a true
change of mind and heart.
Why, then, believe in God as
Trinity? In earlier chapters of The
Orthodox Way, Bishop Kallistos teaches that the two most helpful ways
of entry into the divine mystery are to affirm that God is personal and that God is love –two notions which imply
sharing, and reciprocity. First, a
“person” is not at all the same as an “individual.” In isolation, none of us is an authentic
person but merely an individual, a bare unit as recorded in the
census. Each becomes a real person
only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for
them and in them. There can be no
man, as it has been rightly said, until there are at least two men in
communication. The same is true,
secondly of love. Love cannot exist
in isolation; Self-love is the negation of love. As Charles Williams shows to such
devastating effect in his novel Descent
into Hell, self-love is hell; for, carried to its ultimate conclusion,
self-love signifies the end of all joy and all meaning. Hell is not other people; hell is myself cut off from others in self-centeredness.
God is far better than the best that we
know in ourselves. At the very heart
of the divine life, from all eternity God knows himself as “I and Thou” in
a threefold way and He rejoices continually in this knowledge. All, then, that is implied in our limited
understanding of the human person, this we affirm also of God the Trinity,
infinitely more than we can ever imagine.
Personhood and love signify life,
movement, discovery. So the doctrine of the Trinity means that
we should think of God in terms that are dynamic rather than static. God is not just a unit but a union, not
just unity but community. There is
in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. For our images of the Trinitarian God we
should look rather to the wind, the running water, to the unrestng flames
of fire. A favorite analogy for the
Trinity has always been that of three torches burning with a single flame. But in the end the least misleading icon
is to be found not in the physical world outside us, but in the human
heart. The best analogy is that with
which we began: our experience of caring intensely for another person, and
of knowing that our love is returned.
Taken from: The Orthodox Way, by Father Kallistos Ware, St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY,
1986
