Part 4 of Truth in Apprehensible Reality & Reflections on the Unthinkable
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Trinity with the Son symbolized by the word "Verbum", Minoritenkirche, Tulln, Austria
There are a few reasons that we want to look at the Trinity through the Ontological Hierarchy. We've been thinking about Ultimate Reality lately, and the topics are directly related. It also hangs in the background of areas we frequent and want to clarify some logic. We'll finish with some thoughts for the bigger metaphysics project. But first, here's what we're not doing.
The Band makes no theological pretenses. Our perspective is Christian, but we reasoned out the Ontological Hierarchy without dogma. Just following what we can know and how we can know it to the necessary ends to solve Postmodern problems with the nature of reality. But the Band has been empirical and logical from the jump. It was only later that we saw homologies between the Bible and other epistemological frames of reference. Which led to the realization that Christian metaphysics perfectly align with the necessary structure of reality as known logically and empirically. And fill in those areas beyond that knowledge.
Some relevant preamble. Because of this, we keep personal Christianity out of the reasoning in our posts. Overtly, anyhow. It's not possible to completely escape your ideological perspective. And the idea that sacred and secular could be separated into two lives is demented beast nonsense anyhow. Unless the faith is fake. Anyhow, we always work outward from what we can know. Bottom-up, like the accretive experience of human being-in-the-world. The Ontological Hierarchy retains its religiously neutral terminology. Even "Logos" has some structural similarities with its origins in Greek philosophy.
Logical necessities are apparent from any perspective - how each reader accommodates the knowledge is up to them. Material level reality. Omni-nationalism. True diversity. It's why readers come from a range of non-Christian backgrounds, and we get more views from Asia than America. We just lay out the reasoning.
The link suggests the attribution to the great Song Dynasty painter is wrong. They give it to a Ming Zhe School artist influenced by Ma Yuan. These were self-conscious tradionalists reconnecting with the past after the disruption of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. The Band is Western in focus, but there are lots of other cultural treasures we appreciate and enjoy. Chinese painting is a fascinating diversion. With its own haunting sublime.
An organic culture with some grasp of logos is capable of apprehending the necessity of the Ultimate. And developing refined, sophisticated artistic forms. Source: the former West.
Obviously we can be harsh, and on moral questions, our Christian perspective is apparent. The harshness comes from the manifest mass stupidity that self-torpedoed the West. How could one who isn't ensorcelled look at the potential in Western culture, how it self-immolated through centuries of greed and inversion, and where it is now, and not be harsh? As for the morality, ideas like organic enculturation, bottom-up society, intrinsic moral drivers, etc. are historical facts and logically obvious. They are required for a high trust productive society. And the socio-morality of the West is Christian. It's best face comes from actual, faithful, application of Christian virtue. Its faceplants are all deviations from actual scriptural Christian Truth. We assume non-Western readers take these observations and apply them to their own socio-cultural contexts.
It's not unusual for the Band to use a piece of culture or a thinker to launch into more general speculations. The Trinity is a bit different. It's religious dogma, and that tends to fall under faith. Outside our usual lines of reasoning. And in those terms, it refers to Ultimate Reality - the part of the Ontological Hierarchy that is definitionally beyond our apprehension.
Hieronymus Bosch, The Ascent of the Blessed, panel from Visions of the Hereafter, 1505-15, oil on oak panel, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice.
Faith-based knowledge of Ultimate Reality in humanly meaningful terms don't make it any more logically conceivable or empirically observable in itself. How then, do we approach this? There's a reason we've shied away from Ultimate Reality until now.
This post will introduce the concept of the Trinity, since many today are unfamiliar with or confused by it. Including issues around theological thought in the current House of Lies ontological Flatland. Then we'll look at it through the terms of the Ontological Hierarchy and see how it fits with what and how we can know. Some non-theological insights about Ultimate Reality for the book will wrap it up.
The Trinity is the mainstream Christian concept of God as Being absolute in His unity, but having three personas or hypostases. [The Father or God the Father], [the Son, Word, Logos, or Jesus Christ], and [the Holy Spirit or Ghost]. It it upheld by every significant denomination and differentiates Christian theology from the other Abrahamic faiths - Islam and Judaism. Since we are disinterested in conventional theology, we'll frame it in our terminology [Note that this is not a claim that our terminology is somehow definitive. It isn't. It's an evolving description. And this is a test for it].
Here's the current working form. It oversimplifies, but holds up well as a basic heuristic.
It's developed it since this. We've noted that the relationships between levels needed work which is what we've been doing. The biggest advance has been the constinctive relationships between levels. Click for a post with more background explanation on this version. Click for part one and part two of the metaphysics book chapter where we work out constiction in Abstract and Material Reality.
This post will speculate on the upper regions. The lower region represents the turn from reality that defines the House of Lies. We've shown through many posts that this made the current collapse inevitable from the Enlightenment.
After working out the basic onto-epistemological relations, it became apparent that our own position as finite conscious beings in Material Reality had to be considered. It's one thing to see objective structures of truth in reality. It's another when people have the capacity to ignore truth for generations before the consequences start to bite. We took the term being-in-the-world from Heidegger for the complex ways we as conscious individuals interact with the reality we're born into. It's integrated, like the reality it happens in. We can break onto-epistemology down into neat graphic boxes for analytic purposes. But we encounter reality as one unified venue, where reason, observation, and faith work together.
Bringing us to a fundamental human condition. Our consciousness of reality is mediated through representation. Internally, and especially externally, where communication required conversion to semiotic codes. This was where Postmodern ideas that reality is all discourse came from. Our communicable experience of it is. But whether or not that has truth value is a matter of representational efficacy. Meaning some things are beyond apprehension or representation. And so are known through allegory and inference and on faith that this actually does correspond to something inherently incomprehensible.
We call it representational filtering. It's the one thing Poststructuralism got right. But representation doesn't replace reality, or we wouldn't exist. It complicates our understanding of it.
While it is fair to say we detest theology, it's also reductive. It's a certain attitude to theology that feeds corrosive, self-pwning vanity. In the simplest sense, theology is just knowledge of God.
Here's an uncontroversial source. We just wrote several paragraphs describing our own epistemological acceptance of faith as knowledge that Christian dogma is true. That is literally theology. It's even systematic. There are theological aspects to morally reasoning out a situation that isn't explicitly spelled out scripturally. Relying on prayer is an act of theology.
And a mainstream example of definition #3 from Notre Dame. It seems reasonable enough. Hardly worthy of ire. But note the explicitly Catholic framing. Putting aside any sneaky inversion and taken at face value, it proceeds logically within an assumed ontological foundation.
So to be accurate, what we detest is the categorically erroneous posture that human apprehension can draw definitive conclusions about the essential nature of Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality. Outside of tracing and applying logical consistencies between faith and what can be apprehended through logic and observation. It's the exact same auto-idolatry House of Lies secular transcendentalists fall into. Logic is precisely truthful within a frame of reference. That frame - even atheism, especially atheism - is taken on faith. Which is only a problem if the object of inquiry is ontologically prior to the inquisitor and his tools. And since God qua God is Ultimate Reality put into Christian terminology...
The two realities we just laid out explain this position.
1. Ontological priority order means the necessary conditions to permit logic and observation are not reducible to logic and observation. Any more than hammering a nail explains the integrated processes needed to turn ore into hammers [click for the relevant post from the currently stalled metaphysics book project].
The tl,dr is that logic collapses into infinite regression or recursion when trying to pin down ultimate origins. And observation is material and the material is accretive. There's no intrinsic limit to "what's next". But our being-in-the-world is logically and empirically resolvable to the limits of our discernment. Perceptually and rationally stable. Meaning these epistemological tools are reliably grounded in a Truth that exceeds them ontlogically. That's Ultimate Reality. Logic and observation point to the necessity of its "existence". It has to be real. But beyond that, they're blind. Hence faith.
2. Representational Filtering - our knowledge of every aspect of reality is representationally filtered. Reduced to logical applications of material signs. Observation and meaning. Abstract and Material Realities working practically together through physical vectors. And as equally incapable of approaching Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality as the human infocognition that it represents.
Methodologically. theology is abstract reasoning. Applied logic. And like any logic, able to assess truth claims within a closed frame of reference. Logic is only as good as its inputs. So any logical theology is building towers of reason on foundations taken on faith. This means the logical operations are ontologically downstream from the starting assumptions. And the operation by necessity cannot comment on the validity of its starting assumptions.
There are two possibilities. Accept reality and keep theological reasoning out of category error. Or spiral over fake claims that are intrinsically impossible.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1645-1652, marble, Santa Maria della Vittoria Rome
A note on mystical experience. We aren't talking about the kind of new age woo woo that only correlates with cat hoarding. Supernatural contact with the divine - either through visionary experience or actual mystical union. Like Bernini's visionary masterpiece.
These are real and add empirical components to Christianity. But they aren't universally experiences or explicable in rational terms, so we're leaving them aside.
Which brings us to the Trinity. This is a perfect example of a dogma held on faith but isn't explicitly stated in the same terms in the supporting Biblical passages. Not in a way that quashes low-wattage skepticism with a pithy wrap-up. Since we're operating outside a Christian frame, pass over the faith claims and adjudicate the argument on its critical merits. Compare the literal content of the supporting passages and dogma that was founded on them. So two apparent faith claims to keep separate, without which theological towers are as meaningful as Jenga ones. The Bible is True. And a credible interpretation can support an ironclad doctrine. Obviously, the Band accepts the former. Our allegory and entropy posts summarize the macro-analogy that convinces us. But is a credible interpretation ironclad doctrine?
This last question is disingenuous - at least in this case. Most critics or skeptics raise objections that fail ontologically. There are a few ways this goes, but they generally involve assuming Ultimate reality conforms to the existential parameters of Apprehensible Reality. It can't. The division of reality into levels or strata is an objective description of the coexistence of real truths with fundamentally different ontological parameters. Since we are describing reality as we can know it and what’s real is what’s true, this gives us different coexistent “realities”. And since reality is ultimately unified – as is clear in the coexistence of these truth standards – it’s more precise to think of them as levels within a whole.
This is a conceptual floor. It’s either self-evident or not explainable. But cognitive limits are irrelevant to reality. Pretending it's all subject to the same incoherent post-Enlightenment magic materialism gave us the House of Lies. We call that Flatland, and it's utterly self-crippled the ability of the West to face actual reality. Even in the face of societal collapse [click for a post on secular transcendence. It's the actual conceptual foundation beneath all whole Enlightenment inversion path to the House of Lies. The self-evident lie that timeless absolutes exist materially despite logical and empirical impossibility].
The biggest problems with conceptual representation come from confusing the parameters of the representation with the parameters of the real thing being represented. Call it representational conditioning, because it's mostly unconscious. It comes from having to express something immaterial or transcendent in material terms. The error is self-evident because the [realization that the thing needs to be materially represented] = [demonstrated knowledge that they aren't the same]. But because the representation is how the concept was conveyed, it becomes definitive in more general ways. It conditions how the concept is conceptualized in itself.
All a conceptual representation is trying to do is get an idea across. It's a form of analogy - something that can be shown calling to mind something that can't. The Trinity is complex and seems paradoxical, because it can't be represented in its entirety. A diagram or a descriptive text can only communicate analogous relationships via something utterly different. It it absolutely not a claim that this diagram or text is an exhaustive and perfect recreation of the Trinity itself. In fact, the visual or logical paradoxes make a statement about the limits of representation as a manifestation of an intangible. It tells us that resolving the concept with full transparency is beyond it. Material and Abstract Realities cannot support Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality.
It's analogous to how Abstract absolutes manifest imperfectly in Abstract terms Materially. Yet we don't claim the limits of carpenters' tools disproves math. That would be ontologically inverted.
Henri Adrien Tanoux, The Next Commission, 1898, oil on canvas, private collection
Almost like thinking painting lofty personifications transmit those qualities onto the client...
It's not a small problem.
The way to use conceptual representation is to focus on the concept. Then instead of pretending that the differences between the two disprove the concept, think about what they mean. A tripartite relationship of similarity and difference indicates Ultimate Reality presents conditions we are not infocognitively equipped for. This is nothing new to readers conceptually. Just represented differently than usual.
To show how representation oversteps its boundaries change the diagram. Think of it in 3D - with the three aspects coming "forward" conceptually. Or "up and out". Only not physical-spatially. Ontologically.
Being God on an Ultimate level is the Same. Ontologically parameterized representations / manifestations are different. How would Ultimate reality emerge into apprehensibility?
Hold that idea.
We do need a quick note on mysticism. We know we said we were leaving it aside, but it's too important to the history of the Trinity as a doctrine to ignore. So a quick aside that can be ignored if it is uninteresting. Tl,dr follows.
Logic is only one side of the Western theological tradition. It tends to be the main stream in modern times. When it is distinguished, it can have different names - Positive, Cataphatic, and Rational Theology are common ones. The other side doesn't fit Flatland sensibilities and gets less press. But it's an equally ancient part of Christian understanding. This is Negative, Apophatic, or Mystical Theology based on the direct contact with God mentioned earlier.
Mystical Theology is different from plain mysticism because it is applied. Mysticism is the contact or experience in general. Mystical theology uses the knowledge revealed mystically for logical theological processes. This isn't as contradictory as it sounds. Mystics have always been a bit of a two-edged sword for the Church.
Direct contact jumps the Ontological Hierarchy with temporary awareness of pure Truth. This is obviously invaluable. They also are inspiring figures - the level of religious dedication needed is archetypal. That mix of charisma and revelation appears in the originator of every major Church movement. Like the Discalced Carmelite founder transcribing knowledge from the Holy Spirit.
The problem - as readers can well imagine - are liars. Being able to claim divine authority is very attractive. It's why the Church has always had to be aggressive in sniffing out the frauds. You can't have grifters and subversive wandering around claiming to speak for God.
The point is that once mystical experience becomes a public thing, it's already subject to logical doctrinal analysis. We don't mean someone's private contact in prayer, unless they bring it forward as an example. That is, make it a public thing. But claiming authority on mystical claims should bring scrutiny. Moral reasoning, wolves in sheep's clothing, and so on.
Assuming the experience is legitimate, it can obviously be reasoned from. For anything relating to God directly - Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate reality - it's really the only source of knowledge. Hence apophatic.
Apophatic or negative theology is based on stripping away awareness until the soul is open God. In Band terms, it focuses on the last limit of discernment that blocks us from Ultimate Reality.
Eliminating observation and logic to create a state of complete unknowing. At which point, there are no Fallen human obstacles to distract and God can reward the soul.
Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, Nicolas-Hays, 2004; Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs - The Mystical Ark - Book Three of the Trinity, Paulist Press, 1979; The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, Penguin Books, Reissue, 2001; Saint John Of The Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, Royal Classics Case Laminate Hardcover with Jacket, 2021
Landmarks of the apophatic tradition in the West. Something anyone interested should read. We can't speak to the quality of the translations - they're easy to find version's we've read.
The difference between apophatic mysticism and similar heretical movements - or other traditions like Buddhism - is the recognition that God is Willful and cannot be compelled. There is no guarantee of mystical contact. And the path depends on constant self-purification through the strictest Christian devotions. Heretical movements present mysticism as an alternative to the Church. Apophatic mysticism or theology sees it an extension and reward. It’s the exemplary Christian life that God rewards with contact.
One other interesting thing from our perspective is how mystical contact overloads infocognition.
Mystical experience takes different forms. In many cases, the conscious mind remains aware and the supernatural experience is comprehensible to a degree. Most Born Again experiences fit here, as do standard visions and other sensory sendings. Intellectual visions would fir here too – when some opaque idea or concept is illuminated and clarified internally.
Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, Saint Augustine in Ecstasy, 1665-75, oil on canvas, Seattle Art Museum
But the full union of the most advanced mystics defies explanation or representation. God chooses to touch the soul directly – Ultimate Reality bypassing the Fall and briefly igniting the eternal, inaccessible aspect of humanity. Readers know that the experience of Ultimate Reality in any measure is not supportable by Apprehensible Reality. So it’s no surprise that no mystic in 2000 years has been able to coherently describe the experience. Not that they don’t try. Countless pages of paradox and oxymoron – sweet agony, luminous darkness, all-knowing oblivion, etc.
The theological term for this is ecstasy – going outside oneself. And returning to observing, thinking being-in-the-world removes any possibility of relaying it in a coherent way. Artists like Bernini used different tricks to call this to mind.
Easy to see why we find mysticism interesting and relevant. Even the attempts to represent this most exalted of states show us a lot. But the problem for the Band is the personal nature. It's experiential, since it involves direct, personal encounters with the immaterial. Direct experience is an anchor for the Band's own faith, but it isn't something that can be transferred to someone else. As a testimony, it's only convincing to people who accept those starting premises. So outside the terms of this post.
And the tl,dr. Claiming a vision of the Trinity is no more certain than declaring an interpretation for those who reject the initial faith.
So how does the Band see it?
Nothing that follows makes any theological or dogmatic claims at all. We are leaving out doctrinal faith and operating strictly from the parameters spelled out above. Being "right" in logical-empirical terms doesn't really apply here. Because we're limited to our apprehension and trying to assess something to which our apprehension doesn't apply without faith. All we can do is observe how a triune nature of God is not only consistent with our onto-epistemological, representationally-mediated, being-in-the-world. It's necessitated by it. How this maps onto specific doctrinal claims is a matter of faith.
Antoine Coypel, Almighty God the Father, 1709, detail of the Palace of Versailles chapel ceiling fresco
As Christians, we accept our knowledge of Ultimate Reality on faith. And pure faith claims can be judged contradictory to logic and observation, but not conclusively proven by them.
We also consider logic-based truth claims about the essential nature of Ultimate Reality category errors. Like pretending God actually looks like this. If this were not the case, the debate would have been resolved by now.
We can all agree [representation] != [the thing it represents], even if that representation has a divine Truth value.
We're hamstrung by the limits of our own discernment. We may worship God directly. We may even experience a mystical contact with Him. But but our own temporal, entropic material nature means what we worship or experience is [God as we are capable of apprehending Him from a finite and impermanent vantage point]. Break down the onto-epistemology for analytical purposes. We are dealing with one entity but two represented onto-epistemological states. Again, representational states. Mental or experiential representations of levels of an Ultimately unitary reality.
The first is the negative designation of something that transcends Abstract and Material Reality in ways not expressible in logical or empirical terms. Like the paradoxes of the mystics.
Andrea Di Bonaiuto, Triumph of the Catholic Doctrine embodied by St Thomas Aquinas, 1365-1367, fresco, Spanish Chapel, Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence
And the second is the positive recognition of limited aspects of Him appropriate to human apprehension. Neither are the absolute nature of God qua God.
They are compatible because because of the ontological difference between our being-in-the-world and Ultimate Reality. It's just too big and remote for anything other than clouds of unknowing. But reality is a constinctive continuum. We can apprehend what flows ontologically downstream from this unknowable source. And in that frame of reference, logic and math are absolutely truthful and infinitely precise. Perceptual reality is stable and observably causally driven. The laws of nature or physics do bind us despite whatever issues we have in understanding or applying them. In Biblical terms, it's the Logos in a Creation ordered and numbered. Any why evil is definitionally anti-Creation and manifestly atavistic/Sorathic in attacking reality.
So they work together - unseeable source of truth and logical extensions thereof.
Seen "vertically" it's analogous to the relationship between actual Ultimate and Apprehensible Realities in the reality it describes. So two parts - Truth known by faith, and downstream implications known by logic.
Carl Heinrich Bloch, The Baptism of Christ, between 1865-1879, oil on canvas
Understanding directly unknowable through material representation pretty much sums up the Bible as a whole. Events that can be pictured coming together to give an impression of something that can't.
The Son and the Spirit in one picture is a good segue back to the Trinity.
The point is that 'defining" God in any semiotic terms is necessarily allegorical. Indicating something by what it isn't. And giving it a discursive name like devotional art or theology is irrelevant. Representation is limited to apprehension or the impossibility thereof. This is one of those painfully obvious bridges too far that fuels misanthropy. In the case of God, both conditions apply. Ultimate Reality/God is beyond the possibility of conceiving, and we can apprehend Abstract or Material manifestations. God's Will or Providence. So two sets of representation - [aspects of God that we can apprehend] and [aspects of God that we can't].
Carl Blechen, Monks in a Grotto, early 19th century, oil on canvas, Museum der Bildenden Kunste, Leipzig
Abstract and Material manifestations of the Ultimate are the relevant part of this post to the metaphysics book. The chapter we posted focused on how the Abstract Materializes. That's a much more intuitive relation though because it's homologous with our own cognitive-representational process. Logic and observation. How does this pattern apply to the Ultimate-Abstract transition? Hold that thought until later.
The hard part with Ultimate Reality is that there is no non-faith based path to knowledge. An iceberg analogy works if we stay purely empirical - the part you can see and the part you can't in no way makes a statement about the reality of the iceberg. It doesn't deny it's ontological thingness. If there's a statement, it's about our perceptual limitations. Material empirical perception can only perceive the parts of the whole that are perceptible empirically. It isn't capable of getting it all. Again, no comment on the nature of the iceberg, beyond being beyond our sensory limits to fully grasp.
Lawren S. Harris, Icebergs, Davis Strait, 1930, oil on canvas, McMichael Canadian Art Collection
The Band isn't the first to think of icebergs as analogies of transcendence. This Canadian painter was more into Theosophic nonsense about "the North", but his icebergs are magnificent uses of abstraction to point at the sublime.
The analogy breaks down because the full nature of the iceberg can be determined logically, through abstractions. We can calculate the necessary submerged volume and create machines that use basic principles to extend our perceptual range. So while the iceberg is not partially knowable empirically, it is apprehensible logically. God is partially knowable logically and partially knowable empirically.
Note that this is irrelevant to God's ontological foundational unity. That needs to be repeated, given the mentally crippled "criticisms" wafting up from the idiot fringe.
Here's the certitude. If Ultimate Reality were not capable of ontologically inferior or less substantive distinctions, neither we, nor Creation would exist to declare it so. We'll wait for the logic to the contrary. Any claim that God is mysteriously or mystically absolutely one relative to us is a presumption that higher and lower ontological status relations are real. Hence [us] and [God] as two terms in an ontologically stratified relation. Having to explain that that necessitates continuity is pointless. Anyone doltish enough to need it won't be able to grasp it. Or why clipping your nails doesn't deny the ontological unity of your soul.
We necessarily experience fragments of it at a time that seem disconnected because we're to onto-epistemologically small to see the whole thing. Our representational/cognitive processes are inherently dividing when approaching something they can't get all of. To say nothing of an entity defined negatively as [not apprehensibly knowable in Itself at all].
Fra Bartolomeo. God the Father with Saints Catherine and Mary Magdalene, 1509, oil on canval on wood, Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, Lucca
Consider what definition is. Linguistic parameterization. Constinctive distinction from a larger set. This isn't applicable to Ultimate Reality. All we can do is create representations that convey some conceptual accommodation in infinitely reductive terms.
This painting lets us visualize what exemplary Christians are contemplating and praying to. A cosmic "Father", with an indeterminate, bright, cloudy heavenly setting. The error is thinking God is limited in the ways this figure is. Don't be fooled by the appealing realism. It's a concept diagram of apprehensible traits.
Matheos Ioannou of Naoussa, The Beginningless Father (Ὁ ΑΝΑΡΧΟC ΠΑΤΗΡ), 1854, katholikon dome fresco, Pantokrator Monastery, Mount Athos.
Icon painting is more formalized and brings the diagrammatic side out better. The very existence of any sort of heavenly or angelic host presumes distinction that's ontologically meaningful on a lower level than Ultimate unity. Asking "what" the motivations for the mechanisms are is a category error.
A recognizable Supreme Father-Creator or Pantokrator-type figure and a triangle halo give us an understandable relationship in our terms. But God Himself is precisely not these things. Hence apophatic mystical theology. Stripping away all the metaphorical accommodations.
The point of all this is to define the Band's attitude towards theology. As a way to logically extrapolate Truths held on faith or apply them morally, it's essential to Christian being-in-the-world. As an academic "discipline", it's as insightful as whatever House of Lies pillar it calls home. But...
Defining the nature of God in a conceptually-limited way on the basis of human finitude is inverted.
Luciferian. Definitionally auto-idolatrous. God in man's image.
So what is the Trinity outside an article of faith?
Avoid trafficking in misrepresentation. Presenting something as other than what it means in order to "problematize" it is dishonest or stupid. God can't actually Be a triangle or three dudes. If cognitive limits make some people have to think of him only in those terms, that's fine. The whole point of sound doctrine is Truthful guidance without having to solve ontological puzzle boxes. We've called it a cheat code to living in reality. The question is whether it's actually sound.
Andrés López, The Holy Trinity, 1780, oil, Colección Blaisten
Doesn't actually look like this either.
Other than those mystical experiences, we don't encounter Ultimate Reality directly on this level. We just need to know how to align with it in the Apprehensible realms we can access. A man is a Material being. And the Bible tells us order and number are Created properties. So we know these symbols are onto-epistemological properties of Apprehensible Reality. And the Creator is not constrained by things He creates. Any more than building a model train set limits your range of mobility.
The act of conceptualizing God in any terms is necessarily allegorical - literally "speaking other". Revealing something about something by referring to it by what it literally isn't. Something that registers in our sequential, parameterized terms. What it is representing is a relationship.
A relationship between aspects of an Ultimate unitary God that are representationally apprehensible to us.
Cuzco School, Trifacial Trinity, between 1750-1770, oil on canvas, Lima Art Museum
Speaking of concept diagrams...
According to the link, the trifacial type was based on medieval models but had been suppressed in Europe. It was revived in the colonies because it proved effective in communicating the concept of the Trinity.
This one shows difference, but puts the emphasis on the idea of underlying sameness and unity.
Taddeo Crivelli, The Trinity, 1460–70, tempera and gold on parchment, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
This one shows sameness and unity, but puts the emphasis on identifiable difference.
So a relationship of three apprehensible aspects of an inconcievable Unity. Three parts that reflect the tripartite nature of our apprehension of reality.
These parts will be analytically separable, but in reality are constinctive. They have to be for logical reasons worked out in the posted chapter. Except as mentioned, the Material-Abstract relation is in line with our experience. Our negative conception of Ultimate Reality is defined by indiscernibility. We can only "see" one end of the continuum.
Eva Koleva Timothy. In the Beginning Was the Word, 2023, print
We know it has to have what we called a meta-infinitude - the ability to serve as final ground and first cause without generating more logical iterations. But no possibility of even conceptualizing what that is like. Hence the necessity faith. And like the iceberg, the parts of God we can apprehend will be constinctive with those we can't. We'll do some preliminary reasoning afterwards as work for the metaphysics work.
First, look at the official doctrine. The Nicene Creed is the foundational belief statement for most Christian denominations in the world. According to Britannica, it's the only ecumenical creed because it is accepted as authoritative by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches. There are slight variants that seem more like translation differences than fundamental alterations of meaning.
What's interesting historically is that it's actually the second 4th-century Nicene Creed. We'll refer to it with the more accurate alternate name Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to distinguish them. The original Creed of Nicaea was proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea in 325. What is commonly called the Nicene Creed today came out of the Council of Constantinople in 381. There are strong similarities, but the differences are important too. We'll call original the Nicene Creed and the second the more precise Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to keep them straight.
We've clipped the comparative pages from the old book cited by Infogalactic - The Creeds of Christendom: with a History and Critical Notes by Philip Schaff published in 1877 by Harper. Click for a link to the full text.
It's a solid resource. One of the inverted claims of the modern Progress! narrative is historical scholarship becomes "outdated". Charlatans and fantasists tend to get exposed, although the House of Lies has successfully spewed inversion for generations. But history is built from surviving source material. And exacting collation and presentation of that stuff doesn't have a shelf life. It's interpretation that falls out of methodological fashion.
Two relevant historical background details to consider here. The role of Councils and the formative history of the Early Church.
The first Christian centuries define the Church that emerges from antiquity. It was historically inevitable. It went from a grassroots evangelizing movement among the fringes to the official and majority religion of Empire. Just stick to socio-cultural dynamics. The loose structure described in the later books of the New Testament couldn't possibly manage centralizing Imperial Christianity. We saw visual echoes of this change in the arts of the West posts. Christian art goes from vernacular pictures in the catacombs to gleaming mosaics in huge basilicas. Click for a post. And here's a post on the visual transmission of Imperial Christianity under Justinian in the 6th century.
Traditio Legis, late 4th century Paleochristian mosaic, Basilica di San Lorenzo Maggiore, Milan
Early signs of change. The Traditio Legis form refers to Jesus as Law-giver. But he is shown as a literal Roman Emperor amid an imperial court.
Ecumenical councils were convened to deal with the growing pains and work out official positions on theological issues. The name refers to all of Christendom - only the first seven are truly ecumenical because both Eastern and Western Churches accepted them. A council was made up of the main figures and thinkers in the Church and its conclusions were taken as dogmatic. On the purely material level, they were the necessary mechanism for the Church to form as a coherent institution. Whether they were infallible or actively guided by the Holy Spirit is a matter of faith.
Councils lead into the larger context of the early Church. The Early Christian era or Late Antiquity in the history books. This was a tumultuous time in the Empire across the boards. It's a historical truism that empire always prefigures collapse, so there are relevancies for us today. Lack of ideological or nationalistic cohesion, mass movements of people, political and economic instability, fake rituals evacuated of original meaning, proliferating "religions" and cults, military decline - the list goes on. And against this twilight backdrop, a rapidly growing and coalescing Christianity. Then as now, the manifest failures of vanity and inversion point people to reality.
Jan Styka, Saint Peter Preaching the Gospel in the Catacombs, 1902, oil on canvas
Christianity was spread by men with direct knowledge of Jesus and the Apostles. Peter and Paul brought Apostolic authority and knowledge to Rome. Over time, founders grew more distant and conflicting interpretations of central dogmas appear.
A couple of things. The very thing that gives the Bible its incredible power - inhuman universal applicability - also makes it vulnerable to conflicting interpretations. Different contexts will have different incentives to promote different takes. Obviously there have always been regional differences in the material manifestations of the faith. But that's different from doctrinal consistency. As the Church became the spiritual venue in the West, a unified canon of beliefs was necessary.
Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea with the burning of Arian books, around 825, drawing on vellum from a compendium of canon law,, Biblioteca Capitolare, Vercelli.
"the synod of Nicaea number / of holy fathers 318 and all / subscribed."
"Constantine the emperor."
"Arian heretics condemned."
The Ravenna post looked at visual records of the Arianism-Orthodoxy dispute. Cultural context - the Arians in Ravenna were mostly Ostrogoths. Later converts by non-Apostolic missionaries with a totally alien culture to the late Antique Mediterranean. This what we're talking about. An alternative interpretation growing up as Christianity ages and spreads. It was likely that the Roman and other non-Germanic Arians in Ravenna were influenced by this critical mass.
Alternative interpretations promote themselves as much as the orthodox line because they also believe they're right on faith. They can't be benignly ignored - they have the same evangelizing ethos as any Christian and spread. It's spiritually and logistically essential to get to consensus in some way.
Councils did just that. Gathering all the players meant the different points got their best presentations. Essential differences could be debated and judged - when consensus was impossible, this broad and learned a body was best equipped to pick the right one. Conciliar records are an invaluable historical resource for the perspectives and arguments they record.
The Nicene Creed was proclaimed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325.
Michael Damaskinos, First Council of Nicaea, 1591, tempera and gold leaf on panel, Collection of Agia Aikaterini of Sinai
An Orthodox take - note how the emperor and all the prelates are subornment to the holy decrees.
This was also the first ecumenical council and dealt specifically with Arianism [note on terminology. Heresy is a belief that contradicts Church dogma. It was the council that repudiated the Arian position, making it the Arian Heresy thereafter]. The institutional advantage of conciliar decrees was clearing up confusion and gray areas with clearly spelled out positions..
Arians held that Jesus - as Son of God - was begotten in time. He therefore logically had to be distinct from the Father. This is a common take today among critics of the Trinity today. It's not inconsistent with a surface reading of the Band. If Ultimate Reality is truly atemporal and acausal - preceding the possibility of "time" and causality - than something temporal and caused can't be ontologically the same. Before getting into more philosophical distinctions, note temporality as a central issue. The question is whether the Son shares Ultimate meta-infinitude. Can be said to have "always existed" - in the sense of ontologically preceding Creation/Apprehensible Reality. Asking what happened "before" that or about the relations "in" that are category errors.
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Romeyn de Hooghe, Arrius Alexandrinus..., 1701, print, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Interesting that Arius (c. AD 250–336) came out of Alexandria. That polyglot city was a hive of heterodox interpretations and outright occultism.
The First First Council of Nicaea declared the Son "homoousios with the Father" meaning consubstantial or of the same substance. The original Nicene Creed states this plainly.
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance (iipoovaiov) with the Father
We came across an interesting article discussing consubstantiality in the context of 4th-century thinker Marius Victorinus. It's called "Consubstantiality as a philosophical-theological problem: Victorinus’ hylomorphic model of God and his ‘correction’ by Augustine" by Sarah Byers [click for the link]. Paraphrasing, Victorinus derived a model from Aristotele’s concept of primary substance as indivisible substrate of form and matter. God is conceived as praeexistens subsistentia where the prae is metaphysical – a substrate for definable properties that is also indistinguishable. God the Father becomes a First Principle substrate distinct from form - pure existence and the Logos or Son is the form. Linguistically it’s described like this – the Father is ‘to be’ (esse) while the Son is ‘to be thus’ (sic esse).
Raphael, Prime Mover (Urania, Muse of Astronomy), between 1509 and 1511, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatical Mueum
Victorinus’s argument for God as unity of Father and Son was directed against the Arians after the First Nicene Council. [One primary substance] vs. [Son as created entity subordinate to the Father]. The article suggests Victorinus was ignored by scholars because he was overshadowed by Augustine, who identified the main problem with the theory. It denies God’s Ultimate simplicity. A mix of pure existence substrate and form isn’t simple. Victorinus claims dividing the Godhead into substrate and form doesn’t ascribe accidents or temporal generation and isn’t divisible. But this is irrelevant – determinative components mean God is non-simple.
We find Victorinus’s ideas about metaphysical priority and mutual constitution interesting for their suggestions of ontological priority order and constinction. We agree with the lack of unity critique, but note two things that are not considered. Ontological Hierarchy and Vertical Logos and representational filtering. More later.
It's Augustine’s On the Trinity (De Trinitate) that is the foundation for Western Trinitarian theology. It was probably written between 400-420, after the First Council of Constantinople and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. That was the second ecumenical council, and was called by Emperor Theodosius I in 381 to reach a consensus on the nature of Jesus. This became the standard Christian position and states the consubstantiality more bluntly.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (aeons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father;
Translating aeons as worlds makes the temporality aspect less overt. But it's overt.
Giusto de' Menabuoi, Creation, between 1376 and 1378, dome fresco, Padua Baptistery
It's the first book of John that defines the Logos as operant principle of Creation that Incarnates to redeem it. Pre-Creation is incomprehensible atemporality. Jesus appears physically at a moment in time. But the Logos he incarnates is eternal.
This is a representation using standard symbolism. Bearded Jesus with his cruciform halo and red-blue color scheme, blessing gesture, the zodiac, and the celestial spheres. But the Incarnation is a unique event, in that the "representation" isn't actually a representation. It's a real presentation. Something ontologically Ultimate becoming ontologically Material.
The Holy Ghost [note - we are unconcerned with Holy Ghost vs. Holy Spirit. They refer to the same entity] doesn't get the same explicit treatment.
And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.
Although if we take "proceedeth" as aspect of [the same], the consubstantiality is implied. But it's only with Augustine that it gets a though discussion.
Giovanni Lanfranco. St. Augustine Meditating the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, around 1615, oil on canvas, Rome, Sant’Agostino
‘Indeed,’ said the child, ‘but I will sooner draw all the water from the sea and empty it into this hole than you will succeed in penetrating the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your limited understanding.’ From the link.
Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine, 1645-50, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Augustine had those types of mystical experiences we mentioned before. And there's a Neoplatonic bent to his theology. But he's more logical than apophatic - unlike the Greek Fathers, to generalize. He admits when understanding exceeds rational thought, So his arguments draw more from scripture and his reasoning than his mysticism.
Augustine’s canonical take on the Trinity refers to three persons that aren’t discrete selves. God is timeless, simple, and perfect – consistent with how Ultimate Reality must appear to us – in an ontologically Truer way than Creation.
His idea that our Fallen natures make the doctrine incomprehensible makes us perk up. There are real consistencies between Augustine and the Ontological Hierarchy, including limits of discernment. We have not been consciously influenced by Augustine but are struck by the compatibilities with our thought. It shouldn't be a surprise – we share a commitment to logic, elements of faith, and an understanding of ontological levels. But there's over 1600 years between one of the most influential figures in the history of Christendom and an obscure blogger. It would be vanity not to feel good about that.
Start with the City of God for the summary. From Book IX, Chapter 10 - Of the Simple and Unchangeable Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, One God, in Whom Substance and Quality are Identical. Our comments to the right.
It's in On the Trinity where Augustine really gets into the subject. Click for a link to the online text we're using. It’s a long text and the Augustine style is tedious, but we’ve excerpted some relevant passages. Book VII directly references directly references discernment limits, human finitude, and the impossibility of secular transcendence. We’ve kept the chapter titles where they appear in the translation. They’re in a darker color for clarity. Bold emphases are ours.
Chapter 4, 7. no such name occurs to the mind, because the super-eminence of the Godhead surpasses the power of customary speech.
The inability of Fallen, finite minds to apprehend something logically and experientially impossible comes up repeatedly. Our allegory and entropy posts on the Fallen nature of material reality agree with this position, even if it is unsatisfying to the human ego in ways.
Otto van Veen, Quod oculus non vidit, nec auris audivit, engraving from Balthasar Moretus, Amoris Divini Emblemata Studio Et Aere Othonis Vaenii Concinnata, Antwerp, 1660
This emblem negatively describes God with 1 Corinthians 2:9. It translates to "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard"
Emblems were popular in the late Renaissance and Baroque. They combine words and pictures to express an abstract idea, virtue, state, or entity. Some collections become canonical - visual references books like the famous Cesare Ripa. But creativity, wit, and insight were purpose of projects like Moretus and van Veen's.
Here he is recognizing the limitations of material finitude and limits of discernment, from book VII...
Chapter 6.— Why We Do Not in the Trinity Speak of One Person, and Three Essences. What He Ought to Believe Concerning the Trinity Who Does Not Receive What is Said Above. Man is Both After the Image, and is the Image of God.11. But in God it is not so; for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together is not a greater essence than the Father alone or the Son alone; but these three substances or persons, if they must be so called, together are equal to each singly: which the natural man does not comprehend. For he cannot think except under the conditions of bulk and space, either small or great, since phantasms or as it were images of bodies flit about in his mind.
The terminology and style are different. But he is describing Apprehensible Reality as a constinctive mix of Material and Abstract conditions. Completely unsuited to Ultimate Reality ontologically. Or what we have referred to numerous times as finite and Fallen, born into a reality that precedes us. Our friend from the Hudson River School posts visualized it like this...
Do not take this as Cole or us or anyone calling Creation a terrible place. This is one of those "too short for the rise" charts you stand beside. Metaphorically. [Ability to comprehend metaphor and other non-literal or figurative representation] being the cut-off.
Obviously all representation is different from its represented thing. That's representational filtering. But representational systems can be more or less "literal" - explicitly declarative in conventional meaning. This accepts the filter as frame of reference and so can stop having to acknowledge it every time a distinction is made. Within a representational system, elements have conventional meanings. Using those to convey something in straightforward ways is literal. Using them is unexpected or contrastive ways to trigger an association is figurative, metaphorical, non-literal, allegorical, etc. A second-order realism distinction within an artificial system.
Language is the easiest example. All the devices like metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, typology, etc. are based on connotations outside the conventional definitions of words.
The value is rhetorical. A metaphor adds surprise and extra associations that ups the impact. Literal descriptions are drier but more precise, with less room for imagination.
Pictures are less granular and systematic, but there is a literal-figural analogy. Here it has to do with realism and symbolism. Is it a straightforward mimetic depiction of something that works by recognizable resemblance?
Hyperrealism is about as literal as painting gets. Not that it's not rhetorical or moody. A good realist gives you viewpoints, moments, or settings that are packed full of emotional response. What makes it literal is that the whole experience is based on an accurate representation of how things really look. With no fantastical elements.
Or something you can recognize in the service of a higher meaning? The classical allegories of academic art are obvious choices. No one thinks this is something real like Penner's Co-op.
Charles-Antoine Coypel, Thalia Chased by Painting, 1732, oil on canvas
From the essay on the linked site. It's a witty allegory on Coypel's two careers as painter and playwright. All the elements in his studio refer to his own learned life and accomplishments. The personification of Painting running Thalia, Muse of Comedy out may refer to his own much more lucrative success as a painter. .
Allegorical landscapes and other scenes fit here too. Cole is basically realistic, but the setting communicates the idea of life's tribulations. This stage of the voyage is turbulent and ominous. The future looks dangerous and the guardian angel is hard to see. But with resolute faith, a bright future is on the horizon. All of this is extraneous to a literal, physical place.
Lamb of God from the Sacramentary of Henry II, between 1002-1014, illumination on parchment, Bavarian State Library
Abstraction can dial back or remove mimetic "literal" reference processes for conceptual subjects. This page from an Ottonian imperial liturgical book represents the Lamb as a negative image against an impossibly complex abstract background. It isn't realistic like Penner, Coypel, or Cole, but it calls to mind the unknowable apophatic Ultimate Reality "behind" the Biblical imagery.
Put aside how different words and pictures look. Adjust "literal" from [standard definitions] to [optical realism] and they're actually really similar.
Math and symbolic logic is a different, although it looks and operates more like writing than pictures. It is a system of Abstract representation. The signs are material by necessity, but the elements - the alphabet and vocabulary - refer to Abstract entities. They can be applied to Material things, but remain a pure immateriality in themselves. This limits their operations to Abstract truth standards, where absolute precision eliminate literal-figural as possibilities.
The equations are either are literally right or they're wrong.
Augustine is explicit that the Fallen nature of our being-in-the-world sets onto-epistemological limits. And that this must move knowledge of Ultimate Reality to faith.
12. And until he be purged from this uncleanness, let him believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, alone, great, omnipotent, good, just, merciful, Creator of all things visible and invisible, and whatsoever can be worthily and truly said of Him in proportion to human capacity ... And if this cannot be grasped by the understanding, let it be held by faith, until He shall dawn in the heart who says by the prophet, If you will not believe, surely you shall not understand.
The concluding Book XV is more explicit.
Chapter 24.— The Infirmity of the Human Mind.And they would certainly not so fail in understanding, and hardly arrive at anything certain, were they not involved in penal darkness, and burdened with the corruptible body that presses down the soul. And for what demerit save that of sin is this evil inflicted on them? Wherefore, being warned by the magnitude of so great an evil, they ought to follow the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world.
God is placed outside Fallen finite temporal conceptualization because He is, in the Band's terms atemporal. Ontologically prior to the sequenced distinctions necessary for any concept of "time". This is beyond comprehension because thought is a sequential process. From Book 15…
Chapter 23.— Augustine Dwells Still Further on the Disparity Between the Trinity Which is in Man, and the Trinity Which is God. The Trinity is Now Seen Through a Glass by the Help of Faith, that It May Hereafter Be More Clearly Seen in the Promised Sight Face to Face.43. For that [Trinity], in the nature of the Divinity, or perhaps better Deity, is that which it is, and is mutually and always unchangeably equal: and there was no time when it was not, or when it was otherwise; and there will be no time when it will not be, or when it will be otherwise.
Not mysterious to the unfallen mind. Souls restored through grace will see it clearly. Again suggesting the “problem” with the Trinity is us. Hang on to the idea of human limitations. Put it aside with representational filtering.
Masaccio, Holy Trinity. circa 1426-1428, fresco, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
One if the emost famous Trinities of all. Masaccio introduces one-point perspective to public art. The link has a lot of information.
One thing it points out is how God the Father's visible feet show a humanistic concept of Him. We'd add that this is joined by an odd spatial incongruity. Masaccio was geometrically meticulous in rendering his space. God stands erectly right behind the Cross, which is placed right at the front of the imaginary chapel. But His head is at the back of the arch. The laws of physics don't apply to him. And a humanizing allegory can't resolve spatially.
The whole thing has a mystical quality to it. The remains of the deceased as a reminder of mortality. Their effigies in endless prayer "outside" the illusory chapel. The Biblical figures just inside the space, but optically coherent. Then God. It feels like an intellectual vision.
Regarding the Holy Spirit, there is less to work with scripturally, but Augustine ascribes same concept of consubstantial persons. We noted it was less of an issue at the First Constantinopolitan Council, where the nature of Jesus was central. This is the foundation of the Western notion of the Trinity.
We are deliberately avoiding his canonical status as a Father of the Western Church. That is a faith claim external to this post, although it is worth noting that most any mainstream Trinitarian theology rests on him. Consensus is less of a problem than with a lot of Christian dogmas.
Once again, the ontological limitation of Fallen discernment.
Chapter 25.— The Question Why the Holy Spirit is Not Begotten, and How He Proceeds from the Father and the Son, Will Only Be Understood When We are in Bliss.45. There we shall see the truth without any difficulty, and shall enjoy it to the full, most clear and most certain. ... why the Holy Spirit is not a Son, although He proceeds from the Father.
And the recognition of the atemporality of Ultimate Reality. He doesn’t elaborate it the way we do but read for content not phrasing. The obviousness of the sequential nature of Apprehensible Reality didn’t appear last year. The explicit reduction of temporality to sequence is our formation, but the literally inconceivable concept of a sequencelessness is implicit.
Chapter 26.— The Holy Spirit Twice Given by Christ. The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and from the Son is Apart from Time, Nor Can He Be Called the Son of Both.Further, in that Highest Trinity which is God, there are no intervals of time, by which it could be shown, or at least inquired, whether the Son was born of the Father first and then afterwards the Holy Spirit proceeded from both; since Holy Scripture calls Him the Spirit of both.
“There are no intervals of time, by which it could be shown, or at least inquired” is precisely a state where sequential relations are inapplicable and therefore irrelevant. The same applies to the Holy Spirit. Of course, understanding without time is beyond non-mystical insight. Which isn’t really insight if it’s divinely generated. He knows tha
47. Wherefore let him who can understand the generation of the Son from the Father without time, understand also the procession of the Holy Spirit from both without time. And let him who can understand, in that which the Son says, As the Father has life in Himself, so has He given to the Son to have life in Himself, not that the Father gave life to the Son already existing without life, but that He so begot Him apart from time, that the life which the Father gave to the Son by begetting Him is co-eternal with the life of the Father who gave it: let him, I say, understand, that as the Father has in Himself that the Holy Spirit should proceed from Him, so has He given to the Son that the same Holy Spirit should proceed from Him, and be both apart from time
Pictures don't fare any better.
Anton Raphael Mengs, Descent of the Holy Spirit, 1751, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
No matter how spectacular, the workings of the Spirit are reduced to [conceptually similar but totally different]. The same goes for the rest of the Trunity.
He owns his own inadequacy at the end.
Chapter 27, 50. But among these many things which I have now said, and of which there is nothing that I dare to profess myself to have said worthy of the ineffableness of that highest Trinity, but rather to confess that the wonderful knowledge of Him is too great for me, and that I cannot attain to it.
Ultimately, its a negative mystery.
On the Trinity is an interesting read with recognition of central aspects of reality and human existence of it. Some central aspects. The metaphysical speculations are understated but profound. This shouldn’t be surprising, given his stature, but so many names have turned out to be disappointing frauds. A few thoughts for the Band’s point of view.
Augustine is less systematic with onto-epistemological distinctions than the Band, but we don’t see that as a fault. It is a consequence of very different contexts and starting points. The Ontological Hierarchy came organically, almost by accident. Dismantling Postmodernism led to the realization that the whole “West” was sinking under the weight of false founding premises. As our perception of levels of reality got clearer, it became obvious that a noumenal Ultimate Reality was necessary for numerous reasons. But it was just as obvious that we could only say more on faith. Constinction is the solution, but that took some time to figure out. The early reasoning is all there under the Epistemology label. The oldest posts come first.
Preliminary version of the Ontological Hierarchy from an early post. The terms and the structure were really immature. But the core idea that we are limited by our finite discernment was there. As was recognition that the Christian account of Ultimate Reality dovetailed with the reality a rational non-Christian could know. It's been quite a journey.
We tell this story to show that the Ontological Hierarchy wasn’t a single flash of insight. Understanding of onto-epistemology developed slowly as our thinking evolved through writing. Getting to context in relation to Augustine. We are children of Flatland, conditioned from childhood to accept inverted fictions and implausible just-so stories. All with the tacit assumption that real proof was out there, in the hands of the chit-weilders. Realizing it wasn’t meant everything was up in the air. Proceeding systematically from what can we know and how can we know it was the only viable way forward. We grasped the concept of levels of reality from philosophical and religious study and fantasy reading. But the idea that it was applicable to "real life" never occurred to us. So we had to learn to think our way up out of Flatland. And that took a lot of growth and maturity.
Holy Trinity Poster Print
When we converted, the apparatus was already there. It seemed miraculous how perfectly it all aligned. Jesus provided the missing confirmation for the role of Logos as connection. But we stayed systematic and analytic because we were preconditioned to think about metaphysics that way. And because God lit up the parts of the Ontological Hierarchy we knew had to be there but couldn’t apprehend. A necessary alignment inductively confirmed empirically. Through experience.
Now we draw knowledge of Ultimate Reality from scripture through faith, but the structural relationships are unchanged. It’s why we will speak on Christian subjects, but never from a position of authority. We are not inspired beyond our own understanding. We have not received a call. Our conslusions are just projected pattern recognition and human predictability. Nothing prophetic. If we disagree with readers' faith-held positions, we’re confident our reasoning is still useful for navigating reality.
We also assume that in Augustine’s time, awareness of ontological distinctions was more of a given. It’s pre-Flatland, where systematic processes like ours weren’t necessary. We aren’t implying he perfectly anticipated the Ontological Hierarchy. We’re saying he didn’t have to.
If we aren’t going to take Augustine’s authority on faith, we can turn to the foundation of his arguments. The Band – like Augustine or any Christian - considers the Bible authoritative, so that’s the first place to look.
Reichenau School, Luke Evangelist portrait from the Gospel Book of Otto III, around 1000, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
Back to issues with theology. If we accept the Bible as divinely True, it is a material representational manifestation of God’s Will. What can know of Ultimate Reality. Epistemologically, this is faith, though there are logical and empirical corroborations. Once it's accepted, then logic and observation come into play.
As a representation, the Bible is limited to its own content. There are the clear, coherent principles needed for deontology, but the situations are specific. Sometimes we have to use moral reasoning to apply scriptural wisdom to new scenarios. Generally, it’s not hard to figure out – human nature being pretty consistent. The point is that applicational reasoning is fundamental to the Bible as a practical representation. Even simple translations – like applying Old Testament idolatry to House of Lies materialism – are applications of one Truth across time and space. Theological debates are at the other end of the applicational complexity scale.
We assume it is this accommodation of Ultimate Reality that gives the Bible its sense of indescribable profundity. We remember being perturbed by that when reading it for content in our agnostic salad days. Beyond the impossible coherence, there is an inescapable sense of something sublime beyond reckonging. Narration is relatively spare – even in the Gospels – unless there are specific points that need to be delivered clearly.
Carl Bloch, The Daughter of Jairius, 1863, oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
“Don’t be afraid; just believe.” Mark 5:36 The whole Bible is suffused by this vast, inchoate, glorious depth, numinously filling the background. Some moments more than others...
In any case, the result is that some things aren’t spelled out as clearly as we might like. Our Fallen fault, but insurmountable regardless. Direct statements are a gold standard. The Resurrection being a central one. There’s no ambiguity. From a moral reasoning standpoint, this can be taken as a bedrock point of departure. Something like the Sermon on the Mount may need some vocabulary cleared up, but the words are explicit.
Sometimes things come up where that level direct statement isn't available. The Trinitarian-Arian debates are a good example. The contested terms are not directly settled in scripture, so the Councils weighed arguments from passages to reach a logical conclusion. Christian art is another example dear to the Band. Essentially differentiating devotional images from idols on the basis of function and usage. Balancing the Second Commandment, carved images on the Tabernacle, and Jesus as Incarnate Logos, among other things. There are complex theological arguments distinguishing devotion and worship. These aren’t nonsense – the Band would describe them as recognizing the difference between the representational filter and the deity. But it’s not stated point blank, so we're hesitant to condemn iconoclasts on theological grounds. Though they should be composted on cultural heritage ones.
Juan Martínez Montañés & Francisco Pacheco, Christ of Clemency, 1603–1605, polychromed wood, Seville Cathedral
This masterpiece of the Spanish hyprrealistic woodcarving tradition shows plusses and minuses of religious art. A devotional image differs from an idol because it is not worshiped or considered to have supernatural powers in itself. The Eastern and Western Churches use textual analogies – artworks are references like books with no intrinsic status . Images are viscerally appealing, so they have certain rhetorical advantages - inspiration and instruction.
The counter-Reformation Church put a lot of emphasis on visualization. A sculpture like this makes it easier to picture the Crucifixion as an event. The premise being, attention then moves to the real Jesus who isn’t actually present.
Spanish Baroque art took the rhetorical appeal to an extreme. Approaching the altar reveals Montañés Jesus is shown alive and seems to acknowledge someone directly below. Rhetorically, it turns walking down the nave into a virtual re-enactment of coming to know Christ though the Passion.
The danger with this sort of emotional engagement is confusion between the image and the real object of worship. That’s idolatry.
Virgin of Macarena, 17th century, polychromed wood, Basilica of Macarena, Cathedral of Seville
From the link. Religious reformers and art writers were concerned with “excessive” devotional reactions that blur the representation-reality line. It doesn’t have to be actual worship to raise concerns. No matter how lofty the reference, the image remains a Material thing. Getting to attached to the material is a distraction from God.
The clothing, glass eyes, real hair, tears, jewelry, etc. all show intense desire to experience Mary as as physically present. But they also treat the image as valuable in itself. Any artwork has some material focus by definition. The issue with religious art is keeping it in the lines.
Diego Velázquez, The Crucified Christ, around 1632, oil on canvas, Prado
The iconoclast answer is to simplify the problem by just getting rid of the religious images. But that deprives Christianity of one of its most powerful rhetorical tools. When managed correctly, religious art has been a central pillar of Western culture.
Just consider the degenerate trash in beast Church! today. Note that the House of Lies isn’t iconoclastic. It recognizes the value and inverts it.
At this point, the perennial problem with Biblical interpretation is easy to spot. Self-interest. The Band has pointed out the self-detonating illogic of abominations like "the Jefferson Bible". The logic is really simple. If the Bible possesses objective moral authority, it has to be an inspired representation of Ultimate Reality in some way. Otherwise it’s a book some dude wrote and as relative in its wisdom as any other. Especially given that the uncanny ways it maps onto pro-social outcomes aren’t reasoned out inductively from observation. The kind of wisdom that seems timeless tends to be either an observed pattern...
2nd century BC Han Dynasty inscribed bamboo-slips of The Art of War, 18th-century Qianlong banboo copy; and a recent popular translation
Sun Tzu's observations hold up because they describe consistent patterns external to historical conditions.
Exekias, Achilles and Ajax Playing Dice, detail, Attic black-figured amphora, 540-530 BC, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco - Vatican Museums
Or an accurate description of human nature...
Like Shakespeare or Homer. The stories resonate because they reveal truths about our bring-in-the-world that are deeper than cultural or historical superficialities. The Ilias was already centuries old when Exekias painted this.
William Marshall, frontispiece to the 1640 edition of Francis Bacon's Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning
Or sound logic...
The basic premise of the Scientific Method - logic and observation working together – is the basic structure of human being-in-the-world. Move out from representation to ontology and it’s the basic structure of Apprehensible Reality. It’s an objective knowledge process.
The spheres at the top of the title page visualize this concept allegorically. The Mundus Visibilis [visible or terrestrial world] clasps hands to with the blank Mundus Intellectualis [mental world]. Observation and logic.
The Bible is much broader and deeper. The wisdom literature is just the surface of a vast array of applicabilities on every literal and figurative level. We’ve already mentioned that this was notable as a non-Christian reader. It’s logical as a Christian one. But regardless, stay simple by sticking with faith.
If the Bible possesses objective authority of any kind, it has to have some kind of real Ultimate inspiration or backing.
This means two possible truthful responses – logical truth being internal logical consistency. Number One is to accept the authority as an act of faith. Necessarily faith whether admitted or not, since that’s the only way to know specifics about Ultimate Reality. If this is the case, there is no way the text can be altered. Interpreted, weighed one part against the other, but not altered. If it’s Objectively True, the very act is by definition a lie.
Christ Pantokrator, 12th century apse mosaic, Cefalù Cathedral, Sicily
Medieval Sicilian art is a mix of Byzantine, Norman Gothic, and Islamic influences. Like a Pantokrator mosaic in a pointed basilica apse vault. The inscription states the Bible is True representation of the Truth of the Logos.
EGO SUM LUX MUNDI QUI SEQUITUR ME NON AMBULABIT IN TENEBRIS SED HABEBIT LUCEM VITAE [I am the light of the world: he that followeth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life] John 8:12
Number Two is to reject the supernatural objectivity and treat it as a product of natural human authorship. The Bible as literature or history camp. In this case, one must justify the Apprehensible value of its wisdom. Or pick and choose, the way Bartlett’s can make the most ideological opposite writer seem fist-pump worthy. This is the Jesus as wise teacher camp, where the Bible takes its place on the Great Books shelf. Logically, this places the judgment of the reader over that of the author. Biblical – or Homeric, or Shakespearean, or Freudian, or whatever – “wisdom” in his own image. Which is fine if it’s between Lao Tzu and Plotinus on the world thinkers reading list. But it is definitionally anti-Christian. An inversion of the Ontological Hierarchy. And the choice to do what thou wilt over accepting reality.
Self-interest can lead to such blindness that this rudimentary logic is opaque. In Jefferson’s case, his personal commitment to secular transcendence made him redefine “God” in that image. Pure auto-idolatry of the kind we’ve grown to expect from Enlightenment “thought”.
It’s easy to mock blatant stupidity, but Jefferson was an objectively intelligent man. How do you square the “moral teacher” without either divine or ideological authority? The answer is faith.
The great fallacy of all the materialisms is that they are freedom from faith. Now consider our ontological position. Our Ultimate foundations of reality are beyond apprehension. But if we want any kind of understanding of origins of moral order, we need an objective foundation. And any Ultimate knowledge claim is known by faith. The problem is that Rationalism or any other secular transcendence is logically incoherent as a foundation. For the differences between Ultimate and Abstract Reality discussed in countless posts.
That’s the Enlightenment secular transcendence trap. An inverted incoherent faith replaces a coherent one, under the false consciousness that there is no faith at all. Remember any morality or notion of objective truth required an Ultimate origin that is epistemologically faith. So all the claims of pure reason, self-evidence, and “Natural Laws” are really just extensions of an unrecognized, incoherent faith. Because it is so Ultimate, faith shapes fundamental pre-conscious attitudes and reflexive world views. It’s the set of preliminary assumptions that conscious activity departs from. Unless you make a deliberate effort like this one, it goes unnoticed. Jefferson held it on faith that his “reasoned” judgment was an objectively superior moral authority to the Bible. The self-detonating illogic is an extension of the incoherence of the belief system.
As was his creeping around the slave pen. Click for a good presentation on his sexcapades that shows how incoherent personal "morality of reason" leads to indefensible outcomes.
You could get away with incoherent, self-aggrandizing luxury beliefs in a basically moral, reality-facing Christian society. More than enough abundance to cover some parasitism. But we can see the emerging cognitive dissonance among the FTS-2s as the House of Lies unravels. As explained in the r/K posts, there’s no longer enough societal buffer to subsidize pretending reality isn’t real.
The Band has worked with Biblical material before. For readers unfamiliar with it as a knowledge source, it may be a bit of an adjustment. The Allegory and Entropy post took this issue up by looking at the Bible and natural science as totally different representational systems or “languages” then translated the references between them. If readers find Augustine unsystematic, the Bible makes him look like a schematic diagram. This is a result of the otherwise utterly inaccessible Truth it conveys. A closer representation is apprehensibly impossible.
Another of the most famous painted Trinities. The Russian icon shows the three visitors to Abraham in Genesis 18 who are widely interpreted as an allegory of the Trinity.
The Three Visitors
The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Genesis 18:1
What this means is that scriptural arguments aren’t methodologically spelled an in analytical subjects like philosophy, theology or the sciences. Passages are allusive or declaratory, without much exposition. Contextually, the whole book is a mind-blowingly vast and coherent tapestry of interrelated references. The connotative range of the passages comes into view slowly as the bigger picture is better understood. It’s no surprise that sophisticated textual interpretative techniques developed around the Bible. We’ve read it multiple times and reflected on it for years and make no claim at all to have mastered its wisdom. That’s endless in this lifetime. But we can explain how these passages make an argument in Biblical terms. Including the fit with the Ontological Hierarchy and their impact outside of presumed Christian faith. Beyond that, we can’t say much.
Jonah Swallowed, probably Phrygian, 280–90, marble, Cleveland Museum of Art
We follow a basic traditional exegetical approach to Bible interpretation that is not controversial. Allegorical and other figurative applications are completely legitimate, so long as they are coherent with the internal logics and references of the larger book and do not contradict literal meanings. This is something Christians do all the time when they apply scriptural knowledge to new situations.
Traditional exegetics look at four levels starting with the literal - the actual story. The typological links it allegorically to the New Testament. Three days in the whale literally. Three days in the tomb figuratively.
Jonah Cast Up, probably Phrygian, 280–90, marble, Cleveland Museum of Art
The tropological level is the applicable personal lesson. In this case, the efficacy of faith and prayer in deliverance from sure death. The anagogical level applies the story to a more universal truth. Like the world being redeemed through the will of God.
Whether you choose this particular model, there is one thing that's totally consistent.
Figurative meanings cannot contradict the literal ones.
It’s more than just matching numbers, although numeric consistency is part of it. It’s holistic. Take the typological allegory. Story beats, outcomes, God’s role, etc. work together to prefigure the Gospels and their implications. Letting you see the blurry outlines of what is to come, although the actual form remains unclear.
The lesson for any application is that meaning is grounded in context. This is true of any text, but especially a sacred one. A lot of Bible lawyering and other dishonest dealing comes from selective quotations that don’t match the original usage. Does the sentiment go with or against the grain of the overall message? Are there other parts that explain or contradict the interpretation? Allusive references pile up into a larger patterns that are more determinate in the aggregate.
Like the Trinity.
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Master of the Codex Rossiano, The Trinity in an Initial B , 1387, tempera and gold on parchment, Metropolitan Museum of Art
This medieval manuscript from Siena shows it as three equal hypostases known through the Book. What is clever is how this picture is set in an illuminated letter. Your reading shows that your reading is the path to knowing them.
There are two issues in play that make the Trinity difficult for many. The juxtaposition of common essence and different personage, and the theological claim that they are fundamentally, ontologically the same. Co-equal and co-eternal. The different personages are easy. The Bible presents them as distinct. The common essence is a bit harder, but not very. Total consubstantiation a little more.
As you’d imagine, the amount of Biblical argument for the Trinity has built up over the years. Here’s one site with one list of references for example. If you don’t believe us, deep dive “Trinitarian theology”. We'll wait. Meanwhile, start with what we’d call the ontological distance of Ultimate Reality-God qua God. Like Augustine, language fails us, but readers understand.
Gaetano Previati, Let there Be Light, around 1913, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
The Bible shows God is beyond us in different ways.
Starting Creation with light is starting it with the possibility of sensory perception and illumination. Of consciousness.
Keep in mind that these become more powerful in the aggregate. Repetition of underlying message in different ways compensates for lack of systematic argumentation. And we can’t possibly present even a representative sample. It’s worse than the Hudson River School that way. All we can do is pick a few good ones to show how the process works and draw some conclusions. So one more time, not authoritative. All quotes from the NIV.
Start with what we consider a self-evident limit of discernment. And an introduction to how allusive Biblical language is. In Band's terms, Ultimate Reality knowable only by faith.
Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God. 1 Corinthians 8:4
The language only seems lofty or vague from Flatland starting assumptions. [Dude, what's the sound of one hand clapping]-tier depth of thought. As we pointed out earlier, we're children of the House of Lies. "Ontological strata" wasn't something that ever came up, and wouldn't seem serious if it did. Like "logical coherence" to a boomer, but more arcane.
Henry Fuseli, The Creation of Eve, 1793, oil on canvas, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Pay attention to grammar. Those who think they know something is everybody. And do not yet know as they ought to know means apprehensible human knowledge is insufficient.
The reversal of direction - whoever loves God is known by God. The verbs - think, know, know, know, loves, is known by. Human knowledge is insufficient. Making loving something that can't be known an act of conscious faith. And through that comes the important thing. You become part of that unknowable Ultimate Reality's intention.
Our systematic approach seems more reassuring to modern readers for the same reasons we needed it. But Christians who actually live their foundational metaphysics would find it quite clear. And that's without considering the larger context of Biblical attitudes towards human perceptual clarity.
Moving on. It’s easy to get side-tracked with the Bible. The language is so allusive, internally referential, and reflective of the structure of reality, all at the same time. Endlessly fascinating, but the point is to cluster some Trinity passages and space is finite.
Here's mention that the Spirit is commensurate with the Father in experiential and epistemological ways.
But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:16-18
The veil is the Fallen, finite intellect of the Allegory and Entropy and other posts. It is the Spirit that restores us, which "is the Lord".
Referred to separately, but we are reassured are the same. This is the kind of language that Flatanders can’t resolve. They either ignore one part for the other or write it off as a mystery. It is a mystery, but not in the sense that passages like this are “impossible”. The mystery is the incomprehensible foundation that lets them resolve.
This passage warns against what we call auto-idolatry and secular transcendence. The whole inversion package of the post-Enlightenment House of Lies and the alignment with reality through Logos alternative. And follows with a statement about the relation between Father and Son.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces[a] of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. Colossians 2:8-10
Philosophy is love of knowledge, so hollow and deceptive philosophy is what we've called fake truth. And human tradition and elemental spiritual forces represents essentially the same foundation as Material and Abstract Reality Secular transcendence and luciferian auto-idolatry. Collective do what thou wilt over alignment with Truth.
The relevant point for this particular post is that the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. We know the fullness of Ultimate Reality can't be Materialized. As did Augustine when he told the story of the child on the seashore.
Cornelis Monsma, The Transfiguration, 2006, oil on canvas, private collection
As did Jesus, when revealing divine nature results in dematerialization, representational failure, and loss of rational consciousness.
This assumes commensurability across ontological separation.
Skip the standard theological path into endless speculation over what this means the hypostases “are”. Consider what it means from the perspective of what we can know and how we can know it. To our being-in-the-world, considering we're the ones the whole apparatus is directed at. Hold that for now.
It's stated directly that the Son is how the incommensurable God qua God is known directly to humans.
The Father Revealed in the SonAt that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do. “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Matthew 11:25-27
The I praise you, Father is the sort of passage critics will point to to question the Trinitarian unity of Father and Son. How does Jesus praise himself? We’ll take this up later – now we want to go through some passages in a group to get a feel for how the Bible presents information. Just consider what one essence, three personages means. It’s not a simple concept. Pretending it is is a different kind of revelation...
There are typological arguments for the Trinity, like Abraham’s three visitors mentioned earlier. Christian metaphysics are built on the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and conditions in the New. Old Testament events become taken as prefigurations or allegories of the Gospels. And common language or reference builds associative meaning. Like the use of "Lord" for Jehovah and Jesus.
This is what the Lord says - Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Isaiah 44:6
yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. 1 Corinthians 8:6
Be attentive to the language. Isaiah connects the monotheistic unitary God, the Lord, and the King and Redeemer in one entity. They are established as different ways of referring to the same thing. Corinthians reiterates that there is one God and Lord – complete agreement with the Old Testament type. But it calls the [I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God] part [one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live] and the [Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty] part [one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live]. Keep holding on to the fullness of the Deity in bodily form and commensurability across ontological separation.
Gebhard Fugel, The Last Judgement, mural painting, 1921, parish church, Hauerz/Allgäu
The alpha and the omega, The Logos in Creation and the Judge at the End. It’s basically the Pantokrator in art - the Son as Lord.
The passages with the clearest statement of common nature also seem ones with manuscript variants. This may reflect the controversial nature of the dogma in Late Antiquity.
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. John 1:18
Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. Acts 20:28
John repeats the idea of [knowable material form of the same thing] more strongly. Acts points to another common site of anti-Trininarianism – how could Ultimate Reality “die”? The answer is that IT can’t. It precedes the concept of life and death, or of “concept”. But in Material form means different ontological parameters. It’s the seeming impossibility of putting one in the other that leads to Augustine’s metaphor of the sea in a tiny hole. So real divine essence did die in the bodily form it entered the world in. The impossible redemptive paradox was violently ended. And God “experienced” mortal death to the extent that that is materially applicable. Hence is himself God and bought with his own blood.
Bernard van Orley, Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John, 1525, oil on panel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
You can see it if you don't take the figures as literally mimetic.
There are alternative manuscript versions of the Acts passage, but thus is most widely considered original. Here’s Douay-Reims for contrast.
Take heed to yourselves, and to the whole flock, wherein the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops, to rule the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.
And a few passages that state the common essence.
For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Titus 2:11-13
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” John 10:28-30
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. John 14:9-11
One can argue whether these proclaim the Trinity in the precise terms that it comes to be defined doctrinally. If it were obvious, works like Augustine’s wouldn’t be necessary. But it does indicate conditions of commonality and difference between Father and Son. Seen blurrily, as through a glass darkly. The theological arguments depart from here, referencing passages against the whole and each other to build a case. It’s a logical process, involving necessary consequences of God’s utterly transcendent nature. The most simplistic reasoning would be something like this. If...
God is Ultimate unity
and
God has a common essence with anything
then
God has qualities that express as different to us
but are essentially "the same"
Don’t get caught up in theological complexity. Stick to the basic issues. The faith claim is that the Bible is True. The logic claim is that [Ultimate Reality expressing differently] remains [Ultimate Reality] And if that gets readers thinking about the non-recursivity of meta-infinitude...
Pieter de Grebber, God Inviting Christ to Sit on the Throne at His Right Hand, 1645, oil on canvas, Bisschoppelijk Museum Haarlem
We know the Catholic Church believes similar truth value is present in its temporal institutions. We are ignoring this for authorities Christians universally accept. This doesn’t change the [foundation in faith] + [interpretation in logic] formula. It does add weight to arguments by Fathers and Doctors. Dogmatic in ways Protestants don’t recognize, though their own theology draws on them.
As we saw with Augustine, the nature of the Spirit is even less elaborated then Father and Son. There are passages indicating some sort of shared nature...
Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.” Acts 5:3-4
The Lord is the Spirit... quote from 2 Corinthians up above obviously fits here.
Other allusive passages ascribe traits to the Spirit that are generally associated with God Such as being eternal...
Ivan Aivazovsky, And the Spirit of God Moved on the Face of the Waters, 1838, oil on panel, private collection
That's stated explicitly.
How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! Hebrews 9:14
Onmipresent...
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? Psalm 139:7
Omniscient...
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 2:10-11
The Holy Spirit is intimately involved in God’s works. We've mentioned Creation. Then there's the Incarnation...
This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Matt. 1:18
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Annunciation, 1655-1660, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). Matt. 1:20-22
The Resurrection
And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you. Rom. 8:11
Salvation is described in the opening of Romans 8 (Rom. 8:1-27) as a complex interaction between the Three.
Creation is something we want to wrap with, because it is perhaps most relevant to our own ontological concerns. We’ll leave the Spirit with the same observation as the Son. The Bible doesn’t state Trinitatrian theology in theological terms. But it does indicate some sort of common nature and different personage. The Bible opens with the direct statement that God and the Spirit of God are present in Creation.
We'll look at some passages with mosaics from the legendary basilica of San Marco.
The San Marco mosaics span some eight centuries and cover the whole interior with Christian themes of all kinds.
Mosaics in the South Cupola, West Narthex, 1215-35, Basilica di San Marco, Venice
The Creation mosaics are in the narthex or front porch. San Marco has more of a Byzantine plan than a Western one with lots of domes throughout.
The cycle isn’t widely published – probably because it’s huge, hard to photo, and doesn’t really boost the Beast Art Narrative. But it’s very extensive and creative. Venetian medieval art is a mix of Byzantine and Western Romanesque influences and is capable of uniquely inventive visualizations.
The Creation scenes in the San Marco narthex occupy one of the ceiling domes. They form concentric narrative panels that tell the story in sequence.
The innermost ring is the most primordial material. It isn’t as big or famous, or technically brilliant, but we consider it as creatively interesting a visualization as the Creation scenes of the Sistine Chapel.
Creation is hard to depict. Visual art relies on showing you things. Words can describe Reality coming into existence. But until it does, there’s noting to show. This is where artists have to be most creative with their figurative imagery. And this helps us understand, because the elements they use are things that relate to the larger topic in their frame of reference. We can see what they choose to represent something metaphorically.
The celestial spheres and curious angelic motile force catch the eye. But note the Creator. He resembles God the Father in later medieval and Renaissance art, only with the cruciform halo that indicates Jesus. This is the Logos in Creation – the hypostasis of the Son recognizable materially as Jesus as described in Genesis and John. Beardless in the manner of the earliest images of him.
Look to the left of the Creation and a bit of the Holy Spirit over the Waters is visible. Creation is another place where all three hypostases are shown to play parts. It should be clear to that why or how that works is beyond us.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Genesis 1:1-2
When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. Psa. 104:30
And this brings us to John and the discussion of Logos that anchors the Ontological Hierarchy. Like Genesis, the language is lofty and suggests profound depth beneath the declarative statements. This makes sense. In Band terms, we are literally being presented with Apprehensible Reality – the possibility of apprehending… anything – coming into existence. “Before” isn’t even relevant for reasons we’ve worked out in the chapter preview. From our side of the limit of discernment, it simply appears as time and sequentiality begin.
The sparse language of Genesis is consistent with metaphysical necessities of apprehensible reality. Meta-infinitude initiating universal causality, temporality, definitional logic, material distinction – all the conditions that make comprehensibility possible. This is ontologically foundational for our discernment, so It's worth a close look at the opening of John 1.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it ...
Christina DeMichele, Christ Enthroned in His Creation, 2009, acrylic on canvas, St. Andrew Orthodox Church, Riverside, CA
Contemporary icon painter captures the Logos as was with God and … was God and through him all things were made.
Was with and was are a contradictory pair that tells us this is outside logical resolution. It can’t be represented in terms of logical truth. Break it down. The past tense means it is speaking temporally – from within Apprehensible Reality looking back at the origin. The perspective of human being-in-Creation when Ultimate Reality becomes representable or thinkable, even in it’s unthinkability. Our perspective.
The Logos and God are the same thing “before” Creation. Before stratified, sequenced, and definable reality. Once that comes into existence, Ultimate Reality is definable within its limited terms. How it “looks” or manifests. At that point – within Creation – it is possible to think of God as having aspects. The Logos being the operant principle in the process with some contributions from the Spirit. It’s still one God in Ultimate terms – the only terms that matter for foundational ontology. But Apprehensible Reality creates possibilities for manifestation on lesser ontological foundations.
So the Logos that Ultimately is just “God” was with God once Creation creates a limited Apprehensible Reality that can’t fully grasp Ultimate Reality. The difference is every bit as real as we are in the ways that reality exists to us. But it coexists beneath Ultimate unity. That sounds like constinction’s music...
Think of Jesus' mandorla three-dimensionally. It’s obvious once you see it. He isn’t just floating in heaven – He’s coming forward into Apprehensible Reality from unknowable ontological depths.
The Logos going from was God Ultimately to was with God once Creation makes it possible to apprehend a difference.
Compare it to the apophasis stricture. We can only penetrate so far before we run out of discernment. But God can come to us in a form that we can discern. And trust, since its constinctive origin is in that Ultimate Truth we can’t reach on our own.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him ...
If Creation makes the Logos Abstractly conceivable, the Incarnation carries it all the way to Material reality.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:1-14
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Colossians 1:15-17
The NIV uses Word, but we prefer Logos for precision. It combines word – as in speech act - and logic emanating from God. Creative potential, light and life, with the coherence and order that backstop objective truth. John describes the Incarnation as this Logos taking human form and paradoxically entering the reality it precedes and creates. This is what ties the Ontological Hierarchy together. It's how truths can manifest differently, but still point to the same Truth.
As always, we aren’t just making it up.
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! Philippians 2:5-8
Here’s a statement of shared identity between Ultimate Reality and the Material Reality it enters. Consider what we know about Abstract/Material relations. Abstract Realities have to manifest materially to me Materially real. Pretending they don't is part of the the whole secular transcendence inversion. And when they do, they become subject to Material conditions and constraints. They aren’t [Abstract Truth qua Abstract Truth]. They can’t be, because Material Reality lacks the ontological conditions to support Abstract Realities. The lenngth of a board vs, [Length] the physical property or [Quantitiy] the nature of a divisible reality.
Why wouldn’t the same ontological accommodation apply when the inconceivably more incommensurable Ultimate Reality manifests Materially?
It would, It has to. Ultimate Reality can only materialize to the extent that Material Reality can accommodate it’s meta-infinitude. So the manifestation is constinctively God, but [God as Material Reality can realize Him]. That is the same, but different, in all the ways that Material human existence differs from the Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality. That’s an inconceivable transition.
Time, death – all the entropic forces of a Fallen reality would apply. No wonder he cried out.
Thomas Cole, Angels Ministering to Christ in the Wilderness, 1843, oil on canvas, Worcester Art Museum
There has to be a point where the ontological limits of the Material manifestation prevent it from accessing the fullness of its own Ultimate nature. This inconceivable finitude in a Fallen reality would be traumatic in ways we can’t fathom.
From this perspective, Word was with God, and the Word was God makes perfect sense. Distinction doesn’t apply to Ultimate Reality. Anything precedent to Apprehensible Reality is one “essence”, if that term applied in such an ontologically remote domain. But in Apprehensible Reality, they appear in distinct capacities. Different perceptions of the same imperceptible whole. We can say the same about the relation between the Logos and the Spirit over the waters in Genesis. If both are discernable expressions of Ultimate Reality, further discussion is unnecessary. And yes, we are aware Jesus addresses the Father. It’s why we’ve already referred to it as something to address later.
Wrap with a mention of all three together as a single Christian authority...
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Matthew 28:18-20
That's a solid Biblical overview. We could go on, but the point was to give enough of the text to get a feel for Biblical language and to show that isolating one passage leaves out a vast amount of context. The presentation is different, but when we walk through it, the isomorphy with the Ontological Hierarchy is wild for us.
We think this is because we built the Ontological Hierarchy as part of a sincere effort to understand the reality we found ourselves in. We never had a pet theory or interpretation that we staked our credibility on. We just reasoned from what we could know and how we could know it. It is more of a description than a theory. And if the Bible is the True account of reality, they're describing the same thing. There's a reason why we claim our Christianity isn't purely based on faith. We recognized the logical necessity before we could believe. Once we could, the work we'd done to break out of Flatland became even more valuable. A lot of the metaphysical realities modern geldings find perplexing were already self-evident. And lighting up all the holes and voids showed us how it really fits together.
We do realize that idea like simultaneously one and many or divisible Ultimate Reality are big problems for some. Jesus’ references and prayers to his Father indicates that they are separate beings. While John informs us that the Logos was of God before Creation and temporal distinction. Some check out here. The faithful accept it as a mystery, which it is. But others write it off as impossible. Because it is impossible…
In Flatland.
Put aside the allusive profundity of Biblical language for more analytical precision. The idea was to review the Biblical material for evidentiary patterns, then work with those. We see Truth in it as through a glass darkly, but even an imperfect representation of Truth represents Truth.
Jean Fouquet, The Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, around 1470, miniature from Flavius Josephus' Antiquites Judaiques, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Big recurring patterns are one way the Bible shows us things that aren’t apprehensively obvious. Individual examples sometimes seem perfunctory or allusive - it makes them bluntly direct and broadly applicable at the same time, but gives up exposition. But recurring themes convey quite a bit when you’re attentive to context and patterns. That comes through in just that little collection of passages up above. And once we’ve ascertained what information is available on faith, we can use it to ground our reason and observations.
For non-Christian readers, think of it as parameterizing a frame of reference that happens to correspond ontological to reality. Once we have the frame of reference, logical operations indicate internally true and false conclusions. Representational filtering actually has some pluses in this context. We can switch frames of reference - modes of representation - while talking about the same thing. Pretending the words themselves are magic is a fundamentally inversion of salvation through the work of grace in the heart. But arrogant “magic” isn’t foreign to Bible stories. And those sorcerers have larger eschatological concerns.
Benozzo Gozzoli, Saint Peter and Simon Magus, 1460s, tempera on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Consider the Trinity through two self-evident conditions of human being-in-the-world that have been ignored for millennia. Representational filtering and onto-epistemology. Any apprehensible - thinkable - conception of God, however limited and inadequate, is known through representation. And what is represented is a constinctive ontological relationship. Leave full mystical union out of the discussion for simplicity. Representation that ontologically isn't what is being represented. All the theorizing and debate is over verbalizing something that isn't verbal.
The word "trinity", the concept of "consubstantial tripartite personae", and all the rest are representations of the inconceivable. Difference between them is built in. The Poststructuralists thought that meant something about reality. Other than it's infocognitive mediation. What representation does do is reduce the multiplicity of reality to a single mode. The ontological fullness of Reality in the form of a text string. And a text string is a specific form of semiotic system with its own rules and limits. It can explain that God is utterly transcendent with different representable aspects, but they all appear to us as textual characters.
Diagram of the Trinity from Missel à l'usage de Langres, colors, engraving and print on parchement, Paris, Jean Petit, 1517
Or as images. Or both. The point is that however it is represented, pictured, or described, it isn’t the same as this…
In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Psalm 102:25-27
There's a discrepancy between what is described and how it is described. If the idea of metaphor is elusive - that "laying the foundations" doesn't mean a dude in overalls with a trowel - best stick to accepting truth on faith. And if logic isn't an issue, look past the representational filter to what is being represented. That's ontological distinction and vertical logos.
Go back to the constinction relationship. Hierarchical distinction and continuity. It’s literally everywhere – thought, language, reality. Same and different coexist through an ontologically hierarchical relation. It's the only way they don't self-contradict. Figuratively "bypassing" each other "vertically".
Reminder of the basic constinction relationship. It describes how things can be the same and different at once. Distinct elements on one level are also the same on a more general one.
The Ontological Hierarchy has three constinctive reality-based levels. Obviously ontology corresponds to epistemology – what we can know and how we can know it. We haven’t written up the Ultimate Reality part, but by this point in the post, the logically necessity doesn't need another recap.
Now consider the Trinity through the Ontological Hierarchy. We've been hinting at it all post.
Carlo Dolci, The Holy Family with God the Father and the Holy Spirit (detail), around 1630, oil on copper, private collection
Note how we aren't overly concerned with precise definitions. The Ontological Hierarchy isn't a comprehensive reality theory. That's a category error. It's a graphic description of observable and logical relationships that necessitated by our experience of reality. We've tweaked and refined different parts of it after encounters with Christianity and a host of thinkers and authors - Langan, Heidegger, Plato, Aristotle, late antique Neoplatonists, Dante, Peirce, Day, Tolkien, Donaldson, artists like the Hudson River School and medieval designers, classical and Romantic aesthetics, Newton and the Scientific Revolution, even the wretched Postmodernists - just to name a few lurking in the blog archive. Because it's a description, we have no ego investment in it. Descriptions are always incomplete. And they can always be sharpened with more thought and observation.
Jerónimo Ezquerra, The Trinity of the Earth, before 1733, oil on canvas, Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga
General relationships don't require exhaustive internal definitions of their components. The same way we can make pool shots without knowing the chemical composition or precise diameter of the balls.
Catholics have a highly developed system of artistic representation, having gone all in on art from the beginning. Defining religious images as purely rhetorical freed Western Christendom from the strict formalism of the Eastern icon. And opened the way to the indescribable creativity of the arts of the West. This packs a lot of doctrinal relations into a single picture.
We're not even married to the idea of three levels. We've already added a fourth outside the Hierarchy that represents rejecting reality. In a post on Neoplatonism, we looked at a conceptually similar arrangement by Plotinus with different categories and relations.
Turning away from Logos is turning away from reality on an ontological level. The only path here is the entropic dissolution intrinsic to the Fallen Material world. Sorathic evil is the metaphysical endpoint. Pure anti-Creation and dissolution of all distinction into nihilistic indeterminacy. Ontological absolute zero to Ultimate Reality’s meta-infinitude.
What matters is that we recogize the constinctive, ontologically hierarchical nature we inhabit. The three parts followed from our reasoning. That said, here's one of those observations that shows the value of the whole project...
That's worth repeating. Each of the three hypostases of the Trinity manifests God on the onto-epistemologically appropriate way. In representation and within the actual constinctive parameters of a objective coherent Reality.
Each level of reality is fully “real” within its ontological parameters. And at the same time, ontologically different – “higher” or “lower”, more or less Ultimately Real – than the other levels. For the Ultimate to manifest Materially or Abstractly, it is real in those terms, but constrained by them. The Incarnation is a man. An extraordinary one, but subject to a man’s conditions. For the Spirit to operate within time, It it takes on the properties of Abstract Reality. Immaterial, unchanging, infinite in scope, but sequenced and causal.
Alexei Korzukhin, Lord Of Hosts, before 1894, oil of canvas, Stavropol Krai Museum of Fine Arts
We've always been clear that God is Ultimate Reality in Christian terms. If He isn't, the difference isn't knowable because it involves distinctions beyond apprehension. But this isn't a controversial position. Consider what we know about Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality. It’s a logically necessary meta-infinitude to account for reality as we can apprehend it. But it ontologically precedes the basics of conceptualization. It’s atemporal, undifferentiated, unthinkable, and unrepresentable in itself. Epistemologically, anything further is known on faith. Any attempt to represent or imagine it is just a sign of its unrepresentability or unimaginability.
In the Trinity, the transcendent God the Father, knowable only through the Logos fits here. Utterly remote, unknowable qua Himself. Ontologically anterior to the possibility of ontological anteriority. The Holy Spirit corresponds with Abstract Reality. An imperceptible, immaterial expression of God that manipulates Creation like an abstract law or force. If they're consubstantial, they're the same essentially as unitary Ultimate Reality. But It's manifesting constinctively through ontologically different states.
The Bible explicitly ties the Incarnation of Jesus Christ to Material Reality. To be Apprehensibly real - perceptible and sufficiently understandable - the Ultimate/Abstract manifestation must conform to the limits of the Material. Otherwise it isn't a material manifestation. It's literally immaterial. The expression of an intrinsically timeless abstraction is limited by the lifespan and conditions of the material reality manifesting it. The same must hold for Ultimate Reality, inconceivable as it is. To fully experience human materiality, the higher order is limited to human materiality.
Put it another way. Even a divinely true Bible is an iterated representation. How does motivated Ultimate Reality that Created man in His Material image enter Material Reality non-representationally? In itself. Kind of has to be in human form.
Francesco Tanadei, Instruments of the Passion, late 18th-early 19th century, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
Each level of reality is fully “real” within its ontological parameters. And at the same tome, ontologically different – “higher” or “lower”, more or less Ultimately Real – than the other levels. For the Ultimate to manifest Materially or Abstractly, it is real in those terms, but constrained by them. The Incarnation is a man. An extraordinary one, but subject to a man’s conditions.
Which explains how Jesus can be crucified without God ceasing to exist Abstractly or Ultimately. Constinction is ontologically hierarchical. Material manifestation means manifesting as a discrete Material entity. [Ultimate Reality as Materially manifest] is and is not [Ultimate Reality] constinctively. Manifesting Materially no more ties God up in one thing than a rock rolling down a hill becomes the entirety of “acceleration”. But it is accelerating in a material, temporal way. Just as Jesus is Ultimate Reality in a Material temporal way. Unique because he bridges the entire hierarchy.
The Anastasis - or Harrowing of Hell, or Descent into Limbo, or whatever - is also covered by this schema. The Logos free of Material manifestation and operating Abstractly within Creation/time.
First, we need to elaborate the difference between Ultimate atemporality and Abstract permanence, endlessness or eternity.
Abstract timelessness is infinity as an endless count. Sequenced, apprehensible in temporal terms, but never ending or changing. Immortal.
Ultimate atemporality precedes the conditions necessary for time, sequence, or distinction. To us, it all perpetually is. To ask why God didn’t do something at a point in time is to recast him in our apprehensible image. “When” and “point in time” are ontologically meaningless.
In order to intervene in a way that registers within Creation, Ultimate Reality has to “self-limit” to Creation’s ontological parameters. In the Band’s terms, the dematerialized – bodily dead - Logos is now working in Abstract terms. Perfect, and without material limit or constraint, but within logical causality and temporal sequence. Meaning a window of time would be needed to engage in metaphysical pursuits within the terms of Creation.
Kateryna Shadrina, Harrowing of Hell, 2021, acrylic on wood
The circles symbolize the entrance of the Logos into Hell. Reality into a place of ontological self-erasure.
Flames are a common image of Hell – another Material represention of something immaterial. But think of it through the Ontological Hierarchy. It exists Abstractly within Creation, but negatively. Not the infinite perfection of small-l logos, but the infinite regression away from God and Truth. Abstract unreality with no access to Ultimate meta-infinitude because it’s self-exiled in any positive way. There is no constinctive link to backstop the infinite regression. It’s caught in a literally eternal spiral towards absolute existential darkness. Endless flames perfectly capture the concept of eternal self-immolation.
It would look like this on the Ontological Hierarchy...
And whatever the metaphysical reason for God having to experience Material death, nothing prevents atemporal Ultimate Reality from manifesting again - so long as it occurs in the temporally-sequenced terms of Apprehensible Reality..
Anthony van Dyck, The Resurrection of Christ, 1631-32, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Once again, we find Donaldson’s Covenant Trilogy oddly insightful. In this case, the idea of a Creator constrained by what he calls the Arch of Time. It’s not that He isn’t powerful enough to act – it’s that he’s too powerful. His Creation can’t accommodate His fullness. To operate within it – to honor its Abstract properties of temporality and causality and human free will – He abides by them.
Again, we aren’t making a theological claim. We aren’t saying this is what God “really is”. What we are saying is that His workings are consistent with reality as we objectively describe it. No wonder the beast hates the arrow of time.
Thinking of God operating through the ontological parameters of a stratified reality of His Creation can account for the Spirit as well. Reality as we know it is stratifies, so it follows that our apprehension of God would be as well.
Emmanuel Kratky, Pentecost, around 1850, oil on canvas, private collection
To operate within but throughout time – as opposed to the Material singularity of the Incarnation - God’s manifests temporally but Abstractly. Like the Son, the Spirit is an ontologically-appropriate accommodation of Ultimate Reality. In this case, the properties of Abstract Reality - immaterial, unchanging, infinite in scope, but sequenced and causally operant. Working on the world like a natural force, but without the mechanistic consistency. And visualized through symbolic representations – the Dove and light mainly.
Non-standard representations make it easier to see. This illumination accompanied a copy of the medieval abbess and visionary Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias and was produced under her supervision. The original was lost in fire, but a hand copy exists, made by nuns in Abbey of St. Hildegard between 1927 and 1933. Here's her description of the vision from Scivias Part II, vision 2
Then I saw an extremely bright light and in the light the figure of a man the colour of sapphire, and it was all burning in a delightful red fire. And the bright light flooded through all the red fire, and the red fire through all the bright light, and the bright light and the red fire shone together through the whole figure of the man so that they were one light in one strength and power. And again I heard the living light speaking to me.
She describes the vision:
Master of Hildegardis Codex, The True Trinity in True Unity, from Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias, around 1165
Therefore you see ‘an extremely bright light’, which signifies the Father ... And in the light is ‘the figure of a man the colour of sapphire’, which represents the Son ... and who before all time, according to his divinity, was begotten of the Father, but afterwards, in time, according to his humanity, became incarnate in the world. And ‘it was all burning in a delightful red fire ... which represents the Holy Spirit, by whom the Only Begotten of the Father was conceived in the flesh, born in time of the Virgin and poured out his light, truth and brightness over all the world.
One is Material, two are temporal-Apprehensible, and all are ontologically appropriate. That’s our take. We would conclude that an ontologically-stratified apprehension of God is a necessary consequence of the nature of reality. The logic of constinction requires it. Our existence requires a connection to Ultimate Reality. But Ultimate Reality is beyond apprehension. The connection will manifest and be known through the reality we can apprehend, The specific forms are matters of faith.
At this point, we will speculate a little. We won't bother with a different font, but be aware of what we are doing. We have no idea why the mechanics of salvation had to play out the way they did. It’s utterly beyond us. C. S. Lewis’ "deeper magic from before the dawn of time" is good enough. But if we accept the Gospel story on faith, this is simply how it had to be for reasons beyond our knowing. The internal logic is consistent. If a single sacrifice is to redeem the Fall - at least on a personal level - it has to have an essentially limitless metaphysical quality. That's the only way it can pay in open-ended perpetuity. The Logos entering Materially Reality as a constinctive expression of Ultimate consubstantiality is such a sacrifice.
And if that sentence seems convoluted in its terminology, be attentive to the meaning. It’s actually straightforward once the alien words and structure are seen for what they are. The Trinity is really complex - like the reality within which it is known. And equally logical once we put aside the bizarre fantasy that the mechanics of Creation must be instantly comprehensible to a 6-year old.
Guido Reni, La Trinità, between 1625-1626, oil on canvas, SS. Trinità dei Pellegrini, Rome
The [active principle in Creation as human] truly is the Light of the World. And in order to die redemptively, the Son had to be Materially fully human. That means a human consciousness and finite limits of discernment. The logic is a simple extension of the necessary parameters of Material existence - Ultimate Reality is unbound by logical or material limits, but an apprehensible manifestation isn’t.
Either [ontological incapacity to access Ultimate infinitude qua Ultimate infinitude] or [not fully Material]
But aware of his nature as finite manifestation of Ultimate consubstantiality. Of course there’s a disconnect. The fullness of God has to seem like a “different person”, only fully and completely in ways that human psychological analogies can’t possibly represent.
But about that day or hour no one knows... Matthew 24:36
For the sacrifice to matter - to work redemptively - it would have to be freely chosen and independent of God's Will. Meaning the Material human consciousness comes with human free will. Explaining the Agony in the Garden, the cry on the Cross, and other times where the limited Material extension confronts the disconnect between its Ultimate essence and manifest spatio-temporal finitude.
Heinrich Hofmann, Christ in Gethsemane, 1886, oil, on canvas, Riverside Church, New York
In order to die, the material manifestation had to be cut off from the upper hierarchy. To be fully human in order to fully self-sacrifice through a fully human death.
In non-religious terms, the sudden change of state represented by death is not applicable to Abstract or Ultimate Realities. Any more than stopping an accelerating car ends [Acceleration] as an abstract reality. So Jesus has to be ontologically differentiated from God’s Fullness. Or he can’t die.
We would assume the cry on the Cross was moment the divine Logos experientially grasped the full weight of the Fallen human condition. That which "is" anterior to Creation confronting the pure existential horror of severance from God and a mortal death in bodily human terms. The valley of shadow and darkling glass are all we know, and the nature of our condition is frustratingly, frighteningly obvious. We literally cannot imagine what it would seem like to one that “exists” as Truth. It does not surprise us that God as we can apprehend Him appears to soften in the New Testament. To the extent that He operates within sequenced time, it would be strange if He didn’t.
The role of the Spirit in also follows. God from God's Ultimate "perspective" is unitary. God operating within the ontological parameters of Creation manifests different aspects. The Spirit is the active expression of Will or power - Ultimate Reality directly asserting Himself within the terms of His own Creation. Which beggars the imagination in philophical terms as well as theological ones.
The Spirit is how this manifests Abstractly. Of course its present when He Incarnates, or when He reignites the Material manifestation in the Resurrection.
Just a thought. The larger point is that thinking about reality systematically fumigates a lot of nonsense and clears up some puzzlers. Once we get out of Flatland, we see the logic of constinction fits the Father the Son, and the Holy Spirit perfectly. That’s because reality is real and patterns are consistent across domains. As for specific dogmas, we can’t say. The Ontological Hierarchy only maps possible relationships. Details of faith are beyond it. But it does show us that the Trinity as understood dogmatically is perfectly consistent with the way reality “works”. As far as we can see it.
That’s about as much as we’re willing to say on the matter. The post started with our lack of fitness or desire to lead religiously and a mild disavowal of theology. We wanted to show how the premise is completely consistent with the structure of reality and our impression of it. Anything more heads into those undesired countries.
What we do want to finish with is something closer to the Band’s project. The chapter we posted extensively broke down the relationship between Abstract and Material Reality and their representational mediation. The constinctive structure of Apprehensible we’re using here is a direct result of that. We were serious when we pointed out that the Ontological Hierarchy is a developing description of relations.
What we haven’t really done is think about Ultimate Reality. That is a planned for a chapter and needs some preliminary thought. We sympathize with Tolkien - chapters force final form and these ideas are evolving. It’s why we like this format so much. It’s an open-ended integrated longform campaign where we can reference old posts, rework ideas, generate new insights, and jump in new directions. Just note that this is preliminary and will likely change. But we do want to lay out some starting reasoning for this most rarified topic. Earlier on, we asked you to hold a thought about the Ultimate-Abstract transition on the Ontological Hierarchy.
The hard part is the total conceptual inaccessibility that’s always the problem. We can only ascertain what it “looks like” on our end of the constinction.
Abstract manifestation in the Material is easy, once the stink of Flatland clears. Because that relationship homologous with our own cognitive and representational process. Logic and observation. It’s intuitive. But how does it work with an Ultimate Reality beyond comprehension?
First, the Ontological Hierarchy is hierarchical by absolute truth-value. Immaterial, perfect, infinite abstractions are more perfectly true in themselves than entropic, temporal, finite stuff. And Ultimate reality simply IS. Ineffable beyond even abstraction. Working through the Trinity could give us models of Ultimate manifestation, but we aren’t comfortable using it that way. Our point is that Ontological Hierarchy shows descriptive homology with the Trinity . Not the pretence that the Ontological Hierarchy somwhow determines the nature of God. One is a relatively successful description of Reality by a finite Fallen creation in it. The other is satanic inversion. If they disagreed, it’s the Ontological Hierarchy that would need revising. Representation and reality in ontological priority order.
Father John Giuliani, Lakota Trinity, 21st century, oil on canvas
We came across this interesting representation of the Trinity using non-traditional Western Christian symbolism. According to the link, the artist - Father John Giuliani – was a Catholic priest “dedicated to creating Catholic iconography that celebrates the lives and cultures of Native Americans”.
He uses Wakan Tanka in headdress of eagle feathers as halo for the Father, an eagle for the Spirit, and a victorious Sioux warrior with a gesture of self-giving for the Son. It captures the metaphysical relations. But the idea of redemptive sacrifice is only implicit in the giving warrior.
But we can think about these transitions in our usual ways. Staying logically coherent and recognizing our limits keeps us on the truth track anyhow. What we can apprehend of the Ultimate-Apprehensible constinction are role as generative origin and necessary pre-fundamental meta-infinity. We can't know what "It is". We can only know what It does in Apprehensible terms.
First, the Ontological Hierarchy appears as a simple three-part column with blurry transitions between them. In more detail, it is constinction within constinction. Set it up.
The graphic is simplified for clarity. But we also know that Abstract and Material Realities are constictively symbiotic – experience is the stuff of thought, thought interprets experience. Put another way, Material Reality manifests the Abstract, Abstract Reality informs the Material.
We can break them up to facilitate discussion or show relative truth value. But we don’t actually experience them in isolation. Together, we call them Apprehensible Reality. The stuff and representation of Langan’s infocognition.
Be transparent with wnat we're doing. Since we are considering the constinctive whole, we can flip the graphic representation. This removes the original emphasis on their hierarchical truth value. That’s less important to the synergistic whole – internal hierarchical difference is implicit in the external composite form.
Trade hierarchical information for better impression of constinctive unity.
Creating a graphic representation of the unified Apprehensible Reality for simplicity
And a higher-level constinction between the aspects of reality we can apprehend and those we can’t.
We don't have to be able to apprehend Ultimate Reality to grasp the Apprehensibly relevant aspects of the constinctive link. With Abstract-Material we can "see" both sides, so the relationship is apparent. With Apprehensible-Ultimate, only one end is accessible to us. It's an ontological continuum bisected by the final limit of discernment. This means we can comprehend the metaphysical outflow, but not the source.
The most important thing is the recurring interaction mechanism. Logically, we can extrapolate from Material-Abstract
The “higher” or Truer level of reality manifests within the parameters of the lower.
The homology with the Trinity suggests this holds for Ultimate as well. With a catch. The paradox that demonstrates limits of discernment is that Ultimate and Apprehensible cannot be reciprocally dependent the way Abstract and Material are. That’s the meta-infinitude – Creation is constinctive without regression or recursivity.
Apprehensible Reality manifests and depends on the Ultimate. But the Ultimate is utterly one and self-contained despite how lower levels appear to human being-in-the-world. The final big picture we can’t reach.
We can color in the rectangle.
But we can do better, even stuck with geometric dimensions as metaphors for ontological ones. Move from “2D” Apprehensible to “3D” Ultimate – with the caveat that this is just frame of reference.
The idea of “sphere” or “borders” are definitional and ontologically part of Apprehensible Reality. Not applicable to God. But it is a more effective representation of this logically impossible relationship.
We're not even going to try to put it into one diagram. Too cluttered. Just keep in mind that the Ontological Hierarchy is a graphic oversimplification.
Which is why Creation - spatio-temporal, ordered, infocognitive Reality as we can apprehend it - seems to appear suddenly. Whether in the Bible or in mathematical models. A state of temporality within the atemporal would register from inside as just ... starting. Count and causality originate by becoming possible. Existence winking into existence.
San Marco Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars mosaic.
That can’t register the same way Ultimately, but that’s beyond us. We're limited to sequenced processes.
It's why questions of Abstract foundations are unanswerable. Why does logic work? What makes the laws of physics hold? Why is objective perception stable? What is matter? We would suggest that these are all things that are products of a constinctive Creation process where we can only access one end.
Then there's consciousness. If the soul is a spark of the Ultimate, then the ultimate source will prove elusive forever. It's another place where pre-Enlightenment concepts of the soul do a far better job of accounting for observable reality than mechanistic fantasy. And if animals demonstrate cognitive abilities, we'd suggest that says more about their pneumological nature than the existence of Ultimate Reality.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, A Soul Carried to Heaven, around 1878, oil on canvas, Musée d'art et d'archéologie du Périgord
The question for this post has to do with the simple Ontological Hierarchy. Put aside complexities of fractal constinction and representational filtering for the three basic levels in order of ontological truth value. How does the Ultimate-Abstract transition work?
Using our more philosophically-sourced technical language, we represent Abstract Reality with logical and conceptual abstractions. Perfect, replicable, internally consistent, immaterial concepts and relations that are capable of infinite scale and absolute precision. Logic allows us to explore this level virtuously endlessly by determining and manipulating equivalencies. Until we reach the complexities of modern mathematics.
Nabil Nahas, Eclypse, 1978, acrylic on canvas, Tate London
Since Abstract Reality has a truth value, it extends from Ultimate Reality (what IS) and is real ontologically. Only with properties that are not amenable to Material or Ultimate things-in-themselves. We know we experience it Materially - empirically observably - by Material manifestation. Material Reality can't support Abstract Realities in themselves either - they express through the Material. Which means the expressions are limited to those Material ontological properties. They can't materialize absolute infinite precision or scale. They can't be replicable with a 0.0 repeating error. They can't literally last forever. They're Abstract truths made epistemologically accessible to Material means. The call them to mind representationally.
Try that again. Abstract Reality extends from Ultimate Reality (what IS) but has properties that cannot support Ultimate "things"-in-themselves. We observe Abstracts through Material manifestation. So why wouldn't we conceive of Ultimate "things" through Abstract - logically conceivable - manifestation?
What would Ultimate Reality manifesting Abstractly “look like” conceptually? The expressions would have to be limited to Abstract ontological properties or else they wouldn’t be Abstractly Real. The parameters aren’t able to conceptualize meta-infinities or true atemporality. Because they can't encompass the origins of their own conditions of possibility. It's Ultimate Truth made epistemologically accessible to Abstract means - logical conceptualization - through Abstract manifestation with Abstract limits.
Gaspare Diziani, Wisdom and Time discovering Truth, second quarter of 18th century, ink and sanguine on paper, National Museum in Gdańsk
So what does Ultimate Reality look like at the limits of logic? Or more precisely, what Absract properties best manifests It logically?
The Band suggests the very thing that makes It logically necessary for Apprehensible Reality to exist as it does. Allegories illustrate Abstract Realities to apply Materially.
Ultimate Reality is the necessary anchor for logical and perceptual coherence. It's what Is. Not "true", what makes "true" possible ontologically. The apophatic source of the objectivity of Creation. As an Abstract concept, that would be the purest imaginable form of Truth. Ultimate Reality is logically True. Watch for inversion. Truth isn't Ultimate Reality qua Ultimate Reality. That's beyond comprehension, description, parameterization, or any other sequenced process downstream from It. Truth is a word we use to express the most logically rarified - and hopelessly inadequate - property we can conceptualize. Existential, essential, ontologically objective reality.
It follows from the logical apprehension of Truth as defined here - the coherence of existential, essential, ontologically objective reality - that morality is deontological. The existence of Truth as an Abstract manifestation of the Ultimate means distinctions like correct-incorrect, right-wrong, true-false, etc. all have objective answers.
Unknown British artist, An Allegory of Man, 1596 or after, oil on wood, Tate London
If we carry this down into the Material, it means we can choose to be honest or dishonest. To align with reality or parasitize short-term beast abundance. Anyone not wanting to ride the clown car into the Abyss should be thinking about lining up with what is True.
The path starts with lower-case t Abstract and Material truths. They're constinctive extensions after all.
Morality moves us to the human realm, since we are gifted the choice to align with Truth or not. Hence deontology. If Reality is objective, Truth is real and we get objective moral direction. What we call "good" is moral reasoning that applies Truth to Material circumstances. To be good is to align with the True is to align with Ultimate Reality. Stretched to the limits of logic, the multiplicity of goodness reflects the Good.
The manifest Will of Ultimate Reality determines the Abstract standard of the Good. But we can get there inductively. It is possible to induct Abstract truths from empirical pattern recognition. Witnessing things accelerate brings awareness of [Acceleration]. But it’s also possible to move inductively from lower abstractions to higher ones. Recognition of truthfulness as a recurring pattern leading to Truth as a universal or meta-concept. Whether we work down from faith or up from observation, the “upper limit” of Abstraction is the same.
Didacus Valades, Great Chain of Being, engraving from Retorica Christiana by Diego Valdes, 1579.
Neoplatonic reasoning to the extent that they recognized ontology and used words.
God is motivated - hence Creation - and we reject the gamma fantasy of "glimpses of the Forms/One" as auto-idolatrous lies. All the Good means here is the condition of being True. The "nature" of Ultimate Reality at the limit of discernment. What Is is Good is True.
Another big inversion hovers around God is good. Aspiring luciferians pretend it holds God to whatever contemporary "moral" standard the beast is pimping at the moment. The correct statement is God/Ultimate Reality is Good to the extent we can apprehend Him. The absolute objective moral standard. Otherwise we define him in our image, which is blasphemous. Or we pretend effects determine causes, which is retarded.
So the Good and the True are conventional terms for Ultimate Reality manifesting Abstractly. At which point they become apprehensible and available for understanding, moral reasoning, and however many other infocognitive processes.
Antonio Canova, Psyche Awakened by Eros, 1793, marble, Louvre Museum
Bringing us to the third of the venerable trio - the Beautiful. This term is more distorted than the others because of its place in aesthetics and popular culture. But even with the myriad distortions of the original, we can work with it.
Beauty is objective. An endless blather of lies notwithstanding. There are a number of reasons for this, the biggest probably being confusion with sexual attraction/power. What we call allure, to avoid confusion. The vast majority of people don't recognize the difference between beauty and allure - the most "beautiful" is the one they're most attracted to. And while there is correlation between beauty and allure, they aren't isomorphic.
John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery
We are material creatures and finite applications of the conceptual penthouse will always have some variance in opinion. But there is vastly more variance in human sexual response. This is much more animal/instinctive, and types play much more of a factor. In Flatland, where the very idea of ontology doesn't exist, the two are easily confused.
The sublime is more psychological, but related. Overwhelming, awesome experiences that can be mind-blowingly enjoyable, exhilarating, or terrifying, but lack The ordered symmetries and harmonies of classical beauty.
In landscape...
Sydney Laurence, Northern Lights, oil on canvas, before 1940, private collection
Or other passions...
But neither hotness nor sublimity are beauty. Beauty plays a role, but they're psycho-emotional reactions involving a lot of factors. And even here, there are commonalities. Because beauty plays a role. And Beauty in a classical sense is intellectual. It has to be. It's an abstracted abstraction that expresses what Ultimate Reality looks like empirically and logically at the very limits of discernment.
Symmetry, harmony, proportion, appropriateness, elegance - these are all properties that indicate how close a thing or idea comes to that absolute standard of Truth and Goodness in Creation.
The Good, Beautiful, and True indicate Ultimate Reality manifesting Abstractly across the final limit of discernment.
Once more, the choice of words is unimportant. We opt for the old Platonic triad because it has huge historic weight and definitions that are fit for purpose. The important thing is the consistence of constinctive manifestation across the Ontological Hierarchy. The purest logical accommodations of Ultimate Reality that can be thought. What It it is, Its nature, and what It looks like as best we can understand.
Ivan Aivazovsky, Chaos (The Creation), 1841, oil on canvas, San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice