Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Dante's Analogy for the Trinity

In previous posts I've tried to convince readers that the analogies illustrating “how God is three and one” are not successful and also not very interesting, because the doctrine of the Trinity is not about how God is three and one. But for anyone who's still interested, I know of one analogy that's far better than the others. It's not exactly successful, because it's actually incoherent, but the incoherence reflects, in a material image, the strange arithmetic of the doctrine of the Trinity.

It comes from the last canto (chapter) of Dante's Paradiso, the final stage in his journey through hell, purgatory and heaven in his poem, the Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century. Here at the end of the journey he tells of himself seeing God directly with his mind. He describes what he saw as a circle of light, consisting of three different colors, each filling the whole circle without being mixed up or blended with each other.

So imagine that: a circle of light, say green. And then light of another color, say red, completely filling the same circle—not just in one part of the circle while the green light is in another part. And then a third color, again filling the same circle completely. And yet the three colors remain distinct, each retaining its own integrity, not muddying each other up like when you mix different colored paints and get a nondescript brown. That distinctness, integrity and completeness is an image for how the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not the Father - - and yet there is only one God, one circle of divine light with three distinct colors, each of which fills the whole circle.

And then Dante sees something absolutely lovely about the second color, which it turns out is actually flesh colored, having a human face. And that of course, is an image of the incarnation.

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