Trinity and Incarnation: comfort in tension

Man is an animal of grave consequence and inescapable predicament. On one hand he supposes to enjoy, unbound, the diversity of creative intercourse and non-determinative freedom. On the other, he longs for the unity of person and absolute authority that would yield a final solution to his doubts, a final deductive indubitable certainty. This epistemological interplay between oneness and many-ness, universality and particularity, as a part of man’s cognitive milieu, is age old. One need only consider Raphael’s famous ‘The School of Athens’ in which Plato and Aristotle are depicted in conversation about the real. The great Athenian master has his finger raised toward the sky, lifting his hopes toward an ideal and abstract realm of certain formality. The equally astute pupil points his palm toward the ground, emphasizing the concrete particularity of things as ultimate in common experience.

So which is it? One, form, universal-invariant-absolute OR Many, accident, particular-changing-temporal? Is there a system of thought that can responsibly unify the poles? Will the answer find its locus in autonomy and terrenal starting points? Even a cursory scan of the last 2500 years of western thought must yield a resounding nein.

Enter the discomfort of every rationalist: the supra-rational, divine cognition, transcendental necessity.

Trinity and Incarnation. I will assert through interrogative: what else can actually account for one and many, transcendence and immanence? If there is silence, then there is also an answer.