THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY AND THE MOTHER OF GOD.
If a God without feeling, without a capability of suffering, will not
suffice to man as a feeling, suffering being, neither will a God with
feeling only, a God without intelligence and will. Only a being who
comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man. Man's
consciousness of himself in his totality is the consciousness of the
Trinity. The Trinity knits together the qualities or powers which
were before regarded separately into unity, and thereby reduces the
universal being of the understanding, i.e., God as God, to a special
being, a special faculty.
That which theology designates as the image, the similitude of the
Trinity, we must take as the thing itself, the essence, the archetype,
the original; by this means we shall solve the enigma. The so-called
images by which it has been sought to illustrate the Trinity, and
make it comprehensible, are principally: mind, understanding, memory,
will, love--mens, intellectus, memoria, voluntas, amor or caritas.
God thinks, God loves; and, moreover, he thinks, he loves himself;
the object thought, known, loved, is God himself. The objectivity
of self-consciousness is the first thing we meet with in the
Trinity. Self-consciousness necessarily urges itself upon man as
something absolute. Existence is for him one with self-consciousness;
existence with self-consciousness is for him existence simply. If
I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or
not. Self-consciousness is for man--is, in fact, in itself--absolute. A
God who knows not his own existence, a God without consciousness, is
no God. Man cannot conceive himself as without consciousness; hence
he cannot conceive God as without it. The divine self-consciousness
is nothing else than the consciousness of consciousness as an absolute
or divine essence.
But this explanation is by no means exhaustive. On the contrary,
we should be proceeding very arbitrarily if we sought to reduce
and limit the mystery of the Trinity to the proposition just laid
down. Consciousness, understanding, will, love, in the sense of
abstract essences or qualities, belong only to abstract philosophy. But
religion is man's consciousness of himself in his concrete or living
totality, in which the identity of self-consciousness exists only as
the pregnant, complete unity of I and thou.
Religion, at least the Christian, is abstraction from the world; it is
essentially inward. The religious man leads a life withdrawn from the
world, hidden in God, still, void of worldly joy. He separates himself
from the world, not only in the ordinary sense, according to which
the renunciation of the world belongs to every true, earnest man,
but also in that wider sense which science gives to the word, when
it calls itself world-wisdom (welt-weisheit); but he thus separates
himself only because God is a being separate from the world, an
extra and supramundane being,--i.e., abstractly and philosophically
expressed, the non-existence of the world. God, as an extramundane
being, is however nothing else than the nature of man withdrawn from
the world and concentrated in itself, freed from all worldly ties
and entanglements, transporting itself above the world, and positing
itself in this condition as a real objective being; or, nothing else
than the consciousness of the power to abstract oneself from all that
is external, and to live for and with oneself alone, under the form
which this power takes in religion, namely, that of a being distinct,
apart from man. [44] God as God, as a simple being, is the being
absolutely alone, solitary--absolute solitude and self-sufficingness;
for that only can be solitary which is self-sufficing. To be able to
be solitary is a sign of character and thinking power. Solitude is
the want of the thinker, society the want of the heart. We can think
alone, but we can love only with another. In love we are dependent,
for it is the need of another being; we are independent only in the
solitary act of thought. Solitude is self-sufficingness.
But from a solitary God the essential need of duality, of love,
of community, of the real, completed self-consciousness, of the
alter ego, is excluded. This want is therefore satisfied by religion
thus: in the still solitude of the Divine Being is placed another,
a second, different from God as to personality, but identical with
him in essence,--God the Son, in distinction from God the Father. God
the Father is I, God the Son Thou. The I is understanding, the Thou
love. But love with understanding and understanding with love is mind,
and mind is the totality of man as such--the total man.
Participated life is alone true, self-satisfying, divine life:--this
simple thought, this truth, natural, immanent in man, is the secret,
the supernatural mystery of the Trinity. But religion expresses
this truth, as it does every other, in an indirect manner, i.e.,
inversely, for it here makes a general truth into a particular one,
the true subject into a predicate, when it says: God is a participated
life, a life of love and friendship. The third Person in the Trinity
expresses nothing further than the love of the two divine Persons
towards each other; it is the unity of the Son and the Father, the
idea of community, strangely enough regarded in its turn as a special
personal being.
The Holy Spirit owes its personal existence only to a name, a word. The
earliest Fathers of the Church are well known to have identified
the Spirit with the Son. Even later, its dogmatic personality wants
consistency. He is the love with which God loves himself and man,
and, on the other hand, he is the love with which man loves God and
men. Thus he is the identity of God and man, made objective according
to the usual mode of thought in religion, namely, as in itself a
distinct being. But for us this unity or identity is already involved
in the idea of the Father, and yet more in that of the Son. Hence we
need not make the Holy Spirit a separate object of our analysis. Only
this one remark further. In so far as the Holy Spirit represents the
subjective phase, he is properly the representation of the religious
sentiment to itself, the representation of religious emotion, of
religious enthusiasm, or the personification, the rendering objective
of religion in religion. The Holy Spirit is therefore the sighing
creature, the yearning of the creature after God.
But that there are in fact only two Persons in the Trinity, the
third representing, as has been said, only love, is involved in
this, that to the strict idea of love two suffice. With two we have
the principle of multiplicity and all its essential results. Two
is the principle of multiplicity, and can therefore stand as its
complete substitute. If several Persons were posited, the force
of love would only be weakened--it would be dispersed. But love
and the heart are identical; the heart is no special power; it is
the man who loves, and in so far as he loves. The second Person is
therefore the self-assertion of the human heart as the principle of
duality, of participated life,--it is warmth; the Father is light,
although light was chiefly a predicate of the Son, because in him the
Godhead first became clear, comprehensible. But notwithstanding this,
light as a superterrestrial element may be ascribed to the Father,
the representative of the Godhead as such, the cold being of the
intelligence; and warmth, as a terrestrial element, to the Son. God
as the Son first gives warmth to man; here God, from an object of
the intellectual eye, of the indifferent sense of light, becomes
an object of feeling, of affection, of enthusiasm, of rapture;
but only because the Son is himself nothing else than the glow of
love, enthusiasm. [45] God as the Son is the primitive incarnation,
the primitive self-renunciation of God, the negation of God in God;
for as the Son he is a finite being, because he exists ab alio, he
has a source, whereas the Father has no source, he exists à se. Thus
in the second Person the essential attribute of the Godhead, the
attribute of self-existence, is given up. But God the Father himself
begets the Son; thus he renounces his rigorous, exclusive divinity;
he humiliates, lowers himself, evolves within himself the principle
of finiteness, of dependent existence; in the Son he becomes man,
not indeed, in the first instance, as to the outward form, but as
to the inward nature. And for this reason it is as the Son that God
first becomes the object of man, the object of feeling, of the heart.
The heart comprehends only what springs from the heart. From
the character of the subjective disposition and impressions the
conclusion is infallible as to the character of the object. The
pure, free understanding denies the Son,--not so the understanding
determined by feeling, overshadowed by the heart; on the contrary,
it finds in the Son the depths of the Godhead, because in him it
finds feeling, which in and by itself is something dark, obscure,
and therefore appears to man a mystery. The Son lays hold on the
heart, because the true Father of the Divine Son is the human heart,
[46] and the Son himself nothing else than the divine heart, i.e.,
the human heart become objective to itself as a Divine Being.
A God who has not in himself the quality of finiteness, the principle
of concrete existence, the essence of the feeling of dependence, is
no God for a finite, concrete being. The religious man cannot love a
God who has not the essence of love in himself, neither can man, or,
in general, any finite being, be an object to a God who has not in
himself the ground, the principle of finiteness. To such a God there is
wanting the sense, the understanding, the sympathy for finiteness. How
can God be the Father of men, how can he love other beings subordinate
to himself, if he has not in himself a subordinate being, a Son, if
he does not know what love is, so to speak, from his own experience,
in relation to himself? The single man takes far less interest in the
family sorrows of another than he who himself has family ties. Thus
God the Father loves men only in the Son and for the sake of the
Son. The love to man is derived from the love to the Son.
The Father and Son in the Trinity are therefore father and son not
in a figurative sense, but in a strictly literal sense. The Father
is a real father in relation to the Son, the Son is a real son
in relation to the Father, or to God as the Father. The essential
personal distinction between them consists only in this, that the one
begets, the other is begotten. If this natural empirical condition is
taken away, their personal existence and reality are annihilated. The
Christians--we mean of course the Christians of former days, who would
with difficulty recognise the worldly, frivolous, pagan Christians
of the modern world as their brethren in Christ--substituted for
the natural love and unity immanent in man a purely religious love
and unity; they rejected the real life of the family, the intimate
bond of love which is naturally moral, as an undivine, unheavenly,
i.e., in truth, a worthless thing. But in compensation they had a
Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love,
with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. On
this account the mystery of the Trinity was to the ancient Christians
an object of unbounded wonder, enthusiasm, and rapture, because here
the satisfaction of those profoundest human wants which in reality,
in life, they denied, became to them an object of contemplation in
God. [47]
It was therefore quite in order that, to complete the divine
family, the bond of love between Father and Son, a third, and that
a feminine person, was received into heaven; for the personality of
the Holy Spirit is a too vague and precarious, a too obviously poetic
personification of the mutual love of the Father and Son, to serve as
the third complementary being. It is true that the Virgin Mary was not
so placed between the Father and Son as to imply that the Father had
begotten the Son through her, because the sexual relation was regarded
by the Christians as something unholy and sinful; but it is enough
that the maternal principle was associated with the Father and Son.
It is, in fact, difficult to perceive why the Mother should be
something unholy, i.e., unworthy of God, when once God is Father
and Son. Though it is held that the Father is not a father in the
natural sense--that, on the contrary, the divine generation is quite
different from the natural and human--still he remains a Father, and a
real, not a nominal or symbolical Father in relation to the Son. And
the idea of the Mother of God, which now appears so strange to us,
is therefore not really more strange or paradoxical, than the idea
of the Son of God, is not more in contradiction with the general,
abstract definition of God than the Sonship. On the contrary, the
Virgin Mary fits in perfectly with the relations of the Trinity, since
she conceives without man the Son whom the Father begets without woman;
[48] so that thus the Holy Virgin is a necessary, inherently requisite
antithesis to the Father in the bosom of the Trinity. Moreover we have,
if not in concreto and explicitly, yet in abstracto and implicitly,
the feminine principle already in the Son. The Son is the mild, gentle,
forgiving, conciliating being--the womanly sentiment of God. God, as
the Father, is the generator, the active, the principle of masculine
spontaneity; but the Son is begotten without himself begetting, Deus
genitus, the passive, suffering, receptive being; he receives his
existence from the Father. The Son, as a son, of course not as God,
is dependent on the Father, subject to his authority. The Son is thus
the feminine feeling of dependence in the Godhead; the Son implicitly
urges upon us the need of a real feminine being. [49]
The son--I mean the natural, human son--considered as such, is an
intermediate being between the masculine nature of the father and the
feminine nature of the mother; he is, as it were, still half a man,
half a woman, inasmuch as he has not the full, rigorous consciousness
of independence which characterises the man, and feels himself drawn
rather to the mother than to the father. The love of the son to the
mother is the first love of the masculine being for the feminine. The
love of man to woman, the love of the youth for the maiden, receives
its religious--its sole truly religious consecration in the love of the
son to the mother; the son's love for his mother is the first yearning
of man towards woman--his first humbling of himself before her.
Necessarily, therefore, the idea of the Mother of God is associated
with the idea of the Son of God,--the same heart that needed the one
needed the other also. Where the Son is, the Mother cannot be absent;
the Son is the only-begotten of the Father, but the Mother is the
concomitant of the Son. The Son is a substitute for the Mother to the
Father, but not so the Father to the Son. To the Son the Mother is
indispensable; the heart of the Son is the heart of the Mother. Why
did God become man only through woman? Could not the Almighty have
appeared as a man amongst men in another manner--immediately? Why
did the Son betake himself to the bosom of the Mother? [50] For what
other reason than because the Son is the yearning after the Mother,
because his womanly, tender heart found a corresponding expression
only in a feminine body? It is true that the Son, as a natural
man, dwells only temporarily in the shrine of this body, but the
impressions which he here receives are inextinguishable; the Mother
is never out of the mind and heart of the Son. If then the worship
of the Son of God is no idolatry, the worship of the Mother of God
is no idolatry. If herein we perceive the love of God to us, that he
gave us his only-begotten Son, i.e., that which was dearest to him,
for our salvation,--we can perceive this love still better when we
find in God the beating of a mother's heart. The highest and deepest
love is the mother's love. The father consoles himself for the loss
of his son; he has a stoical principle within him. The mother, on the
contrary, is inconsolable; she is the sorrowing element, that which
cannot be indemnified--the true in love.
Where faith in the Mother of God sinks, there also sinks faith in the
Son of God, and in God as the Father. The Father is a truth only where
the Mother is a truth. Love is in and by itself essentially feminine in
its nature. The belief in the love of God is the belief in the feminine
principle as divine.* Love apart from living nature is an anomaly,
a phantom. Behold in love the holy necessity and depth of Nature!
Protestantism has set aside the Mother of God; but this deposition
of woman has been severely avenged. [51] The arms which it has used
against the Mother of God have turned against itself, against the
Son of God, against the whole Trinity. He who has once offered up the
Mother of God to the understanding, is not far from sacrificing the
mystery of the Son of God as an anthropomorphism. The anthropomorphism
is certainly veiled when the feminine being is excluded, but only
veiled--not removed. It is true that Protestantism had no need of
the heavenly bride, because it received with open arms the earthly
bride. But for that very reason it ought to have been consequent and
courageous enough to give up not only the Mother, but the Son and the
Father. Only he who has no earthly parents needs heavenly ones. The
triune God is the God of Catholicism; he has a profound, heartfelt,
necessary, truly religious significance, only in antithesis to the
negation of all substantial bonds, in antithesis to the life of the
anchorite, the monk, and the nun. [52] The triune God has a substantial
meaning only where there is an abstraction from the substance of
real life. The more empty life is, the fuller, the more concrete is
God. The impoverishing of the real world and the enriching of God
is one act. Only the poor man has a rich God. God springs out of the
feeling of a want; what man is in need of, whether this be a definite
and therefore conscious, or an unconscious need,--that is God. Thus
the disconsolate feeling of a void, of loneliness, needed a God in
whom there is society, a union of beings fervently loving each other.
Here we have the true explanation of the fact that the Trinity has in
modern times lost first its practical, and ultimately its theoretical
significance.