/lit/ - Literature

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The normative Christian doctrine is that the three persons of God head are one in divinity but three persons, ever unified but not confused, not a static oneness but rather an interpenetration. In the Christian tradition this kind of unity is understood to be even more unified than a singular static Monad. How so? I shall quote Hegel who’s drawing from the Christian mystic Jacob boehme.

“When we say, “God is love,” we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two – to be outside of myself and in the other – this is love.”

Thus this is the nature of Love which we identify with the inherent nature of Godhead and divinity from before creation and in eternity, God in his self relation as Lover, loved and the Love between, the whole creation being an act of love born of God’s self love and love of all of his properties, which occurs automatically within time as God is unchanging he is necessarily always father, creator, messiah, prince of peace and any other title you can imagine.

Early Christian mystics and theologians will argue that the trinity of persons is a manifest appearance whereas the Divinity behind them is an inert unity which automatically makes the three necessary (see Dionysius and also some readings of aquinas) others argue apophatic arguments that such is impossible to know, others argue in more heretical modes that it is an avatar or emanation system and some aspects of godhead are elder, some would argue all three persons of the Godhead are only technically divided for our sake due to incomprehensible unity.

Any of these you choose, Christ states by entering the church, by his death and resurrection, by becoming his bride we enter into this same Nondual unity as the three persons partake of. We do not “become God” in the sense of gaining his persons, but rather we become one of the persons within the Godhead, distinct but through love we are unified. This fuses beautifully with platonic conceptions in the writings of St athanasius in his on the incarnation, who tells us that Christ is perfect reason and wisdom, the image of god is reason and that by reflecting/contemplating/proximity to Christ our reason like a mirror is cleaned and we can perfectly reflect the light of God. In this regard Christianity preaches a Nonduality through love but not a confusion or dissolution in Nonduality. Rather fullness of being and perfection is attained.