Graduate 76: Trinity and Self-Consciousness

So I'm working on this paper about self-consciousness, and around mid-day, Monday, the following occurs to me.

It is one of the enduring problems of philosophy that we seem quite unable to grasp our selves by direct observation or even introspection. The British Empiricist, David Hume (1711-1776), wrote one of the most well-known passages on the point:

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.... But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), bk. 1, part IV, sec. 6, pp. 251-253

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We might illustrate the problem with a simple picture. Imagine your self as a point on a piece of paper. Imagine a number of rays that originate that point--representing thoughts, perceptions, and the other ways in which we grasp objects outside of us, be they physical objects, mental objects, abstract ideas, etc. Given this diagram, it would seem the easiest thing in the world to direct one of those perceptual rays back at the object from which it originates, in order to apprehend the source. But this is just what we seem quite unable to do. We seem not to be able to grasp, as an object of our perceptions, that very source of our perceptions, which leaves us quite ignorant of one of the most important parts of us--namely, our self.

There are philosophers who will object to this picture of human beings and selves and the mechanisms of perception, but it is a very well-established picture nonetheless. And it occurred to me that this condition must have something to do with our natural finitude and contingency. And that thought, in turn, caused me to turn to think about the only infinite and necessary being that I know of--God.

Now wouldn't it seem silly if God was plagued by this same blind-spot that faces us human beings? Wouldn't we think it a problem to assert that the most perfect being could not reach, apprehend, or grasp this fundamental and most essential part of his own nature?

And then it hit me--God CAN grasp this fundamental and most essential part of His own nature because God is TRINITY! When the Father looks to the Son, He beholds the fullness of deity in the Son. Likewise when the Son looks to the Father and when they look to the Holy Spirit and he looks back, they each behold the fullness of deity in the other. This plurality within the God-head allows God to apprehend His own being fully and completely. There are no blind-spots for Him as there are for us human beings.

Now I won't be so bold as to suggest that Hume was the first person to observe this human inability to grasp the self. Certainly people before him made similar observations, although his work was quite significant as a critique of the mainstream of philosophy up to that point. But just think, twenty-one hundred years before Hume lived, Moses wrote of the plurality that exists within the God-head, in the first chapters of Genesis.

Like I said, philosophy is divided on the nature of the self, and I don't pretend to understand the Trinity, but the sublime simplicity of this connection between the two was so striking that it lifted my Spirits for the rest of the afternoon.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure it was a bit like Eugene Melstner after he re-calibrated his barometer yielding a five-percent increase in the reading of the relative humidity.)

Doctrine is not boring. (Here's hearkening back to my last blog-entry.) The deeper you go into it, the more you discover, the more you want to praise God for His glory and majesty and greatness and goodness.

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.