Flatland and the Trinity

If you have not read it, I highly recommend Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland. In this delightful satire the narrator, A. Square, describes the two-dimensional world that he knows. Everything is perceived as coloured lines of varying brightness (for, of course, being flat they don’t see shapes in their full form as we would) and the cardinal directions form the total concept of movement. Different shapes have differing degrees of intellect and consequently importance in society, with women being straight lines and the least intelligent, while circles and near-circles being the priestly aristocracy, and so on.

 Then one day A. Square receives a visit from a Sphere, who is able to move in and through the Flat Dimension at will and who reveals to him the world of the Third Dimension. A. Square is stunned and irreversibly changed by this experience, though when he tries to explain it to his neighbours and friends he discovers that he can scarcely even comprehend what he’s seen, let alone explain it, and has to fall back on a seemingly-meaningless formula: “Up, but not North”.

 Intentionally or not, this charmingly surreal fable illustrates an important truth: when dealing with a higher nature than oneself, one will necessarily encounter seeming contradictions and mysteries. It would indeed be a strong grounds for suspicion if one didn’t. A less abstract and less extreme example of this would be if you imagined trying to explain the concept of money to your dog: for all his virtues, the good woofer would have no capacity to understand what you are talking about (though to be fair, it’s a concept many humans have trouble with as well).

 The Holy Trinity, being the inner life of God, must by hypothesis be the supreme mystery; incomprehensible to us. The angel who met St. Augustine on the beach in the guise of a child likened his efforts to understand this most sublime of dogmas to trying to pour the ocean into a small hole in the sand.

 This is one of the essential difficulties in speaking of the things of God. If God be real, He must, on hypothesis, be immeasurably above us. Which means that we can never comprehend or understand Him. There will always seem to be contradictions, snares, and things that just ‘don’t make sense’. Which means that it will always be possible – if not strictly logical at least intellectually feasible – to argue against His existence.

So, on the one hand, if God could be explained in such a way as to seem perfectly clear and rational, then that would be strong evidence that what we were describing wasn’t God. On the other hand, anything above our own nature must seem strange and incoherent to us in many ways, so that the intelligent Atheist will never lack for apparent contradictions and intellectual knots when he wants to dismiss the idea.

The same may be said for the other great mysteries of the Faith: the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Real Presence, for instance. We know how to describe them. That is, we know the verbal formulae for expressing the correct dogma. But to actually understand them is beyond human power. It is one of the defined dogmas of the Church that “God’s Nature is incomprehensible to man.”

And herein is part of the virtue of Faith: as described above, the Nature of God is such that though we can know His existence with certainty, we cannot escape many seeming contradictions and difficulties. There can never be an absolutely air-tight case for God, because He’s simply too far above us for that (that is, we can know with logical certainty, but we can’t satisfy every possible objection). Faith is the virtue that allows us to shrug at such problems and humbly admit that we don’t have the answer, but believe anyway. In the words of St. John Henry Newman, “A thousands difficulties do not add up to one doubt.”

Before the immensity that is the Trinity, many times further beyond our intellect than a Sphere is from a Square, intellect and reason are dumb, and understanding is out of the question: we are called only to believe and to adore.