Franciscan Penance Library

THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY AS NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

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In Chapter 5 of Professor Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, he treats the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity as “negative theology”.  Negative theology focuses on the limitations of our knowledge of God as opposed to positive statements concerning the nature of God.  If the painful history of the human and Christian striving for God proves anything, it surely proves this:  that any attempt to reduce God to the scope of our own comprehension leads to the absurd.   We can only speak rightly about him if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let him be the uncomprehended.  Any doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, cannot aim at being a perfect comprehension of God.  It is a frontier notice, a discouraging gesture pointing over to unchartable territory.  It is not a definition that confines a thing to the pigeonholes of human knowledge, nor is it a concept that would put the thing within the grasp of the human mind.

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This character of Allusion, in which the concept becomes a mere hint, and comprehension a mere reaching out toward the incomprehensible, could be accurately mapped by the ecclesiastical formulas themselves and their early history.  Every one of the main basic  concepts in the doctrine of the Trinity was condemned at one time or another;  they were all adopted only after the frustration of condemnation; they are accepted only inasmuch as they are at the same time branded as unusable and admitted simply as poor stammering utterances---and no more.  The concept of persona (or prosopon) was once condemned, as we have seen; the crucial word that in the fourth century became the standard of orthodoxy, homoousios (= of one substance with the Father), had been condemned in the third century; the concept of “proceeding” has a condemnation behind it---and so one could go on.   One must say, I think, that these condemnations of the later formulas of faith form an intimate part of them: it is only through the negation, and the infinite indirectness implicit in it, that they are usable.  The doctrine of the Trinity is only possible as a piece of baffled theology, so to speak.

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Here Professor Ratzinger is pointing out the folly of taking any doctrinal statement and isolating it from other truths and making it absolute.   For example, it is heresy to assert the personal nature of God if by “person” (Latin persona, Greek Prosopon) you mean simply a role or mask as was the original meaning of the word “person”.   God has to be understood as “person” in the modern sense of person.  Another example would be the statements of St. Paul concerning salvation by faith apart from works of the Law.  These statements do not mean that one can willfully sin as long as you have faith.   St. Paul himself emphatically denies that interpretation in Romans chapter 6.  As Professor Ratzinger explains it:  On the contrary, every heresy is at the same time the cipher for an abiding truth, a cipher we must now preserve with other simultaneously valid statements, separated from which it produces a false impression.  In other words, all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into  something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.

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Professor Ratzinger then points out that just as you cannot describe or understand God in simple statements which explain everything, the same thing is true of physics.  The physicist is becoming increasingly aware today that we cannot embrace given realities---the structure of light, for example, or of matter in general--- in one form of experiment and so in one form of statement:  that, on the contrary, from different sides we glimpse different aspects, which cannot be traced back to each other.  We have to take the two together---say, the structure of particle and wave--- without being able to find a comprehensive explanation---as a provisional assessment of the whole because of the restrictions implicit in our point of view.  What is true here in the physical realm as a result of the limitations in our ability to observe is true in an incomparably greater degree of the spiritual realities and God.  Here, too, we can always look from one side and so grasp only one particular aspect, which seems to contradict the other, yet only when combined with it is a pointer to the whole, which we are incapable of stating or grasping.  Only by circling round, by looking and describing from different, apparently contrary angles can we succeed in alluding to the truth, which is never visible to us in its totality.

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Just as we cannot explain God in simple, neat statements, we also cannot observe God as a “neutral observer”.   We have to enter into Him to know Him.  Professor Ratzinger explains that this is also true of physics.  We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience.   This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity even in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature’s answer, depends on the question put to it.  In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature in itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of what is characteristically ours, a bit of the human subject.  This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God.  There is no such thing as a mere observer.   There is no such thing as pure objectivity.  One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it penetrates the center of individuality; and the more it engages the beholder’s individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in pure objectivity  Thus, whenever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen victim to self-deception.  This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man.  He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer.  He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing.  Even the reality “God” can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God---the experiment that we call faith.  Only by entering does one experience; only by cooperating in the experiment does one ask at all; and only he who asks receives an answer.

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Pascal set this out in his famous argument of the wager with an almost uncanny clarity and an acuteness verging on the unbearable.  The verbal strife with the unbelieving interlocutor has finally reached the point at which the latter admits that he must make a choice about God.  But he would like to avoid the leap, to possess a mathematical certainty: “Is there no way of illuminating the darkness and of seeing the face of the cards?”  “Yes, Scripture and all the other testimony of religion.”  “Yes, but my hands are tied and my lips are closed…I am so made that I cannot believe.  What am I to do?”  “So you admit that your inability to believe does not come from reason; on the contrary, reason leads you to belief; the reason for your refusal lies elsewhere.  There is therefore no point in trying to convince you any further by piling up the proofs of the existence of God; you must above all fight against your passions.  You would like to reach faith, but you do not know the way?  You want to cure yourself of unbelief, and you ask for a remedy?  Take a lesson from those who were earlier racked by doubts like yourself…Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having Masses said, and so on.  This will bring you quite naturally to believe and will stupefy you.”

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In this curious passage, this much at any rate is right; the mere neutral curiosity of the mind that wants to remain uninvolved can never enable one to see---even in dealing with a human being, and much less in dealing with God.  The experiment with God cannot take place without man. 

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 Unfortunately, many theologians use the arguments given here by Professor Ratzinger to deny the validity of Divine Revelation. They reason that since the subjectivity of man is involved even in Divine Revelation, there is little or no objective validity in Scripture and religion in general. Of course, Professor Ratzinger, both here and elsewhere, asserts strongly the validity of Divine Revelation.  We cannot simply assume that God is incapable of conveying genuine truth to us just because He uses humans to deliver this truth.  It is difficult to see how God could possibly reveal Himself to us if we don’t enter into the “experiment with God” which we call faith.  As Professor Ratzinger put it “only he who asks receives an answer.”

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--Jim Nugent, CFP