Last Updated on March 7, 2023 by GMC
Persons Are Wholes, Not Parts
The Three One has no “internal conductor,” but can the Trinity be conceived as the “conductor” of human persons and the cosmos?
What is the relationship between persons and the cosmos? From our material frames of reference, human persons are parts of the universe. We belong to systems within systems (internal biological systems, geosystems, chemical systems, political systems, the solar system, and so on). Relativity of parts gives rise to the myriad systems discoverable by our human minds.
Persons in the image of the Trinity, however, are destined for a wholeness beyond relativity. Persons are not merely individual parts of human nature, but unique identities transcending it. In the Incarnation, the Logos assumed human nature in its entirety. The interpenetration of the second person of the Trinity and our human nature reveals the interpenetration of each human person and the whole human nature.
Persons Contain Nature
In theandric oneness, persons dwell within the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: every person is “in” us and we are “in” every other person, for we are essentially one in Christ.
“In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
John 14:20
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Colossians 1:17
The cosmos has no separate existence from the theandric body. Each person contains the cosmos, and the cosmos dwells within every person. The cosmos is our very body, though in our current individualized state we experience ourselves “inside” it, and the cosmos as “outside” us.
Beyond Flatland
The resurrected Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary have provided glimpses of life beyond prepositions. Entering through closed doors and appearing instantly from one GPS point to another, the transfigured life infinitely surpasses Flatland experience.
In the sixteenth century report by Don Antonio Valeriano about the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Juan Diego tried “to avoid being detained by the Heavenly Lady” by going around the hill at Tepeyac on the fourth day after her first appearance. He needed to attend to his sick uncle; he could not afford to run into the “Heavenly Lady.”
“But she came out to meet him on that side of the hill…” The rest of the story is legendary, and Juan Diego’s miraculous tilma remains as evidence of the unseen world.
Cosmic Symphony?
Perhaps the Trinity may be seen as a “divine conductor” insofar as the interconnected parts of the universe are orchestrated in marvelous and intricate ways. From a poetic angle, the cosmos resounds like a “symphony” with silent and hidden melodies wafting through trees and under rocks, and whistling through clouds and galaxies.
Reality Escapes Observation
Then again, in light of progressive insights in science and philosophy, the notion of “interconnected parts” fails to account for the underlying wholeness yet to be discovered. The assumption that the “observer” stands outside the “observed” in a subject-object relationship is no longer tenable at the quantum level.
There is more to reality than meets the eye. Deep mysteries lie beyond four dimensionality, such that even physicists have explored the idea of “pre-space” (David Bohm and Basil Hiley).
Jesus’ revelation of the primordial communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit personalizes the cosmos and reveals the multifarious faces of the communion of saints ever-present to our “4-D geometry.” The conductor-cosmos motif works just as well with a monistic, impersonal deity or principle, and therefore falls short.
We may not “see” or “touch” the Trinity and communion of saints, but we must be wrapped within them even now, as they have no longitude or latitude. “Where” would they be?