“The Charm Of Threes”

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Oh, I takes de gospel whenever it’s pos’ble, but wid a grain of salt.”
—Ira Gershwin, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” 1935

Clemson, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—4/5/10—The French essayist Montaigne speculated in the 16th century that “if triangles invented a god, they’d make him three-sided.”

Guess what? They already had in the 4th century at the Council of Nicea, just twelve years after Constantine had legalized Christianity. At the emperor’s behest, church bishops met to confront the threat of the “Arian heresy,” the belief that God’s son is not of one substance with His father. Though Jesus had told his disciples to baptize “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and two of the patriarchs had written about various triads, “the Holy Trinity” was not an integral part of church doctrine until AD 325. The beauty of the concept allowed Christians to attract monotheistic Jews to the faith while retaining the divinity of Jesus and his shadowy companion, the “Holy Ghost.”

By the 11^th century, however, a dispute over one word in the Nicean Creed led to the great East-West split that culminated in the formation of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Filioque (“and from the son”) was the word that divided them, and the issue was whether the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from God alone (the Orthodox view) or from God and his son (the Roman view).

One patriarch was so incensed by the implied demotion of God that he excommunicated the Pope, which naturally led the Pope to excommunicate the patriarch.

To attract converts and explain the concept to their illiterate followers, Christian artists began experimenting with a variety of ways to symbolize the Trinity. Perhaps the earliest device involved three interlocking circles à la Ballantine Beer. Abstract as the circles were, they satisfied the precept that two of the threesome were always invisible to man.

Gradually, however, a hand or eye in the sky came to represent God before He became a bearded old man in a robe. The dove had been a convenient stand-in for the Holy Spirit ever since Noah, and the son was represented by a cross, a book, or a lamb before he was shown as a boy seated on his mother’s lap.

When some South American artists used a three-headed man to represent the Trinity, Pope Urban VIII in 1628 forbade its use because he felt it promoted polytheism.

The great mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton thought that belief in the Trinity was a violation of the first commandment—worship no other gods but Jehovah; nevertheless, three fish, hares, eagles, lions, or tendrils on a triangular grapevine were deemed acceptable.

Church officials frequently alluded to the Trinity in their gestures (the three-fingered blessing of the right hand), their dress (the Pope’s three-tiered tiara), and church architecture (the trefoil window to name just one). All of which in the 19th century led William Ellery Channing to declare, “We [Unitarians] are astonished, that any man can read the New Testament, and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God.”

From earliest recorded times, the triad has been a popular moralistic and mnemonic device. In an effort to explain unity amid diversity and offer an escape from head-butting dualisms, priests and teachers of all stripes have turned to the smallest number that can represent this universal intellectual need, even at the risk of oversimplification.

Familiar triads include: a human being comprises mind, body, and spirit. The French march under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Matter exists as gas, liquid, and solid. Theology concerns itself with heaven, earth, and hell. The personality splits along the lines of ego, superego, and id. Nature is animal, vegetable, or mineral. Time is past, present, or future. Speeches should have a beginning, middle, and end.

Idioms and proverbs often use triads such as, “Three’s a charm”; a drunk is “three sheets to the wind,” and every genie grants its liberator “three wishes.”

Long before the Bible, there were Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egypt; Odin, Thor, and Frigg in Scandinavia; Anu, Ea, and Bel in Sumer; Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva in India, and Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades in Greece. By the 1st century, the authors of the New Testament understood the convenience of triads, and so we have “faith, hope, and charity,” three Magi, three Mary’s, three denials of Peter, three crosses on Cavalry, and three days of Jesus’s death.

In his 2007 film documentary, Religulous, Bill Maher interviewed one fellow dumbstruck by the power of three. The young man plays Jesus at an Orlando theme park that features presentations of the passion six days a week. Apparently “Jesus” had given a lot of thought to his role because he used a clever analogy for the Trinity that took the celebrity atheist by surprise. The Trinity is like water, the actor said; it exists in three states, solid, liquid, and gas, yet it’s always fundamentally H₂O.

Back in the van, Maher confesses that the analogy is “brilliant,” but ultimately “bullshit because it proves nothing.”

Well, no, analogies are not properly proofs or even arguments; they are approximations of complexities best used in expositions. So I have to side with “Jesus” on that one. I just wish Maher had given the actor enough time to explain his analogy—is God ice because He is the solid foundation of the Trinity, or water because He’s necessary to all life, or gas because, pantheistically, He pervades all nature?

A quick check of Google uncovered a weedy abundance of what Rudyard Kipling called the “tangled trinities.” St. Patrick explained the mysterious triad using a shamrock: it’s like three leaves growing from a common stem. Others have explained it as an egg consisting of shell, yolk, and albumin; a coin with two faces and a rim; a candle with three wicks; a football snapper, holder, and kicker; three dimensions in space: length, width, and height; a government with executive, legislative, and judicial powers; a parent who’s simultaneously father, husband, and son; or a can of “3-In-One-Oil that cleans, lubricates and prevents rust.”

The conservative journalist Cal Thomas was annoyed with the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2006 when it voted to consider a policy paper that merely suggested replacing “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” in the liturgy with among other things, “Mother, Child, and Womb.” Indeed, how can there be a holy Trinity, I have often wondered, without a feminine component?  Would a “Quaternity” be so bad? I doubt that the proposal will ever leave the committee’s table, but had I written it, I would have cited one more alternative, Robert Ingersoll’s trinity of science: “Reason, Observation, and Experience.”