Trinity and Creation

A sketch of thoughts touching upon earlier posts on mediation and multiplicity...

"It is not possible to overemphasize the positive value of the multiplicity of creatures: Thomas conceives of the plurality of creatures as a partici­pation in the Trinity. Personal relation - the principle of distinction within the Trinity - is seen to be the ultimate source of creation and the principle of all plurality in our world."
-David Burrell

The multiplicity of existing things didn't make sense for Neo-Platonism. The One, the goodness beyond being, "the One in no way many," was perfectly self-sufficient, unchanging, and so perfectly simple that any proposition attached to it was nonsense - to say "The One is true" is to posit the One as both "The One" and "true", now two and not one, destroying its simplicity. Even to say "The One is One" is to posit similarity in the One, thus making it both "The One" and "similarity". (This is because for Plato, a thing participates in the forms to receive its nature - something is beautiful because it participates in Beauty, etc. saying the One is true is to say the One participates in the form of Truth. No, Plato does not put the forms as ideas in the mind of God - the One doesn't have a mind... as the One. Hold that thought.)

This utterly simple One, therefore, could not have a will, so solely through the superabundant nature of goodness, it emanated forth in Nous, or Mind, which "unrolled" from the One "as if in a drunken stupor." But Nous did not create the world directly either - when Nous turns back to the One in thought, it thinks the multiplicity of ideas in the world (the Forms), which gives rise to the world soul (where our souls exist). The world soul, finally comes to rest and give order to the undifferentiated (pre-existing) matter. (Creation ex nihilo is an original Christian idea.) So I become me when the world soul gives a heap of undifferentiated matter the forms of Human and Woman and Nerd, etc. (More or less, this is the Neo-Platonic system.)

But the Trinity is not a "One in no way many": the Trinity is a One in Three Persons. Not only does this differentiation in God allow creation to be an act of free will, but it also is responsible for diffracting this triune-unity into the multiplicity of creation.

So MULTIPLICITY is a fundamentally Trinitarian phenomenon.

MEDIATION, however, is also Neo-Platonic. Hmm... I wonder what that means. But this is nothing new - Stoicism took up the idea of Nous, but named it Logos, and this is precisely what John had in mind when he wrote his gospel, and what tripped up Arius and many early Christian thinkers - isn't the Word just an inferior mediation of God? Etc. etc.

But in Neo-Platonism, in which every emanation is a further removed diffraction from its source - the farther removed you get, the more multiplicity you get. To return to the Nous you abandon all discursive reasoning, but to get to the One you have to "close the eye of the intellect" altogether - this is to abandon the mediation of things, of words, of reason, even intuitive knowledge - just to be utterly silent.

For Trinitarian theology, on the other hand, Christ as Logos means that he is not only the mediation, HE IS THE THING ITSELF.

When I say a word to you, you hear the word, and then process the idea to get the truth of my revelation of myself.

When God says a word to you, he GIVES HIMSELF.

The mediation of Christ is special.

In fact, I think we can talk about it in three, or maybe 4 ways, depending on whether you think the Incarnation is necessary to metaphysics (Bonaventure) or not (Aquinas).
1) Creation through the Logos.
2) Historical Encounter with the person who is Incarnation of the Logos.
3) the Incarnation's transformation of creation
4) our mediation with each other after deification (by which we come to union with the divine nathre)

(1 and 3 would be the same for Bonaventure - Creation was always through the Logos who would be Incarnate. It might be the same for Aquinas too... this gets into the different kinds of necessary actions of the Trinity - was Logos eternally going to become Incarnate since God is outside of time, even if he didn't necessarily HAVE to become Incarnate? That gets complicated. So maybe 1 and 3 are the same for Aquinas too in practice. In theory, though, they could be separated: what would creation be like if the Logos was not to-be-Incarnate? How does that change once the Logos was Incarnate?)

Next step of exploration, specifically through 1/3: Analogia entis - the analogy of being.