Aligning the Christian and Daoist Trinities

I’ve written fancifully about the Trinity before, here and here. I just wanted to follow up here, laying out my current fanciful understanding of the Trinity, especially as I feel like I have found a way — a way that works for me, for now, that is — to reconcile the trinities of East and West.

Very quickly, the Christian Trinity is laid out as follows:

• Father

• Son

• Holy Spirit

These are the three parts of the Godhead, or what in Daoism, we would call the Dao. In the first article I wrote on the Trinity, I briefly discussed a trinity commonly seen in Daoist philosophy:

• Heaven

• Humanity

• Earth

Humanity, finding itself between heaven and earth, is commonly referred to as “The Marriage of Heaven and Earth.”

Any agreement between these two concepts of trinity would have to align Father with Heaven, and Son with Humanity. These associations are so natural that they barely seem to need comment. This leaves the Holy Spirit to align with Earth, which is a bit more tricky.

First, we consider gender. Father and Heaven are both clearly masculine. While the Son is masculine, Humanity is an equal mixture of masculine and feminine qualities. In Daoist philosophy, the Earth is decidedly feminine. While the Holy Spirit is historically considered masculine, in more recent times, various feminine interpretations of the Holy Spirit have come about. The only explanation for these discrepancies is the inherent bias — at least historically — in the West towards the masculine form. If we adjust for this bias, things line up acceptably.

One major problem for me with reconciling the Holy Spirit with the Earth derives from the distinction between spirit and soul. In modern times, we conflate the two. But in the time when the New Testament was written, these were two different things. The spirit — spiritus in Latin, and pneuma (πνεῦμα) in Greek — was seen as the divine aspect within a person that connects directly to God. The soul — anima in Latin, and psyche (ψυχή) in Greek — was that earthly aspect of human nature, the part that connects us to the physical world and to our human emotions, desires, and intellect. There seems a glaring problem with associating the Holy Spirit with Earth: The energy of the earth is anima, or soul, and not spirit!

Anima is found not just in humanity, but in all living things on the Earth. It is the force that drives movement, as reflected in modern words like animation. A part of the Earth’s energy bubbled up on to the surface, engendering various forms of life. Spiritus descends from the heavens, and mixes with the anima within us, making certain forms of life — including humans — imbued with an admixture of the two.

It clarifies things to consider that the word spirit — along with its Latin and Greek equivalents — functions as a synecdoche; That is, when a word commonly used to indicate the whole is used as well to indicate a part (or vice-versa). We use the word spirit to indicate that divine energy that permeates the universe, and we also use the same word to indicate that divine energy that pours onto the surface of the Earth from the Heavens. The latter is a subtype of the former. From our perspective here on the surface, some of that Earth energy comes up to the surface and enlivens us and the other plants and animals. We call this soul. But from a broader perspective that can perceive the Earth as a kindred being, this anima is simply a specific form of spiritus. In this way, calling the Earth energy the Holy Spirit stops feeling like a contradiction.

One severe limitation to the above analysis is that it fails to take into account in any way the actual character and qualities of the Christian Holy Spirit. This is partially due to the fact that whenever I try to learn or understand what the Holy Spirit is, I come up with less than nothing. It seems a whole series of disconnected concepts and characteristics are served up to me. I am not yet sure if this is due to my own lack of understanding, or rather to a lack of understanding in general on the part of people who discuss and write about such things. The Holy Spirit is notorious for being subtle and difficult to understand.

What I do understand about the Christian Holy Spirit has nothing to do with Earth energies at all. But then again, it seems that virtually nothing in the Christian theological conception of God relates to the Earth. It is a mere creation — a stage for the drama of the salvation history, which begins with the fall from Eden, and ends with the anticipated second coming.

Eventually, I will read Augustine On The Trinity, at which point, I might be able to begin to consider these questions more seriously. In the meantime, I have a folksy, probably wildly inaccurate interpretation of the Trinity that seems to work for me, for now.