The Centrality of the Trinity

The intellectual setting of the early 20^th century in the West was culturally hostile to Christianity and dismissive of the deity of Christ and with it the doctrine of God as trinity. Even in the Church the doctrine of the trinity had fallen on hard times. Here the trinity was not denied but ignored. The twentieth century Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner observed, “We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.”¹ In a similar vein Catherine La Cugna states: “[F]or a number of historical and theological reasons leading up to the contemporary situation, the doctrine of the trinity for the most part has little bearing on other areas of theology.”² I would add to this, nor does it have much bearing on our practical spiritual experience. While we Christians in the West continue to assert that God is Trinity, most of us in fact live our lives as believers in a unitarian God.

Trinitarian reflection in both Catholic and Protestant traditions was during Lewis’s life at a nadir. (Thankfully we are seeing changes in the early 21^st century.) In light of the dearth of Trinitarian emphasis during Lewis’s lifetime some have seen it as utterly amazing that he grasped the doctrine as so central to his theological understanding and teaching.

While on the surface this amazement makes sense, when we look at Lewis’s personal spiritual journey we get a different picture. Lewis had a keen rational mind, but he also sought for joy in his innermost being. This search was personal, emotional and intuitive. His reverence for myth came from the way it touched his heart, even when he saw myth as “lies . . . breathed through silver.”³ Tolkien and Dyson opened the door for Lewis to see that mythology communicates a non-literal truth, “a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on the human imagination.”⁴ In short the myth of the dying and rising God, common in pagan mythologies, had literally come true in Christ. This night with Tolkien and Dyson cleared the way for Lewis to accept as fact, what he loved as myth. Myth had in the incarnation become fact. Shortly thereafter he reached the conclusion that Jesus Christ was indeed God.

Lewis was a scholar. As a scholar and a Christian he read and digested not only the Bible but also the Church Fathers to whom he occasionally alluded. Lewis’s Trinitarianism was deeply rooted in the historic faith. His presentation and discussion about the Trinity did not bring any new theological insight to the doctrine. Instead he provided creative illustrations that help in measure to apprehend a reality that is ultimately incomprehensible to us as finite mortals (a trait that applies to all three persons of the Godhead).⁵ To use the terminology of T. F. Torrance, we can apprehend God as Trinity, but we cannot comprehend Him. We can have true knowledge of God but not exhaustive knowledge. Lewis did not receive the Trinity on the basis of beauty, grandeur and richness. When viewed from a poetic perspective he says, “the doctrine of the Trinity seems to me to fall between two stools. It has neither the monolithic grandeur of strictly Unitarian conceptions nor the richness of Polytheism.”⁶ He received it because he was convinced it was true.

And because it was true and central to the faith he undertook creative ways to illustrate its truth to the contemporary world.

The Trinity Illustrated

Lewis employs several illustrations to help the layman get a feeling of what the doctrine of the Trinity implies. Illustrations of the Trinity are notoriously hard to come by. Most common illustrations ultimately fall into one of the ancient hereises, modalism (i.e. that Father, Son and Spirit are three ways (modes) that the one divine person has revealed himself in history) or tritheism (i.e the Father, Son and Spirit are three separate but co-equal entities). We have no strict analogies in our experience to draw from. As I have sought over the years to find illustrations, one that seemed to hold up somewhat was the analogy of time having three aspects: past, present and future, but all partaking of the same nature. I tried this out on one of my colleagues who shot the illustration down because it was impersonal. But Lewis was not averse to using impersonal illustrations to help illuminate some aspect of the being of the Trinity.

The Trinity and plane geometry

One original illustration Lewis used for the Trinity was drawn from geometry.

You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.

Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.⁷

Process theologian Norman Pittenger objected to Lewis portrayal of God as a cube to which Lewis, wryly replied, “It is true, I do not understand why it is vulgar or offensive, in speaking of the Holy Trinity, to illustrate from plane and solid geometry the conception that what is self-contradictory on one level may be consistent on another.”⁸

The Trinity as the Great Dance

The image of the Trinity as the Great Dance finds its roots in the work of Gregory of Nazianzus (d. AD 390), Archbishop of Constantinople and one of the three great Cappadocian theologians who did much to shape the development of Trinitarian understanding in the ancient Greek speaking church. Here the illustration is employed by Lewis to point out the difference of the Christian God to the Absolute monotheism of Greek Philosophy. (It also serves to contrast the Christian understanding of God with that of post A.D. 70 Judaism and Islam.)

And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know this is almost inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about the ‘spirit’ of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk about its ‘spirit’ because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not have if they were apart.* It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.⁹

The imagery of the Great Dance has in the past several decades become prominent in Trinitarian explications with a return to the study of the Church Fathers and the accompanying rise of Trinitarian centered theological thinking in both Protestantism and Catholicism.

God is Love

The New Testament unequivocally proclaims that God is love. Lewis echoing the theme articulated by Augustine and further developed by Richard of St. Victor in the 12^th century employs the concept of God as love. Using this scriptural affirmation Lewis uses the assertion that “God is love” as another evidence that God in his inner being cannot be merely an undifferentiated monad. Lewis relies on Augustine’s argumentation as opposed to Richard’s later development of the idea. J. N. D. Kelly summarizes Augustine’s explanation seeing the starting point as the lover (i.e. God the Father), the beloved (God the Son) and the love which binds the two together (the Holy Spirit). Kelly observes that Augustine does not really develop this analogy¹⁰ (nor does Lewis). The way Augustine explains this illustration does contribute an important insight concerning the inner dynamic of Trinitarian life. However Augustine’s explanation led to the depersonalization of the Spirit in the following centuries. Richard of St. Victor developed the analogy along a different line arguing that Love cannot be alone, for it to be love and not narcissism love requires an object. But love is not perfected between to the lover and the beloved, it requires a third, a common (mutual) object of love. Thus, perfect love involves a symmetry of three each of whom fill the roles of lover, the beloved and common person beloved by the other two.

The Trinity as experienced in Prayer

This is not so much an illustration as an appeal to the normal experience of the believer. The believer in his or her prayer life prays to get in touch with the Father. But if as a Christian he or she has any theological understanding there is a sense that the Holy Spirit, himself God, is also within prompting us to pray, and

. . . he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.¹¹

Two books

Another impersonal illustration that Lewis draws from everyday life involves two books stacked one upon another on a table. The lower book supports the one above it so that the upper book actually never touches the table upon which it rests. There is no before or after to this arrangement it simply is. It is an eternal unchangeable relationship of the lower book supporting the one that rests upon it. If we were to imagine this as an eternal condition this would give us some insight of the dependence of the Son on the Father.

How is this a Trinitarian illustration? In the strictest sense it is not Trinitarian because the Spirit is not in view here. Lewis uses this homey picture to give an accurate (albeit inadequate) glimpse into the Father’s relationship to the Son. And from this impersonal dependence of the top book upon the one beneath which supports it he makes the step into the interpersonal relationship between the Father and the Son.

The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the second; we call it begetting, not making, because what He produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only word to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first—just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after about it. And that is why I think it important to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.¹²

The Trinity in Lewis’s Fiction

Walter Hooper has observed, “if the Chronicles of Narnia have a theological weakness, it is possibly that the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is not properly represented.”¹³ Vaus takes issue with the assertion, and I agree with him. The Trinity is a reality that is difficult to explicitly develop in a narrative genre. A look at Scripture itself, in the gospels and in Acts, does not give us clear unambiguous expositions of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The only narrative passage in Scripture where the three members of the Trinity are on stage at the same time is at the baptism of Jesus. Clearly, Aslan is a deliberate Christ figure, most clearly developed in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by his vicarious self-sacrifice in the stead of Edmund the traitor. Aslan’s death is followed by his resurrection, according to the deep magic from before the beginning of time. His resurrection spells and defeat of the White Witch and the freeing of Narnia from her tyranny and the reestablishment of the kingdom of Narnia rule by Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy as Aslan’s vice-regents.

But I digress. While the Son can be readily pictured, the same is not true for the Father and the Spirit. Aslan is identified as the son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea, Jesus makes frequent reference to The Father and being sent by the Father who is in heaven. Likewise we see an allusion to the Holy Spirit when Aslan breathes on creatures that the White Witch had turned to stone, thereby bringing them back to life. Certainly Lewis had in mind Jn. 20:22 (He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Personally, my favorite volume of the Chronicles of Narnia is, The Horse and His Boy. It is in this volume that we get the most complete allusion to the members of the Trinity. Shasta, the unlikely hero of the story is on a mission to warn the King of Archenland of an impending attack by the Calormen forces. Having accomplished his mission and warned the King, he has now gotten separated from the rest of the company. Alone following the road in the dark Shasta becomes aware of a presence beside him, a Thing (he knows not who or what it is). Exhausted from his journey, he is terrified. “Who are you?” he asks. Is he a giant? Is it a ghost? The Thing assures him he is not a ghost by breathing his warm breath on the shivering Shasta. Still in the darkness the Thing reveals that he is a lion. Shasta askes, “Who are you?” In a clear allusion to the threefold description of Yahweh as holy in Isaiah 6, the Lion answers,

“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so the earth shook: and again, “Myself,” loud clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.”¹⁴

The answer also reminds me of the soft whisper of Yahweh to Elijah in 1 Kings 19 and the threefold name of God in Matt. 28:19. There is light coming from the great Lion, Shasta sees it, dismounts from his horse and falls at Aslan’s feet. Aslan touches Shasta’s forehead and disappears.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s fiction the space trilogy gives clear Trinitarian allusions. In Out of the Silent Planet, Maleldil the Old, King of Kings is an unambiguous reference to God the Father; Maleldil the Young is Christ; and The Third One designates the Holy Spirit.

When we turn to Perelandra we find a story that replays the temptation account of Genesis 3, but this time without the fall. As the book draws to a close we witness the enthronement of the King and Queen and the Great Dance. This is a celebration not just of the victory over the forces of evil that sought to destroy this new creation by Maleldil, but a celebration of the union of the created order participating in the joyous life of the Trinity (“the summing up of all things in Christ:” Ephesians 1:10). Drawing from Gregory of Nazianzus’ image of the life of the dynamic beauty of the internal life of the Holy Trinity we see Lewis’s vision of participation of all creation in this Great Dance.

And the birds began clapping their wings and the beasts wagging their tails, and the light seemed brighter and the pulse of the whole assembly quickened, and new modes of joy that had nothing to do with mirth as we understand it passed into them all, as it were from the very air, or as if there were dancing in Deep Heaven.¹⁵

Interestingly Lewis, in harmony with the theological vision of the ancient church asserts, “The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect until the peoples of the Low Worlds are gathered into it.” ((Ibid, 183.)) Instead it is a dance that flows through all creation and the dance for which creation and humans in particular are made. “The dance which we dance is at the center and for the dance all things were made.” ((Ibid, 183.)) The dance is complex and multifaceted. “In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed.” ((Ibid, 186.))

For Lewis the Great Dance is not just a future hope, though that is when it will be perfected. The dance is dynamically active even in our fallen creation with all its pain and dysfunction. The Trinitarian life and koinonia/fellowship exists here and now. We can and do participate in it. What we must do is train our eyes to look beyond the obvious to see and experience it.

1. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (Crossroad: New York, 2005), 9-10. [↩]
2. Catherine La Cugna, God for Us (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1991), 22. Italics added. [↩]
3. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 43. [↩]
4. David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert (Downers Grove: IVP, 2002), 147. [↩]
5. C.S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 76. I am using the terms apprehend and comprehend here in the sense that Thomas Torrance did. We can apprehend or perceive a reality without being able to comprehend it i.e.understand its nature or meaning. [↩]
6. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 118. [↩]
7. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 161–162. [↩]
8. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperOne, 1994), 198.

   * This corporate behaviour may, of course, be either better or worse than their individual behaviour. [↩]

9. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 175. [↩]
10. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines revised ed. (Peabody Mass: Prince Press, 2004), 277. [↩]
11. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 163. [↩]
12. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 173. [↩]
13. Walter Hooper, CS. Lewis Companion Guide (New York: McMillan, 1965), 217. Cited by Will Vaus, Mere Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004), 47. [↩]
14. C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 1982), 165. [↩]
15. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, EPub Edition., vol. 2, Space Trilogy (HarperCollins Publishers, 2012), 179–180. [↩]