Race, Culture and Nation

Towards a Trinitarian Politics

by
Dennis R. Klinck

Assistant Professor in the Department of English,
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon.

Recently, Malcolm Spicer has written of the need 'to recall and resignify the meanings of the Trinity for individual Christians and for the collective perspectives of western and Christian civilization.'1 He detects significances of the concept of the Trinity not only in the areas of psychology and the arts, but also of politics, and contrasts with trinitarianism both 'monotheism' and 'dualism,' which he describes as 'psychological structures [having] serious moral and political overtones' (24). Spicer, of course, is not the first to have suggested the correlation of various theisms and political systems. For example, in Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton makes a similar point:
There is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but he is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahommed.
The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.... If the love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians ... God Himself is a society. 2

Three important sorts of relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity are implied here:
(1) insofar as it gives an account of the relationship of God to man, the doctrine provides criteria for the relationship of the governor to the governed;
(2) as a description of the Sovereign, the Trinity can be seen as a prototype of the constitution of temporal sovereignty;
(3) as a 'living complexity,' a 'society,' the Trinity is a pattern of the diversity in unity which characterizes any association.

In his treatise Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,3 Emmanuel Kant elaborates the first of these. He distinguishes two kinds of societies: the 'juridico-civil (political) state,' in which persons 'all alike stand socially under public juridical laws (which are, as a class, laws of coercion),' and the 'ethicocivil state,' in which persons 'are united under non-coercive laws, i.e., laws of virtue alone' (87). As an example of a juridico-civil state, Kant points to what he calls 'the Jewish theocracy,' whose laws were all characterized by 'external compulsion' rather than 'the inner essence of the moral disposition' (74). This kind of state is consistent with a conception of God as simply unitary and non-immanent, a conception to be contrasted with the Christian ideas that one Person of the Trinity became immanent in the world and another distributes gifts which allow recalcitrant mankind to fulfill the law 'spontaneously.' Thus, Kant likens an ethical commonwealth to a household (family) under a common, though invisible, moral Father, whose holy Son, knowing His will and yet standing in blood relation with all members of the household, takes His place in making His will better known to them; these accordingly honour the Father in him and so enter with one another into a voluntary, universal, and enduring union of hearts. (93)

This analysis raises problems, as Kant himself recognizes. Both the existence of the juridicocivil state and the trinitarian scheme of renovation assume the fallen condition of man. Since man is fallen, and we have no assurance that all persons at all times will be redeemed, we recognize as impossible a comprehensive state based simply on 'the inner essence of the moral disposition'; coercive law cannot be dispensed with. At the same time, Kant's analysis implies an absolute qualification of statutory law; insisting upon the operation of internal compulsion, it regards persons as essentially moral, and places limits on external constraints. Another way of putting this might be to say that persons have a relationship to God prior to their relationship to the juridicocivil state.4

Kant also alludes to the second area of trinitarian application to politics:
the constitution of the sovereign. God, as the sovereign of the world, evinces a threefold function: '(1) as the omnipotent Creator of heaven and earth, i.e., morally as holy Legislator, (2) as Preserver of the human race, its benevolent Ruler and moral Guardian, (3) as Administrator of His own holy laws, i.e., as righteous Judge' (131).
Similarly, Kant says, this notion is present in human commonwealths, 'in which such a threefold higher power (pouvoir) will always be descried,' although, rather than being 'combined in one and the same Being,' 'in a juridico-civil state must of necessity be divided among three different departments [legislative, executive, and judicial]' (131). The characteristic structure of temporal governments imitates the constitution of the Godhead.

An earlier exercise in trinitarian politics--that of John Wyclif--combines the questions of relation of subject to sovereign, constitution of Government, and the principles governing different elements in society which make these a unity. Wyclif argued that the 'three estates' constituting society correspond to the three Persons of the Trinity:

Corresponding to the Father, power, are secular lords, to the Son, wisdom, are the clergy, and to the Holy Ghost, love, are the commons.5 Here, a locus of power is identified, but, in accordance with the trinitarian formula, this power co-exists with the complementary qualities of 'wisdom' and 'love,' whose loci are elsewhere in the concordant society. Moreover, that wisdom and love are distinct from power but neither subordinate to it nor separate from it points to the crucial importance of what are perhaps the defining qualities of 'personality'--wisdom and love, or reason and will--in the political dispensation envisaged by Wyclif. The identification of 'wisdom' with the clergy suggests the political importance of a repository of authority distinguished from, but complementary to, 'might.' That the 'commons' are held to be analogous to the Holy Ghost and love seems to imply a measure of consent or voluntariness on the part of the governed.
Although Wyclif speaks especially of the obedience of the commons to temporal lords, an implication of his analysis is that any power that attempts to rule in defiance of the authority of, say, the laws enacted by what Kant calls the 'holy Legislator,' and of the love or volition of the commons is, according to the trinitarian formula, defective.

Well before Wyclif, Gregory of Nazianzus formulated, at least implicitly, the question of the relation of the Trinity to politics:

The three most ancient opinions about God are atheism (or anarchy), polytheism (or polyarchy), and monotheism (or monarchy). The children of Greece played with the first two; let us leave them to their games. For anarchy is disorder: and polyarchy implies factious division, and therefore anarchy and disorder.... What we honour is monarchy: but not a monarchy confined to a single person; for a single entity may be divided against itself and become many.6

The political metaphors which Gregory uses emphasize the problem of unity in diversity: he rejects both atheism and polytheism--conceptual supports for 'pluralism'--because they entail fragmentation. At the same time, he does not advocate simple monotheism, which is consistent with unity, but, because it involves 'a narrow, jealous, impotent' God, not with differentiation or distinction. He sees in the qualified monotheism of trinitarianism a concept of God which sustains unity without requiring uniformity. As we shall see, there are important ways in which 'atheism' and 'polytheism' (as extensions of dualism) do engender or support political anarchy--opposition, division, 'violence.' At the same time, simple monotheism is, as both Chesterton and Kant observe, consistent with political absolutism, with 'oppression,' which, in turn, may breed reaction or revolution and thus revert to dualism. Perhaps this is what Gregory means when he speaks of 'a single entity' becoming 'divided against itself.' The trinitarian concept seems to reconcile the claims of 'personality' with a principle of unity.

These historical examples are of interest both because they direct our attention to some areas of the relevance of theology to politics and because associated with the Persons of the Trinity; see, e.g., The Sermons of John Donne, edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953-59), Vol. 9, 85, and Sir Henry Godyere's The Mirrour of Maiestie (London, 1619), they demonstrate the concern of Christians to relate their political structures to their understanding of God as the Trinity. That this concern is ongoing is indicated by the further efforts of more recent commentators to analyze political issues from a trinitarian perspective.

Thus, in terms reminiscent of Gregory's , W. H. Auden relates political order to criteria outlined in the Athanasian Creed.7 Civilization--that is, 'high grade social order'--makes, he says, two presuppositions: '(a) that throughout this universe there is one set of laws according to which all movements and events in spite of all difference agree in happening'; and '(b) that, nevertheless, there are in this universe many different realms or societies, each composed of a class of things peculiar to itself to which events of a peculiar kind happen (one important peculiarity is position in time), and that the peculiar laws of these several realms are modifications of the universal law mentioned in (a)' (131).

Here, (a) refers to a unifying principle underlying reality, a principle of objective rectitude. However, (b) implies that this rightness need not be manifested uniformly in all things but may be expressed in different (though not contradictory) ways. Hence, (b) suggests the possibility of distinction--but not 'autonomy'8--of individuals or particulars within the unity of the 'law.'

Auden then argues that corresponding to these two assumptions 'are two heresies by which civilization has constantly been threatened.' These heresies are both defined in the Athanasian Creed: 'dualism' or 'dividing the substance,' and 'monism' or 'confounding the persons.' These are the two 'psychological structures' about which Spicer expresses apprehension.

'Dualism' Auden defines as 'the denial of any relation between the universal and the particular, that is, that the particular laws are modifications of the general law.'
What this seems to suggest-what 'dividing the substance' certainly suggests--is the possibility that reality consists in many different principles which are unrelated or even contradictory. 'Dualism,' then, and its corollary, polytheism, lead to a situation in which 'factious division' is inevitable. If there are multiple, autonomous principles of reality, then reality must be fragmentary or internally divided against itself, must evince the radical antagonisms implied in what Spicer calls 'the battlefield metaphor. ' This construct is consistent with the notion that politics is 'war': thus, political parties want to 'defeat' 'adversaries'; the 'right' and the 'left' are implacable enemies; Marxism maintains that progress is the result of contradiction. However, what appears to be 'dualism' is often not a genuine antithesis: for example, Hitlerism and Stalinism are both manifestations of crude 'monism.' Moreover, far from being progressive, dualisms are more likely to be entropic: violence wastes energy; it does not conserve it.

There is, Auden argues, a further corollary of dualism, which he describes as 'an empiricism which denies the necessity of any metaphysics.' Politically, this 'modification' of dualism is 'individualism' and manifests itself as 'the atomic view of society as a multiplicity of unrelated special individuals pursuing special unrelated occupations. 'It is, Auden suggests, consistent with atheism:
there is no unifying principle, Note that this heresy, which may also be called 'pluralism' or 'particularism,' is attractive in that it appears to sustain 'freedom,' albeit at the expense of 'order,' while monism sustains 'order' (regimentation) at the cost of freedom or individuality. At the same time, particularism is suspect because, if each individual becomes a law unto himself, then any effort to coordinate or regulate these individuals contradicts the assumption that they are unrelated.

Nevertheless, Auden claims, even in such an 'atheistic' dispensation, there is a need for order, which may lead to identifying 'the universal with the political.' Where no 'universal law' is recognized, the principle of order has to be manufactured-by politicians, whose special function this ostensibly is. The danger inherent in dismissing the concept of God as legislator and replacing him with politicians Auden explains: 'On the liberal assumption that the politician has the unique occupation of keeping order between all the other unique and non-political occupations, the moment serious disorder occurs he is obliged to become the dictator.' The paradox here is that, just as monarchy may breed revolution and, thus, fragmentation, so may pluralism issue in a demand for order or stability that leads to 'monarchy.' From the assumption that society is composed of disparate individuals or functions, one of which is the political, particularism is in danger of becoming its opposite, 'monism,' 'the assumption that the peculiar laws of one of the peculiar realms are the universal laws from which all the others are derivative.' In Auden's example, the peculiar laws of the political function come to be regarded as universal laws.

While Auden's analysis is primarily a critique of the extremes of monocracy and anarchical individualism, it reminds us of some important limitations of' democracy,' which seeks to reconcile order and freedom. Its dilemma, however, is that it may do this by constructing a dualism, one side of which-the state-may behave as a monism while the other side is a particularism. The dualism is the political versus the 'personal,' or, in Kant's terms, the political versus the ethical. This is the kind of split that Auden has in mind when he speaks of the unique or separate occupation of the politician: our lives tend to become compartmentalized, 'politics' falling into one compartment and 'private affairs' into the other. This kind of perhaps inevitable compromise between order and freedom can be seen to constitute an uneasy marriage of the practical correlates of monotheism and atheism whose limitations are brought into focus by the trinitarian perspective.

One of these limitations is that the political-personal dualism involves opposition, with the result that the two spheres may make contradictory demands upon us: the augmentation of the political tends to entail the deprivation of the personal. Moreover, recognition of the political as autonomous from the personal can lead to its constant self-consolidation, precisely because it may be seen as not subject to external restraints or sanctions. At the same time, because the political is generally characterized by greater unity (or, at least, more concentrated power) than the personal, which consists of disparate individuals pursuing widely divergent private objectives, the political tends to make inroads into the personal. If Kant is correct in regarding the political as characteristically a coercive order, the undesirability of these inroads is obvious.

Related to this question is the individual's function within the political realm. It consists, in ballot-box democracy, largely in voting, in converting the process of making choices from a qualitative to a quantitative one. While this does permit participation in collective decision-making, the underlying assumption that every vote is equal implies the abolition of distinctions between persons; the voter, as voter, is in danger of being reduced from a complex personality to an arithmetical unit in a process that might be described as 'the monotheism of the mathematical majority.' In trinitarian terms, this situation is unsatisfactory, for, if it insists on anything, the concept of the Trinity insists that the parties to an association must be persons, must retain distinctiveness. Insofar as political decision-making is in this sense 'impersonal,' any tendency for the political sphere to become comprehensive must be restricted.

Another problem with 'majority democracy' arises from the trinitarian account of the relation of God to man. As we have seen, the trinitarian scheme of salvation supposes that man is fallen. The question is: Can we trust the insights of a majority of fallen beings to be in any absolute sense 'right'? This question was addressed, at least implicitly, by Wyclif: he recognized that authority (that is, rectitude) is distinct from the love or will of 'the commons.'

We must resist the temptation to believe that adding together the opinions of individuals is a reliable way of arriving at truth; it is merely a way of arriving at what most of them want, which is, of course, quite another matter. To use Auden's terms again, the democratic process first 'divides the substance' by ascribing equal validity to the opinion of every particular individual, and then may 'confound the persons' by deriving the 'universal law' from the sum of these particular 'laws.' The point that I want to make is that we ought not to confound the will of the majority with authority; the trinitarian account, insisting that the 'law' of righteousness is prior to human determinations, reminds us once again that careful restrictions must be placed upon the political, restrictions defined by the ethical relationship of persons to God's 'law.'

The question of the limits of the claims of the group over the individual can also be looked at from the perspective outlined by Herbert W. Richardson in an article entitled 'A Philosophy of Unity,'9 which develops a philosophical underpinning for trinitarianism. Three aspects of Richardson's argument are particularly relevant to my discussion: (1) his elaboration of the relationship between being and essence; (2) his criticism of monotheism, dualism, and pluralism; (3) his identification of three categories of unity. As he himself says, 'if my thesis is correct, then it is of utmost importance not only to the intellectual but also to the political order.'

Richardson's discussion of the relationship between being and essence is interesting first because of his treatment of the question of unity or integrity and second because this relationship involves the problem of the many and the one.

In the course of his argument, he successively asserts that the being of a thing consists in its unity, that the 'oneness' of things is their identity, and that 'oneness cannot be understood apart from an essence, for it is the oneness of that essence, i.e., its identity.' While being or oneness is what is the same in all things and 'whatness or essence' is what distinguishes things one from another, both these categories coincide in any thing. The importance of this argument is that it identifies the integrity of a thing with its resistance to becoming something else or nothing at all. The essence of a person is not simply numerical distinction but personality. The political issue is concerned not only with the existence or being of units, but with the essence which distinguishes entities as persons.

In his elaboration of being and essence, Richardson remarks that explanations of the relationship between the two tend to imply fallacies or unacceptable conclusions. Two dangers he specifies: (1) the identification of 'being with one kind of essence and not with another'; (2) the acknowledgement 'that being is not one, but is as many as the distinctions appropriate to the realm of essence.' In these two, we recognize the two' heresies' outlined by Auden. The first is a kind of 'confounding of persons': being is related to the essence of one category of things only, and other categories therefore are inferior or subordinate. The political expression of this 'heresy' is, as we have seen, the imposition of one particular law (or essence, or personality) on all others. The second error is a 'dividing of the substance': as Richardson says, 'to identify being universally with the realm of essence implie[s] that being is many.' This is pluralism; reality is radically divided; there is no principle of unity. Richardson claims that Plotinus postulated this kind of pluralism and tried to preserve unity by proposing a 'transcendent and unknown One.' The problem with this account, says Richardson, is that it 'absolutely divid[es] the world from its essential unity (the One).' This situation is like the tendency which occurs in the political realm:
the One (say the state, even as it is sanctioned by the majority) stands over against the many (individual persons, conceived as having private lives discontinuous from the political). As Auden suggests, the transcendent political One may arrogate to itself absolute powers: the dualism (or the pluralism) is in danger of falling into monocracy.

Having, 'by asserting that being is that oneness which constitutes the identity of things,' given' an account which preserves the universality of being without either (1) relegating it to a transcendent order or (2) sacrificing its intrinsic unity,' Richardson proceeds to discuss what he calls 'the Three Hypostases of Unity.'
These are: '(1) the unity of any denumerable individual, or individuality, or (2) the unity of any two or more individuals when taken together, or considered as one thing--i.e., relationality, or (3) the unity of any, or all possible relationalities considered as complete, or wholeness.' Noteworthy here is that, in respect of their oneness, these 'hypostases' are all equal; none is before or after another in importance.

Moreover, they are not mutually exclusive: the occurrence of one form of unity does not preclude the coincidence of the others. This analysis again, a trinitarian analysis--once more has important political implications. For one thing, it asserts absolutely the claims of the individual relative to any association or whole of which it may be a part: 'the characteristic of reality is unity,' says Richardson, 'and it is "as real" to be an individual as it is to be a whole.' Thus, it implies that the individual is not subordinate to the group.

Further, if as we suggested earlier the identity of the human individual is inextricably bound to his essence--that is, personality--then it implies that the integrity of the individual as a person has an absolute validity. Any other category of unity--relationality or wholeness--which violates this personal integrity is, in Richardson's trinitarian view, questionable. At the same time, of course, the trinitarian account cannot be an absolute individualism or particularism, for, as Richardson observes, the unities of relationality and wholeness have equal validity.

This poses problems, for we have grown accustomed to regarding the group and the individual as in some ways antithetical. Indeed, as my discussion of the dilemma of democracy suggests, there is some warrant for this assumption of antagonism. But the trinitarian picture gives both the individual and the association a basic and a coincidental validity. This leads to the conclusion that any relation or complex of relations should not abrogate the identity of any individual who is party to that relation. If human individuals are persons, then their participation in relations must not abrogate their personality.

More particularly, if personality is a 'centre of consciousness' defined as Augustine suggests by reason and will (or wisdom and love),10 then an association which diminishes or negates one or both of these qualities is in trinitarian terms unsatisfactory; if a relationship entails the obviation of the essence, the defining characteristics, of one of the participants, then it is violating an important kind of unity. An association may compromise the reason not only by forcibly restricting it but also by obscuring the basis of judgement--in the trinitarian view, 'the universal law.' For this reason, again, a trinitarian politics must distinguish 'authority' from power, perhaps even identify this authority with some institution, as Wyclif identifies it with the church. At the same time, the will may be compromised not only by direct prohibition of its exercise but also by limiting its effective exercise, say, by the vetoing of a person's choices or by the holding him responsible for other people's choices. Even if such restriction is an inevitable feature of any 'juridico-civil' state, the trinitarian account (as Richardson presents it)reminds us that a relational unity (such as exists between the state and the person, or among the persons comprising the state) which subsists by virtue of the denial of the essence or integrity of one of the parties is flawed. The trinitarian criteria not only caution us against regarding any political order as ideal but they also suggest a definition of the limits of the claims of the state, as a relationality, over the individual.

There is, of course, a complementary aspect to this question, one bearing in a different way upon Richardson's second kind of unity, the relational. If one party to an association is in some measure a non-entity (because his essential qualities are obviated) the association itself is unstable; it loses its integrity as a relation. Thus, for example, in a dictatorship, where, politically, the reason and will of one person are alone effectively operating, several consequences must ensue. One of these is that the political dispensation will lack variety and complexity; it will be rigid, static, and uniform. Hence, it will be weak. At the same time, it will lack the vitality that voluntariness imparts to any association.

Moreover, since the persons (at least some of them) over which it exercises control will eventually seek to assert their 'integrity,' their personality, it will be subject to revolution, to internal division. To the extent, then, that a political association, by denying personality, is non-relational, it will be rigid, narrow, and unstable. Rather than expressing the unity of relationality, it will manifest destructive disintegration. In other words, as the term 'relationality' implies, mutuality is a crucial element in this kind of unity: what is good for one party to the association is good for the relationality; what is disintegrative of one party is destructive of the relationality.

Further, just as the unity of relationality (or of wholeness) is not the same as the unity of the individual, so the unity of the more-than-one carries with it benefits beyond those of integral, but unrelated, individuality. Here are a few obvious examples: a man and a woman, as discrete entities, cannot reproduce except through a relational unity; ten men in concert can lift a stone that the same ten men, acting singly, could never raise; brush, paint, canvas, and artist are all integral beings, but their relational union issues in something new, 'extra.'
This point--that relational unities carry with them an 'increment of association' which confers upon the individual advantages that he could never earn alone-has important economic and political implications. One of these is the question to what degree 'wealth' is relational rather than simply individual. Following from this is the problem of access to these relational or social increments: do they belong to the collectivity, or are they to be distributed among the individuals comprising the relationality?

Arising from the trinitarian account, then, are two important kinds of political significance, one which is 'negative' in emphasis, and one essentially positive.

The first of these has to do with the asserting or defining of the limits of power, especially, delegated power. Each of the writers I have cited makes this point: Gregory, by complaining that simple monotheism entails a 'narrow, jealous, impotent' God, at least implies that some kinds of undistributed power are untenable; Wyclif insists that political power divorced from the sanctions of authority (perceived by those learned in God's law and the 'love' of persons governed is unacceptable and that 'law,' ultimately, is not a creature of, but a limitation to, temporal power; Kant observes that the defect of the political state--be it monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic (93)--is that it is a coercive order; Auden warns of the dangers implicit in erecting 'the political' into the tabernacle of 'universal law'; and Richardson's philosophy of unity seems to require that no association (including the political unity of the state) should violate the integrity) of personality. Negatively, then, trinitarianism sets limits on political power in two ways: by insisting upon what might be called the 'rights of individuals,' that is, their integrity as persons, and by suggesting (as do Wyclif and Kant) non-unitary constitutions.

The more positive conclusion to be drawn from the trinitarian account is that the properly-constituted group is not antithetical to the individual. Indeed, the unity of relationality offers the integral person benefits that he could not acquire in isolation. Thus, the Trinity teaches us that the unity of relationality is desirable--so long as it does not require the destruction of the unity of the individuals subscribing to it. God the Trinity is more than the sum of three unrelated Persons. The unity of the diversity is a whole greater than, say, three separate gods. At the same time, the trinitarian account of salvation implies a communication of that whole with man, in a relationality, which involves a realization of personality in a fuller way than, say, by a unitary, disincarnate deity promulgating regulations for human behaviour. The pictures that the Trinity--as a society Itself and in its relations with man-provides of relationality are a validation of this kind of unity . Our relationalities, of course, cannot duplicate the Trinity, which is perfect unity in diversity; moreover, once again the account of the Trinity's relations with man reminds us of our own imperfections and of the necessary inadequacies of our own associations.
Nevertheless, the trinitarian pattern remains, and we can evaluate our associations as they approximate to that pattern, as they embody the principles it suggests.

This is, admittedly, a preliminary exploration. However, it does point to some important ways in which the doctrine of the Trinity has political implications, and it does generate some criteria for a trinitarian politics. The Trinity--as an epitome of differentiated unity, of diverse yet cooperative sovereignty--seems to furnish a uniquely Christian insight into questions of social and political organization.

Reference notes

1 'The Trinity: A Psychological God,' SR 5/2 (1975-76), 117; hereafter cited as Spicer.

2 London: Fontana, 1961 (first published 1908), 133-34.

3 Trans. by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960); thereafter cited as Kant

4 For a discussion of the concept of 'the autonomy of the spiritual life' in English Common Law, see Richard 0' Sullivan's Christian Philosophy in the Common Law (Westminster, MD: The Newman Bookshop, n.d.), an expansion of a paper on 'The Foundations of English Freedom' read to the Aquinas Society in 1942.

5 'The Clergy May Not Hold Property,' The English Works of John Wyclif (London: Early English Text Society, n.d.), 362-63. During the English Renaissance several writers held that temporal sovereignty must embody the power, wisdom, and love conventionally

6 Quoted in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. by Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 116.

7 'A Note on Order,' The Nation (February 1, 1941), 131-33; hereafter cited as Auden.

8 The 'autonomy' to which I refer here is that described by Nathan A. Scott as implying that 'man himself is the source of the law of life and ... the culture which he creates is not therefore to be measured by reference to any ultimate principle. 'The Modern Experiment in Criticism: A Theological Approach,' The New Orpheus (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 170.

9 Harvard Theological Review 60 (1960), 1-38; hereafter cited as Richardson.

10 See, for example, C. N. Cochrane, who in Christianity and Classical Culture (London Oxford University Press, 1957) says of Augustine: 'in the Trinity, he discovered a principle capable of saving the reason as well as the will, and thus redeeming human personality as a whole' (384).

Dennis R. Klinck is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. SR 8/1, pp. 57-66 / hiver/winter 1979 / imprimé au Canada/printed in Canada

FAIR USE CLAIMED for limited study and non-commercial purposes.

Further Reading:

The Church and the Trinity by Geoffrey Dobbs in the "Australian Heritage Series"

"The Foundations of Liberty," by Canon Arthur Fellows