Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology

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Title: TOWARD A TRINITARIAN ANTHROPOLOGY , By: Dixon Jr., John W., Anglican Theological Review, 0003-3286, March 1, 1998, Vol. 80, Issue 2 Database: Academic Search Elite

TOWARD A TRINITARIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

Before there can be a Christian anthropology there has to be an anthropology. The question is: where do we find a satisfactory anthropology? We can no longer rely on propositional thought to determine such matters by deduction from general principles. We can now speak of evidence. We can ground our investigation on extensive experimental research and carefully argued conclusions. Can a Christian anthropology (which is implied by the word "Trinitarian") be properly built on the findings of the sciences? Leaving aside the inescapable fact that this is precisely what always and necessarily happens,(n1) my answer is a qualified "Yes." The qualification has to do with the heart of my argument: science can serve as the foundation for a Christian anthropology provided it is completed by the trinitiarian principle. (The lower case "t" is deliberate and necessary; the Trinitarian principle is Christian, the trinitarian principle, derived from a proper grasp of the Trinity, is universal.) The present task, therefore, is to outline the foundations of an anthropology, to build a trinitarian anthropology on the foundations and, departing from the rigors of argument, to make the necessary proclamation as a Postlude. Foundations for a Trinitarian Anthropology Few of us in the humanities have competence in the sciences; the problem is to choose those things which can be considered established and do our work on the basis of them. The ineluctable wholeness of the material order. In response to those who speak of fragmentation as reality, a quantum physicist responded ". . . wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action, guided by illusory perception which is shaped by fragmentary thought."(n2) "Rather, both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable" (9). "In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement"(11). The primacy of relation in physics and anthropology. It was an unfortunate moment when the necessary name for a redefinition of physics so closely resembled something quite its opposite: relativism. This seemed to place subjectivism and the denial of reality at the heart of the modern enterprise. In an essay too little known, Ortega corrected this error in 1922: Relativism is not here opposed to absolutism; on the contrary, it merges with it, and, so far from suggesting a failure in our knowledge, endows the latter with absolute validity. This is the case with the mechanics of Einstein. His physical science is not relative, but relativist, and achieves, thanks to its relativism, an absolute significance. The most absurd misrepresentation which can be applied to the new mechanics is to interpret it as one more offspring of the old philosophic relativism, of which it is in fact the executioner. In the old relativism our knowledge is relative because what we aspire to know, viz., space-time reality, is absolute and we cannot attain to it. In the physics of Einstein our knowledge is absolute; it is reality that is relative.(n3)

The key term, then, for Einsteinian physics and for our philosophy and criticism, is not relativism but relation. Every life is a point of view directed upon the universe. Strictly speaking, what one life sees no other can. Every individual, whether person, nation or epoch, is an organ, for which there can be no substitute, constructed for the apprehension of truth. This is how the latter, which is in itself of a nature alien from historical variation, acquires a vital dimension. Without the development, the perpetual change and the inexhaustible series of adventures which constitute life, the universe, or absolutely valid truth, would remain unknown.(n4) Physicists continue to speak (very awkwardly, according to Bohm) of elementary particles as the units of "reality." Yet particles are not separate things. They are concentrations of energy, elements in relation. The ordering of matter is hierarchical.(n5) Each level of this hierarchy emerges from and is integrally related to the level "below" it: none can be accounted for or explained by that level. Every level possesses "emergent properties"; all reductionisms are misleading or false. Equally, nothing is apart from the whole (Bohm's "implicate order"). Whatever distinction there is by way of mobility and intention, everything is part of an infinite, rhythmically vibrating web of interacting relations. The awareness we have of distinct parts is a consequence of our naming them, an act of our consciousness. Our bodies are material substance, in their structure not to be distinguished from any other physical form. Our knowledge of the workings of those bodies, particularly the workings of our nervous system--the critical part of consciousness--demonstrates the electrochemical function of neuronal interconnections.(n6) The physical and the chemical activities cohere to form the next level: the biological. The biological is the level of what we, with considerable justification, think of as life, however difficult it is to define life. The crucial aspect of biology is evolution. Life begins somewhere in that ill-defined area where the inorganic and the organic meet to define the most elementary organisms that then develop by means of gradual change with adaptation to the containing environment until we meet the organisms as we know them. The world and all that is in it, including ourselves, is a product of the long, intricate process of evolution. We do not have a given world containing creatures evolving. The environing world is evolving as well. The processes of adaptation are not solely external to the organism. There are internal forces at work on the course of evolution, the potentialities of the ordered energies of every organic structure to affect both possibilities and direction of evolution.(n7) Evolution generated the vast array of creatures who possess mobility and intentionality, which is to say, animals, including humans. All animals have "primary consciousness,"(n8) the awareness of the surrounding world and the ability to act on it with purpose. Primary consciousness involves the ability to form concepts, the ability to identify the things and events of the world and to control behavior appropriately,(n9) Concepts are a neural process, not dependent on speech. "Conceptual capabilities develop in evolution well before speech. Although they depend on perception and memory, they are constructed by the brain from elements that contribute to both of these functions." (Edelman 108). Primary consciousness involves thinking, which animals are certainly capable of doing. In addition to primary consciousness, humans possess "higher-order consciousness" (Edelman 112) which is the consciousness of being conscious. (Cf. Barfield's "beta thinking."(n10) The origin of this form of consciousness is the origin of the human; as much as we would like to know how this took place, we cannot. It began before language with the human process of imagining (Edelman's "concepts"), the ability to see the potential function of things within their form (a thigh bone as club, a scapula as spade) then to abstract from the form those aspects of it that can better serve the function. These are processes that generate a peculiarly human relation to the world and eventually require language for their fulfillment. "[Higher order consciousness] embodies a model of the personal, and of the past and the future as we]l as the present"(Edelman 112). Higher-order consciousness makes possible the development of language with its vast enlargement of conceptual and symbolic behavior: Higher-order consciousness depends on building a self through affective intersubjective exchanges.... primary consciousness coexists and interacts with the mechanisms of higher-order consciousness. Indeed, primary consciousness provides a strong driving force for higher-order consciousness. we live on several levels at once (Edelman 150). "In human beings part of the world has become conscious of itself...."(n11)

The brain is a product of evolution, retaining its primitive structures with the addition of the more complex later structures. The most Obvious attribute of the brain--thinking--involves the whole brain (actually the whole of the body's processes). "Mind" is a function of the organism. This is materialist but not reductionist; just as the other stages of the hierarchical ordering of life, the mind is an "emergent process," not explainable by nor reducible to the purely material level "below" it. The human mind and its products are a part of the web of relations. The relational structures of human culture are added to the order of nature as a part of it as well as supplementary to it, not over against it as something wholly other. Culture considerably preceded the completion of evolution and participated in it. Culture is not other than nature but is a part of nature, understandable by natural processes, both complementing and supplementing nature, an emergent property of a natural process. The "Harvard Law of Neurophysiology" states, "Under ideal experimental conditions, a well-trained laboratory animal subjected to controlled stimulation will do as he damn well pleases." There is among the animals, including ourselves, the possibility, the certainty, of caprice, of willfulness, obstinate resistance, evasion, accident, all the things that make up the sheer cussedness of human life. Willfulness is accompanied by the possibility (or the certainty) of error. Humans may have a "blessed rage for order" but there is also, to use the title of a book, Man's Rage for Chaos.(n12) We are characterized by an infinite capacity to miss the point, to misunderstand the situation, to act on partial and prejudiced information, to let desires rather than intelligence determine actions. There is, further, the attraction of evil. It is not merely the presence of evil, which might be attributed to error, but the inescapable fact that there are those who want evil for the sake of evil, and the attractiveness of evil is ever present in most of us. Both willfulness and evil are hard to account for by simple evolution. These factors are a consequence (emergent properties) of the complex interaction of the processes developed in the course of evolution. Since they are so complex they open up a nearly infinite range of possibilities. Often these are, or seem to be, at cross-purposes with each other, requiring decisions which are always open to error, and to evil, as well as possibility. There is more: the possibility, the necessity, for creativity, the whole realm of making, of the imagination (which is the ability to live in both past and future, with memory and hope). The rich and complex array of neuronal patterns and linkages in humans generates a depth of memory that is not only greater in extent but in productive power than anything available to animals. Such memory in conjunction with present situations requires a transformed sense of the future in which deliberate planning is necessary. With planning there comes purpose and with purpose, hope. After a certain point, every trait, working with the others in coordinated activity, is capable of doing many things beyond its immediate purpose as a mechanism for survival. These are the emergent properties of the human and they make creativity possible--and necessary. The mind is a process of the totality of the body but it is not reducible to the purely physical. These emergent properties are the realm of the spirit. All the elements cohere, interact, to contribute to the search for meaning, which is the spiritual, a human attribute alone. I have outlined two fundamental aspects of the human. First, we are inescapably a part of nature, organisms that develop and evolve as all organisms do, inseparably linked to the material order of our bodies. Second, these later paragraphs outline all the things that set us apart from nature. By nature we are a part of nature. By nature we are apart from nature. This paradoxical structure of the human is the source of both possibility and tragedy. Being apart from nature means that we have the necessity to choose, which is the openness to possibility. Being a part of nature means that we are under the inescapable destiny of the organic. The two are inseparable--and irreconcilable, which is the tragedy of the human. As human we know the power of this contradiction, the pull in both directions. There is a desire to realize one or the other, to evade the tragic contradiction by flight into one or the other or a need to reconcile them somehow. The great religions are dedicated to one or another of these possibilities. There can be no final

resolution of the paradox, only temporary accommodation. So the restless, exhilarating, noble and futile human enterprise proceeds. What resources do we have for this enterprise? So far, I have suggested those elements of ourselves that are the successive adaptations and the emergent properties of those adaptations. The adaptations fit us for survival in our circumstances. The emergent properties have added to us, as humans, the need for meaning. Meanings (and value) cannot be determined solely by propositional rationality. They are determined by the models, the images, that govern our sense of who we are (our anthropology), and the emotions that determine the decisions we must make. We are not only mechanisms receiving and processing information. We are in constant and active interchange with the world. Consider the title of a book by Quentin Smith, The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling.(n13) Emotions, feelings, are not extraneous. They are the means for apprehending as well as making the kinds of meanings we all live by. They are not something other than reasoning, something extraneous to reasoning, an interference. They are part of the fullness of reasoning, understood in its fullness. There is more. ". . . Feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image. . . ."(n14) Feelings are a part of knowing, of reason. Emotions are inseparable from the processes of meaning and purpose. Damasio has made clear, with case histories, the necessity of emotions in relation, in decisions, in the determination of meaning. Another human necessity is again indicated by the title of a book: Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.(n15) The body's processes provide the basis for the metaphoric processes of our thinking and our feeling response to the world. It is not only that thinking is a material activity, involving the whole body. The body in its interaction with the world provides the shape of our imaginative meanings. Metaphor is at the center of those symbolic constructs that organize our neuronal processes. These metaphors cohere into models--myths, rituals, art works, philosophies--of order and of meaning, our anthropology. Two fundamental dimensions of the human enterprise are the crafts, the means for contending with, of using, the facticity of the world, and those models that determine meaning, value, and purpose. Models are not quite what some interpretations of the word suggest: things we make outside ourselves. They are dimensions of our selves, means of organizing our neuronal structures and processes. It is the crux of my argument that the trinitarian model is both a psychological and a historical necessity. The inescapable centrality of craft and the arts is a subject to pursue on another occasion. With this outline in hand, it remains now to investigate the central model of the Christian faith. Outline of a Christian Anthropology The anthropology outlined so far is easily translated into a Christian vocabulary. Doing so is a constant motif of contemporary Christian thinking, which finds in these accounts a legitimate representation of the Incarnation, the wholeness, the indissolubility, of what had been known as body and spirit.(n16) Without trying to work out the implied details, many have felt that the presence of the divine in the human validates the human as a fit receptacle of the divine, the human understood in the full range of its somatic existence.(n17) The Incarnation is an indispensable part of any Christian anthropology. It represents to us, in the context of the faith, the double nature of the human situation and gives it meaning beyond its imprisonment in the irreconcilable conflict between them. Were there no more to say, this paper would not be necessary. Yet it cannot stand alone as a full statement of the Christian understanding of the human situation. For that we need the doctrine of the Trinity as a full resource for a Christian anthropology, as a true model, defining the self. What it has to say is equally indispensable. Such models are not merely "useful fictions." To work, models must be imaginative and, therefore somatic, realities. To be models, they cannot contain all the complex details, the quotidian contingencies, of actual life, but they must contain or set out the essential structure of what is or what ought to be. Since the Trinity is a mystery in several senses of that word, we need to use it as such an imaginative reality, which is best represented by adapting a wonderful medieval diagram:

This shows succinctly the thing that cannot be shown or even grasped securely with the mind. It is basic to our logic that a thing cannot be simultaneously A and not A or B, yet something fundamental about reality cannot be envisaged any other way. In the first draft of this paper, I drew this diagram from memory. Aware of the fallibility of memory, I checked and found that my memory had significantly altered the diagram from its medieval form: Raymond Lull, who originated the diagram in the fourteenth century, is making a point rather different from mine, yet there is a purpose in including both. Taken together the two diagrams outline what Charles Williams called the "co-inherence" both of the godhead and of the redeemed.(n18) The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the boldest and most creative intellectual acts of the human mind. The essential human paradox, already suggested, is a precise description of the human situation: by nature we are a part of nature; by nature we are apart from nature.(n19) We are animals. As animals we are part of the harmonics of the natural order, the rhythmic interaction of harmonically organized hierarchies of energy. The prime characteristic of the natural order in all its variety is precisely these harmonics, and this unity. All its systems find their completion in unity. We are self-conscious animals. As self-conscious, we are separated from the unity that is of our nature and subjected to a remorseless and inescapable duality. As animals, as organisms, we are subject to the remorseless logic of the natural processes. As more than, or other than, animals, we have the responsibility of making a human life and a human world. We do so under the conditions of the natural world with the openness that is the human world. The conditions and the areas of that making can be briefly described. There is the area of structures. The body itself is a structure and a part of the structures that are the synchronic world. This includes not only visible, tangible structures but the structures of relation that sustain order. Since this is the more static element of life, it might, for convenience, be called geometries. There is the area of energy, force, change, process. All life is process. Since this includes both the natural energies and the energies of decision, of conscious interaction within the model narrative that shapes decision, it might be called dramatics. As human, we have a future which requires planning, and planning is determined by purpose. The study of purpose can be called telics. Purpose, and its companion, hope, is varied beyond summary. Ultimate purposes, the purposes we call religion, might be fitted into a rough outline, determined by the basic human paradox, the fatal duality that is the condition of all human work. In the process of abstraction which is humanistic logic, there are a limited number of possibilities for the placement of the human within this duality, the attempt to understand and cope with it. Duality can be affirmed as the controlling principle of human affairs, the origin of dualisms. Unity can be sought, either in opposition to or in harmony with the primal unity. This unity can take two forms: the domination of one principle over the others, the origin of all monotheisms; the absorption of all units into the infinite oneness, or a balanced equality of all things, the origin of polytheisms. The separation created by duality is accepted as governing all things and thus generates the dream of anarchy (which, by definition, cannot have any control of power and, therefore, will always succumb to one of the others). The paradoxical situation of the human, caught between unity and duality, is accepted as constituent of the order of things. One attempt to resolve this paradox is the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis with its unceasing oscillation between unity and duality which is another way of resolving duality back into unity. The boldest, most original, attempt to resolve the paradox is the Christian Trinity, engendering from the duality a new unity, which sustains and enhances the distinctiveness of the elements of the unity, without either domination or obliteration. This is the reality modeled by the two diagrams. It is the only model, the only

anthropology, I know that is adequate to the achievement of full human purpose. (The principle of the Trinity, the essential and constituent element, the defining element of Christianity, is never achieved institutionally in the Church and, within the limitations of the human, never can be. Instead, the Church resolves its nature into one of the others, normally a monarchical monotheism. This is not an indictment of the Church, the chalice which contains the principle, the proclaimer of it, the creator of its possibility.) As a model, this presupposes an anthropology based on the earlier presentation. We are inescapably a part of the natural order, yet not exhausted by it. The inherent logic of this situation generates certain possibilities according to the outline and these constitute the bulk of human responses to their situation. The "trinitarian" response is considerably less logical, as it cuts across the normal human responses within the human situation. It is, however, a possibility and depends on an anthropology that presupposes the possibility of fateful decision. As an anthropology, it is an account of what the human is but also what it can be, or ought to be. "Natural man," the human as merely a part of the natural order, either absorbed into it or escaping from it, is incomplete, unfinished. It is the responsibility of the human to achieve that completion. Let us consider the principle, not in the form of abstract debate but of a concrete human issue, the model as applied to the actualities of human life, to marriage. Marriage is one of the most complex of all human relations. In its working out it illustrates all the possibilities of the outline. Marriage begins as a particular instance of duality. This can harden into a form of dualism, a common form of marriage; two people who enter into an agreement for one or several forms of convenience and gratification. Such a dualistic agreement is easily abrogated when gratifications cease. The duality can be surmounted by two kinds of unity. In its monotheistic or monarchical form, one partner dominates the other. In the other form of unity, there is at least the attempt (impossible of achievement) to absorb each individual into an undifferentiated oneness. Anarchy, the false dream of some politics, is illustrated by the "open marriage," in which those involved are independent and the unity of marriage only a formal one. The "trinitarian marriage" is achieved when the two become united in a unity that is truly new, truly a unity, yet preserves and enhances the distinctiveness of the individual persons. In such a marriage, there is truly a spirit, a holy spirit, that is the relation that creates the unity within duality. We have no way of knowing how often this kind of marriage is achieved. There should be no doubt that it has been achieved by many couples in many cultures, including couples and cultures who have never heard of the Trinity. The trinity as a model is vividly illustrated in this crucial form of human relation but, as a model, it is present in all the complex modes of the human. It is not only a model but the enspiriting reality of the truest modes of human relations. The distinctive character of a trinitarian anthropology begins to appear. Ordinarily the term "anthropology" is understood--properly--as descriptive: this is what being human is, now. This anthropology also asserts what being human ought to be. In that sense it can properly be considered an ethic, defining the purpose of human behavior. More is involved. The "trinitarian relation" is not merely a worthy goal but the necessary completion of the human, a completion that is necessary to the achievement of "eternal life." The old motif, "man makes himself" is revived in our time, but with the sense that everything essential about the human is a cultural product, tainted with ideology (one of those half-truths that are falsified when they are considered whole truths). We have the responsibility for making ourselves in a far deeper sense than that, making ourselves as humans, not as beasts or angels. Biologically and culturally, we depend for our sustaining reality on community, on our participation in the social whole. It is a matter of life and death to be clear on these matters. I do not know what the unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit, is. Since the Spirit is the life-giving relation, we could do worse than consider that sin to be the violation or destruction of the necessary relation. Emphasizing both terms of the achievement avoids the trap of the sentimentality that defines Christian responsibility solely in terms of service to others.(n20) Mikhail Bakhtin's principle of "dialogue" may help us to a more balanced statement, of particular relevance to one purpose of this essay, relating its anthropology to

critical method.(n21) The usual meaning of "dialogue" is stiffer and more limited than Bakhtin's intention. Bakhtin does not intend merely the exchange of views between independent people. It is so much a living situation that even the attempt to define it or describe it falsifies it. The dialogic situation can be denied and perverted, but we inescapably live within it. Fidelity to dialogue does not mean submersion in the other or blending with the other or treating the other person as someone over there, outside. When we speak, I see you against your background, which you cannot see, just as you see me against my background which I cannot see. The situation is whole, a unity, yet we can be truly a part of it only by remaining ourselves. In contrast to more sentimental definitions of the relations among separate people (nobody can truly feel another's pain), Morson and Emerson summarize Bakhtin's view: How shall I respond to another person's suffering? What is most productive? We sometimes recommend empathy--merging as much as possible with the other's position, attempting to "see the world from his point of view," and renouncing one's own outsideness and surplus of vision. But to the extent that such empathy is possible, it is also sterile. "What would I have to gain," Bakhtin asks, "if another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."(n22) Bakhtin applies this same principle to the study of other cultures, in contrast to those who think we should enter into another culture entirely in its own terms (and at this point we truly open the door to critical method and a more humane "theory of culture"): Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the objects of his or her creative understanding--in space, in time, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others (55,Emphasis original). Bakhtin adopted the term "field" from physics as descriptive of the order of relations among persons. "Cultural entities more closely resemble oscillating 'fields', a play of force lines rather than an assembly of objects" (51). Within these. fields, people define each other: Spirit describes I-for-myself, my experience of myself from within, arid it possesses no firm points of consummation. Consummation belongs to soul, a consequence of I-for-others. Others must partake in the process of engendering soul out of me for themselves, which means that soul is inevitably partial and purposeful. Depending on particular instances of outsideness and specific acts of finalization performed by others, my soul always responds to someone else's concrete need.... The phrase my soul must therefore be seen as a sort of paradox or oxymoron, because my soul results from a complex process in which others finalize me and I incorporate their finalization of me. That is why my soul is simultaneously "social" and "individual". My soul is a moment of my inner open-ended, task-oriented self (my spirit) that some other consciousness has temporarily stabilized, embodied, enclosed in boundaries, and returned to me "as a gift". "The soul is a gift of my spirit to the other" (Morson and Emerson, 192-3). The individual is not separate from nor other than the whole but is not identified with the whole nor exhausted in it. The I and the other cannot rightly be defined in terms of dominance and subordination, of fusion, of monadic separation but only of interaction, of mutual creation. Bakhtin is here describing a trinitarian anthropology, even suggesting (as the rest of his work so richly does) the kind of critical method that is a consequence of such an anthropology A Christian anthropology has to begin with the wholeness of what we now know, the somatic wholeness and the complications of being human. But, however hard it is for the scholarly intellectual to accept, it cannot, by its nature, continue in what was traditionally known as the detached area of thinking and the mind, which this essay so far is. Hence the necessity of the Postlude. Postlude The trinity is a model for the understanding of human nature and responsibility. It is also the Trinity, not only a

heuristic device. Or, better, it is also a heuristic device for the understanding of divinity, which is never to be grasped directly but only through images, myths, models, paradigms and metaphors. The trinitarian anthropology is inseparably linked to the Trinitarian theology. The Incarnation is not only, as our imaginations would have it in an essential image, the babe in the manger. It is the image or metaphor or model of divine presence and action. But the Incarnation is also the Son, the Christ, who was born but, as one born, as mortal, must also die. That death is the model, or paradigm or metaphor for the divine act that is also an inescapable dimension of the human, the inevitable death that is the involvement in the evil of the human world. As Paul says, death is not sin but sin is, inevitably and necessarily, death. Built into the myth, the model, the paradigm, is the possibility (not necessity) of Resurrection, the restoration to life. "For I through the law, died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:19-20). I do not know what Paul meant when he said that Christ lives in him. I have no way of knowing if he knew what he meant. We are now, perhaps, in a position to say more precisely what such a statement means. The human personality, a part of nature, is shaped by neuronal organizations that are in turn shaped by physical necessities (evolutionary adaptation) and by those images that are, necessarily, the means for shaping those emergent properties that arise from but go beyond what we are in nature. These images (myths, paradigms, metaphors, models) are not dispensable instruments but aspects of our selves, processes, structures, determining who we are. (While it is true that this anthropology-theology is derived from--or learned from--the Christian model, it is universally applicable; the good Buddhist incorporates the Buddha as a definition of the self. It is not for me to say whether the universality of the Christian paradigm should indicate a universal authority for the Christ.) The incarnate God, dying and rising, is not all. Out of that process must arise the third, the spirit, that informs all relations. Where she, the Spirit, is present, there too is the Christ. The relation of the Trinity is love that permits the one, the individual, to be and yet maintains the whole from which the one can draw its life. Since the human condition is duality, the individual might grasp the telics and the geometries of the Trinity but not the dramatics and, in the name of the Trinity, reassert an imperialistic unity. But true love is defined by its openness to sacrifice on the model of love that was sacrificed. Or the individual might grasp the telics and the dramatics of the Trinity but not the geometries and, in the name of the Trinity, define human purpose as the sacrifice of the self in a larger order. But true love is conditioned by its willingness to sacrifice and it is defined by the openness to the love that generates the abundant life. The condition of the Trinity is exchange. The manifestation of the Trinity is relation. To live in Christ is not simply to live in and for the other, which is only ethical monotheism. To live in Christ is also to let the other live in me. The one must become many as the many can only live in the one. Love that is not sacrificial is not love in the Trinity, but love that is only sacrificial is not in the Trinity either. "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." In this anthropology, Paul's statement is literally true. The whole structure of images, the paradigms, models, metaphors--neuronal structures--that had made up Paul's world had been shattered, the old man had died. Christ lived in him by the new ordering of the self in its world. It is within and from this world that we can speak, with hope that we can achieve the words that serve the truth. The Logos, the Word, is the living relation that restores us to the actuality of our lived world, with its possibilities of truth. (n1) The inevitability of this mode of work is involved in the principle of the Incarnation Christians are not other than or superior to the common life of their own times. Our disjointed age has an advantage over some others. There is no generally acknowledged anthropology so we have the responsibility of choosing according to measures themselves of our own choosing.

(n2) Bohm, David, Wholeness and the implicate Order (London Ark Paperbacks, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 7. (n3) Ortega y Gasset, Jose, "The Historical Significance of the Theory of Einstein" in 'The Modern Theme (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 137-8. (n4) Ortega, "The Doctrine of the Point of View," Ibid., 91. I cannot stress too strongly the importance of Ortega's work for my case. Together with Bakhtin's work, Ortega's seems to me crucial for constructive modern thought. His earliest public statement, Meditations on Quixote, should be decisive and, so far as I can tell has no influence on philosophy at all. I set out these issues at some greater length in my paper, "Ortega and the Redefinition of Metaphysics." In Cross Currents, Fall, 1979, 281 -299. (n5) Toulmin, Stephen and Goodfield, June, The Architecture of Matter (New York, Harper and Row, 1962), 375. (n6) Careful and detailed reflection on the remarkable work of Oliver Sacks is relevant at this point. Sacks demonstrates with the greatest humane sensitivity, the incredibly complex interactions of our nervous system such that a disorder in one part of it can throw the whole thing out of phase. (n7) Whyte, Lancelot Law, Internal Factors in Evolution (New York, George Braziller, 1965). (n8) Edleman, Gerald M., Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York, Basic Books, 1992),112. (n9) Ibid., 108. (n10) Barfield, Owen, Saving the Appearances (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, n.d.), 25. (n11) Peacocke, Arthur, God and the New Biology (London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986), (n12) Peckham, Morse, Man's Rage for Chaos (New York, Schocken Books, 1965). (n13) Smith, Quentin, The Felt Meanings of the World (West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press). (n14) Damasio, Antonio, Descartes' Error (NY., Grosset/Putnam, 1994), 159. Emphasis original. (n15) Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1987). (n16) See Peacocke for a summary account of various Christian formulations of this principle. (n17) This interpretation is not inevitable. Some Eastern Orthodox thinkers, for example, tend to interpret the Incarnation as a voluntary humiliation of the divine, the God should subject himself to the limitations of matter and the human form for the salvation of people. (n18) Williams, Charles, The Descent of the Dove (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 1939), passim. (n19) The following paragraphs are dealt with more fully in my book The Physiology of Faith (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1978), 30ff. (n20) Inevitably giving rise to the quip, "We are put on earth to serve others. What on earth the others are for, I don't know." (n21) I am following the interpretation of Bakhtin in Morson, Gary and Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990). In keeping with that dependence, I will quote Bakhtin from their book. (n22) Ibid., 54. ILLUSTRATIONS

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By JOHN W. DIXON, JR.(*) (*) John W. Dixon, Jr. is Professor of Religion and Art, Emeritus, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Copyright of Anglican Theological Review is the property of Anglican Theological Review Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: Anglican Theological Review, Spring98, Vol. 80 Issue 2, p169, 17p, 2 diagrams. Item Number: 632342

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