Originally posted by Conrau K
[b]the holy spirit ( or ghost ) is not a third person but rather a power emanting from god in the same way that a wave sloshes onto the beach from ocean ( god ).
This is the heresy of modalism which posits that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are just modes of God, ways of expressing and revealing Himself, otherwise known as Sabellianism. The Nicene ...[text shortened]... are one in being (thus rejecting the second idea that one is a sub-being to the other.)[/b]
According to Diog. Laer. ix. 20 (K. 37), “When Empedokles said to Xenophanes that the wise man was not to be found, he answered: “Naturally, for it would take a wise man to recognise a wise man”.
Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic School who was born about 580 B.C., according to Diog Laer. iii. 16; Cic. de nat. Deor. i. 27, said amongst else:
-- “But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own -horses like horses, cattle like cattle”.
It seems to me that the Trinity is merely the sum of the essential fundamental distinctions which man perceived through time in his own nature. This is the reason why the concept of Trinity is understood slightly different by the Western and by the Eastern religions.
Furthermore these distinctions -as offfered by you- are followed in analogy too with the supposed nature of the universe thanks to the idea that God exists in the Human and that the Human is a creation kat’ eikona kai kath’ omoiosin tou Theou. It seems to me that the idea of the Trinity is a fusion of polytheism and monotheism, of imagination and wannabe reason, of fiction and reality.
The Trinitarian theologian offer that these three persons are not essentially distinguished or different due to the fact that they are omoousia (they are one in essence). And we can surely imagine three different persons that they are identical in essence: our three persons will do have a different identity but human beings they would remain due to the fact that their essence in common is their human nature. Well, this is indeed a fine example of the sharp use of our everyday empiricism and it is justified by our mind and by our feelings too. Furthermore, these three persons are united because their inner nature is also pure love and above the trivial discriminations that are related to the common mortal human beings like social taxis, IQ etc. And all of them three persons are perfectly capable to feel to the hilt sympathy and compassion -and on the other hand they are omnipotent, ultra smart, ultra powerful and ultra whatever. And them three persons have constitute through love a single moral personality whilst each one holds in full a divine and at the same time a physical existence for himself.
Furthermore, these three persons can be absorbed in each other and they do not dispense with each other -and at the same time they have always a formally independent existence. This is the trinitarian God, whose three persons have no existence out of each other. These imaginary “persons” that they are totally different in nature from the real human beings lack of a real personality due to the hypothesis that the real personality of God is not one by one these three separated personalities -and this is the mechanism used by the theology in order to have the polytheistic element excluded and to prove the unique divine nature of tris-hypostatos Theos. However this negation turns these three personalities/ hypostases into a ghost and therefore their self-subsistence is annihilated in the self-subsistence of the unity, and at the same time it is never annihilated at all. The Son does not exist without the Father, the Father does not exist without the Son and the Holy Spirit expresses merely the relation of the two to each other. However the three divine persons are distinguished from each other only thanks to the agents that constitute their mutual relations. The essential in the Father as a person is that he is a Father and of the Son that he is a Son. Over here the Father is God, and as God he is identical with the Son as God, and this is the reason why it is said that “God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost” God is in all three alike, and that there is one person of the Father, another person of the Son and another person of the Holy Ghost but the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all one”. So they are indeed distinct entities but without distinction of substance, and thus the personality is related solely in the relation of the Fatherhood, and therefore we come to the conclusion that the idea of the person is indeed only a relative idea.
But in the real life a Human father is not a father without the son and he has a formal existence for himself apart from his son; but in God the Father, there is no distinction between God the Father and God the Son as God -however at the same time these relations have to do not with ghosts but with real substances, and so the truth of polytheism is reaffirmed whilst the truth of monotheism is denied. To require the reality of the persons is to require the unreality of the unity, and to require the reality of the unity is to require the unreality of the persons.
Of course all the above is merely theology (with the exemption of Xenophanes’ aphorisms), and it probably works perfectly for the theologians and their fellow believers. However for the philosopher the so called “holy mystery” of the Christian Trinity, which is supposed to represent an “absolute truth” distinct from the human nature, it’s bonkers -it collapses into itself and it cannot be accepted dew to its obvious contradictions and sophisms😵