The Comic Trinity of Nicaea

The year 2025 marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, convened by Emperor Constantine I to resolve the Arian controversy. The Creed hammered out in the fourth century is the bedrock of Christian convictions about the Triune God. Sunday next is Trinity Sunday. All in all, it’s a good time to reflect on the import of the church’s unique confession that the living God is Father, Son, and Spirit. 

To see one facet of that confession, we may start from the end of the Creed. Regardless of specific beliefs about eschatology, all Christians believe that history climaxes with the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Christians deny the world will simply return to its origin; we renounce the grim expectation of a return of the same and defy the ultimacy of death. The world won’t end with fire or ice or with a stage littered with corpses. It will end with the laughter of an endless wedding feast. Ours is an eschatological faith not only because we believe there is an end, but because we believe the end is a glorified beginning. New Jerusalem is Edenic, but it’s an Edenic city, a garden urbanized. 

To say the same in other words: In both its broad sweep and many details, the Bible is divine comedy. Broadly: The Last Adam surpasses the First (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15), and the sanctuary advances from portable wilderness tent to the glorious temple of Jerusalem to a final city-temple beyond comprehension. Specifically: The wedding guests at Cana assume, like many ancients, that things get worse as time passes, but Jesus, following the lead of his Father, instead reserves the best wine for the end, providing an enacted parable of the kingdom’s coming. “The last shall be first, and the first last” is a fundamental plot twist in the Bible’s story of the world.

What does this have to do with the Trinity? Ancient thinkers were by and large quite certain the highest principle, the source of all that is, must be purely and undilutedly One. The Absolute is, by definition, unrelated; if it were related to another, it would be relative rather than Absolute. The One can have no companions or competitors. Further, everything that emerges from the First Principle must, again by definition, be a diminishment. All descends from the Source by a kind of metaphysical tragedy.

Trinitarian theology upended this common sense. Yes, the Triune God is One, but he’s One in an unprecedented way. Nicene orthodoxy insists on a relative Absolute, a Father eternally in relation to his Son and Spirit, and they to him. The Son goes out from the Father, yet entirely without dilution. Arians to the contrary, there’s no “leakage” of divinity as the Father generates the Son. The Second is so fully the image of the First that he is all the First is, save only that he is Second rather than First. Further, as Athanasius stressed, the Father is Father only insofar as he generates the Son. The Father would not be Father without a Son, which is Athanasius’s proof that the Son must be eternal: If there’s no eternal Son, there’s no eternal Father either, only a faceless “ungenerated” something. Nicaea marks a revolution in ontology: Emanation and generation within the One, God from God, a Father who is Absolute Father because of his relation to the Son he begets. The Trinity is metaphysical comedy, because the Second and Third are the articulate Word and shining Glory of the First.

Now, origins correspond to middles and ends. Ancient pagan metaphysics and myths displayed the same tragic shape. As the world is a defection from the One, so humanity slides downhill from the golden age, through silver and bronze ages, until it entirely ceases to be metallic at all. But if the Origin is Triune, if the Second Person is the glory of the First, then it becomes conceivable that the second moment of time enhances the first, the third enhances the second, the fourth the third, and so on to the end. Basil the Great grasped this correspondence. Following ancient logic, his Arian opponents insisted any “Second Person” had to be inferior to any “First Person.” In his treatise On the Holy Spirit (section 47), Basil retorted with a reductio: “If the second is [always] subordinate to the first, and since what is subordinate is always inferior to that to which it is subordinated, according to you, then, the spiritual is inferior to the physical, and the man from heaven is inferior to the man of dust!” Arianism entails an Arian, and ultimately pagan, reading of history: If the Second Person is a diminished First Person, so the Second Adam must be a lesser being than the First. Conversely, the comic history of both Adams unfolds the comic life of God—Father, Son, and Spirit.

We confess a Triune Creator. We confess the resurrection of the dead and hope for the descent of the new Jerusalem. Is there any connection between these two unique features of the Christian credo? Is Christianity comic because it is Trinitarian? Yes, and yes.