The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a mythos, because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos, and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience.39 The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being.