Christianity as creative myth

greater or less than another: but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.’

- That this is a mythological expression of a spiritual reality and not an actual description of a transcendent God is clear enough, for both within it, and between it and the gospel story there are paradoxes and contradictions which ordinary reason would not allow. The profundity of this whole mythology does not make it any less mythological. Vedanta has also a triunity Sat-ChitAnanda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss). Sat, Chit and Ananda are a unity consisting of three principles, but they are three eternal principles. As principles they are the same in meaning as the three principles of the Christian Trinity, but there is one essential difference. The three principles of Vedanta are only in simultaneity, not in succession. They are in eternity but not in time. In the Christian Trinity the second Person who is from eternity the Word (Logos), as St. John’s gospel tells us, and who corresponds to Chit in Vedanta, actually incarnated in time as a man, and lives to eternity as the risen Christ. These three principles are expressed philosophically in succession by Hegel, who showed how the thesis, as it were, begets the antithesis, and the synthesis proceeds from the thesis and the antithesis.

It is quite fair and reasonable to expect a religious doctrine to be shown to bear some relationship to experience, if it is to be accepted as relevant to one’s personal life and to the future of Mankind. And so it is fair that the notion of the Trinity should be shown to relate to normal human experience and not to be just a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo. The most direct reflection of the Trinity in our daily experience is in our recognition of three relationships. The first is that sensations and events are continuously impinging on us of which we are not aware of being the cause; it is even the case that thoughts, feelings and desires come into our consciousness and we perform actions without being fully aware of the cause of them. In other words, both from outside us and from inside us some cause appears to be working the ultimate origin of which is a mystery to us. The second, which is a relationship of identity, is that we are aware in ourselves of being self-conscious persons. The third is that we are aware of our fellow human beings whom we believe to be self-conscious persons like ourselves. And we are also aware of plant and animal

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