Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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as object. The whole of my subjectivity is in my willing, my thinking or my feeling, or in all three together. How then am I related to these three? I am neither a transcendent being apart from them, nor am I simply the sum of them, for I refer to each one of them as ‘mine’. I even have a sense of identifying myself at different times more closely with one than with the others and taking sides in the conflicts between them, Yet there is no ‘I’ which is not willing, thinking or feeling. So I have to say that my willing is I, my thinking is I and my feeling is I, but my willing is not my thinking, my thinking is not my feeling, and my feeling is not my willing. Yet I am one individual and not three separate persons.

This is exactly the relationship which is portrayed by a diagram in churches and described in the Athanasian Creed between the three Persons of the Trinity; namely, the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. Yet there are not three Gods but one God. Neither must the Persons be confounded by failing to distinguish between them, nor must the Substance be divided by supposing that any of the three is independent of the other two. And there is a further relationship described in the Athanasian Creed. It is that the Father begets the Son and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In what sense could the relationship between willing and thinking be compared to that between God the Father and God the Son? Traditionally the supreme qualities of the Godhead are omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. Omnipotence clearly refers to willing and omniscience to thinking. And though these three qualities refer to the whole Godhead, nevertheless omnipotence is more evidently the quality which describes God the Father and omniscience God the Son (Logos), as omnipresence describes the Holy Spirit. Though there is no question of one Person of the Trinity preceding the others in time, since all are eternal, nevertheless God the Father has a certain precedence as the begetter of the Son. Equally ‘will’ — the power of existence, of being and continuing to be who or what one is — precedes consciousness and thinking, and could be said to beget it. The sense in which feeling proceeds from willing and thinking, as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, has already been shown.

This pattern of triunity is represented not only in the Christian Trinity, but has pervaded human thinking from earliest times in many different forms. It is the essential morphology of the human organism and can also be shown to be the pattern of all organism from the single cell upwards. Since it recognises contradiction as dynamic and productive, it is compatible with change and