1693–8.
Dr. Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul’s and Master of the Temple, now in the black books of High Churchmen, undertook to meet the new attacks upon the Trinity; and, as so much was made of the assumed unreasonableness of that doctrine, he commenced his vindication of it with an elaborate argument to prove that it involves no contradiction whatever. He used the shield of reason to resist the darts of reason. His notion was, that self-consciousness constitutes the numerical unity of a Spiritual Being,—that the unity of a mind or spirit reaches as far as its self-consciousness,—that, in the three Persons of the Trinity, there is what may be called a mutual self-consciousness, a self-consciousness common to the three; and that therefore these three Persons are essentially and numerically one. A moral union in knowledge, will, and love, he says, is the only union of created spirits; but there is an essential union between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, through the existence of a mutual consciousness. This notion contains, according to Sherlock, the true faith of a Trinity in unity. It is orthodoxy rationalized. It does not confound the Persons; it does not divide the substance.[256] After working out an abstruse argument to this effect, and after endeavouring to show there is authority in some of the Fathers for his theory, he concludes by taking up, seriatim, certain objections which had been urged in recent Unitarian writings.
THE TRINITY.
A young man, a Master of Arts, just turned 27, stood up, on the 28th of October, 1695, in the pulpit of St. Mary’s, Oxford, before a large audience of Dons and Gownsmen, to preach from the text—now given up on all hands as an interpolation—“There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.” The preacher was Joseph Bingham, a scholar of surprising erudition, destined to throw a world of light upon the antiquities of the Christian Church; in the sermon, and preface to it when published, he distinguished between the patristic and the scholastic doctrines of the Trinity, maintaining that Luther, in his theology on that point, followed in the wake of the Fathers, whilst Calvin trod in the steps of the Schoolmen. The Lutheran, the Patristic, and the Scripture doctrine, in Bingham’s estimation, amounted to this—that there are three individual substances in the Godhead, really and numerically distinct from each other, though at the same time they are one in another sense; for they are not of a different nature; they are not divided like men and angels; they are not three parts of one whole; nor are they three Beings, who have Divine natures independently, every one from himself; nor are they three opposite principles, or three providences, clashing with one another. No; they constitute “one harmonious providence, and one undivided principle of all other things.”[257] Sherlock, a citizen of the world, catching the spirit of the age, appealed to reason; Bingham, a recluse, scarcely touched by habits of thought outside his University, appealed to tradition. This piece of hard, dry learning, without the slightest tincture of pathos, or a single practical remark from beginning to end, must have proved a repulsive lesson even to an Oxford audience. Its general drift, running in the same direction as Sherlock’s teaching, though it included no theory of mutual consciousness, alarmed the authorities; they went home from St. Mary’s in great agitation, muttering against the young preacher charges of Tritheism, Arianism, and other heresies. Bingham was simply a student who had missed his way in theological speculation; but Sherlock was personally disliked by Jacobites, who were irritated by his political apostacy, and by the adherents of William, who envied him his church preferments. No hornet’s nest could be worse than the attacks which this unlucky controversialist aroused. Many who, under other circumstances, would have let heterodoxy alone, could not tolerate it when coming from such a quarter; and the most unseemly reflections on the man’s character were mixed up with arguments against his doctrines.[258]
1693–8.
South plunged into the fray, and used his sledgehammer with unmerciful violence. Not unlearned, not unversed in logic, South was more of a rhetorician than a philosopher, more of a wit than a Divine. After denouncing Sherlock’s explication as wholly inconsistent with the mysteriousness of the subject, and representing his exceptions to the use of certain words in relation to it as false, groundless, and impertinent, he exposed, with tremendous ridicule, the theory of mutual consciousness. “For self-consciousness, according to him,” says South, “is the constituent principle, or formal reason, of personality. So that self-consciousness properly constitutes or makes a person, and so many self-consciousnesses make so many distinct persons. But mutual consciousness, so far as it extends, makes a unity not of persons (for personality as such imports distinction and something personally incommunicable), but an unity of nature in persons. So that after self-consciousness has made several distinct persons, in comes mutual consciousness and sets them all at one again, and gives them all but one and the same nature, which they are to take amongst themselves as well as they can. And this is a true and strict account of this author’s new hypothesis; and such, as I suppose, he will not except against, because justly I am sure he cannot; howsoever, I may have expressed the novel whimsey something for the reader’s diversion.”[259] How monstrous to think of diverting people, when professedly engaged in studying the awful secrets of the Divine Essence!
THE TRINITY.
South maintained that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not distinct infinite minds or spirits—that to say they are so, is to contradict Councils, Fathers, Schoolmen, and later Divines; that the book he assailed contains philosophical paradoxies and grammatical mistakes; and that the author was insolent, scornful, and proud beyond all parallel. To quote a full sample of South’s personal abuse would be to cover pages.[260]
1693–8.
THE TRINITY.