Divine Arithmetic

We live by the numbers. Insurance companies, government agencies and sociologists parse out our lives by percentages: take an aspirin a day and add five years to your life; eat the delicious, crispy fat on your lamb chop (God intended us to take some risks) and subtract four. Our lives are hedged in by numbers.

The Psalmist says some of us will live an allotted “threescore years and ten,” others more, others less. We buy because numbers in our bank account tell us we can; we work because the same numbers tell us we must. The digital age which now dominates our world is, I’m patiently told by those who know, is built on an endless sequencing of zeros and ones in countless orderings. Numbers are built into the fabric of creation. They’re one of God’s inventions.

God, though, is above them—outside them. “God” writes St Maximus the Confessor with wonderful theological insight, “is above arithmetic.”

It’s one of the most basic notions of Christian teaching that God is not only above arithmetic but above everything. Before He said “Let it be,” nothing existed. Part of the basic notion that God is above everything is that God is above even existence. Existence, “being,” is part of God’s creation. Because God is above existence, we can’t even say, in a theological sense, that God exists. Existing is what created things do, and He is most definitely NOT created, or part of creation.

Yesterday I had a fun conversation with a very bright, very earnest and very unconventional Protestant minister. He and I are poles apart (he began our conversation by saying he “loathes tradition,” so you can imagine we had a hard time finding much common ground), but we both obviously relish lively conversation.

He declared the Church’s teaching was fundamentally flawed with its dogma of the Trinity. “It’s a logical impossibility,” he said with an assured certainty. “You can’t have three equaling one, or vice versa. Ever since 325” he said (the date of the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated our Nicene Creed), “the Church has been teaching an absurdity.” We had a fun conversation, and he said he wants to stop by St Joseph’s to cross friendly swords again. I look forward to it, but this morning I sent him an email of a single sentence. It’s the quotation from St Maximus: “God is above arithmetic.”

For us human beings, three equaling one is a logical absurdity. God the Three-in-One, though, isn’t an arithmetic problem. We know He is Three in One because Christ our God told us so. He didn’t concern Himself with proving it, any more than we can prove God’s existence—and you can see from the above that we needn’t even bother to try. It’s not because belief in God is illogical, but because it’s above logic—above numbers—above existence. That’s the “high and holy place” where God simply Is. And incredibly, unbelievably, if we consider Who He Is and who we are, that, St Maximus further says, is where He calls us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox