Observations placeholder
Pordage, John - The nature of the Holy Trinity
Identifier
000619
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The entire concept of the trinity in Christianity is based on the works of a scholar of dubious merit who hardly used the New Testament in devising the concept.
A lot of the Christian mystics have been deeply uncomfortable with the established Church view ever since and whilst attempting to avoid being burnt alive, tortured, imprisoned or [as John Pordage was] simply expelled from the Church, attempted to reconcile the absurdities.
A description of the experience
The Wisdom of John Pordage [editor Arthur Versluis]
The nature of the Holy Trinity as they exist in the globe of eternity, without and before eternal nature, is a very great mystery. Many disapprove that the word person be applied to the Trinity, because their spirits, in the sight of vision and the light of revelation, never could perceive any personality in the Holy Trinity. And indeed nothing is more true than that there are no figurative persons in the Deity. Neither does the Scripture in any place tell us of three persons in the Trinity, but when it speaks of the Trinity, it expresses itself by referring to the three and the one. Hence it is that mystical writers, instead of the word person, make use of numbers to signify the Trinity by calling the Father Monas, the Word Duas and the Holy Ghost Trias. And if it would keep to these expressions, it would take away much contention about the words
Despite his suffering Pordage was able to say the following about the Trinity he had perceived in his visions …………….
The Wisdom of John Pordage [editor Arthur Versluis]
The Holy Trinity’s nature is all happiness and blessedness; no misery, torment or anguish is to be found in it, or proceeds from it. Hell, death, and the curse never proceeded from the Holy Trinity, because its nature is all happiness. ……….The Unity … is nothing else but love. In the eternal world, in eternal nature, and in the angelic world, there is no other manifestation but that of love…….. Love is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and ending of all essences. We cannot ascend higher than this love, because there is no essence above, before, or beyond it. As in number we cannot pass beyond a unity, first of numbers, and so neither can we, when we speak of essences, go beyond the love essence, which is all and all in the eternal world, which is the first and beginning of all worlds.
From his later writings this perception he had of love was primarily generated, not by his experiences of the Holy Ghost as he would term it, but his experiences of the level of aether and the Sun/Moon; Mother/Father regions. This perception ties in with a large number of other observations – that the ‘higher’ you go towards the Creator and Created, the greater sense you have of love and power.