In the famous exchange of letters with Maximus, Maximus addresses Augustine, in the opening of his letter, with the gentle assertion that everyone can sense the presence of the gods in the marketplace. Augustine responds harshly, both accusing Maximus of jesting with him and dealing with the issue of the gods as if Maximus were only referring to the statues of gods and human sages placed in the market square.

            I would suggest that Augustine’s response is not only characteristic of the vehemence and bitterness he can exercise against those he deems his opponents, but also reveals Augustine’s essential spiritual deadness apart from the doctrinal core of the Roman church.

            What makes this last problematic, of course, is that the core doctrine concerning the ‘godhead’, namely ‘trinity’, involves a spiritual as well as a theological potency. In the Gospel of Thomas, we have Jesus saying, ‘Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are one or two, I am with him.’ What Augustine shows us, in both his life and writings, is that when one focuses on a trinitarian conception of God, one can access an illumination which is both spiritual and ‘trans-spiritual’, or truly religious. The problem, of course, is that both the spiritual and religious understanding which arises, when it is limited to a trinitarian doctrine not based in the original nature of the triune – which is the mystery of consciousness itself – remain within the essentially ‘mythical’ nature by which trinity itself is conceived. If we do not grasp directly that trinity points to the reflective nature of consciousness – and the double mysteries inherent in reflection – then, while the ‘spiritual’ light that is revealed bears the true nature of Spirit and the light reaches ‘in’ or ‘out’ toward the dark core ‘beyond’ Spirit, the whole is limited by the limited understanding of the triune, and cannot extend these ‘revelations’, properly, into the wide world.

            Spirit is pervasive and universal. Trinity points to the otherness at the center of experience – the Great Mystery, which is the Great Death, and therefore acquires such correlated but indefinable names as ‘God’ – an otherness which all religions, including shamanism ultimately point to. And to give ‘God’ substance in any form is not only a travesty, but both blasphemy and sacrilege, since God, as such, is a speculative corollary for this human experience of the Mystery.

            This is not to say that we cannot in some sense live in the Presence of this Otherness. Such is vocation, the sequential revelation of the true self. And the Great Death assigns benevolence to this Mystery, an incontrovertible conviction of its being and benign nature. But otherwise, it necessarily remains unknowable as ‘a nature’.

            I repeat what I have said elsewhere: the basic known fact that Augustine’s doctrine of trinity originates in Plotinus. But – also a known fact – he acquired his understanding from his primary conversionary teacher – Ambrose of Milan – and not from the writings of Plotinus himself.

            My own feeling at this point is that Augustine was a rhetor and not a philosopher in any true sense. Creative and imaginative he no doubt is. But what he creates is essentially myth – a communal myth grounded in the spiritual collectivity of the church, and specifically the metropolitan churches that ultimately come to focus in the Roman see. Within that relatively limited spiritual context, his focus on trinity gives him the prophetic insight characteristic of the creative literateur.

            But the true philosopher, on the other hand, finds the independent prophetic power of trinity, by hook or by crook, as inherently beyond all Spirit; and hence can use it, precisely, as the instrument by which to break out of the pervasive stranglehold of Spirit, thus escaping such narrowing spiritual entities and communal powers.

            The fact that Augustinian trinity is less than the actuality of true trinitarian power – is in fact a myth – is exemplified pragmatically by the emergent potency of the Mother as essentially coequal with the godhead in the formal worship of the church. The Mystery is neither male nor female. Only a primitive understanding of trinity would insist on its essential masculinity. But this insistence has corrupted the church into its present abusive hierarchy.

            We can view the trinitarian source as either essentially male or essentially female. The difference results in radically different views. The Mystery itself stands beyond both.

            But this is the point of trinity. Any legitimately embracing understanding of Three can produce the profound awakening that ‘transcends’ Spirit and enters the Mystery, provided, of course, that the understanding of Three is also essentially vocational.

            It is the limitation of all subsequent development within the church to this Augustinian myth for trinity that has limited church mysticism to a relatively narrow ‘spiritual’ trinitarianism – eventually becoming the defining condition for mysticism within the frame of the church.