Dopo Padre Nostro e Ave Maria, dedichiamoci al “Credo”: non si tratta solo di formule esoteriche da rimasticare come come ciacolatorie, bensì di affermazioni ragionevoli dotate di senso probailistico.
Il mistero della Trinità occupa tutta la prima parte: pensandoci bene, il fatto che Dio si presenti nelle tre persone è un’ ipotesi tutt’ altro che improbabile:
Suppose the Father existed alone. For a person to exist alone, when he could cause others to exist and interact with him, would be bad. A divine person is a perfectly good person, and that involves being a loving person. A loving person needs someone to love; and perfect love is love of an equal, totally mutual love, which is what is involved in a perfect marriage. While, of course, the love of a parent for a child is of immense value, it is not the love of equals; and what makes it as valuable as it is, is that the parent is seeking to make the child… into an equal.
A perfectly good solitary person would seek to bring about another such person, with whom to share all that she has… goodness is diffusive: it spreads itself. The Father will bring into existence another divine person with whom to share his rule of the universe. Following tradition, let us call that other person ‘Son’.
A twosome can be selfish. A marriage in which husband and wife are interested only in each other and do not seek to spread the love they have for each other is a deficient marriage. Of course the obvious way, but not the only way, in which they can spread their love is by having children. The love of the Father for the Son must include a wish to cooperate with the Son in further total sharing with an equal; and hence the need for a third member of the Trinity, whom, following tradition, we may call the Holy Spirit, whom they will love and by whom they will be loved. A universe in which there was only sharing and not cooperation in further sharing would have been a deficient universe; it would have lacked a certain kind of goodness. The Father and the Son would have been less than perfectly good unless they sought to spread their mutual love of cooperating in further sharing with an equal…
… anyone who really loves someone will seek the good of that person by finding some third person for him to love and be loved by. This demand can of course only be satisfied by having no less than three divine persons…
Certo che immaginarsi un essere dissociato in tre persone è dura. O no?
It wa s Freud, the modern founder of psychoanalysis, who helped us to see how a person can have two systems of belief to some extent independent of each other.
Freud described people who sometimes, when performing some actions, act only on one system of beliefs and are not guided by beliefs of the other system; and conversely.
Although all the beliefs of such a person are accessible to him, he refuses to admit to his consciousness the beliefs of the one system when he is acting in the light of the other system of beliefs. Thus, to take a well-worn example, a mother may refuse to acknowledge to herself a belief that her son is dead or to allow some of her actions to be guided by it. When asked if she believes that he is dead, she says ‘No’, and this is an honest reply, for it is guided by those beliefs of which she is conscious. Yet other actions of hers may be guided by the belief that her son is dead (even though she does not admit that belief to consciousness); for instance, she may throw away some of his possessions.
The refusal to admit a belief to consciousness is of course itself also something that the mother refuses to admit to herself to be happening.
the Freudian account of such cases helps us to see the possibility of a person intentionally keeping a lesser belief system separate from her main belief system, and simultaneously doing different actions guided by different sets of beliefs, of both of which she is consciously aware—all for some very good reason.
Indeed even people who do not suffer from a Freudian divided mind can sometimes perform simultaneously two quite separate tasks (for example, having a conversation with someone and writing a letter to someone else) in directing which quite distinct beliefs are involved, which we can recognize as ‘on the way to’ a divided mind in which we have two different sets of beliefs…
A volte RS mi lascia sbigottito, certo che si capisce meglio il rispetto che gli tributava Richard Dawkins quando, parlando di lui, affermava: “sul fronte opposto uno dei pochi a parlar chiaro e a prendere sul serio le tesi che difende”.
Richard Swinburne – Was Jesus God?
