“For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
This is the cause of the Revolutionary. They fight for Uniformity and against all differentiation. This has been seen over and over again in History. We’ve noted it here before. Whether it was the Phrygian cap worn by the French Revolutionaries to communicate the leveling enterprise or the slogan of citizen which labeled all people alike. Whether it was the ubiquitous Mao suit as a leveling advertisement or the usage of “Comrade” to level men and women. Revolutionaries are hopeless Unitarians. They really believe that all colors bleed into one and they are fighting for that Unitarian goal. This promise of the Unitarian God was used by the Serpent in the Garden. His promise to our first parents was … The differentiation between you and God will disappear if you just eat.
But the Christian has been and is described as Trinitarian. We fight with all our being against the Unitarian impulse we see all around us. We are fighting for differentiation and in fighting for that we are fighting for the Character of God … we are fighting for the Trinity. It is the Uncreated Trinity that reminds us of created differentiation. When we insist upon distinctions we are at that moment being Christian. When we chastise the visible Church because it is advocating the unitarian impulsed of the World we do so out of love for what Gregory of Nyssa called, “My Trinity.”
Now, what does Chesterton mean when he ends his quote by saying, “It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity?” Chesterton is first telling us that God is both Union and Differentiation. God is both One and Many. When we lose either of these realities we fall into the heresy of Unitarianism. And this is where we are right now in the modern Church. We are functionally Unitarian… and this includes the Postmoderns, oddly enough.
Postmodernism, it is argued, is a philosophy that differentiates. However, I would say that Postmodernism does result in Unitarianism. The Union that Postmodernism finds in the universal lack of unity. Postmodernism gives us the negation of union as the means of unity. Both the Unitarian error and the Postmodern Diversity error bring about a Unitarian world. Unitarianism does so by the denial of the Trinity. Postmodernism does so by the unity found in the negation of unity. There is a Unity found and lived in the negation of unity.
And so the only way to escape from a Uniformity world that is absent the Many taught in Christianity is to find our way back to Trinitarian thinking. Trinitarian thinking allowed for differentiation between men and women in their roles, differentiation between men and women in their biological realities, differentiation between children and adults, and differentiation between people groups.
On this Trinity Sunday, we must fight hard for a return to the idea of God as One and Many because the loss of this understanding is creating a monochromatic world where colors, genders, ages, and peoples do indeed bleed into one.
Whether our age is more immoral than other ages I shall not decide; but as a defective notion of penance was the specific immorality of the Middle Ages, so that of our age might easily be a fantastic ethical weakness, a voluptuous, soft, exaltation of despair, in which individuals, as in a dream, fumble after a conception of God without feeling any terror thereat, but on the contrary pluming themselves upon the superiority which in dizziness of thought … possesses as it were a presentiment of God in the indefinite. p. 484.
Soren Kierkegaard, ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, trans. Swenson & Lowrie
And Kierkegaard was a damnable heretic.
That may be the conclusion one would come to if he only read S.K’s philosophical works, or only weighed in the balance the influence he had on neo-orthodox theologians and secularists — who I’d say misrepresented his thought. If you read some of his devotional works such as ‘Works of Love’ you might be more inclined to leave the judgment up to God.
The trouble is …. I’ve read those works.
Kierkegaard was no friend of the God of the Bible. His subjectivism is off the charts.