Introduction
Fr. Spitzer’s Proof of the Unity of God
The Trinity explained by the act of looking at a bottle
The Incarnation
The central paradoxes of the Trinity and the Incarnation

(NOTE: I’ve included the above podcast, which is divided into five sections, for the benefit of those who would prefer to listen to what I’ve written, rather than read it. People who prefer to read my post are welcome to continue scrolling down.)

Fr. Robert Spitzer S.J. is a Catholic priest in the Jesuit order and a retired President of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Currently, he is President of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith and the Spitzer Center of Ethical Leadership. As well as having a Bachelor of Business Administration degree, Fr. Spitzer has a Master’s degree in Philosophy, a Master of Divinity degree, a Master of Theology degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree. He has published more than ten books, as well as dozens of articles, and he has appeared on several national television programs, including Larry King Live, The History Channel in “God and The Universe,” The Today Show, the PBS series “Closer to the Truth,” and the Hugh Hewitt Show. So when I came across a Youtube video featuring Fr. Spitzer being interviewed by Lila Rose (a pro-life activist and convert to Catholicism) titled, You’ve Never Heard the Trinity Explained Like THIS, I was intrigued.

Having watched Fr. Spitzer’s 14-minute exposition, I have to say I’m disappointed. I don’t want to sound disrespectful of such an eminent Catholic priest, and I certainly don’t wish to impugn his orthodoxy, even if I don’t like some of his illustrations, but I will say that I thought his philosophical arguments weren’t terribly cogent, while his theological explanations were highly misleading. Worst of all, he failed to address the cardinal difficulty relating to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation: the notion that several selves can share the same mind, or that two minds can belong to one and the same self. Instead, he talked a lot about different levels of consciousness, which I thought was beside the point. But perhaps my assessment is too harsh. So what I’ve decided to do is present a step-by-step exposition of Fr. Spitzer’s talk, and let readers judge for themselves. The video can be viewed below:

Fr. Spitzer’s proof of the Unity of God

Fr. Spitzer begins his exposition by asserting that while science can establish the existence of a Creative Power, it cannot prove the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. I should note in passing that Fr. Spitzer is no slouch in the scientific arena: he’s debated Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow on Larry King Live. His scientific arguments for the existence of God (which draw heavily on the fine-tuning argument) can be viewed here. I shall say no more about this part of Fr. Spitzer’s exposition, as I am specifically concerned with his elucidation of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation.

The next stage of Fr. Spitzer’s talk is concerned with the unity of God, which he argues for as follows (in this post, I’ll be summarizing his points, rather than quoting him verbatim, and I’ll be highlighting his comments in bold, indented paragraphs):

You can only have one infinite entity. This goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Let’s suppose you had two infinite entities: infinity 1 and infinity 2. There would have to be a difference between the two of them. If they were the same in all respects, they’d be the self-same entity. Therefore they must differ. But if they do, then one either has something the other does not, or is something that the other is not, which means that the other is finite, yielding a contradiction. Therefore, you can only have one infinite power. There’s only one infinite nature.

My comment:

This is an unconvincing argument. It certainly goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 11 art. 3), but not to Plato or Aristotle, neither of whom believed in God’s actual infinity. (Aristotle believed in a potential infinite, but not an actual one.) One could perhaps claim that the argument traces its roots back to the Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (c. 205-270 A.D.), although Aquinas states it much more clearly and succinctly. Moreover, Aquinas’s version of the argument is significantly different from Fr. Spitzer’s, in that Aquinas starts from the principle that God is Existence itself (which he argues for here). I’ve argued elsewhere that the essence-existence distinction is not a real one, and that while it makes sense to say that a thing is its own existence, the notion of Pure Existence makes no sense whatsoever. Put simply, it’s absurd to say that Existence exists, just as it is to say that walking walks, that shining shines, that thinking thinks or that loving loves. And it’s even more absurd to say that Pure Existence is tri-personal, created the world, talked to Moses, wanted the Jews to honor the Sabbath day, and now wants Christians to go to church on Sundays. But let’s suppose that Aquinas is right, and that God is Pure Existence. In that case, the unity of God would follow: the notion of there being two individuals who are identical with Pure Existence makes no sense, as the term “Pure Existence” doesn’t denote an individual in the first place – although speaking as a layman, I would have a hard time praying to such an abstract Deity. However, Fr. Spitzer omits this vital premise, basing himself on the rest of Aquinas’s argument:

If then many gods existed, they would necessarily differ from each other. Something therefore would belong to one which did not belong to another. And if this were a privation, one of them would not be absolutely perfect; but if a perfection, one of them would be without it. So it is impossible for many gods to exist. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 11 art. 3)

Taken by itself, this is a very poor argument for God’s unity. For one could imagine two beings both possessing infinite power, but exercising it in different ways: Infinite Being 1 makes a world (call it A) which is free from suffering, while Infinite Being 2 makes another world (call it B) in which suffering is permitted as an opportunity for soul-making. While the two beings act differently, each could have done what the other did, so neither of them is limited in power. One might argue that Being 1 has an extra determination (“Maker of world A”) which Being 2 does not, while Being 2 has a determination (“Maker of world B”) that Being 1 does not – but so what? Neither of these determinations is intrinsic, as each being would still be the same individual that it is now, even if it hadn’t created a world at all. Moreover, it is simply ridiculous to speak of Being 2 as suffering a privation, merely because it doesn’t opt to make world A. The act of making world A doesn’t make Being 1 any greater; rather, Being 1’s greatness comes from possessing infinite power.

The argument also assumes a premise which is known in philosophical circles as the Identity of Indiscernibles: that there cannot be two separate objects or entities that have all their properties in common. Leaving aside the point that I have already shown how two beings with infinite power might have differing properties which are not intrinsic, the premise itself is questionable. Indeed, there are particles called bosons (which have an integral spin – for instance, force-carrying particles such as photons and gluons, as well as composite particles such as mesons and helium-4 nuclei) which seem to violate this principle, as they can have identical properties and can even occupy the same place at the same time. Thus it is doubtful whether two deities whose powers and actions were identical would have to be the same entity.

The Trinity explained by the act of looking at a bottle

Fr. Spitzer then proceeds to explain how one Infinite Being can be a Trinity, by offering a striking illustration where he focuses on a bottle:

I’m aware of this bottle. I’m also aware of my being aware of this bottle. Not only that, I’m aware of my being aware of my awareness of the bottle. I can do a triple.

At this point, the perceptive Ms. Rose interrupts and asks Fr. Spitzer: “Can you do a quadruple?” He answers, “Maybe, but I know I can do a triple. In that sense, I get my own universe.” Fr. Spitzer continues:

This is a genuinely spiritual power; us getting ourselves getting ourselves. This requires traveling at an infinite velocity, which is physically impossible. We have a spiritual capacity. This means we can be in three positions relative to ourselves at the same time.

Analogize each person of the Trinity to a self-consciousness, a self-conscious power. You can only have one Infinite Power, but you can have three self-consciousnesses making an unconditional use of the same infinite power.
It’s not like three terminals that are plugged into the same central processing unit, because the CPU has finite power. God’s power never runs out.

The Cartesian theater. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

My comment:

I can follow Fr. Spitzer when he says: “I’m aware of my being aware of this bottle.” However, I’m not sure what it means to say: “I’m aware of my being aware of my awareness of the bottle.” Maybe I’m one of these subhuman people that can’t “do a triple.” Notionally, of course, I can get my head around this three-level awareness, but it’s a very thin understanding, and I can’t really picture it. However, on a purely notional level, I can get my head around four- and five-level awareness, too.

In any case, there are plenty of philosophers who claim that we can have fourth-order intentionality, where “The speaker wants the recipient to know that the speaker wants the recipient to know that x, whereas x is any given information to be communicated,” as Christine Sievers puts it an her 2022 paper, “Interaction and ostension: the myth of 4th-order intentionality” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377:20210105, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0105). So I’m not really sure why Fr. Spitzer thinks God has to stop at three. It seems to me that if He’s infinitely powerful, He can continue for as many levels as He likes. In which case we should ask: why are there only three persons in God? Why not an infinite number?

Fr. Spitzer maintains that the Trinity consists of three self-consciousnesses making use of the same infinite power, but there’s a huge dis-analogy with the human mind here. I might (if I have a mind like Fr. Spitzer’s) possess three levels of consciousness (call them consciousness, self-consciousness and meta-self-consciousness), but I do not possess three self-consciousnesses. Why not? Because I only have one self. However, according to most contemporary expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity, God has three selves, which is why Jesus (whom Christians believe to be God the Son incarnate) refers to the Father as “You” and the Spirit as “He”. And it is genuinely paradoxical to say that three distinct selves can share one and the same Mind. (Note that Scripture speaks of the Mind of God, but never the Minds of God.)

Incidentally, this is one area where the Catholic Church really needs to gets its story straight. Fr. Spitzer is a Jesuit priest who ascribes three self-consciousnesses to God. However, the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner S.J. (1904-1984), who was also a Jesuit, maintains a diametrically opposite point of view in his book, The Trinity (Burns and Oates, 1970, reprinted 2001, p. 107), where he asserts that in God, “there are not three consciousnesses; rather the one consciousness subsists in a threefold way,” adding that “There is only one real consciousness in God, which is shared by Father, Son and Spirit, by each in his own proper way” (bolding is mine). However, in an online article titled, “Are there three personalities in God, an “I” of the Father and an “I” of the Son and an “I” of the Holy Spirit?” (June 15, 2011), Fr. Ryan Erlenbusch, a priest of unimpeachable orthodoxy, appears to hedge his bets: “Though I will not go so far as to say that there are three “consciousnesses” in the Trinity, I will say that the three “I”s, egos, and personalities in the Trinity are that to which human consciousness may be considered as analogous” (bolding is mine).

It gets worse. If I consult the 1912 article on The Blessed Trinity in The Catholic Encyclopedia, I find that the author (Fr. George Hayward Joyce S.J.) completely rejects the identification of personhood with self-consciousness, which Fr. Spitzer takes for granted in his exposition of the doctrine. Here is how Fr. Joyce disposes of an objection to the doctrine of the Trinity:

It is urged that since there are Three Persons there must be three self-consciousnesses: but the Divine mind ex hypothesi [i.e. by assumption – VJT] is one, and therefore can possess but one self-consciousness; in other words, the dogma contains an irreconcilable contradiction. This whole objection rests on a petitio principii [i.e. a begging of the question – VJT]: for it takes for granted the identification of person and of mind with self-consciousness. This identification is rejected by Catholic philosophers as altogether misleading. Neither person nor mind is self-consciousness; though a person must needs possess self-consciousness, and consciousness attests the existence of mind (see PERSONALITY).

Fr. Joyce goes on to say that in the Trinity, “the same mind will have a three-fold consciousness, knowing itself in three ways in accordance with its three modes of existence.”

So I have to ask: what’s going on here? Which Jesuit priest is right: Fr. Joyce, Fr. Rahner, or Fr. Spitzer? As a Catholic layman, I am genuinely perplexed.

Fr. Spitzer continues:

There’s only one Infinite Intellect, one Infinite Intelligence. But there are three self-consciousnesses. What are they doing relative to each other? They’re in love. The first self-consciousness loves the second. That is, the Father loves the Son. That’s why he’s called the Beloved One (ha agapetas) in the New Testament. The second self-consciousness (the Son) loves the Father back. Thus the Lover (i.e. the Father) is also a Beloved, while the Beloved (i.e. the Son) is also a Lover. The Father and the Son, together in their unity, love the Spirit, who receives the love from both of them and gives back the love to both of them in their unity – rather like a child receiving the love of its parents and giving it back to them. So now we have a completeness: a Lover, a Beloved, and the Beloved of the Lover and the Beloved.

Thus according to Aquinas, there’s one nature, three persons and four processions. The Lover loves the Beloved (1st procession), Who receives the love from the Lover and gives it back to Him (2nd procession). Then the Lover and the Beloved in their loving union give themselves to the Holy Spirit (3rd procession), Who receives the love of the Lover and the Beloved and reflects it back (4th procession).

My comment:

Although Fr. Spitzer’s illustration of a Lover, a Beloved, and the Beloved of the Lover and the Beloved is a beautiful one, I regret to say that he is misreading St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas actually says there are two processions in God, not four: “In God there are not more than two who proceed — the Son and the Holy Ghost. Therefore there are in Him but two processions” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 27, art. 5). He argues that there cannot be any more than two processions, because the divine processions can be derived only from actions which remain within the agent, and in the divine nature, which is intellectual, these actions are but two: acts of intelligence and acts of will. In other words, since God is a Mind, God necessarily knows Himself (an act of intelligence) and loves Himself (an act of will). The Son is the Father’s knowledge of Himself, while the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. This is the standard Augustinian explanation of the Trinity, and Aquinas frequently cites Augustine in his discussion of the Trinity. However, Fr. Spitzer’s exposition is strikingly different from that of Aquinas on three points.

First, what Aquinas says is that in God, there is one nature, and there are two processions, three persons, four relations (paternity, filiation, spiration and procession) and (probably) five notions, or proper ideas whereby we know a divine Person, for in addition to the four relations, the Father can also be known by the fact that He is from no one (unlike the Son and the Holy Spirit).

Second, Aquinas offers a reason (of sorts) why the Divine persons stop at three: namely, that there are only two mental operations – knowing and willing – which remain within the mind of an agent. Thus there’s no need to ascribe any other mental operations to God. The Son is God the Father’s knowledge of Himself, while the Spirit is God’s love (i.e. the shared love between the Father and the Son). And we can stop there. By contrast, Fr. Spitzer offers no good reason why there are only three Divine Persons. He refers to the Son as the Beloved of the Father, and he also says that the Father and the Son, together in their unity, love the Spirit. But why can’t there be more persons? Why can’t the Father, Son and Spirit, together in their unity, (timelessly) love a fourth Divine Person into existence? We are not told.

Third, Aquinas insists that God the Father’s act of knowing Himself actually generates God the Son (timelessly, of course). It isn’t merely a case of the first self-consciousness [God the Father] loving the second [God the Son], as Fr. Spitzer puts it; rather, the first self-consciousness, by knowing (or loving) itself, generates a second self-consciousness. Likewise, it isn’t strictly accurate to say, as Fr. Spitzer does, that the Father and the Son, together in their unity, love the Spirit; rather, by loving each other, they generate (or more precisely, spirate) the Spirit. So what Fr. Spitzer needs to explain to his contemporary Catholic audience is: how can one person’s act of knowing or loving themselves generate a new person, even timelessly? After all, it doesn’t happen with humans: my thought of myself is just a thought, and nothing more. So, why does it happen with God?

The Incarnation

Meanwhile, Fr. Spitzer endeavors to explain how the number two ties in with God:

What about the number two? That pertains to Jesus Christ, who has two natures. In the Incarnation, who becomes incarnate? Not the Infinite Power of God, which doesn’t enter into a finite body. That’s a contradiction: a finite infinite. It’s the second person, that second self-consciousness which is making use of the one Infinite Power, is what becomes incarnate. That self-consciousness enters into a finite, physical body, but He doesn’t give up making use of His infinite power with the Father and the Spirit.

We can make an analogy here. In my own self-consciousness, I know I’m talking to you. You’re a real person. In a dream, my self-consciousness can enter a “dream body” in a “dream world,” where I’m flying around, and I think it’s me. But in a dream, you might be falling, and then you can tell yourself, “This is a dream.” Self-consciousness can do that. It’s aware of the real world and the dream world, and which one is which. That’s just an analogy. So we can say: Jesus Christ is one person, one self-consciousness, that’s making use of an infinite nature and a finite nature at the same time. Thus two natures – one finite and one infinite – are being used by the one self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is the second self-consciousness in the Trinity: the Son, the Beloved of the Lover.

My comment:

Fr. Spitzer relates the number two to the Incarnation, but this is not a good parallel to the Trinity. According to traditional Christian doctrine, God is intrinsically a Trinity; He cannot be otherwise. However, the Incarnation is something God (or more precisely, God the Son) freely chose to do. Had He not done so, there wouldn’t have been two natures in the second person of the Trinity.

I also completely fail to see why (according to Fr. Spitzer) it’s a contradiction to say that an infinite power enters into a finite body, but it’s not a contradiction to say that an infinite person (God the Son) enters into a finite human body. After all, what does “enters into” mean? If it literally means “occupies a finite volume of space,” then an infinite person can’t do that, any more than an infinite power can. Hence I can only suppose that “enters into” means “assumes,” or “takes control of.” And I see nothing absurd in saying that an infinite power can control a finite body. After all, God’s infinite power controls every finite body in the universe. The difference is that in the Incarnation, God (the Son) took over not only a human body, but also a human soul: namely, the body and soul of the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Furthermore, I was quite shocked to hear Fr. Spitzer liken the body of Jesus, which was assumed by God the Son in the Incarnation, to a dream body. As Fr. Spitzer knows perfectly well, there was a first-century heresy (Docetism) which was condemned by the Christian Church for denying the reality of Jesus’ body. Now, I understand that Fr. Spitzer is trying to use contemporary language to communicate traditional Christian mysteries, and he does qualify his language by saying, “That’s just an analogy.” Personally, however, I don’t think it’s at all helpful to suggest, even as an analogy, that God the Son’s infinite self-consciousness enters into an illusory reality (a dream body). That undercuts the whole point of the Incarnation.

Finally, Fr. Spitzer concludes his exposition:

It’s not proper to say that God has a physical body, because the infinite power of God cannot have a body, but we can say that the second person of the Trinity, the person of Jesus, has human nature which includes a body. Thus we can say that the Son of God has a body, but we don’t say that the nature of God has a body. The second person of the Trinity is incarnate in a finite body, just like my self-consciousness can be, in my dream world, a body.

My comment:

I have to say I simply don’t follow Fr. Spitzer’s logic here. Of course it’s a contradiction to say that the infinite power of God is a body, because the latter is inherently finite, but I see no contradiction in saying that the infinite power of God has a body, if “has” means “possesses” or “controls.” After all, a very powerful individual like Joe Biden or Xi Jinping might possess things or control people that are much less powerful than himself.

Finally, I strenuously object to Fr. Spitzer’s concluding analogy, for reasons mentioned above: “The second person of the Trinity is incarnate in a finite body, just like my self-consciousness can be, in my dream world, a body.”

The central paradoxes of the Trinity and the Incarnation

As my readers will have gathered by now, I consider Fr. Spitzer’s expositions of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation to be highly problematic. However, to my mind, his most significant failing is that he didn’t address what I would regard as the cardinal difficulty relating to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Let’s put aside the vexed question of God’s self-consciousness for a moment. Nevertheless, it still makes perfect sense to ask if God has one Mind or three. As was pointed out above, if God is truly one then He has One Mind, as Scripture confirms (Romans 11:34-36). Likewise, it makes perfect sense to ask whether the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same self, or different selves. There can be no getting around the fact that in Scripture, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are different selves: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all talk to one another and even address each other as “You”. Even St. Athanasius (296-373), the staunch fourth-century defender of the Trinity, concludes his classic work, “On the Incarnation of the Word”, with the following invocation: “through Whom and with Whom be to the Father Himself, with the Son Himself, in the Holy Spirit, honour and might and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” Clearly, he believed in a three-self Trinity.

So here’s the central paradox of the Trinity: the notion that several selves can share the same mind. The Incarnation has its own central paradox: the notion that two minds can belong to one and the same self, as in the Hypostatic Union, where one Divine Person (God the Son) has the Mind of God in His Divine nature, as well as a finite mind (the human mind of Jesus) in His human nature – for in the New Testament, Jesus always calls Himself “I,” and never “we” (making Him one self), and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, to which 62% of all Christians belong, both teach that Christ has two wills, from which it follows that He must have two intellects or minds. A non-Christian might well ask: what does it even mean to say that three selves or “I’s” (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) share a single mind? And what does it mean to say that one self possesses two minds? Unfortunately, Fr. Spitzer did not attempt to answer these profoundly puzzling questions. While he talked a lot about different levels of consciousness, he overlooked what I will call the “self-mind” paradoxes relating to the mysteries of the trinity and Incarnation. All the same, though, Fr. Spitzer got one thing right: the Catholic Church (and the Christian Church in general) needs to revamp its presentation of these doctrines to a 21st-century audience, using terminology that makes sense to people living today. He did at least make a manly attempt to convey these mysteries to his listeners.

Let me wrap up with three short videos. None of these videos grapple with the two central paradoxes I mentioned above. However, they do present authentic Christian teaching on the Trinity, for those readers who may be curious as to what this teaching is. First, here’s a Catholic explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity:

And now, here’s a Protestant explanation, which focuses on Scripture:

And lastly, here’s a funny video made by Hans Fiene of Lutheran Satire, titled, “St. Patrick’s bad analogies,” which sums up why earthly analogies for the Trinity are so misleading. Enjoy!