"Therefore when the mind knows itself and loves itself, there remains a trinity, that is the mind, love and knowledge"
About this Quote
Lombard is trying to make the most audacious Christian doctrine feel less like revealed mystery and more like the mind’s own native grammar. If the Trinity sounds metaphysically baroque, he counters with an inward experiment: watch consciousness fold back on itself. When the mind knows itself and loves itself, three distinct “somethings” appear without splitting the self into three selves. Knowledge isn’t identical to love; love isn’t identical to the mind; yet none of them is detachable from the living subject that sustains them. The intent is apologetic and pedagogical: to give students in the emerging scholastic classroom a conceptual bridge from introspection to theology.
The subtext is careful boundary-setting. Lombard isn’t saying God is basically a human psyche scaled up; he’s offering an analogy sturdy enough to defend “threeness” without sliding into tritheism (three gods) or modalism (one god wearing three masks). By rooting plurality in a single agent’s self-relation, he makes “distinct but not divided” feel intellectually tractable.
Context matters: Lombard’s Sentences became the medieval West’s standard textbook, a machine for training clergy to argue precisely about invisible things. His triad echoes Augustine’s psychological analogies for the Trinity, but with scholastic crispness: mind, knowledge, love line up neatly as terms you can parse, define, and debate. It works rhetorically because it recruits a reader’s most undeniable evidence - the experience of thinking and wanting - and turns it into a proof-of-possibility. The doctrine stops being merely asserted; it becomes thinkable.
The subtext is careful boundary-setting. Lombard isn’t saying God is basically a human psyche scaled up; he’s offering an analogy sturdy enough to defend “threeness” without sliding into tritheism (three gods) or modalism (one god wearing three masks). By rooting plurality in a single agent’s self-relation, he makes “distinct but not divided” feel intellectually tractable.
Context matters: Lombard’s Sentences became the medieval West’s standard textbook, a machine for training clergy to argue precisely about invisible things. His triad echoes Augustine’s psychological analogies for the Trinity, but with scholastic crispness: mind, knowledge, love line up neatly as terms you can parse, define, and debate. It works rhetorically because it recruits a reader’s most undeniable evidence - the experience of thinking and wanting - and turns it into a proof-of-possibility. The doctrine stops being merely asserted; it becomes thinkable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Peter
Add to List
