Tag: ozone

Posted on in Heart of Language

12. One

The concept of the Trinity has flummoxed theologians for centuries. We might liken it to the birth of a child (a third person), or the branching out of a tree (a tree needs branches and leaves to bear fruit). In terms of language, we might identify three persons in the number one when written with capital letters: ONE.

And what is it we must believe? We must believe in God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s as simple as that. The rest will take care of itself.

The Christian concept of the Trinity – three persons, one God – has perplexed even theologians over the centuries, but we might think of our own birth to understand it (two people come together in order to create a third, which is why birth and third are connected, pair of letters that look alike b-d). We might also think of the shoot that branches out – the tree that becomes three – in order to grow and bear fruit.

But as language has taught us about the creation of the world, about the importance of belief, about our final destination and the Last Judgement (when an angel will enter the field to glean the wheat), so I think we can turn to language for an understanding of the Trinity.

Three in one. This doesn’t help us. Let us try writing one with capital letters: ONE. Now we can begin to see.

The word ONE comprises three numbers: 0, 2 (on its side) and 3 (back to front). The one number that ONE does not contain is itself: 1.

This is because in chemistry the subscript 1 is not written down. So if we take the first letter, O, to represent God (it has no beginning or end) and decide to write the three persons of the Trinity as chemical formulae, then God the Father would O(1), God the Son would be O2 and God the Holy Spirit would be O3. Three in ONE, literally.

For God the Father, we can read the formula O1 as no one, the end of the progression from the name of God in Exodus, AM, and from the purpose of Adam in the Book of Genesis to name the creatures, so that they mean something, to which he says amen. When we apply the progression of the Greek alphabet, AIO, to these words, from AM we get I’m and om, which with the phonetic pair m-n and addition of final e gives no one, God the Father. We are back to the beginning. From amen-mean-name, we get mine and nemo, the Latin word for “no one”, and omen. Again, we find ourselves back at God the Father, O1, the first person of the Holy Trinity.

Why would God the Father be “no one”? Because it’s the only way he can be everyone. We individual humans are someone – that is, as distinct from someone else, countable nouns, each with a line around them. The closest we can get to “no one” is the figure of the translator, that person who lives on the line, ferrying cultures across, enabling communication and understanding, and enriching people’s lives with what is other. The translator is “no man” – he lives inside the line, in no man’s land. He almost doesn’t exist – he is largely ignored, his name is sometimes omitted, he barely has enough to live on, and yet he believes in the value of the work he is doing… and so he continues beyond the bounds of what should be possible. He starts to push the boundaries of possibility, to test them, to see whether in fact they are real, whether the illusion will kill him or he will live to fight another day.

The translator, in human parlance, is no man. He doesn’t exist. He finds himself in the firing line between two opposite sides (sides that only exist because of the line), without a gun. He raises his arms in a semblance of crucifixion and implores an end to this madness of viewing people and things as external to ourselves. He doesn’t win, he loses, but he speaks the truth.

This is the closest we can come to the divine – “no one” – in this life. There are two indicators of truth: one is coincidence (things that happen together), the other is paradox (an apparent contradiction that turns out to be true). Language is full of paradox. God, who is in fact all that is, is no one. He is nowhere to be seen (which means he can be everywhere), but nowhere is also now here.

God the Son is O2, the chemical formula for oxygen – we breathe him, just as we speak him (because he is the Word) and see by him (because he is the Son/sun). And God the Holy Spirit is O3, the chemical formula for ozone, the layer that protects us from the sun’s rays (which we might understand as the Son’s wrath, existence in a precarious balance).

But let us remember that the letter in the alphabet that represents breath, wind (a word, by the way, comprised of the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3: WIND), is h, so we can choose to represent the Holy Spirit (pneuma in Greek) as H. Combine H and the chemical formula for oxygen, O2, in reverse (common in word connections) – that is, combine God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – and you have H20, the chemical formula for water. We breathe him, we speak him, we see by him, and we drink him in water.

God is three in ONE. The last symbol, O3, can refer to God the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity – or to the Trinity itself: 3 in One (the mantra om).

We have seen how three Os together spell GOD (just as three egos, three Is, spell ill). And we will find these three Os again in the word WOOD, with a lopsided 3 at the beginning. WOOD, of course, is the ultimate symbol of Christianity: the Cross, which is nothing more than a deleted I.

Language is clearly Trinitarian. It is also Christological.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 12/15

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Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (2): The Holy Trinity

In this third video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at another Christian paradox, the concept of the Holy Trinity – God as “three in one”. How is it possible for God to be three and one? Surely he is one or the other. The answer can be found in language.

To access all the videos in this course, use the drop-down menu “Theological English (Video Course)” above. The videos can be watched on Vimeo and YouTube.

Posted on in Language

ONE

It is remarkable that the number 1 is a straight line. We teach our children to count from the number 1 upwards, and when we learn a foreign language, we do the same. But the line separates, it forms a barrier. It is also unstable. A wall can come crashing down, a tower topples.

What is also remarkable is that the ego in English – I – is also a straight line and very similar in appearance to the number 1. So when we teach our children to count from 1 upwards, we are in effect teaching them to start with the ego. This conditions all our thinking. We start with ourselves, instead of starting with the other.

We should actually start with the number 0. 0 stands for the Other. It also stands for God, since 0 represents infinity and is unending (it goes round and round). We might even see that the word G O D is made up of three zeros, one after the other, and this will be important when it comes to understanding the word ONE.

Christianity is full of paradox. Christ says, for example, that we must lose our life in order to find it. This is paradoxical – how can you possibly lose your life and find it? I have discussed this in another article. Another paradox is that the first will be last, and the last first. Again, it seems paradoxical, and I have talked about this paradox here.

Well, one of the biggest paradoxes in Christianity is the concept of the Holy Trinity – that God is three in one. How can that be? Surely, he is either three or one. How can he be both?

Again, language will give us the answer, because language contains information about the meaning of life, about God, ourselves, existence, the world, the creation, the Fall, etc.

It will be easier to understand if we write it in the following way: three in ONE. The Holy Trinity is made up of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three persons, but one essence. The Son is begotten of the Father before all ages. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (and not from the Son, as is recited in the Creed in Western Churches, a later addition).

Three in ONE. Three distinct persons, but one essence. Let us imagine that God the Father is 1, God the Son is 2 and God the Holy Spirit is 3.

We will add these numbers as subscripts to the number 0 or O. So God the Father is O1, which means that he is ‘no one’. The only thing here is that in chemistry the subscript 1 is not normally written down, so we would say simply that God the Father is O.

There is confirmation for this in the Greek language, where the word for ‘God’ is theos. If we omit the final s (as happens in the vocative and is very common in spoken Greek), this can be read the O.

God the Son is O2, which happens to be the chemical formula for oxygen (the air we breathe). And God the Holy Spirit is O3, the chemical formula for ozone, the protective layer that surrounds the planet on which we live.

Now all this information – God the Father as O, God the Son as O2 and God the Holy Spirit as O3 – can be found in the number ONE, because the one number that the number ONE does not contain is itself (1). ONE contains the numbers O, 2 (on its side) and 3 (back to front). It does not contain 1 because in chemistry the subscript 1 is not written down and because there is no selfish impulse in God, there is only love.

Three in ONE. It turns out that this concept of the Holy Trinity is literally true. That is the information about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is contained in the word itself.

There are other connections. For example, if we combine the Son (O2) and the Holy Spirit (O3), we find that they are present in MOON (the 2 is on its side again, the 3 is on its front). This reminds us of the obvious similarity in sound between Son and Sun, so it would seem that God is the air we breathe, he is the light we see by during the day and he is the reflection of that light in the night, so that we even see in the darkness.

And if we remember that the word for ‘Spirit’ in Greek is pneuma – that is ‘wind’ – and that the letter that represents breath in the alphabet is h, then if we combine the Son (O2) and the Holy Spirit (this time written as H), we find that they make up the chemical formula for water: H2O. This means that we drink God as well.

God is all around us. He is ‘everywhere present’. He is even in the language we speak. Since we are translators, there is nothing in this world that is of our own making. All the materials we use were here when we arrived – we transform them into something else, we translate them, just as we translate the air we breathe and the food we eat.

But we have to open our eyes to see him. Eye sounds the same as I. We breathe life into the line and make a circle: O. We open our spiritual eye. When we teach our children to count from 1, we are making life much more difficult for them, because once you start counting from 1, there is no end, you will never reach the answer, when all you had to do was count down to 0.

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com