Holy Trinity or Holy "Quatrinity"?

09/08/2009 Filed in: Martinism
In his Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings, Martines de Pasqually often refers to the hypostases of the divinity. However, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Treatise, don’t seem to follow strict Catholic dogma. Martines de Pasqually was a roman catholic1, yet his use, and probably his grasp, of common theological terms teetered on a fine line between orthodoxy and heresy. Robert Amadou, arguably the greatest specialist of Pasqually’s teachings since the 18th century, described Martines’ archaic christology as antiochian and pre-nicene2. In other words that his articulation of God’s unity in Father, Son and Holy Spirit seem typical of a time before the councils of Nicea (325 A.D.) and Constantinople (381 A.D.) expounded the concepts and vocabulary as used since. If one remembers that Martines was almost certainly a marrano through his father (his mother was catholic), it is more plausible that his understanding of christian theology may have derived from family traditions only loosely influenced by the Church of Rome (traditions which have yet to be identified)3.


Martines writes, with regard to the Holy Trinity:
These three persons are in God only relative to their divine operations and one cannot conceive of them in any other way without degrading the Divinity, which is indivisible and cannot in any way have in it different personalities separate from each other. […] If it was possible to admit three distinct persons in the Creator, we would have to admit four instead of three, relating to the quatriple divine essence which you already know of. […] This is why we conceive the impossibility of the Creator being divided in three personal natures.4


It is fairly obvious that Martines didn’t grasp the meaning of ‘persons’ (hypostases), nor of ‘nature’ (or substance) in the dogma of the Holy Trinity. In fact, he unknowingly raised a straw-man, since christian dogma specifically refutes the idea of three different personalities in the Divinity.


So, was Martines really in contradiction with christian dogma, and more specifically, with the Nicene Creed? One word in the previous citation is a key to unlocking what Martines was getting at: quatriple.
I have written about this concept before with regard to the material world, but let’s revisit this central concept. The word quatriple points to the joining of two words, quadruple and triple. Why - or rather how - can 4 and 3 be combined, since this is what Martines seems to be getting at?
In a traditional Martinesist approach, one may represent the Trinity as a triangle, since the Son is begotten by the Father, and the Holy Spirit procedes from the Father.

Quatrinity

Yet, God is one, and the persons (hypostases) of the Trinity are one substance. One may represent the oneness of God by a point at the centre of our triangle. Still following a typically Martinesist approach, what we have here is a trinity unified by a fourth point which is the source, as it were, of the three others.
From there, one sees that, in Martines’ words, the divine essence is quatriple, i.e. 4-in-3. Moreover, quaternity, and not trinity, respects God’s oneness. This is validated through the arithmosophy of 4 since 1+2+3+4=10=1, whereas trinity leads to 6 through 1+2+3 (see Eleazar Insitute, lesson 2 “Numbers” for the full explanation). 6, as we have previously seen, is a material number.


As heterodox as all this may seem at face value, let us not forget that throughout orthodox christian theology, God has been spoken of both as ternary, and as radically unknowable, infinite, and beyond any description (e.g. the deus absconditus of St Thomas Aquinas, no less). In fact, at least in this regard, Martines was entirely orthodox. What Martines does here with just one word, is to combine the immanent trinitarian understanding of God with the divinity’s radical transcendance. To my knowledge, such a profound theology has never been expressed in such a brilliant way.




1 Le Mariage de Martines de Pasqually, Le Voile d'Isis, 1930
2 Amadou, R. in Les leçons de Lyon aux élus coëns: Un cours de martinisme au XVIIIe siècle, par Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Jean-Jacques du Roy d'Hauterive, Jean-Baptiste. Première édition complète d'après les manuscrits originaux (eds Amadou, R. & Amadou, C.) 11 - 200 (Dervy, Paris, 1999)
3 Martines himself repeatedly attributed his teachings to others who came before him - his father being one obvious candidate (see e.g. his Treatise §97)
4 Pasqually, M. d. Traité sur la réintégration des êtres dans leur première propriété, vertu et puissance spirituelle divine (Diffusion Rosicrucienne, 1995) §182.

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