Ślady Trójcy w stworzeniu – poszukiwania św. Augustyna

Abstract

The category of triplicity appears often in human life. We find basic triads: beginning – centre (development) – end, past tense – present tense – future tense, belief – hope – love, meeting – love – freedom, beauty – good – truth. Biology divides animals in: land – water – aerial, men in white – black – yellow. There are three the most important things, the most difficult things and the most pleasant things; in Poland there are three values: God – Honor – Fatherland. In every human the thinking about the sense of life is concentrated around three notions: God – man – world. From among those three the most mysterious is God. Man – homo religiosus – will always look for God (Ps 105,4). This search is an inseparable element of the structure of consciousness in every man. For some (like Mircea Eliade) it will be expressed in the projection of dreams and in the longing for “something” that was lost “somewhere” at the beginning of the creation, for others (like Jean Paul Sartre) – it turns into the denial of God and the apparent escape from the problem of God, or else it becomes the anxiety of heart in an incessant search for God in creation (like by St. Augustine). St. Augustine all his life looked for some traces in creation and tried to understand the secrets of the Holy Trinity. He wrote a treaty “De Trinitate” in which he contained speculative investigations and personal reflections and became a famous theologian of the Trinity – theologus Trinitatis. In the Old Testament he finds: three angels under oaks of Mamre, three young men thrown into a burning stove, the Isaiah’s vision of the Thrice Holy One. In the New Testament the Son’s relation to the Father is clearly visible and the role of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel as well as the first Trinitarian formulae in the letters of St. Paul. The Trinitarian teofanies tell us about God’s Persons in relation to the creation and to man. God the Father as Creator, Son as Savior, and the Holy Spirit as Consecrator are to be seen together. St Augustine perceives the traces of the Trinity in man: “to find God, one should enter into oneself. Being inside ourselves, we discover triplicity” This triplicity was perceived in many ways, and first of all as: soul – meeting – love as well as memory – intellect – will.