'As long as Christian religion lasts, no man can see God': Jeremy Taylor and rational adoration of the Holy Trinity

On this day after Trinity Sunday, we turn to words from Jeremy Taylor's Ductor dubitantium (1660), in which he gives a negative answer to the question of whether it is is lawful to depict in imagery the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. He begins by considering what would be necessary for the explicit prohibition contained in the Second Commandment to be set aside:

if it should please God any person of the Blessed and most holy Trinity should appear in any visible shape; that shape might be depicted; of that shape an image might be made; I mean, it might naturally; it might if it were done for lawful ends, and unless a Commandement were to the contrary; and therefore so long as God keeps himself within the secret recesses of his sanctuary, and the Majesty of his invisibility, so long it is plain he intends the very first sense and words of his Commandement: but if he should cancel the great reason of his Commandement; and make that by an act of his own to become possible which in the Nature of things is impossible, that is, that an image can be made of God; I should beleeve that God did intend to dispense in that part of the Commandement, and declare that he intended it onely for a temporary band: For if the reason of the commandement were taken away; either the Commandement also ceases to oblige; or must be bound upon us by another reason, or a new Sanction, or at lest a new declaration; or else it would follow that then his visible appearance would become a snare to mankind. 

In the New Covenant, however, this Commandment and its prohibition have not been set aside, as proclaimed in John 1.18:

But because yet he hath not yet appear'd visibly and hath by no figure or idea represented the Godhead; and that it is a truth which must last as long as Christian Religion lasts, that No man can see God, therefore it follows that it is at no hand lawful to make an image of God or relating to the Divinity. If a Dove be made it must not be intended to represent the Holy Ghost, for besides that no Dove did appear, nor shape of a Dove, yet if it did, it related not to the person of the Holy Ghost, but to the impression made upon the person on whom the light descended: and if the figure of the crucifixe be made, or of Jesus in the flesh; it is wholly relative to the Creature, not to him as God; for that is impious, and unreasonable and impossible to be done in any Natural proportion. 

The prohibition also applies to expressions in holy Scripture regarding actions of God:

And the like also is to be said of those expressions in Scripture, of the hand of God, his eye, his arme; which words although they are written yet they cannot, ought not to be painted: I doe not doubt but it is lawful to paint or ingrave an eye or a hand; but not an eye or hand of God, that is, we may not intend to represent God by such sculpture or picture; because the Scripture does not speak them to that end; that by them we may conceive any thing of God; for as Hesselius [a Flemish divine, d.1566] well notes, these and other like expressions are intended to represent some action of God: such as is that of Psal. 78. vers. 65. who brings in God, awaken'd out of sleep, and as a gyant refresh'd [filled, gorged,] with wine: by which if any man shall represent God in picture, his saying, it may as well be painted as written, will not acquit him from insufferable impiety.

Taylor goes on to illustrate how this understanding coheres with two crucial influences on early Christian thought - Judaism and Neoplatonism. He begins by emphasising the profound continuity between Judaism and Christianity regarding the prohibition on images of the Divine:

Concerning the Jews Tacitus saies of them: They acknowledge but one Deity, whom they understand in their mind onely: esteeming all them to be profane who efforme the images of their Gods of corruptible matter into the shapes of men. And the testimony of S. Clemens of Alexandria is very full to this purpose: God by the law Moses was not to be represented in the shape of a man or any other figure. And for the Christians that they also understood themselves to be bound by the same law to the same religious abstaining from making images of God is openly and generally taught by the Doctors of the Christian Church for the four first ages together.

This understanding was also, Taylor declares, seen in the "reason and wise discourse" of the Neoplatonist Macrobius (d. c.430AD):

Nullum simulacrum finxisse antiquitatem, said Macrobius; The old world never made an image (meaning of God); because the supreme God, and the mind that is borne of him, as it is beyond our Soul so it is beyond all Nature, and it is not fit that fables and fictions should be addressed to him,

Nulla auri effigies, nulla commissa metalla.

Forma Dei mentes habitare & pectore gaudet.

God dwells in minds and hearts of good men, not in images and metals.

The prohibition, therefore, on images of the Holy Trinity and the Persons of the Trinity is rooted both in revelation and reason.

What is the significance of this extract from Taylor on the day after Trinity Sunday? Read alongside his robust critique of images of the Holy Trinity in his subsequent work A Dissuasive, Book II (1667), and in conjunction with his 1654 exhortation "concerning the mysterious Trinity, that, which is revealed, is extremely little", it demonstrates how Taylor understood the doctrine of the Trinity as the rational confession of the Divinity, "revealed plainly in Scripture". 

This is obscured both by the speculations of the Schools - "The schoolmen have so pried into this secret, and have so confounded themselves and the articles, that they have made it to be unintelligible, inexplicable, indefensible in all their minutes and particularities" - and by the physical expression of such prying, images. Both debase the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, obscuring what Taylor terms the "ancient simplicity", thus encouraging the criticisms of "the arguments of the Antitrinitarians".

An absence of both irrational depictions of the Holy Trinity - "as in a face with three Noses and four Eyes, one body with three heads", or, indeed, "to paint the Holy Trinity like three men talking to Abraham" - and of the "unintelligible" speculations of the Schoolmen and their "metaphysical learning", allows a sober trust in "the doctrine of the holy Trinity [as] set down in Scripture, and in the Apostles' Creed" to be established. This stands in continuity with Judaism's reception of the Second Commandment and with Neoplatonic wisdom. The irrationality of both imagery of the Trinity and of the speculative metaphysics of the Schools contrasts with Taylor's vision of the rational heart, mind, and soul praising and adoring the blessed Trinity, invisible and everlasting, without body or parts.

(The second picture is of the interior of The Middle Church, in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country. Its noble, plain simplicity is fitted for Taylor's understanding of our the adoration of the Holy Trinity.)