Hi all-

Just got back in from the month overseas with some students (doing Jordan/Palestine/Israel) and studying the Jewish/Palestinian conflict. Amazing.

I was reading Plato’s Timaeus on the flight home and ran across what I thought was an amazing paragraph about the notion of “three.” As far as I could tell Plato was applying it to the necessary sort of relatedness required for God to create a non-God universe (via the demiurge). Anyhow, I thought the paragraph was insightful:

“But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. And the fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and the things which it combines; and the proportion is best adapted to affect such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it, and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean, then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, then will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another, will be all one.”

I’m not sure what Trinitarian applications Plato’s comments here might have. I like the idea of the mediating function that means have between two united elements, but this doesn’t capture the priority of origin which Father plays in the Trinitarian relationships. Still, kinda interesting.

Tom