Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Heresy

The Blasphemy of Saint Augustine

James Hale argues that the Holy Spirit is feminine and that the Trinity is a mirror of the nuclear human family.

Religious philosophers who believe in Hell run the risk of going there themselves. Aurelius Augustine, the patron saint of Christian theology, is a case in point. Best known for his Confessions and The City of God, Augustine devoted the better part of his last thirty-five years composing his treatise, Of The Trinity, wherein he meticulously defined and defended the notion that God exists as three ‘persons’ – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

For the nearly sixteen centuries since that time, the doctrine of the Trinity has formed the vanguard of the Christian movement and become the principal unifying distinctive of the world’s most populous religion. Because of Augustine, however, the doctrine emerged and remains under a shroud of sexism, for according to him, each of these three supposed ‘persons’ of God is thoroughly masculine in nature.

…