Sermon 55: On the Trinity

One of the three principal influences mentioned by Wesley in his own spiritual autobiography (JWJ, May 24, 1738). He knew à Kempis (1380-1471) chiefly as the author of De Imitatione Christi, which in 1738 he said he had read ‘in Dean Stanhope’s translation’ (see JWJ, ibid.). Born in Kempen, near Cologne, Thomas (Hemerken) lived most of his life in the Augustinian monastery of St. Agnes near Zwolle (Netherlands). He was a disciple of Groote and Ruysbroeck and became the most famous of the spokesmen for the ‘Devotio Moderna’ (if, indeed, he was the author of the Imitation). Wesley translated and published the Imitation in 1735. (Moore writes that Wesley was ‘dissatisfied with Stanhope’s translation and determined to give a full view of the self-denying purity of his favourite guide’; cf. Wesley, II.401).

For some of Wesley’s repeated references to à Kempis see Nos. 73, ‘Of Hell’, II.7; 79, ‘On Dissipation’, §17; 125, ‘On a Single Eye’, §1. Cf. also his letter to his mother, May 28, 1725; to Joseph Taylor, Sept. 24, 1782; and to James Macdonald, Oct. 23, 1790. He used Castellio’s Ciceronian translation of it (e Latino in Latinum) as a Latin text for the students at Kingswood.

An obscure Spanish mystic (1542-96), discovered by Wesley in Francisco Losa’s Holy Life of Gregory Lopez, A Spanish Hermite in the West Indies (orig. in Spanish, 1618?; Eng. tr., 1675). This he abridged and published in the Christian Lib., L. 337-406. Wesley must have been impressed by Lopez’s ‘conversion’ in Toledo (age 20) and his resolution ‘to quit both the court, his friends and native country’. Lopez arrived in ‘New Spain’ (Mexico) in 1562, and shortly found a hermitage in the wilderness of Amajac and lived in great austerity for seven years in un alto puro nudo di amore de Dios (‘in an exalted state of the pure, unadorned love of God’). Then came a period of itinerancy (Guasteca, Atrisco, Mexico City, etc.) but always in a severely ascetic lifestyle. His last seven years were spent in a little house near Santa Fé (‘two leagues from the city’ [Mexico City]) where he died. Before one of his infrequent communions, Losa records that Lopez ‘fell on his knees before Fr. Vincent and, striking his breast, said, “Through the mercy of God, I do not remember to have offended him in anything. Give me, if you please, the most holy Sacraments.” Fr. Vincent asked in amazement, “Is it possible a man should have attained so high a degree of virtue, as not to be conscious of [sin]?”’

It is easy to see how Lopez’s example affected Wesley: (1) their mutual source in Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat; (2) Lopez’s voyage to Mexico had parallels to the Georgia mission; (3) ‘holy living’ as a lifelong quest; (4) stress on self-denial; (5) tranquillity of soul; (6) contemptus mundi; (7) identification with the poor; (8) Lopez’s practice of ‘primitive physick’; (9) ‘perfection’ as purity of intention in this life; (10) the equation of holiness and happiness.

Lopez’s influence had already been acknowledged by Molinos and Madame Guyon. Cf. No. 114, On the Death of John Fletcher, III.12, as well as repeated references in JWJ and Letters.

Gaston Jean Baptiste de Renty (1611-49), a highborn Frenchman turned ascetic, known to Wesley through the Life by Saint-Jure, (see No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, n. 70). A precocious youth, de Renty was ‘converted’ by a reading of à Kempis and resolved to become a Carthusian hermit. His parents dissuaded him from this, encouraging him to marry and enter a career of public service. In 1638, however, he abandoned his career to devote himself wholly to ascetic piety (e.g., wearing an iron girdle, etc.) and to charity. He also influenced Henry Buch (1590-1666) to found a religious congregation of Les Frères Cordonniers, one of the models for Wesley’s societies. Wesley’s references to de Renty are numerous; cf. No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, I.15 and n.

See John 5:35.

A bitter echo of the Calvinist controversy and of Wesley’s caricature of Augustus M. Toplady’s Doctrine of Absolute Predestination, ch. 5, §9 (see Bibliog, No. 322): ‘The sum of all is this: One in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will. The reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand, A[ugustus] T[oplady].’

Cf. No. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, I.6 and n.

An echo of another bitter controversy from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (‘adiaphoristic’); cf. J. L. von Mosheim, Institutiones Historiae Ecclesiasticae (1726; Eng. tr. by J. Murdock, 1841),‘Century XVI’, iii.2.28; see also Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 688. In England the Parliament of 1653 had drawn up a list of sixteen ‘fundamental articles’, which narrowly missed enactment as church law; cf. Daniel Neal, History of the Puritans (1754), II.143-44. In 1734 Daniel Waterland had also drawn up a list of seven ‘fundamentals’ which had not included a formal doctrine of the Trinity. Here, as elsewhere, Wesley is reacting against the tendencies of both orthodoxy and pietism (viz., Lange, Spener, et al.); he is taking the narrowest possible view of the irreducible ‘fundamentals’ and a consciously tolerant view of a broad spectrum of theological opinions (i.e., adiaphora).

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, from 1713; his sermon ‘On the Trinity’ was first published in 1744, in Three Sermons; there is no record of when or where it was ever preached. The singling out of Swift’s sermon for praise reflects Wesley’s approval of Swift’s contention that the doctrine of the Trinity is a ‘mystery’, so far above reason as precludes rational explication altogether. Here, they were both dissenting from men like Robert South (‘The Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity Asserted’, in Sermons, 1844, II.174-91) who, with many Anglicans, believed the doctrine could be shown as not contrary to reason. Cf. Joseph Trapp, ‘On the Trinity’ (London, 1730), where it was argued that the doctrine is demonstrably rational. See also Louis A. Landa, ‘Swift, the Mysteries, and Deism’, in Studies in English (Austin, Tex., Univ. of Texas Press, 1944), pp. 239-56; Landa’s thesis is that Swift’s ‘antirationalism’ with regard to the ‘mystery’ of the Trinity is aimed at the rationalism of the Deists.

Cf. Job 38:2.

Cf. BCP, Athanasian Creed, directing that it ‘shall be said or sung at Morning Prayer instead of the Apostles’ Creed on Christmas Day, the Epiphany’, and eleven other festival days, including Trinity Sunday. Wesley was aware that Athanasian authorship of this Western creed had been abandoned by most scholars for more than a century (since G. J. Voss, 1642), and he must have known the conclusions of Daniel Waterland’s Critical History of the Athanasian Creed (1723), where its date is placed in the decade A.D. 430-40 and its authorship attributed to St. Hilary of Arles; see the list of other possible authors in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (New York, Harper and Harper, 1881-82), I, §10. The first certain witness to this creed is Caesarius of Arles (c. A.D. 542). What is noteworthy about Wesley’s comments here is his qualified approval of this Creed’s positive statement on the Trinity and his rejection of the ‘damnatory clauses’ with which it opens and closes. In 1755, he had declined to ‘defend the damnatory clauses and the speaking of “this faith” (i.e., these opinions) as if it were the ground term of salvation’; see Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England, pp. 18-19, 331. Cf. also Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. V, ch. 42.

A remote paraphrase, apparently based on ‘Sententiae vel Propositionum Excerptae Ex Libris Michaelis Serveti’ in Calvin’s Defensio Orthodoxae Fidei de Sacra Trinitate (1554); see Calvini Opera, VIII.501-8. These excerpts should be compared with Servetus’s own words: ‘The doctrine of the Trinity can be neither established by logic nor proved from Scripture…. The Scriptures and the Fathers teach one God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son; but scholastic philosophy has introduced terms which are not understood and do not accord with Scripture. Jesus taught that he himself was the Son of God…. But the doctrine of the Trinity incurs the ridicule of the Mohammedans [Servetus was a Spaniard] and the Jews. It arose out of Greek philosophy…, whereas the church should be founded on the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’ (The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity [no date for the orig.; Eng. tr. by E. M. Wilbur, 1932], pp. 3-5). Wesley (JWJ, July 9, 1741) recounts his discovery of a history of the Calvin-Servetus affair in the Bodleian Library, and in Some Remarks on a Defence of Aspasio Vindicated, §6, cites ‘Dr. Chandler, an eminent Presbyterian divine in London’ as having given ‘a circumstantial account of the whole affair’ (Samuel Chandler, The History of Persecution in Four Parts, London, 1736, espec. pp. 315-25); in the same Remarks, §6, Wesley had already said very nearly what he repeats here.

Calvin has, of course, been condemned and defended for his part in Servetus’s condemnation and death. In the ‘Dedicatory Preface’ to The Eternal Predestination of God (1552; Eng. tr. 1856), pp. 20-21, Calvin denies that he was responsible for Servetus’s death and adds, in The Secret Providence of God (1558; Eng. tr. 1856), p. 346: ‘That I myself earnestly entreated that Servetus might not be put to death, his judges themselves are witnesses.’ See also Actes du Procès de Michael Servète (1553), in Calvini Opera Omnia, VIII.725-856. But see Sebastian Castellio in Concerning Heretics, ed. and tr. by R. H. Bainton (1935), pp. 265-87.

John Albert Bengel (1687-1752), whose Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1742) was Wesley’s principal source for his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (1755). Bengel’s comments on 1 John 5:7-9 run for sixteen pages in the Gnomon and conclude that TR of 5:7 is required by the context rather than by the weight of MS evidence. Wesley’s summary of Bengel’s argument seems to have been based, not upon the Gnomon, but on a separate ‘dissertation’ in Bengel’s Apparatus Criticus (1734). The words between ‘bear record’ (ver. 7) and ‘the spirit’ (ver. 8) are included in no modern critical edn.

Constantius, who became sole ruler of the Empire in A.D. 353 and who died in A.D. 361; cf. the vivid and circumstantial account of this period in William Cave, Ecclesiastici: Or, the History of the…Fathers of the Church (1716), pp. 399-441 (‘The Life of St. Athanasius’).

Dean Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (1884), pp. 224-29, quotes a long section from Hooker’s Law of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.xlii.5, which concludes: ‘So that this was the plain condition of those times: the whole world against Athanasius and Athanasius against it.’ From which he then infers: ‘It is probably from the Latin version of this celebrated passage that we derive the proverb, Athanasius contra mundum.’ Cf. Wesley’s letter to William Wilberforce (commending his heroic struggles against slavery), as well as Charles’s letter to John, Jan. 2, 1738. Cf. also No. 88, ‘On Dress’, §23, where Wesley quotes from his brother Samuel’s verse which makes this same point in different words.

Ps. 19:5(BCP).

A shorthand reference to the knowledge explosion in the physical sciences in his own and preceding centuries and a reflection of his interest in the impact of the new science upon religion. The Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of astronomy had dominated medieval world views until the sixteenth century when they were challenged, less radically by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and much more radically by the heliocentrism of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). It is interesting that Wesley here ignores Brahe’s more famous and influential assistant and successor, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). What is important for him here is the development of the changing world views from the geocentrism of Ptolemy, the fixed earth theories of Brahe, to the radical heliocentrism of Copernicus. Wesley had also read (how carefully one can only guess) Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704), and the Principia Mathematica (1687), along with Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). He was equally interested in the speculations of Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth) and John Keill’s critique (An Examination of Dr. Burnet’s Theory, 1698), as well as the controversies generated by William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth, and John Woodward’s Natural History of the Earth (1695). He was even drawn into the eccentric notions of John Hutchinson’s Moses’s Principia (1724), chiefly as a foil against what he regarded as the naturalistic tendencies of Newton and the Newtonians. His chief reliance, perhaps, was on John Rogers, Dissertation on the Knowledge of the Antients in Astronomy (1755). His gleanings from these various excursions into ‘contemporary science’ may be seen in Nos. 69, ‘The Imperfection of Human Knowledge’, I.5; 77, ‘Spiritual Worship’, I.6; 103, ‘What is Man? Ps. 8:3-4’, I.3-6, II.9-12; 132, ‘On Faith, Heb. 11:1’, §3; cf. also his letter ‘To the Editor of The London Magazine’, Jan. 1, 1765. His summary of ‘modern astronomy’ appears in the Survey, espec. III.279, 296, 328-40. His consistent point, in all these passages, is that science cannot penetrate the mysteries of faith and should not presume to try. Its positive function is to extend and verify our knowledge of creation as the exhibition of the Creator’s providence, wisdom, and glory.

Cf. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, on ‘Jupiter’, ‘Planets’, and ‘Light’. Cf. also No. 69, ‘The Imperfection of Human Knowledge’, I.5 (where Wesley speaks of Rogers’s efforts to discredit Newton) and n. Even so, Wesley maintains a sceptical attitude toward all these claims: ‘With regard to [the planets’] distance from the earth, there is such an immense difference in the calculations of the astronomers…that it is wisest to confess our ignorance and to acknowledge we have nothing to rest on here but uncertain conjecture’ (Survey, III.296). Thus Wesley stands closer to Rogers than he ever did to Newton.

Cf. No. 15, The Great Assize, III.4 and n.

Cf. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xiii.19, xxiii.2 (which discusses this Malabarian philosophy); cf. also Soame Jenyns, A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757) for a later discussion of the ‘fable’. Jeremy Taylor, Works, I.lix (intro.) makes mention of this ‘sage system of Indian cosmogony’. See Wesley’s ‘Remarks on Mr. H.’s Account of the Gentoo Religion in Hindostan’, first published in Lloyd’s Evening Post, Nov. 30, 1774, and afterwards in AM (1785), VIII.425-28, 474-76.

Cf. Job 26:7.

Key terms in the wide-ranging debates about the ‘new science’, the theory of gravitation in particular. Cf. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, on ‘Attraction’ (running to eight quarto columns); see also ‘Force’, ‘Projectile’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Gravitation’. The ‘cobweb hypothesis’ may refer here to the gossamer character of the various theories being spun out so profusely. One of them would have been the odd theory of biblical symbolism of John Hutchinson, who had found, in the unpointed text of the Hebrew Bible, clues to a complete cosmology based on the physical interaction of light, fire, and air (analogous to the Trinity). This was the project of Moses’s Principia and his other prolific writings. Wesley appreciated Hutchinson as a counterweight to Newton, but the empirical turn of his mind quickly turned him away from Hutchinson’s fanciful theorizings; cf. No. 77, ‘Spiritual Worship’, I.6 and n.

Dr. Bl—ir, in his late tract [i.e., Patrick Blair, M.D., of Cork, Thoughts on Nature and Religion (1774); cf. pp. 61-63: ‘(since) all (animals) have a “mind” or faculty of thinking and judging…, they must have as equal a right to an immortal director as the human species.’ Wesley and Blair, however, have little else in common in their assumptions and conclusions].