Anyone can see that these conjectures are a form of irrationality
about God. Yet in the Christian churches they are sacred objects that we
have to kiss with our lips. Nevertheless, we must not give them close
mental attention, because they transcend rationality and will make us
insane if they are raised from our memory into our intellect. This precau-
tion, though, does not do away with our mental picture of three gods—it
just gives us a stupid belief. Thoughts about God that are based on this
faith resemble the footsteps of someone sleepwalking and dreaming in
the dead of night, or the footsteps of someone born blind who is walking
in the light of day.184 You can clearly tell that a trinity of gods dwells in the minds of
Christians—although out of shame they would never say so—by the way
many of them ingeniously demonstrate that three are one and one is three.
They use various phenomena in plane geometry, solid geometry, arith-
metic, and physics, as well as folding pieces of clothing and pieces of paper.
Like a bunch of clowns, they horse around with the divine Trinity.
Their clowning is like people’s eyesight when they have a fever: they
see one object, be it a person, a table, or a candle, as three objects, or
three objects as one. It is like the trick people play by softening wax in
their fingers and pressing it into different shapes. First they make a
three-sided shape to show the trinity; then they make a ball to show the
unity, and they say, “Isn’t the substance one and the same?”
Truly, though, the divine Trinity is like the pearl of great price
[Matthew 13 : 46 ]. Dividing the Trinity into persons is like cutting a pearl
into three parts: it completely destroys the pearl.
185 To these points I will add the following memorable occurrences.
The first memorable occurrence.The spiritual world has climatic zones
just like the physical world—there is nothing in this world that is not
also in that one. Yet the zones in each have different origins. In the phys-
ical world, climatic zones are determined by the distance of the sun from
the equator. In the spiritual world, climatic zones are determined by how
far the feelings in our will and the consequent thoughts in our intellect
are from true love and true faith. All things in the spiritual world relate to
love and faith.
In the frigid zones in the spiritual world you see the same type of
conditions you see in the frigid zones in the physical world. In that