Richard of St Victor on the Trinity

Over at trinities.org, I began a series of posts on Richard of St. Victor's argument that God must be triune. It's a famous argument, or at least the argument Richard gives in book 3 of his De Trinitate is famous, and it's been taken up by a number of people in the 20th century, perhaps most notably by Richard Swinburne. For the first post of this series, see here, but keep an eye out for the rest of the series by myself, Scott Williams, Joseph Jedwab, and Dale Tuggy (the series is ongoing, so these cats haven't all posted their thoughts yet).

Basically, Richard argues that perfect love requires sharing it with another person, and perfect love between two requires loving for the sake of a third. And since God has perfect love, there must therefore be three persons in the Godhead. In my posts for this series, I argue that Richard probably begs the question: if we insist that perfect love requires, by definition, sharing it with another person, then we've already assumed from the start what we're trying to prove, namely that there is more than one person.

But hey, there are a lot of defenders of Richard out there (or perhaps they should more accurately be described as lovers of Richard, and therefore said lover(s) and Richard both exist -- studio audience laughter should be heard at this point), so my view will probably take some criticism.