--We can helpfully chart exclusivism and inclusivism on the trajectories of cult, myth, and philosophy. Some cults are exclusivist, some inclusivist, some pluralist; the state religion of late preexilic Judah and the imagined religion of the redacted Hebrew Bible were both exclusivist, and so, the Second Temple Judaism that formed from the anthologies of the Torah and the Prophets was exclusivist in terms of cult. But at the same time, they were mythically and philosophically inclusivist, insofar as a.) the qualities, stories, and personality traits of many other gods were progressively incorporated into the profile of Yhwh and b.) when Yhwh was deemed God with a capital G, and not merely a god, and understood as transcendent God of the cosmos who also immanently fills all things, it also became possible to have an inclusive monotheism in which the "God of heaven" was really the God of all the nations called by various names. (See Mark Smith's God in Translation on this.) Likewise, later Jews, Christians, and Muslims are to varying degrees inclusivists or exclusivists on the basis of cult, myth, and philosophy, and on the basis of context, just as in the dharmic world; if there's a distinction, it might be that the Abrahmist trends exclusivist, while the dharmist trends inclusivist.
--Or, we can chart it on the model given by Pravina Rodrigues, of varying degrees of communion based on karma, bhakti, and jñāna. So, many religions share a high degree of communion on the basis of karma, or action, and on the basis of jñāna, gnōsis or philosophical vision, and differ mainly on issues of bhakti, devotion, with its attendant scriptural and mythic traditions. So some very philosophically and theologically minded Jews, Christians, and Muslims might well end up in a place where they'd say, we all have basically the same karma yoga, or religious ethics, and we all have basically the same philosophical vision of deity, mutatis mutandis for different idioms and perspectives, but while we share many traditions, postures, practices, etc. in terms of bhakti, we are fundamentally divided on certain questions of how God expects us to worship him and what belongs to the category of revelation. Likewise, Abrahamists could look at the dharmic world and say, we share a lot of karma and jñāna, but Abrahamists, qua Abrahamists, cannot worship dharmic deities, as personal faces of the divine, where there's nothing inherently prohibitive to the dharmist to accepting the Abrahamic God and/or Jesus Christ as personal faces of the divine.
--Finally, then, we might ask metaphysically, how to account for so many personally known and "revealed" faces of the divine that seemingly contradict? And here's where the language of brahman nrguna, brahman saguna, and Ishvara all become so important. Brahman nrguna is brahman in se: beyond all attribution and quality. Brahman saguna is how brahman manifests: brahman as the infinite intelligible, imaginal, and sensible universe(s). But then Ishvara is how the one brahman, both nrguna and saguna, becomes personally knowable to humans, and is to some degree an appearance constructed both by way of revelation and by way of projection, both from-above-down to the mind of the human worshiper and from-below-up from the mind of the human worshiper to grasp the ultimate reality. Because atman is, after all, brahman, and jiva is atman, the mental constructs of jiva are also atman are also brahman; and so the imaginal construction of the divine as Ishvara is the human's active participation in brahman's own outermost form of manifestation. So the personal God, God as Yhwh, or God as Krishna, or God as Shiva, etc. is both culturally constructed and divinely revealed. In Christian theological terms, I'd say that brahman nrguna is the Father (God in the modality of hidden, ungenerated, inexhaustible generativity), brahman saguna is the Son (God in the modality of revealed, generated manifestation), and Ishvara is the Spirit (God in the modality of processual, vivifying life, consciousness, and love).
I think the two frameworks you introduce to consider exclusivist and inclusivist attitudes towards spirituality are helpful. It is certainly interesting to me that both paragraphs either conclude by seeing the Indic/Dharmic religions as inherently more inclusive (as in the first framework) or by actually employing the language of the Dharmic faiths (karma, jnana, bhakti) as the very framework itself. If I understand you correctly, your point largely seems consonant with the one I make in the original piece. (Though please correct me if I am wrong on that!)
When it comes to trying to chart the Vedantic understanding of Brahman onto the Christianity Trinity, though, I don't think I agree with you. To the extent that Ishvara is understood as both Brahman in the act of creating the world (via maya, perhaps for lila), it certainly seems that Ishvara connects much more readily with Logos than with Spirit. And this is only underscored when we remember that, in most cases, Ishvara is the term used for the preferred deity of worship, the "Ideal Image" as Sri Ramakrishna put it, that one actually focuses on in worship. I think few Christians focus their worship on the Spirit as such; surely it is Jesus the Christ who most often gets our attention and praise. And, indeed, to the extent that Ishvara is always identifiable as having clear attributes, I don't see how to associate Ishvara with Spirit—since the Spirit in Christian thought is notoriously fluid and invisible.
That said, I don't really have an alternate proposal on how to map these two differing ways of comprehending the Infinite Absolute. On the one hand, maybe we could say that Nirguna Brahman is the Father (as you said), Saguna Brahman is the Logos as such (apart from Jesus, *pace* Jordan Wood), and then Jesus as the Logos Incarnate is the "primary" deity, the Ishvara, for Christians. This would leave the Spirit to somehow occupy some other conceptual niche.
Or, even more transgressively, we could identify Nirguna Brahman with the Father, and then Saguna Brahman with the Spirit, as the more "qualified" but still non-concrete reality of God manifest. This would leave the Logos Incarnate as the Ishvara. This approach obviously has problems with a mapping onto traditional Trinitarian formulas, but I wonder if it might be productive nonetheless.
Ultimately, I think any such mapping runs into a lot of problems—not only because the culturally specific modes of concretizing the un-concretizable may always leave something "lost in translation", but even more to the point because, in Christian terms, the Trinity can be affirmed as both three and yet one, and yet must *also* be said to be neither three nor one. God is beyond any numerosity, even oneness. This, of course, only leaves us more adrift than before. But perhaps that is the unavoidable state of the finite creature trying to gaze upon the infinite Creator.
I'm open to correction here, but let me try to explain what I was going for.
ὑποστάσις, I am convinced, does not mean something different in Christian theology than it meant for Plotinus: it just means fundamental reality or principle. For Christians, in confessing three ὁμοούσιον, "consubstantial" hypostases, we are therefore saying that God has three τρόποι ὑπάρξεως, or three "modes of existing," as Father, Son, and Spirit. We are decidedly not saying that God is three "persons" in the popular sense of the term, even if the names of the Trinitarian hypostases do come from earlier models of a divine triad in which there is God the Father, his messianic/angelic/divine Son, Jesus, and a tertiary πνεῦμα or spiritus. For Nicaea, anyway, these cultic and scriptural characters are really revelations of three modes of the selfsame divine essence.
So, it seems to me, the Late Platonic way of understanding the Trinity would be to associate the Father with the Plotinian One, the Son with the Nous (precontaining the whole intelligible cosmos), and the Spirit with Soul (already implied by the controvertibility between these words). That there is hierarchy between the hypostases does not imply inequality of essence--after all, nondualism means there is nothing for Nous/Son and Soul/Spirit to be other than the selfsame essence of God/the One--but it logically follows from the differentiation of the hypostases according to origination and nature of procession.
Now, when trying to "map" onto the dharmic system, I agree with you that there are certain cross-cultural dangers in assuming equality of concepts that emerge from very different historical and social locations; totally. But also, I'd say that there's fruitful room for contemplation here because, in the end, the Vedantic system really comes fairly close to saying the same thing that the Neoplatonists do. Brahman, particularly brahman nrguna, is the One; just as the radiance of the One is Nous, so the radiance of brahman nrguna is brahman saguna, the manifest intelligible, imaginal, and sensible/material order of the cosmos. Brahman saguna is what is most directly perceptible to atman, brahman in the localized form of the Self, and therefore to jiva, the Self's descended portion in/as the psychocorporeal incarnate entity. To my mind, this would most immediately correlate with the Logos of Middle Platonism or the Nous of Late Platonism, the ground and very possibility of consciousness in the cosmos.
How does brahman saguna then become atman? Through being individuated by intelligible, imaginal, and sensible forms into diverse beings and bodies, whose formal and final cause, however, is brahman (this is not other than to say, of course, that atman simply is brahman). So atman in some sense both always, already is brahman and is in another sense "becoming" brahman through its processual movement in and as the variety of jivas that it becomes in the world. Both for this reason, and because of atman's etymological relationship to the Greek ἆτμος, which is semantically correlated with the concept of πνεῦμα/spiritus as "breath" for which the more immediate equivalent would otherwise be praṇa, it seems appropriate to see atman in the Vedantic system, and puruṣa in the Saṃkhya system that undergirds Yoga, as the Neoplatonic Soul or the Christian Holy Spirit.
Why, then, would I claim that Ishvara belongs to the hypostasis of the Spirit rather than to brahman saguna? I concede your point that Ishvara, as the personal God and the personal face of brahman saguna, would be more obviously related either to the Logos or to the incarnate Logos, Christ. And so I would lean into the second idea: Ishvara is the personal face of brahman saguna/Nous/the Logos as can only be known in and through atman/Soul/the Spirit, and therefore as is progressively developed in and through the variety of human religious expressions culminating, from the Christian point of view, in the incarnation of the Logos in/as Jesus of Nazareth.
To go further into this: it is already the case that the job of the tertiary principle is to take the forms it beholds in the secondary principle, comprising the intelligible universe, and "translate" them, as it were, into the material medium to create the sensible cosmos as a thing of beauty. I'm supplying the "imaginal" as a middle term here to give due reverence to Ibn Arabi's point that there must be some tertium quid between intelligible and sensible for the two to relate to each other at all. So it is already the case, in other words, that brahman saguna/Nous/the Logos becomes incarnate in and as the world by the operation of atman/Soul/Spirit, first in itself, then as the World Soul, and then as the individuated soul. Here's Maximus's (and Wood's) "creation as incarnation" and "the Logos seeking always and in all things to realize the mystery of its embodiment" (Amb. 7.14): the Spirit acts as the matrix or womb in which the Logos is born into, and as, the world order. Here, too, is Sarah Coakley's recovery of the Spirit as God the Mother, as the matrix of the mystery of the Son's eternal begetting and of Christ's intrahistorical incarnation. And here, too, is Bulgakov's Heavenly Sophia and Creaturely Sophia: the world as it preexists in the Logos, as God's ποίησις, is the archetype of the creaturely world as it is molded (πλάζω) by the Spirit, which seeks always and anon to realize its transcendent form in the eschatological finality of the Kingdom (κτίσις).
So within time, what that looks like is the evolution of the created order into ever more complex, informed, alive, and conscious beings capable of reflexively knowing and loving, and thereby participating in the congress of the divine hypostases, until we come to humanity, in which we reach a noospheric turning point (here's your Teilhard). And through human beings, for the first time, the personal face of brahman saguna may now assume a human form in the development of their consciousness, as Ishvara: whether as the Sorcerer of Trois-Frères or as Rudra or as Anu and Enlil or as Kronos and Zeus or as El and Baal or as Yhwh or as Vishnu, Shiva, and Mahadevi, whoever. All of these become imaginal faces of the divine through the ongoing dialectic of the Universal Consciousness and the Universal Spirit in and as the human creature in its spiritual and noetic evolution, and each of them is legitimately connective and mediatory as an object of mental devotion on the imaginal plane; so said Ibn Arabi, everyone worships his own God in this respect, that everyone connects with the divine through these imaginal simulacra. But that imaginal is always seeking to become sensible, material, flesh: in the cult, ritual, oracle, myth, art, architecture, text, scripture, and so on of different religious communities, all of which in turn reflexively shape the imaginal face of Ishvara as known to each community. Often, but not exclusively, this involves a progressive anthropomorphism of Ishvara's manifestation, as for instance through the development of agalmata in Greek religion or the iconography of Egyptian gods or, conversely, the textual hominization of Yhwh in the midst of the ongoing aniconic reform of his cult.
And so, finally, the Christian Tradition says, in the longue durée of Ancient Israel and Judah's and Second Temple Judaism's cultivation of this knowledge of Ishvara as Yhwh through the cult and scriptures of what became Judaism, finally there is born Jesus as the actual enfleshment and hominization of the Logos and, thereby, the divinization of a living, breathing, historical human being as the face of God.
Sorry for the lengthy reply; you introduced a useful critique and I wanted to see if I could use it to correct myself.
It seems to me that one's view of the approach you develop here will depend on preexisting commitments to various interpretations of a variety of metaphysical doctrines, including what the Trinity itself is really all about. In questioning your previous framework for mapping Brahman to the Trinity, I was mostly arguing that I don't think that mapping would work for a more or less "orthodox" post-Nicene view.
That said, I am perfectly happy to admit that other frameworks should be seen as acceptable (not least b/c the first 3 centuries of the church got along fine without that particular viewpoint being hegemonic or even really clearly articulated).
Interestingly, here is another case where I think Hindu practice could be instructive to us Christians: there are Samhkya practitioners, and Bhakti-focused Vaishnavins, and Vedantin following either Shankara or Ramanuja, and many other schools besides. All these approaches have real differences between them, even as they also have real touchstones of agreement. But, for the most part, none of them seeks to hegemonically eliminate the other schools. Hindus seem to "let a thousand flowers bloom" philosophically, theologically, and even liturgically. And that strikes me as wise.
I do wonder what Christianity might have looked like had the council at Nicea said "look, we think both Arian and Athanasian Christianity work. They agree on enough that we can move forward together." My sense—and of course this is just a counterhistorical intuition—is that this would have enriched the church, rather than endangered it. As D.B. Hart has pointed out, Arius's concerns were perfectly legitimate and even "conservative" or "traditional". He was not some wild-eyed demon trying to destroy the Way.
All of which is to say: your proposal for how to think through the Trinity strikes me as perfectly acceptable, even if I don't personally find that it speaks to my own view on the subject. But this also brings me to a point about my own view on the matter: I am very interested in conversations between pagan Neoplatonism and Christian thought, but that isn't really the central "idiom" that shapes my own spiritual approach to the subject. I was very influenced by Catherine LaCugnia's God For Us, which stressed both the importance of the Trinity but *also* a economic-Trinity focus. Ultimately, I see the Trinity itself as a kind of Ishvara/Saguna Brahman for the uncognizable reality of God as such. But I certainly know that my view here is a minority one in the church universal.
But, again: "let a thousand flowers bloom!" None of our systems captures the mystery, majesty, and infinitude of the Absolute God. And getting the system right really isn't the most pressing spiritual concern for us, either. Let's move forward together!
Man. You have such a wonderful gift for breaking down these complex and dizzying metaphysical concepts and using a, how would you say, a comparative religion framework to relate them and illustrate how much these concepts from across traditions can rhyme and point to very similar phenomena.
Some useful metrics here:
--We can helpfully chart exclusivism and inclusivism on the trajectories of cult, myth, and philosophy. Some cults are exclusivist, some inclusivist, some pluralist; the state religion of late preexilic Judah and the imagined religion of the redacted Hebrew Bible were both exclusivist, and so, the Second Temple Judaism that formed from the anthologies of the Torah and the Prophets was exclusivist in terms of cult. But at the same time, they were mythically and philosophically inclusivist, insofar as a.) the qualities, stories, and personality traits of many other gods were progressively incorporated into the profile of Yhwh and b.) when Yhwh was deemed God with a capital G, and not merely a god, and understood as transcendent God of the cosmos who also immanently fills all things, it also became possible to have an inclusive monotheism in which the "God of heaven" was really the God of all the nations called by various names. (See Mark Smith's God in Translation on this.) Likewise, later Jews, Christians, and Muslims are to varying degrees inclusivists or exclusivists on the basis of cult, myth, and philosophy, and on the basis of context, just as in the dharmic world; if there's a distinction, it might be that the Abrahmist trends exclusivist, while the dharmist trends inclusivist.
--Or, we can chart it on the model given by Pravina Rodrigues, of varying degrees of communion based on karma, bhakti, and jñāna. So, many religions share a high degree of communion on the basis of karma, or action, and on the basis of jñāna, gnōsis or philosophical vision, and differ mainly on issues of bhakti, devotion, with its attendant scriptural and mythic traditions. So some very philosophically and theologically minded Jews, Christians, and Muslims might well end up in a place where they'd say, we all have basically the same karma yoga, or religious ethics, and we all have basically the same philosophical vision of deity, mutatis mutandis for different idioms and perspectives, but while we share many traditions, postures, practices, etc. in terms of bhakti, we are fundamentally divided on certain questions of how God expects us to worship him and what belongs to the category of revelation. Likewise, Abrahamists could look at the dharmic world and say, we share a lot of karma and jñāna, but Abrahamists, qua Abrahamists, cannot worship dharmic deities, as personal faces of the divine, where there's nothing inherently prohibitive to the dharmist to accepting the Abrahamic God and/or Jesus Christ as personal faces of the divine.
--Finally, then, we might ask metaphysically, how to account for so many personally known and "revealed" faces of the divine that seemingly contradict? And here's where the language of brahman nrguna, brahman saguna, and Ishvara all become so important. Brahman nrguna is brahman in se: beyond all attribution and quality. Brahman saguna is how brahman manifests: brahman as the infinite intelligible, imaginal, and sensible universe(s). But then Ishvara is how the one brahman, both nrguna and saguna, becomes personally knowable to humans, and is to some degree an appearance constructed both by way of revelation and by way of projection, both from-above-down to the mind of the human worshiper and from-below-up from the mind of the human worshiper to grasp the ultimate reality. Because atman is, after all, brahman, and jiva is atman, the mental constructs of jiva are also atman are also brahman; and so the imaginal construction of the divine as Ishvara is the human's active participation in brahman's own outermost form of manifestation. So the personal God, God as Yhwh, or God as Krishna, or God as Shiva, etc. is both culturally constructed and divinely revealed. In Christian theological terms, I'd say that brahman nrguna is the Father (God in the modality of hidden, ungenerated, inexhaustible generativity), brahman saguna is the Son (God in the modality of revealed, generated manifestation), and Ishvara is the Spirit (God in the modality of processual, vivifying life, consciousness, and love).
I think the two frameworks you introduce to consider exclusivist and inclusivist attitudes towards spirituality are helpful. It is certainly interesting to me that both paragraphs either conclude by seeing the Indic/Dharmic religions as inherently more inclusive (as in the first framework) or by actually employing the language of the Dharmic faiths (karma, jnana, bhakti) as the very framework itself. If I understand you correctly, your point largely seems consonant with the one I make in the original piece. (Though please correct me if I am wrong on that!)
When it comes to trying to chart the Vedantic understanding of Brahman onto the Christianity Trinity, though, I don't think I agree with you. To the extent that Ishvara is understood as both Brahman in the act of creating the world (via maya, perhaps for lila), it certainly seems that Ishvara connects much more readily with Logos than with Spirit. And this is only underscored when we remember that, in most cases, Ishvara is the term used for the preferred deity of worship, the "Ideal Image" as Sri Ramakrishna put it, that one actually focuses on in worship. I think few Christians focus their worship on the Spirit as such; surely it is Jesus the Christ who most often gets our attention and praise. And, indeed, to the extent that Ishvara is always identifiable as having clear attributes, I don't see how to associate Ishvara with Spirit—since the Spirit in Christian thought is notoriously fluid and invisible.
That said, I don't really have an alternate proposal on how to map these two differing ways of comprehending the Infinite Absolute. On the one hand, maybe we could say that Nirguna Brahman is the Father (as you said), Saguna Brahman is the Logos as such (apart from Jesus, *pace* Jordan Wood), and then Jesus as the Logos Incarnate is the "primary" deity, the Ishvara, for Christians. This would leave the Spirit to somehow occupy some other conceptual niche.
Or, even more transgressively, we could identify Nirguna Brahman with the Father, and then Saguna Brahman with the Spirit, as the more "qualified" but still non-concrete reality of God manifest. This would leave the Logos Incarnate as the Ishvara. This approach obviously has problems with a mapping onto traditional Trinitarian formulas, but I wonder if it might be productive nonetheless.
Ultimately, I think any such mapping runs into a lot of problems—not only because the culturally specific modes of concretizing the un-concretizable may always leave something "lost in translation", but even more to the point because, in Christian terms, the Trinity can be affirmed as both three and yet one, and yet must *also* be said to be neither three nor one. God is beyond any numerosity, even oneness. This, of course, only leaves us more adrift than before. But perhaps that is the unavoidable state of the finite creature trying to gaze upon the infinite Creator.
I'm open to correction here, but let me try to explain what I was going for.
ὑποστάσις, I am convinced, does not mean something different in Christian theology than it meant for Plotinus: it just means fundamental reality or principle. For Christians, in confessing three ὁμοούσιον, "consubstantial" hypostases, we are therefore saying that God has three τρόποι ὑπάρξεως, or three "modes of existing," as Father, Son, and Spirit. We are decidedly not saying that God is three "persons" in the popular sense of the term, even if the names of the Trinitarian hypostases do come from earlier models of a divine triad in which there is God the Father, his messianic/angelic/divine Son, Jesus, and a tertiary πνεῦμα or spiritus. For Nicaea, anyway, these cultic and scriptural characters are really revelations of three modes of the selfsame divine essence.
So, it seems to me, the Late Platonic way of understanding the Trinity would be to associate the Father with the Plotinian One, the Son with the Nous (precontaining the whole intelligible cosmos), and the Spirit with Soul (already implied by the controvertibility between these words). That there is hierarchy between the hypostases does not imply inequality of essence--after all, nondualism means there is nothing for Nous/Son and Soul/Spirit to be other than the selfsame essence of God/the One--but it logically follows from the differentiation of the hypostases according to origination and nature of procession.
Now, when trying to "map" onto the dharmic system, I agree with you that there are certain cross-cultural dangers in assuming equality of concepts that emerge from very different historical and social locations; totally. But also, I'd say that there's fruitful room for contemplation here because, in the end, the Vedantic system really comes fairly close to saying the same thing that the Neoplatonists do. Brahman, particularly brahman nrguna, is the One; just as the radiance of the One is Nous, so the radiance of brahman nrguna is brahman saguna, the manifest intelligible, imaginal, and sensible/material order of the cosmos. Brahman saguna is what is most directly perceptible to atman, brahman in the localized form of the Self, and therefore to jiva, the Self's descended portion in/as the psychocorporeal incarnate entity. To my mind, this would most immediately correlate with the Logos of Middle Platonism or the Nous of Late Platonism, the ground and very possibility of consciousness in the cosmos.
How does brahman saguna then become atman? Through being individuated by intelligible, imaginal, and sensible forms into diverse beings and bodies, whose formal and final cause, however, is brahman (this is not other than to say, of course, that atman simply is brahman). So atman in some sense both always, already is brahman and is in another sense "becoming" brahman through its processual movement in and as the variety of jivas that it becomes in the world. Both for this reason, and because of atman's etymological relationship to the Greek ἆτμος, which is semantically correlated with the concept of πνεῦμα/spiritus as "breath" for which the more immediate equivalent would otherwise be praṇa, it seems appropriate to see atman in the Vedantic system, and puruṣa in the Saṃkhya system that undergirds Yoga, as the Neoplatonic Soul or the Christian Holy Spirit.
Why, then, would I claim that Ishvara belongs to the hypostasis of the Spirit rather than to brahman saguna? I concede your point that Ishvara, as the personal God and the personal face of brahman saguna, would be more obviously related either to the Logos or to the incarnate Logos, Christ. And so I would lean into the second idea: Ishvara is the personal face of brahman saguna/Nous/the Logos as can only be known in and through atman/Soul/the Spirit, and therefore as is progressively developed in and through the variety of human religious expressions culminating, from the Christian point of view, in the incarnation of the Logos in/as Jesus of Nazareth.
To go further into this: it is already the case that the job of the tertiary principle is to take the forms it beholds in the secondary principle, comprising the intelligible universe, and "translate" them, as it were, into the material medium to create the sensible cosmos as a thing of beauty. I'm supplying the "imaginal" as a middle term here to give due reverence to Ibn Arabi's point that there must be some tertium quid between intelligible and sensible for the two to relate to each other at all. So it is already the case, in other words, that brahman saguna/Nous/the Logos becomes incarnate in and as the world by the operation of atman/Soul/Spirit, first in itself, then as the World Soul, and then as the individuated soul. Here's Maximus's (and Wood's) "creation as incarnation" and "the Logos seeking always and in all things to realize the mystery of its embodiment" (Amb. 7.14): the Spirit acts as the matrix or womb in which the Logos is born into, and as, the world order. Here, too, is Sarah Coakley's recovery of the Spirit as God the Mother, as the matrix of the mystery of the Son's eternal begetting and of Christ's intrahistorical incarnation. And here, too, is Bulgakov's Heavenly Sophia and Creaturely Sophia: the world as it preexists in the Logos, as God's ποίησις, is the archetype of the creaturely world as it is molded (πλάζω) by the Spirit, which seeks always and anon to realize its transcendent form in the eschatological finality of the Kingdom (κτίσις).
So within time, what that looks like is the evolution of the created order into ever more complex, informed, alive, and conscious beings capable of reflexively knowing and loving, and thereby participating in the congress of the divine hypostases, until we come to humanity, in which we reach a noospheric turning point (here's your Teilhard). And through human beings, for the first time, the personal face of brahman saguna may now assume a human form in the development of their consciousness, as Ishvara: whether as the Sorcerer of Trois-Frères or as Rudra or as Anu and Enlil or as Kronos and Zeus or as El and Baal or as Yhwh or as Vishnu, Shiva, and Mahadevi, whoever. All of these become imaginal faces of the divine through the ongoing dialectic of the Universal Consciousness and the Universal Spirit in and as the human creature in its spiritual and noetic evolution, and each of them is legitimately connective and mediatory as an object of mental devotion on the imaginal plane; so said Ibn Arabi, everyone worships his own God in this respect, that everyone connects with the divine through these imaginal simulacra. But that imaginal is always seeking to become sensible, material, flesh: in the cult, ritual, oracle, myth, art, architecture, text, scripture, and so on of different religious communities, all of which in turn reflexively shape the imaginal face of Ishvara as known to each community. Often, but not exclusively, this involves a progressive anthropomorphism of Ishvara's manifestation, as for instance through the development of agalmata in Greek religion or the iconography of Egyptian gods or, conversely, the textual hominization of Yhwh in the midst of the ongoing aniconic reform of his cult.
And so, finally, the Christian Tradition says, in the longue durée of Ancient Israel and Judah's and Second Temple Judaism's cultivation of this knowledge of Ishvara as Yhwh through the cult and scriptures of what became Judaism, finally there is born Jesus as the actual enfleshment and hominization of the Logos and, thereby, the divinization of a living, breathing, historical human being as the face of God.
Sorry for the lengthy reply; you introduced a useful critique and I wanted to see if I could use it to correct myself.
It seems to me that one's view of the approach you develop here will depend on preexisting commitments to various interpretations of a variety of metaphysical doctrines, including what the Trinity itself is really all about. In questioning your previous framework for mapping Brahman to the Trinity, I was mostly arguing that I don't think that mapping would work for a more or less "orthodox" post-Nicene view.
That said, I am perfectly happy to admit that other frameworks should be seen as acceptable (not least b/c the first 3 centuries of the church got along fine without that particular viewpoint being hegemonic or even really clearly articulated).
Interestingly, here is another case where I think Hindu practice could be instructive to us Christians: there are Samhkya practitioners, and Bhakti-focused Vaishnavins, and Vedantin following either Shankara or Ramanuja, and many other schools besides. All these approaches have real differences between them, even as they also have real touchstones of agreement. But, for the most part, none of them seeks to hegemonically eliminate the other schools. Hindus seem to "let a thousand flowers bloom" philosophically, theologically, and even liturgically. And that strikes me as wise.
I do wonder what Christianity might have looked like had the council at Nicea said "look, we think both Arian and Athanasian Christianity work. They agree on enough that we can move forward together." My sense—and of course this is just a counterhistorical intuition—is that this would have enriched the church, rather than endangered it. As D.B. Hart has pointed out, Arius's concerns were perfectly legitimate and even "conservative" or "traditional". He was not some wild-eyed demon trying to destroy the Way.
All of which is to say: your proposal for how to think through the Trinity strikes me as perfectly acceptable, even if I don't personally find that it speaks to my own view on the subject. But this also brings me to a point about my own view on the matter: I am very interested in conversations between pagan Neoplatonism and Christian thought, but that isn't really the central "idiom" that shapes my own spiritual approach to the subject. I was very influenced by Catherine LaCugnia's God For Us, which stressed both the importance of the Trinity but *also* a economic-Trinity focus. Ultimately, I see the Trinity itself as a kind of Ishvara/Saguna Brahman for the uncognizable reality of God as such. But I certainly know that my view here is a minority one in the church universal.
But, again: "let a thousand flowers bloom!" None of our systems captures the mystery, majesty, and infinitude of the Absolute God. And getting the system right really isn't the most pressing spiritual concern for us, either. Let's move forward together!
Man. You have such a wonderful gift for breaking down these complex and dizzying metaphysical concepts and using a, how would you say, a comparative religion framework to relate them and illustrate how much these concepts from across traditions can rhyme and point to very similar phenomena.