The term “mask” that I am accustomed to use for the shield we must set before the face of the divine is not a borrowing from the field of anthropology or the history of religions. It is solidly rooted in Christian theology. In the middle of the second century, when there began the effort to unite the idea of one god with the ideas of god-in-Jesus and the promised holy spirit, Tertullian turned to the idea of persona. Persona may look and sound like the English “person”, but in the Latin of the second century it had a considerably different thrust. It was not until the sixth century that Boethius added to the nuances of persona the idea that we today consider the primary meaning, that of a self-sustaining, self-conscious, rational individual. In the Latin world before him the term had two applications, one legal, one theatrical. As a legal term, persona designated a party to a contract, and then as now, such a party could be an individual or a corporation. As a theatrical term persona designated an actor, one who wears a mask. Ancient theater relied upon masks for character identification, and if an actor played more than one role, as often was the case, the mask allowed for that without confusion. (Plays still occasionally list characters as dramatis personae.)
Early Christian theologians had to navigate many conflicting ideas about what is god. How could one adhere to the prevailing philosophical opinion of the ancient world which claimed that that which is perfect is unchangeable and unmovable and relate it to the claim of Jewish and Christian sacred texts which claimed God is involved in human history, indeed, present in human form? How could one profess one god and yet intimately connect god-in-Jesus with that singular transcending divine? How ought one to understand one’s beliefs about this Jesus and the divine spirit he promised? How could God be the above and beyond, and yet dwell in the human soul? Tertullian saw the two usages of persona as providing some assistance. The idea of masks within the godhead gave weight to the singularity of being. The idea of legal entity of action gave weight to the uniformity and inter-relatedness of action. I acknowledge this barely skims the surface of the complexities and the problem.
The heart of the problem is this: a Greek philosophical idea and a Hebrew religious vision were each being twisted to accommodate the other. The more effort expended on melding the two, the more problems presented themselves. The Greek term perichoresis is applied to the intimate participation of the three divine personae in each other. The term literally means “to dance around”, and ironically, that is exactly what all this talk does. It moves back and forth in endless circles around a topic trying to make sense of it and failing to realize it is merely coarctating two very different ways of talking about reality. Karl Barth enunciates the solution most clearly and cuts this Gordian knot: philosophy may speculate to the ends of the earth, but shall never prove or penetrate the divine; faith alone rises above such bounds and apprehends that in Christ Jesus alone is God-for-us faithfully revealed, truly manifested.
I hope this aperçu on trinity illuminates the point I am ardent to reinforce: the masks are essentially neither obscurements nor idols. They are filters. They shield us from the blinding light of the divine and they shield the divine from the defilements of rationalization.