The Trinity | UNDERSTANDING OPPENHEIMER and the poem which inspired the naming of the world’s first nuclear bomb.

It is verse four of John Donne’s religious, divine poem which introduces the word TRINITY, later to be used by Oppenheimer to name the first weapon of mass destruction.

THE TRINITY

. “O blessed glorious Trinity,

Bones to philosophy, but milk to faith,

. Which, as wise serpents, diversely

Most slipperiness, yet most entanglings hath,

As you distinguish’d, undistinct,

By power, love, knowledge be,

Give me a 1 such self different instinct,

Of these let all me elemented be,

Of power, to love, to know you unnumbered three.”

Yet the series of divine poems by John Donne, although written in olde English language, can be translated to mean something else.

Pride before the fall of man.

Perhaps best encapsulated within verse 21 of the divine poems,