Thinking about the Trinity

If one starts with absolute simplicity, then the only way to develop trinitarianism is to view the divine Persons as relations of the simple divine essence (e) to itself. We might, for example, think of the Father, Son, and Spirit in terms of the three relations entailed by identity. Thus, the Father is a monadic reflexive relation (e=e), the Son is a dyadic symmetric relation (if a=e then e=a), and the Spirit is a triadic transitive relation (if a=e and b=a, then c=e). But, against this line of thought it seems obvious that relations aren’t persons. Moreover, there’s no clear ontological difference between this sort of “trinitarianism” and a modalism that takes the hypostatic distinctions to be merely conceptual.