Abstract

The teaching that there are three persons in God is a fundamental Christian doctrine. It is taught in the Scriptures, especially, but not exclusively, in John’s Gospel, where we learn that the Word who is God became flesh and where Christ, the Word-made-flesh, speaks of sending ‘‘to you from the Father the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father.’’ Early Church councils established the basic doctrine that the three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one substance. Later theologians, especially Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, attempted to find and explore analogies that might bring greater understanding to this central article of the Christian Creed.

The term “Trinity” is the theological expression for one of the chief mysteries of the Christian faith. It refers to the three persons that are united in the one God. ‘‘Trinity’’ could be considered a summary expression for ‘‘three-in-one.’’ The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas spoke of some truths of the Christian faith as natural and some as supernatural. The former are truths that can be discovered by human reason and in fact have been discovered by some philosophers who have examined reality more deeply. Such thinkers have proved the existence of God and argued that God is one, and attempted to demonstrate other necessary attributes that could be predicated rightly of God. Supernatural truths are beliefs that are not discoverable by human efforts but are only known through God’s biblical revelation. Examples of supernatural truths are the Incarnation (that God became man, uniting Himself to a human nature in the person of Jesus Christ) and the Trinity (that God, though one God, is three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.).

The ‘‘three-in-one’’ character of God is taught in the Christian scriptures and is affirmed by the earliest Apostolic Fathers. However, the main focus of authors of the early Apostolic age, such as Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, was on Christ himself, not on wrestling with problems of how Christ as the Son of God related to his heavenly Father. Such questions arose with the next generation of the Fathers, the Apologists, who had to confront the many unsatisfactory attempts at reconciling the New Testament revelation of Christ as the Son of God and the inherited view that God is one. One faulty type of explanation is found in the modalism of Sabellius and Praxeas. For Sabellius, God is one, but he manifests himself in different ways in the story of man’s redemption and salvation. For Praxeas, there is one God who exists in such a way that when Christ sufferered it was the Father, who alone is God, that suffered. Another unsuccessful effort to reconcile the divinity of Christ with the oneness ofGod is found in subordinationist explanation that portrayed God the Father as a monarch at the expense of Christ’s true divinity. The Word ‘‘through whom all things were made’’ and the Word who ‘‘was made flesh,’’ according to John’s Gospel, is not for subordinationists an eternal Word, but is tied to the temporal and contingent character of creation and the Incarnation.

The challenge to Patristic Apologists was to find more faithful ways of reconciling the unicity of God and the divinity of Christ. In the Latin world, Tertullian, in chapter II of his treatise Against Praxeas, attacked him for ‘‘thinking that one cannot believe in One Only God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the very selfsame Person.’’ Tertullian puts his own position in positive terms by appealing to the rule of faith: ‘‘All are of One by unity of substance; while the mystery of the dispensation is still guarded, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three persons: the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.’’ With Tertullian we find the vocabulary of Trinity, substance, and person, key terms in later doctrinal discussions of the triune God. However, the precise meaning of a term like ‘‘substance’’ is lacking in Tertullian’s works and would need later clarification. In the Greek world, St. Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, not only declared that Christ was the Son of God in the sense ofthe eternal Son ofGod; but also tried to explain how this was the case. In this effort he was followed by Athenagoras and also by Theophilus, who, in his Letter to Autolycus (II, 22) offered the following analogy: ‘‘For before anything came into being He had Him’’ (i. e., the Logos) as counselor, being His own mind and thought.

Other Fathers searched for greater understanding of the inner relationship of the Father and the Son by pursuing clues in the words of Christ himself. Christ had spoken of coming forth or proceeding from the Father (John 8:42). He also spoke of sending ‘‘to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father’’ (John 15:24). In efforts to grasp the meaning of these expressions of ‘‘coming forth’’ and ‘‘coming from’’ later Greek and Latin Fathers examined how they might better understand a divine coming forth or procession. When we hear the words ‘‘father’’ and ‘‘son’’ we might well imagine that in some way a son comes from or proceeds from his father. Still, a human father and his son are distinct substances. How can we understand that the divine Son proceeds from the Father and yet is the same substance as the Father? Origen, in his On the Principles (I, 2, 4), was well aware of the limits of our analogies concerning God’s inner nature. Still he attempted to portray in some small way the nature of the generation of the Son:

> For we must of necessity hold that there is something exceptional and worthy of God which does not admit of any comparison at all, not merely in things, but which cannot even be conceived by thought or discovered by perception, so that a human mind should be able to apprehend how the unbegotten God is made the Father of the only-begotten Son: because His generation is as eternal and everlasting as the brilliancy which is produced from the sun. For it is not by receiving the breath of life that He is made a Son, by any outward act, but by His own nature.

Elsewhere, Origen speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three hypostases or ‘‘persons’’ and affirms that they are homoousios or ‘‘of the same substance.’’ Despite these contributions of Origen, there were also ambiguities in other parts of his writings. He referred to the Father as

God (ho theos) and the Son as a second God (deuteros theos). He also spoke of the Son as God insofar as He contemplates the Father, but that he is no longer God when he ceases to gaze at the Father. Some of these observations fed the subordinationist theses of Arius, who declared that there was a time when the Logos did not exist, thus making Him a demi-god between the Father and the created world. Despite the ambiguities of Origen’s position, the First Nicean Council borrowed Origen’s term homoousios, that is ‘‘of the same substance,’’ to underscore the truly divine nature of the Son. The counciliar Creed thus declares that the Son ‘‘is begotten, not made, one in being with the Father.’’

Debate did not end at this point, especially over homoousios: some asked if ‘‘of the same substance’’ or ‘‘one in being’’ referred to a numerical sameness or oneness or a generic similarity. St. Athanasius fought the subordinationists who portrayed the Holy Spirit as holding a rank inferior to the Father and the Son. Basing themselves on the assumption that the mission of the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation is to sanctify, the post-Nicean subordinationists argued that the Spirit was only a creature bringing salvation to men. Athanasius pushed further, declaring that the Spirit’s role in salvation was to bring both sanctification and deification to men, and that He could not bring deification unless He were God. Still, Athanasius was not clear on the distinction between ousia (substance) and hypostasis (person). It was the Cappadocian Fathers, Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzen, who distinguished clearly the unique divine ousia or substance and the three hypostases or persons, by insisting on the real distinction between the three persons. Thereafter, the Nicean declaration concerning homoousios (‘‘of the same substance’’) gained greater currency, and at the second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, the application of the basic dogma concerning the Father and the Son was extended to the Holy Spirit.

The ‘‘three-in-one’’ formulation of these councils established the basic doctrine of the Christian Church: the three persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one substance. Beyond their role in establishing this basic doctrine, the Cappadocian Fathers also developed a theology for defending and bringing greater understanding of its truth. St. Basil attempted to provide an explanation for the distinction of persons by presenting actions by which each person was God: ‘‘paternity,’’ ‘‘filiation,’’ and “sanctification.” Gregory of Nazianzen described the three persons by using the verbal forms: ‘‘being unbegotten,’’ ‘‘being begotten,’’ and ‘‘proceeding.’’ St. Augustine, following Sts. Hilary and Ambrose in the Latin world, likewise developed a rich theology of the Trinity, especially in his work entitled The Trinity. The first part of this book provides the Scriptural bases for the doctrine of the Trinity. The second part presents the official Christian teaching and refutes the heresies that oppose this teaching. After establishing these points, Augustine then attempts to find analogies to foster our understanding of this teaching, mainly concentrating on the words of Genesis 1:26, which portrays man as created in the image of God. If man is an image of God, it must be in his soul that he can be an image of such a spiritual being. For Augustine, this image is found in man’s memory, intelligence, and will, and as he examines them, he arrives at the knowledge of his unique soul that through memory remembers, through intelligence knows and through will loves. Augustine thereby comes to a rich knowledge of his multifaceted self; but at a still deeper level he also comes to realize that these acts tell us something of the source and foundation of his soul and its three activities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of whom he is but an image.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, attempted to deepen and unite many of Augustine’s insights that were based on man’s interior life into a more ontological synthesis. He brought out the difference between divine processions and human processions by trying to explain the difference between a transient procession (where a distinct substance comes forth) and an immanent procession (where a different Person, the Son, comes forth, who is yet identical in substance with the Father). In the human world, when we think of a father as a father and the son as a son, we know that we are thinking of them not just as men (something absolute in themselves), but we are also thinking of them as related to one another. Technically speaking, we would say that ‘‘father’’ and ‘‘son’’ express relations. Yet, normally, such relations exist between things that are in themselves absolute distinct substances. The challenge to Christian theologians like Aquinas, in their efforts to offer some limited understanding of how the Father as Father, the Son as Son, and the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son or from the Father through the Son are all the one God, is to explain how relations in the triune God are not accidental relations between distinct substances but subsistent relations, that is, relations ofsuch a character that it is by being the Father that the Father is God and by being the Son that the Son is the same God, and it is in being the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit is God. These theological approaches of Augustine and Aquinas, like those of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzen, were the chief analogical routes followed by medieval theologians to bring some understanding to the teaching of the Church that God is ‘‘three-in-one.

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See also: > Augustine > Church Fathers > Thomas Aquinas