130. The Nicene, Doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinitarian Terminology. (Chapter 9. Theology; the Development of Ecumenical Orthodoxy.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

The doctrine of the essential deity and the personality of the Holy Ghost completed the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity ; and of this doctrine as a whole we can now take a closer view.

This fundamental and comprehensive dogma secured both the unity and the full life of the Christian conception of God; and in this respect it represents, as no other dogma does, the whole of Christianity. It forms a bulwark against heathen polytheism on the one hand, and Jewish deism and abstract monotheism on the other. It avoids the errors and combines the truth of these two opposite conceptions. Against the pagans, says Gregory of Nyssa, we hold the unity of essence; against the Jews, the distinction of hypostases. We do not reject all multiplicity, but only such as destroys the unity of the being, like the pagan polytheism; no more do we reject all unity, but only such unity as denies diversity and full vital action. The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, furthermore, formed the true mean between Sabellianism and tritheism, both of which taught a divine triad, but at the expense, in the one case, of the personal distinctions, in the other, of the essential unity. It exerted a wholesome regulative influence on the other dogmas. It overcame all theories of emanation, established the Christian conception of creation by a strict distinction of that which proceeds from the essence of God, and is one with him, like the Son and the Spirit, from that which arises out of nothing by the free will of God, and is of different substance. It provided for an activity and motion of knowledge and love in the divine essence, without the Origenistic hypothesis of an eternal creation. And by the assertion of the true deity of the Redeemer and the Sanctifier, it secured the divine character of the work of redemption and sanctification.

The Nicene fathers did not pretend to have exhausted the mystery of the Trinity, and very well understood that all human knowledge, especially in this deepest, central dogma, proves itself but fragmentary. All speculation on divine things ends in a mystery, and reaches an inexplicable residue, before which the thinking mind must bow in humble devotion. Man, says Athanasius, can perceive only the hem of the garment of the triune God; the cherubim cover the rest with their wings. In his letter to the Monks, written about 358, he confesses that the further he examines, the more the mystery eludes his understanding,1 and he exclaims with the Psalmist: Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain to it. Augustine says in one place: If we be asked to define the Trinity, we can only say, it is not this or that. But though we cannot explain the how or why of our faith, still the Christian may know, and should know, what he believes, and what he does not believe, and should be persuaded of the facts and truths which form the matter of his faith.

The essential points of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity are these:

1. There is only one divine essence or substance. Father, Son, and Spirit are one in essence, or consubstantial. They are in one another, inseparable, and cannot be conceived without each other. In this point the Nicene doctrine is thoroughly monotheistic or monarchian, in distinction from tritheism, which is but a new form of the polytheism of the pagans.

The terms essence (oujsiva) and nature (fuvsi ), in the philosophical sense, denote not an individual, a personality, but the genus or species; not unum in numero, but ens unum in multis. All men are of the same substance, partake of the same human nature, though as persons and individuals they are very different. The term homoousion, in its strict grammatical sense, differs from monoousion or toutoousion, as well as from heteroousion, and signifies not numerical identity, but equality of essence or community of nature among several beings. It is clearly used thus in the Chalcedonian symbol, where it is said that Christ is consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father as touching the Godhead, and consubstantial with us [and yet individually, distinct from us] as touching the manhood. The Nicene Creed does not expressly assert the singleness or numerical unity of the divine essence (unless it be in the first article: We believe in one God ); and the main point with the Nicene fathers was to urge against Arianism the strict divinity and essential equality of the Son and Holy Ghost with the Father. If we press the difference of homoousion from monoousion, and overlook the many passages in which they assert with equal emphasis the monarchia or numerical unity of the Godhead, we must charge them with tritheism.

But in the divine Trinity consubstantiality denotes not only sameness of kind, but at the same time numerical unity; not merely the unum in specie, but also the unum in numero. The, three persons are related to the divine substance not as three individuals to their species, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or Peter, John, and Paul, to human nature; they are only one God. The divine substance is absolutely indivisible by reason of its simplicity, and absolutely inextensible and untransferable by reason of its infinity; whereas a corporeal substance can be divided, and the human nature can be multiplied by generation. Three divine substances would limit and exclude each other, and therefore could not be infinite or absolute. The whole fulness of the one undivided essence of God, with all its attributes, is in all the persons of the Trinity, though in each in his own way: in the Father as original principle, in the Son by eternal generation, in the Spirit by, eternal procession. The church teaches not one divine essence and three persons, but one essence in three persons. Father, Son, and Spirit cannot be conceived as three separate individuals, but are in one another, and form a solidaric unity.

Many passages of the Nicene fathers have unquestionably a tritheistic sound, but are neutralized by others which by themselves may bear a Sabellian construction so that their position must be regarded as midway between these two extremes. Subsequently John Philoponus, an Aristotelian and Monophysite in Alexandria about the middle of the sixth century, was charged with tritheism, because he made no distinction between fuvsi and u Jpovstasi, and reckoned in the Trinity three natures, substances, and deities, according to the number of persons.

2. In this one divine essence there are three persons1 or, to use a better term, hypostases, 1 that is, three different modes of subsistence1 of the one same undivided and indivisible whole, which in the Scriptures are called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. These distinctions are not merely different attributes, powers, or activities of the Godhead, still less merely subjective aspects under which it presents itself to the human mind; but each person expresses the whole fulness of the divine being with all its attributes, and the three persons stand in a relation of mutual knowledge and love. The Father communicates his very life to the Son, and the Spirit is the bond of union and communion between the two. The Son speaks, and as the God-Man, even prays, to the Father, thus standing over against him as a first person towards a second; and calls the Holy Ghost another Comforter whom he will send from the Father, thus speaking of him as of a third person.

Here the orthodox doctrine forsook Sabellianism or modalism, which, it is true, made Father, Son, and Spirit strictly coordinate, but only as different denominations and forms of manifestation of the one God.

But, on the other hand, as we have already intimated, the term person must not be taken here in the sense current among men, as if the three persons were three different individuals, or three self-conscious and separately acting beings. The trinitarian idea of personality lies midway between that of a mere form of manifestation, or a personation, which would lead to Sabellianism, and the idea of an independent, limited human personality, which would result in tritheism. In other words, it avoids the monoousian or unitarian trinity of a threefold conception and aspect of one and the same being, and the triousian or tritheistic trinity of three distinct and separate beings. In each person there is the same inseparable divine substance, united with the individual property and relation which distinguishes that person from the others. The word person is in reality only a make-shift, in the absence of a more adequate term. Our idea of God is more true and deep than our terminology, and the essence and character of God far transcends our highest ideas.

The Nicene fathers and Augustine endeavored, as Tertullian and Dionysius of Alexandria had already done, to illustrate the Trinity by analogies from created existence. Their figures were sun, ray, and light; fountain, stream, and flow; root, stem, and fruit; the colors of the rainbow;1 soul, thought, and spirit;1 memory, intelligence, and will;1 and the idea of love, which affords the best illustration, for God is love. Such figures are indeed confessedly insufficient as proofs, and, if pressed, might easily lead to utterly erroneous conceptions. For example: sun, ray, and light are not co-ordinate, but the two latter are merely qualities or emanations of the first. Omne simile claudicat. Analogies, however, here do the negative service of repelling the charge of unreasonableness from a doctrine which is in fact the highest reason, and which has been acknowledged in various forms by the greatest philosophers, from Plato to Schelling and Hegel, though often in an entirely unscriptural sense. A certain trinity undeniably runs through all created life, and is especially reflected in manifold ways in man, who is created after the image of God; in the relation of body, soul, and spirit; in the faculties of thought, feeling, and will; in the nature of self-consciousness;1 and in the nature of love. 3. Each divine person has his property, as it were a characteristic individuality, expressed by the Greek word ijdiovth, 1 and the Latin proprietas. This is not to be confounded with attribute; for the divine attributes, eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, wisdom, holiness, love, etc., are inherent in the divine essence, and are the common possession of all the divine hypostases. The idiotes, on the contrary, is a peculiarity of the hypostasis, and therefore cannot be communicated or transferred from one to another.

To the first person fatherhood, or the being unbegotten, 1 is ascribed as his property; to the second, sonship, or the being begotten;1 to the Holy Ghost, procession. In other words: The Father is unbegotten, but begetting; the Son is uncreated, but begotten; the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father (and, according to the Latin doctrine, also from the Son). But these distinctions relate, as we have said, only to the hypostases, and have no force with respect to the divine essence which is the same in all, and neither begets nor is begotten, nor proceeds, nor is sent.

4. The divine persons are in one another, mutually interpenetrate, and form a perpetual intercommunication and motion within the divine essence; as the Lord says: I am in the Father, and the Father in me; and the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. This perfect indwelling and vital communion was afterwards designated (by John of Damascus and the scholastics) by such terms as ejnuvparxi, pericwvrhsi, 1 inexistentia, immanentia, inhabitatio, circulatio, permeatio, intercommunio, circumincessio.

5. The Nicene doctrine already contains, in substance, a distinction between two trinities: an immanent trinity of constitution,1 which existed from eternity, and an economic trinity of manifestation;1 though this distinction did not receive formal expression till a much later period. For the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are, according to the doctrine, an eternal process. The perceptions and practical wants of the Christian mind start, strictly speaking, with the trinity of revelation in the threefold progressive work of the creation, the redemption, and the preservation of the world, but reason back thence to a trinity of being; for God has revealed himself as he is, and there can be no contradiction between his nature and his works. The eternal pre-existence of the Son and the Spirit is the background of the historical revelation by which they work our salvation. The Scriptures deal mainly with the trinity of revelation, and only hint at the trinity of essence, as in the prologue of the Gospel of John which asserts an eternal distinction between God and the Logos. The Nicene divines, however, agreeably to the metaphysical bent of the Greek mind, move somewhat too exclusively in the field of speculation and in the dark regions of the intrinsic and ante-mundane relations of the Godhead, and too little upon the practical ground of the facts of salvation.

6. The Nicene fathers still teach, like their predecessors, a certain subordinationism, which seems to conflict with the doctrine of consubstantiality. But we must distinguish between, a subordinatianism of essence (oujsiva) and a subordinatianism of hypostasis, of order and dignity. The former was denied, the latter affirmed. The essence of the Godhead being but one, and being absolutely perfect, can admit of no degrees. Father, Son, and Spirit all have the same divine essence, yet not in a co-ordinate way, but in an order of subordination. The Father has the essence originally and of himself, from no other; he is the primal divine subject, to whom alone absoluteness belongs, and he is therefore called preeminently God,1 or the principle, the fountain, and the root of Godhead. The Son, on the contrary, has his essence by communication from the Father, therefore, in a secondary, derivative way. The Father is greater than the Son. The one is unbegotten, the other begotten; the Son is from the Father, but the Father is not from the Son; fatherhood is in the nature of the case primary, sonship secondary. The same subordination is still more applicable to the Holy Ghost. The Nicene fathers thought the idea of the divine unity best preserved by making the Father, notwithstanding the triad of persons, the monad from which Son and Spirit spring, and to which they return.

This subordination is most plainly expressed by Hilary of Poictiers, the champion of the Nicene doctrine in the West. The familiar comparisons of fountain and stream, sun and light, which Athanasius, like Tertullian, so often uses, likewise lead to a dependence of the Son upon the Father1 Even the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed favors it, in calling the Son God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God. For if a person has anything, or is anything, of another, he has not that, or is not that, of himself. Yet this expression may be more correctly understood, and is in fact sometimes used by the later Nicene fathers, as giving the Son and Spirit only their hypostases from the Father, while the essence of deity is common to all three persons, and is co-eternal in all.

Scriptural argument for this theory of subordination was found abundant in such passages as these: As the Father has life in himself (e[cei zwh;n ejn e Jautw'/), so has he given (e[dwke) to the Son to have life in himself; and has given him authority to execute judgment also; All things are delivered to me (pavnta moi paredovqh) of my Father; My father is greater than I. But these and similar passages refer to the historical relation of the Father to the incarnate Logos in his estate of humiliation, or to the elevation of human nature to participation in the glory and power of the divine,1 not to the eternal metaphysical relation of the Father to the Son.

In this point, as in the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, the Nicene system yet needed further development. The logical consistency of the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son, upon which the Nicene fathers laid chief stress, must in time overcome this decaying remnant of the ante-Nicene subordinationism.