On ‘Not Three Gods’

St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium (Quod non sint tres dii, “On ‘Not Three Gods,’ to Ablabius”) answers the sharpest objection to Nicene Trinitarianism: if Peter, James, and John are three men, why are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not three gods? Gregory’s reply turns on the single, undivided divine operation (energeia) — every act of God originates in the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit — so that the unity of operation reveals the unity of nature. He concedes that the “three men” analogy is imperfect even on its own terms (strictly there is but one human nature too), a qualification that figures large in the contested modern debate over whether this text is a charter for “social Trinitarianism.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Question

Ad Ablabium is one of a cluster of short Trinitarian treatises Gregory wrote in the years around the Council of Constantinople (381), alongside To Eustathius, On the Holy Trinity and On the Difference of Essence and Hypostasis (the so-called Letter 38, transmitted in the Basilian corpus). It is cast as a reply to a real question from a certain Ablabius, evidently a younger churchman who had been pressed by opponents and could not answer them.

The objection is a logic of counting. We confess one God in three hypostases (persons) — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each of whom is fully God. But, the opponent argues, consider three human individuals: Peter, James, and John each fully possess the one human nature, yet we do not hesitate to call them “three men.” By exact parity, then, three who share the one divine nature ought to be “three gods.” Either the Christian must abandon the distinction of the three, or he must accept tritheism (Gregory, Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1, 37–57 [Müller]; NPNF II/5, On “Not Three Gods”).

Gregory accepts the force of the challenge and does not evade it by retreating into mystery. His answer has two stages: first a concession and correction about the human analogy, and then the positive theological argument from the divine energeia.

One Power, One Nature, Three Hypostases

The settled Cappadocian grammar stands behind the whole treatise: in God there is one ousia (essence/nature) in three hypostases (concrete subsistences, “persons”), the three distinguished not by anything in the nature — which is single, undivided, and identical — but solely by their relations of origin: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding. “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” name not three natures but three ways of being the one nature, three relations within a single Godhead.

A crucial supporting move is Gregory’s analysis of the very word “Godhead” (theotēs). Against the assumption that it is a nature-word (so that three who are “God” would be three instances of a kind, as three men are three instances of humanity), Gregory argues that theotēs is derived from an operation — from God’s act of beholding and overseeing all things (he connects theos with thea, “seeing”). “Godhead” therefore signifies a divine activity, not the divine essence directly (Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1; cf. the cognate argument in Against Eunomius that names are drawn from operations, never from the essence). And the divine operation, Gregory will show, is one.

The Unity of Divine Energeia

Here is the heart of Ad Ablabium and Gregory’s most original contribution to Trinitarian logic. With human beings, he observes, each individual performs his own activity separately: when many men do the same kind of thing — many orators speaking, many farmers working — each carries out a distinct, numerically separate act of the shared nature, and it is this plurality of separated operations that licenses our counting them as “many.” We rightly say “many men” because there are many separate workings.

With God it is otherwise. Every divine operation toward the creation is not divided among the three as three separate acts; it is one single, continuous, undivided activity that has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is brought to perfection in the Holy Spirit (Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1, 47–50; NPNF II/5). Life, sanctification, providence, judgment, the giving of every good gift — in each case there are not three lives given or three sanctifications, one from each Person, but one life, one sanctification, flowing from the Father, mediated by the Son, completed in the Spirit. The three never act in separation; there is never a divine work of the Father that is not equally the Son’s and the Spirit’s, in that ordered, unbroken procession.

From this Gregory draws his decisive inference: the unity of operation reveals the unity of nature. Because we never perceive three separated divine activities but always one, we have no ground for counting three gods, exactly as the plurality of separated human acts was the ground for counting three men. The argument runs from the economy outward: what the three do (one undivided energeia) discloses what the three are (one undivided ousia). The Father, Son, and Spirit are one God not by a numerical addition that somehow stays singular, but because the single divine power and operation, perceived as one, testifies to a single nature.

The “Three Men” Analogy and Its Limits

It is essential — and frequently overlooked — that Gregory does not simply oppose the divine unity to a granted human plurality. He goes further and qualifies the human side of the analogy itself. Strictly speaking, he says, it is a misuse of language (an abuse of custom) to speak of “many men” at all, for human nature is itself one. “Man” names the one nature shared whole and entire by Peter, James, and John; the nature is not parcelled out into thirds. That we habitually say “three men” is a loose convention of ordinary speech, not an exact metaphysical statement; properly, the nature “man” is singular even as the individuals who bear it are many (Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1, 40–41; NPNF II/5).

This qualification cuts in two directions, and reading it carefully is the key to the whole text. On one hand it strengthens Gregory’s case: if even human nature is properly one, then the objector’s confidence that “three men” is exactly correct is already shaky, and the pull toward “three gods” loses its grip. On the other hand it limits the analogy: Gregory is emphatically not building his Trinitarianism on the model of three human individuals as a picture of three divine ones. The human case is, at best, a real but imperfect parallel for the unity of nature, and it is imperfect precisely because human individuals, sharing one nature, nonetheless act separately and so are bodily and operationally divided in a way the three divine Persons never are. The analogy illustrates unity of nature; it fails for unity of operation, which is where the real weight of Gregory’s argument falls.

Because Ad Ablabium takes “three men sharing one nature” as its starting comparison, a strand of modern theology has read it as the patristic charter of a “social” doctrine of the Trinity — the view that the divine Persons are something like a community or society of three distinct centers of consciousness, unified by their perfect mutual love and shared activity, on the model of three human persons sharing humanity.

[Disputed: The “social Trinitarian” reading of Ad Ablabium is sharply contested. A number of (chiefly twentieth-century and analytic) theologians read the treatise as authorizing a social model on the strength of its human analogy. Against this, leading Cappadocian scholars resist the reading and stress that Gregory’s whole argument subordinates the human analogy to the unity of nature and the single divine energeia: Lewis Ayres (whose essay “On Not Three People” in Sarah Coakley’s Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, 2003, directly attacks the social reading and the older “de Régnon paradigm” that East = social, West = unitary); Sarah Coakley herself; and Johannes Zachhuber, who emphasizes the unity of nature in Gregory’s metaphysics. The pro-Nicene consensus of recent scholarship holds that Ad Ablabium, far from grounding tritheism-with-love, is a refutation of any counting of the divine Persons as one would count individuals.] The historically careful position, which this guide adopts, is that the text is best read not as a “social” analogy run forward but as Gregory dismantling the very logic of plural counting in the Godhead — the human comparison is raised in order to be corrected and surpassed, not enthroned as a model.

Relation to Pneumatology

Ad Ablabium is also, quietly, a pneumatological text. The argument from the single energeia — origin in the Father, through the Son, perfected in the Spirit — accords the Holy Spirit a fully divine and indispensable place in every divine work: no divine act is complete except in the Spirit. This is the same confession the Cappadocians secured against the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”) and wrote into the Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, where the Spirit is glorified and worshipped together with the Father and the Son (see Pneumatology). Gregory’s logic gives the doctrine its metaphysical spine: if the Spirit were less than God, the single divine operation would be broken at its consummation, and the unity of the divine work — the very thing that proves the unity of nature — would collapse. The full divinity of the Spirit is thus not an appendix to Gregory’s Trinitarianism but a structural requirement of it.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. Ad Ablabium, Quod non sint tres dii (“On ‘Not Three Gods,’ to Ablabius”). Critical text ed. Friedrich Müller, Gregorii Nysseni Opera Dogmatica Minora, Pars I. Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO) III/1, 37–57. Leiden: Brill, 1958.
Gregory of Nyssa. On “Not Three Gods,” to Ablabius the Bishop. Translated by H. A. Wilson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), Second Series, vol. 5. Ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1893.
Gregory of Nyssa. To Eustathius, On the Holy Trinity. NPNF II/5 (one of the cluster of minor Trinitarian treatises).
Ayres, Lewis. “On Not Three People: The Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology as Seen in To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods.” In Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, 15–44. Directions in Modern Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Zachhuber, Johannes. Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 46. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Maspero, Giulio. Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 86. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Karfíková, Lenka, et al., eds. Gregory of Nyssa: The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism (Proceedings of the 11th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, Tübingen 2008). Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 106. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.