The Mystery and the Limits of Language

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not an explanation of God but a confession of what has been revealed, fenced against misstatement. This file sets out what kind of thing Trinitarian dogma is — why the Church was forced into technical vocabulary she did not want, why the Fathers offer analogies and then withdraw them, and why the confession that God is unknowable in his essence is not a concession made at the end of theology but the condition of doing it at all.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Dogma Is a Fence, Not a Diagram

Nothing the Church has defined about the Holy Trinity explains how God is three and one. The conciliar definitions are almost entirely negative in force: the Son is not a creature; the Spirit is not a ministering spirit; the three are not three gods; the one God is not one person wearing three masks. What the councils produced were exclusions, and the positive terms they coined — homoousios, hypostasis — function chiefly to make the exclusions stick. St. Gregory the Theologian, who of all the Fathers had the most to say about the Trinity, was also the most insistent that saying it was impossible: “It is difficult to conceive God, but to define Him in words is an impossibility” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 28.4; trans. NPNF II/7).

This has a consequence for how the dogma is to be read. A reader who comes to it expecting a model — some structure that, once grasped, resolves the arithmetic — will misread every term in it. The Fathers were not solving a puzzle. They were being pushed, by particular denials at particular moments, into saying precisely what the Church had always prayed, in words exact enough that the denial could not shelter under them. Every technical term in Trinitarian theology has this history: it was introduced because a looser word had been exploited.

The Church Did Not Want the Vocabulary

The Nicene faith rests on a word that is not in Scripture. This was not an accident and it was not welcome. St. Athanasius explains why the council resorted to it: the bishops first proposed scriptural formulas — that the Son is “of God,” “true God,” “the power and image of the Father” — and each time the Arian party accepted the words with a private reservation, since a creature may in some sense be called “of God.” Only when homoousios was proposed did the evasion become impossible, and the council adopted it for that reason and no other (Athanasius, De decretis 19–20; trans. NPNF II/4). The word was chosen because it could not be signed in bad faith.

The same reluctance runs through the fourth century. St. Basil resisted using terms of the Holy Spirit that Scripture does not use, and was reproached for it; St. Gregory of Nyssa argues at length that the divine names are drawn from God’s operations toward us and never from his essence, so that no name whatever tells us what God is (Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius II; trans. NPNF II/5). Behind all of it stands the settled patristic conviction that revelation gives us God truly and does not give us God comprehensively.

What Is Knowable and What Is Not

The line is drawn in a sentence of St. Basil that has governed Orthodox theology ever since: “We know our God from his operations, but we do not undertake to approach near to his essence. His operations come down to us, but his essence remains beyond our reach” (Basil, Epistle 234.1; trans. NPNF II/8). Everything the Church says about God she says on the basis of what God has done — creation, the Incarnation, Pentecost, the sanctification of the saints — and the God so known is really God and not a representation of him. But the essence, what God is in himself, is not an object of any knowledge, human or angelic.

This is not agnosticism, and it is not a pious hedge appended to a body of positive claims. It is the reason the Trinitarian confession takes the form it does. Because the essence is unknowable, the three cannot be distinguished by anything in the essence — there is nothing there to distinguish them by, and any such distinction would introduce difference into what is one. They are therefore distinguished only by how they stand to one another in origin: unbegotten, begotten, proceeding. And because the essence is unknowable, the confession that the three share it cannot be cashed out as a description of a shared property; it is a denial that there are three gods, made in the only vocabulary available. The later Palamite settlement, which distinguishes the imparticipable divine essence from the uncreated divine energies in which the saints truly participate, is the mature form of exactly this rule (see The Palamite Settlement).

The Analogies and Their Withdrawal

The Fathers use images for the Trinity constantly, and the good ones are careful to take them back. St. Gregory the Theologian works through the standard repertoire — the spring, the fountain and the river; the sun, its ray and its light — and rejects each in turn: the first because it suggests a flowing that never comes to rest and a numerical unity that dissolves the three, the second because it makes the Son and Spirit into transient properties of the Father rather than subsistent realities, and because it risks making the Father alone the substance and the others his accidents. His conclusion is worth quoting for its method as much as its content: he resolves in the end to let the images go, “and to cling to the more reverent conception, resting upon few words,” taking the Spirit as guide and keeping to the end whatever illumination has been received (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.31–33; trans. NPNF II/7).

Two rules follow. First, no created thing is an analogue of God, because every created thing is composite, temporal, and one of many, and God is none of these. Second, the analogies that circulate in devotional writing — the three-leafed clover, the three states of water, the sun and its light and heat — fail in exactly the ways Gregory names, and each of them, pressed, yields a heresy the Church has condemned: the clover yields three parts of a divided substance, the states of water yield modalism, the sun and its emanations yield subordination. They are not simply imprecise; they are the very errors the councils were convened to exclude. The safest teaching image remains the one the Church herself has received liturgically and iconographically — the three who appeared to Abraham at Mamre — precisely because it depicts nothing about the divine nature at all (see The Liturgical and Iconographic Witness).

Number in God

Even counting is not straightforward. When we say “three,” we do not mean three of a kind, as three men are three of a kind, because the divine nature is not divided among them and there is no fourth thing, “divinity,” which each possesses a share of. St. Basil devotes several chapters of On the Holy Spirit to opponents who inferred from the ordering “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” that the second and third are lesser, and answers that the numbering in the baptismal formula and the doxology is not a ranking: the count tells us that the three are really distinct, not that they stand in a graded series (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 17.41–18.45; trans. NPNF II/8). Likewise St. Gregory the Theologian insists that when the mind turns to the Godhead it sees one, and when it turns to the three in whom the Godhead is it sees three, and that neither seeing corrects the other (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.14; trans. NPNF II/7).

The most famous statement of this oscillation is Gregory’s, and it is a description of prayer rather than of arithmetic: “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 40.41; trans. NPNF II/7).

Why the Precision Still Matters

It would be a serious misreading of all this to conclude that, since the mystery exceeds language, the words do not matter much. The opposite follows. Precisely because there is no independent access to the reality against which a formulation could be checked, the formulations carry the whole weight of the confession, and an error in them is not corrected by anything else. The fourth century is the demonstration: a single word’s difference — homoousios against homoiousios, one iota — separated the confession that the Son is God from the confession that he closely resembles God, and on that difference hung whether what took flesh in the Virgin was God saving us or a creature representing him.

The Church’s terminology is therefore neither a philosophical superstructure imposed on a simple faith nor an attempt to see into the divine essence. It is the minimum apparatus required to keep saying, without equivocation, what was said at the Jordan and on the mountain of the Ascension. What that apparatus is, and how it was assembled, is the subject of the sections that follow.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. De decretis Nicaenae synodi 19–20. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
  • Basil the Great. Epistle 234. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 17–18. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; also trans. David Anderson, Popular Patristics 42. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius II. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5.
  • Gregory the Theologian. Orations 28, 31, 40. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; also On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, Popular Patristics 23. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2002.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Formation of Christian Theology 2. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.