TRINITY

TRINITY. According to the understanding of the Orthodox Church, the confession of faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (q.v.) is as old as Christianity. It is not the product of human reasoning, but the articulation of divine revelation, and it is embedded in the earliest Christian documents. The Apostle Paul, for example, closes 2 Cor with a Trinitarian blessing sometime in the A.D. 50s, and it seems to be the case that he is himself but repeating a formula already employed in Christian worship. The Gospel of Matthew concludes with the Trinitarian formula for Baptism (q.v.) already in use in that community ca. A.D. 80. The “Last Supper” discourse in Jn 14–16 contains four passages on the Holy Spirit which make it clear that the Spirit is regarded as a distinct person, “another Comforter/Advocate,” together with the Son.

While profession of the three persons is from the earliest Christian scriptural witnesses, the Church also inherited the confession of God (q.v.) as one from the Hebrews: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Duet 6:4). There do not appear to have been any speculative attempts to square this circle earlier than the 2nd c. Father, Son, and Spirit were simply facts of primitive Christian experience; they were acknowledged as such in tandem with faith in the divine unity. The word, “trinity” (Greek trias and Latin trinitas), does not appear until Theophilus of Antioch (Greek) in the 180s and Tertullian (q.v.) (Latin) a decade or two later. The latter, together with Irenaeus of Lyons (q.v.), provide the first attempts at explaining the dual confession of God as one and three.

Tertullian relies primarily on a Stoic model, the divine substance in three different and eternal modes of expression. Irenaeus uses the analogy of the human person, speaking on some occasions of Son and Spirit as the Father’s Word and Wisdom, and elsewhere as his “two hands.” In the 3rd c. Origen, borrowing from Platonism and the earlier work of Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr (qq.v.), arranges Father, Son, and Spirit in a descending hierarchy of hypostases (persons, or substances). His terminology was preserved in the Greek East during the great Trinitarian controversies of the 4th c. But his notes relating to subordination and hierarchy were rejected as a result of the ultimate victory of the Nicene Creed championed by Athanasius (qq.v.). It was the glory of the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations, and Gregory of Nyssa’s (qq.v.) Against Eunomius and “On Not Three Gods,” to supply the language and concepts reconciling Origen’s terms with the Nicene homoousios (consubstantial) in such a way as to become the classical formulation of the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

The ancient emphasis on the Father as source of the other persons is the keystone of the teaching. The Father is the unique and personal (hypostatic) source of the Son and Spirit. Both derive their being (ousia) directly from him, the Son by “begetting” (genesis) and the Spirit by “procession” (ekporeusis). The “being” that they receive is the Father’s own. The divine existence, will, and life is thus one and unique, and the persons three. Begetting and procession are not, however, further defined, and the omission is quite deliberate. The terms refer to processes within the godhead that escape human knowledge and comprehension altogether. The Cappadocians thus lay heavy emphasis upon paradox. The basic data of Christian experience are maintained, God is one and three, and the antinomy of the divine equation is itself held up as a fundamental revelation-in the words of Vladimir Lossky (q.v.), “a cross for human ways of thought.” The primary metaphor for the godhead in Greek thought is therefore that of community.

Such was not the way of the West. Beginning earlier, but most importantly with Augustine of Hippo (q.v.), it was the model of the single human being that served the Latin writers as the ruling metaphor for investigation of the divine mystery. Augustine’s De Trinitate, composed in the later years of his life, has set the agenda for Western theology (q.v.) in much the same way as the Cappadocians did for the East. Taking as his starting point Gen 1and the idea of the human person as imago Dei (image of God), Augustine sought the “footprints of the Trinity” (vestigia trinitatis) in the human psyche. Among the many triads that he proposed based on this model, that of memory-intelligence-will was perhaps his favorite, although he was careful to acknowledge the inadequacy of any comparison to the divine mystery. Given this model, however, his notion of the Spirit as proceeding from both Father and Son followed naturally.

The filioque (q.v.), implicit in Augustine’s very choice of model and explicit at different points in his writings (as it also was in Ambrose of Milan [q.v.]), found its way into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in Spain at the Council of Toledo in 589, probably as an emphasis on the Son’s divinity in response to the Arianism (q.v.) of Spain’s Visigothic rulers. From Spain it traveled in the late 8th c. to the court of Charlemagne at Aachen, where it became an important item in the Carolingian (qq.v.) offensive against the orthodoxy of the emperors in Constantinople (q.v.) in the opening decade of the 9th c. Frankish missionaries in Bulgaria later in the same century carried the offensive to the very threshold of Byzantium, a challenge that drew the response of the Patriarch Photius (qq.v.), who supplied the first and most important extended critique of the filioque in light of the Cappadocians. Photius objected to the phrase as both imperiling the unique monarchy (one source, mia arche) of the Father and muddling the distinction of the persons. The debate between Greek East and Latin West was firmly set in the 9th c. along lines that have continued to the present day.

For two centuries the popes of Rome (q.v.), though embracing Augustine’s thought, refrained from adding the filioque to the Creed at Rome. This changed ca. 1013 when Pope Benedict XIII, at the request of the German Emperor, Henry II, added the phrase to the Creed sung in the papal chapel. The filioque also figured in the anathema that Cardinal Humbert da Silva launched against Michael Cerularios (q.v.) in 1054. The latter, according to Humbert, had willfully omitted (!) the phrase from the universal symbol of faith.

Such historical myopia was not characteristic of the best Latin thought. Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the 13th c. were fully aware of the filioque as a later, uniquely Latin addition, and they sought to defend it against the Greeks on logical and scriptural grounds. Byzantine thought-between labored polemics-tried to deal with the question of the Son’s eternal relationship to the Spirit in the works of Gregory of Cyprus (1285), Gregory Palamas (q.v.), and Joh n Byrennios (15th c.), though without accepting the Latin addition. They argued instead for the “eternal shining forth” (aidios eklampsis) from the Son of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father. The Reunion Councils (q.v.) of Lyons and Ferrara-Florence approved the filioque, but these were not ultimately received in the East.

Modern theologians continue the debate. Western writers such as Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, from the Reformed and Roman Catholic traditions, respectively, vigorously affirm the traditional triadology of the West. Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru Staniloae (qq.v.) reply as emphatically on behalf of the Eastern view. More irenic voices from each camp have begun to seek some sort of accord in recent times. We mention in this regard the Russian church historian V. Bolotov and the philosopher-theologian Vladimir Soloviev (q.v.) in the 19th c. and the modern Roman Catholic theologians, A. de Halleux and Y. Congar. Whether these efforts result in any ultimate resolution remains to be seen.