chistory_trinity1
THE PROBLEM OF THE TRINITY
by Ray Shelton
Before the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), the early theologians of the second and third centuries attempted to solve the problem of the Trinity. The following are the main developments:
The theologian that best summed up the theological thought of the second century, and dominated Christian orthodox theology before Origen, was Irenaeus (c.125-202 A.D.). He was deeply indebted to the Apologists, but he was an advance on them, from whom he also diverged in his deliberate avoidance of philosophical terminology. His statement of the threefold “rule of faith” expressed the framework of his thinking that remained substantially the same as theirs. Irenaeus approached God from two directions, thinking of Him both as
(a) He exists in His intrinsic being, and also as
(b) He manifests Himself in the “economy” (from the Greek oikonomia; Latin, dispensatio),
that is, the ordered process of His self-disclosure. This word occurs in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (1:10; 3:9), where it means the divine plan, or God’s secret purpose. In Christian theology the word began to be applied to the incarnation, the goal of the divine purpose. Among its original meanings, however, was that of distribution, organization, the arrangement of things in a regular order or taxis; and so it was extended to connote the distinction of Son and Spirit from the one Father as disclosed in the working out of God’s plan of redemption.
From the former approach, God is the Father of all things, ineffably one, and yet containing in Himself from all eternity His Word and His Wisdom. In making Himself known, however, or in exerting Himself for creation and redemption, God expresses or manifests these as the Son and the Spirit. Thus Irenaeus claimed that “by the very essence and nature of His being there is but one God”, while at the same time “according to the economy of our redemption there are both Father and Son” and, he could have added, “and Spirit”. He says elsewhere,
“Being altogether mind and altogether Word, God utters what He thinks and thinks what He utters. His thinking is His Word, and His Word is His intelligence, and the Father is that intelligence comprising all things” (Ad. Haer. 2,28,5; cf. ib. 1,12,2.). [1]
Or more briefly,
“Since God is rational [logikos], He created whatever was made by His Word [logos]” (Dem. 5; in the original there is a play on words.). [2]
Here we have the conception, put forth also by the Apologists, of the Logos or Word as God’s immanent rationality which He expresses in creation, etc. But unlike them, Irenaeus rejects the favorite analogy between God’s utterance of His Word and the declaration of human thought in speech on the ground that God is identical with His Word. In fact, taking his clue from Isa. 53:8 (LXX: “Who shall explain His generation?”), he repudiates all attempts to explore the process by which the Word was begotten. He emphasizes more than they the co-existence of the Word with the Father from all eternity. But when he sometimes speaks of the Son being always with the Father, he is not teaching the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son.
Irenaeus closely associated the Spirit with the Son, arguing that, if God was rational and therefore had His Logos, He was also spiritual and so had His Spirit. Here he is a follower of Theophilus rather than Justin, identifying the Spirit with the divine Wisdom, and thereby fortifying his doctrine that the Spirit is the third Person of the Godhead on secure Scriptural basis. Thus he says that “His Word and His Wisdom, His Son and His Spirit, are always with Him”, and that it was to them that God addressed the words, “Let us make man etc.” (Gen. 1:26). That “His Wisdom, i.e. the Spirit, was with Him before the world was made”, is proved by Solomon’s statements in Prov. 3:19 (“By Wisdom God established the earth”) and Prov. 8:22 ff. (“The Lord created me [wisdom] at the beginning of His way etc.”). Thus the Word and the Spirit collaborated in the work of creation, they being, as it were, God’s “hands”. This image is reminiscent of Job 10:8 (“Thy hands fashioned and made me altogether”), and Psa. 119:73 (“Thy hands have made me and fashioned me”), and was intended to bring out the indissoluble unity between the creative Father and the organs of His activity. It was the function of the Word to bring creatures into existence, and of the Spirit to order and adorn them. So he writes (Dem. 5),
“It is the Word Who establishes things, i.e. gives them body and bestows the reality of being upon them, and the Spirit Who gives order and form to these different powers”. [3]
Creation does not exhaust the functions of the Word and of the Spirit. It is by the Word, and the Word alone that the Father reveals Himself:
“He is ineffable, but the Word declares Him to us” (Ad. Haer. 4,6,3.) [4]; and “The Son reveals the knowledge of the Father through His own manifestation, for the Son’s manifestation is the making known of the Father”; and “What is invisible in the Son is the Father, and what is visible in the Father is the Son” (Ad. Haer. 4,6,3; 4,6,6.). [5]
The Johannine basis of this theology is apparent. In the incarnation the Word, hitherto Himself invisible to human eyes, became visible and disclosed for the first time that image of God in the likeness of which man was originally made. Now the role of the Spirit is also essential, for
“without the Spirit it is impossible to behold the Word of God … since the knowledge of the Father is the Son, and the knowledge of the Son of God can only be obtained through the Spirit; and according to the Father’s good pleasure the Son ministers and dispenses the Spirit to whomsoever the Father wills, and as He wills” (Dem. 7.). [6]
Also our sanctification is indeed wholly the work of the Spirit, for it is “the Spirit of the Father Which purifies a man and raises him to the life of God” [7]. Of course the Son is fully divine: “the Father is God, and the Son is God, for whatever is begotten of God is God” (Dem. 47.) [8]. The Spirit also, although Irenaeus nowhere expressly designates Him God, clearly ranked as divine in his eyes, for He was God’s Spirit, ever welling up from His being (Cf. Ad. Haer. 5,12,2.). Thus we have Irenaeus’s view of the Godhead, the most complete and the most explicitly Trinitarian to be met with before Tertullian. Its second-century traits stand out clearly, not of three coequal persons, but rather of a single personage, the Father Who is the Godhead Himself, with His mind, or rationality, and His wisdom. The purpose of this approach, common to all Christian thinkers of this period, was their overwhelming concern for its fundamental tenet of monotheism. But its unavoidable corollary was a certain obscuring of the position of the Son and of the Spirit as “Persons” (to use the terminology of the later theology), prior to their generation or procession. Because of the emphasis on the “economy”, this type of thought has been given the name “economic Trinitarianism”.
Economic Trinitarianism attempted to show how the Son and the Spirit, revealed in the “economy” as other than the Father, were at the same time inseparable one with Him in His eternal being. This view of the Triad as manifested in the creation and redemption continued to find exponents in the late second and early third centuries, among whom is Hippolytus and Tertullian. They stood more or less directly in the line of the Apologists and Irenaeus, and reflected their influence at many points. Hippolytus was the Roman anti-pope and martyr who died in A.D. 235, and Tertullian (c.160-c.220 A.D.) was the North African lawyer and outspoken Christian apologist. Like their predecessors, they both place great emphasis on monotheism, devoting their energies to the refutation of Gnostic dualism. While their ideas are in many respect similar, those of Hippolytus are sketchier and traditional; Tertullian’s brilliant mind was able to formulate a fuller statement of more lasting value. The clue to their teaching, as to that of Irenaeus, is to approach the doctrine of God simultaneously from two opposite directions. God was considered
(a) as He exists in His eternal being, and
(b) as He reveals Himself in the process of creation and redemption.
For the latter direction, they borrowed the comprehensive term “economy” (Greek, oikonomia) from Irenaeus [9]. According to the first approach, both Hippolytus and Tertullian had the conception of God existing in unique solitariness from all eternity, yet having His reason or Word (logos) immanent in and indivisibly one with Himself, on the analogy of the mental functions in a man. This is the Stoic doctrine of the Logos endiathetos (immanent reason); Hippolytus actually uses this technical term. For him, as for Tatian and Irenaeus, God’s Word and His Wisdom are distinguished, being in fact the Son and the Spirit regarded as immanent; but Tertullian follows the tradition which equates Wisdom with the Word. Hippolytus affirms that there is always a plurality in the Godhead, stating
“Though alone, He was multiple (monos on polus en), for He was not without His Word and His Wisdom, His Power and His Counsel”. [10]
Tertullian is more explicit, pointing out that
“before all things He was alone, however, in the sense that there was nothing external to Himself. But even then He was not really alone, for He had with Him that Reason which He possessed within Himself, that is to say, His own Reason.” [11]
Tertullian brings out more than any of his predecessors, the otherness or individuality of this immanent reason or Word. Just as the rationality in man, he explains, by means of which a man cogitates and plans, is somehow “another” (alius), or “a second” in himself, so it is with the divine Word, with which God has been ratiocinating from everlasting and which constitutes “a second in addition to Himself” (secundum a se).
According to the second approach, the threefoldness of God’s intrinsic being is manifested in creation and redemption. Hippolytus held that, when God willed, He engendered His Word, using Him to create the universe, and His Wisdom to adorn or order it. Later still, with the world’s salvation in view, God rendered the Word, hitherto invisible, become visible at the incarnation. Thus in the Godhead alongside the Father there was “another” (auto paristato heteros), a second “Person” (prosopon), with the Spirit completed the Triad. But if there are Three revealed in the economy, there is in fact only one God, since it is the Father Who commands, the Son Who obeys and the Spirit Who makes us understand. Hippolytus is most insistent on the essential unity, stating that there is only one Power, and that
“when I speak of ‘another’, I do not mean two Gods, but as it were light from light, water from its source, a ray from the sun.
For there is only one Power, that which issues from the All. The All is the Father, and the Power issuing from the All is the Word.
He is the Father’s mind. … Thus all things are through Him, but He alone is from the Father”. [12]
Hippolytus was reluctant to designate the Word as Son in any other than a proleptic sense until the incarnation. Tertullian followed the Apologists in dating the Son’s “perfect generation” from His emission or generation for the work of creation; prior to that moment God could not strictly be said to have had a Son, while after it the term “Father”, which for earlier theologians generally connoted God as author of reality, began to acquire the specialized meaning of Father of the Son. As so generated, the Word or Son is a “Person” (persona), “a second in addition to the Father” (secundum a patre). In the third place, however, there is the Spirit, the “representative” or “deputy” (vicaria viz) of the Son; He issues from the Father by way of the Son (a patre per filium), being “third from the Father and the Son, just as the fruit derived from the shoot is third from the root, and as the channel drawn off from the river is third from the spring, and as the light-point in the beam is third from the sun”. He also is a “Person”, so that the Godhead is a “trinity” (trinitas: Tertullian is the first to employ the word). The three are indeed numerically distinct, being “capable of being counted” (numerum … patiuntur). Thus Tertullian can state:
“We believe in one only God, yet subject to this dispensation, which is our word for economy, that the one only God has also a Son, His Word, Who has issued out of Himself … which Son then sent, according to His promise, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, out of the Father”. [13]
Later in the same context, he balanced the divine unity with “the mystery of the economy, which distributes the unity into Trinity, setting forth Father, Son and Spirit as three”. [14] Hippolytus and Tertullian agreed with Irenaeus in regarding the Three revealed in the economy as the manifestations of the plurality which they apprehended, however obscurely, in the immanent life of the Godhead. Where they went beyond Irenaeus was
(a) in their attempts to make explicit the oneness of the divine power or substance of which the Three were expressions or forms, and
(b) in their description of Them (in Hippolytus’ case, of the Father and the Son) as Persons (Greek, prosopa; Latin, personae).
This latter term, it should be noted, was still reserved for Them as manifested in the order of revelation; only later did it come to be applied to the Word and the Spirit as immanent in God’s eternal being. [15] Some have argued that for Tertullian, with his legal background, the word “substantia” signified a piece of property which several people could jointly own. But it is clear here that the metaphysical sense was foremost in his mind, and the word connoted the divine essence, that of which God is, with the emphasis on its concrete reality. As he remarks, “God is the name for the substance, that is, the divinity”; [16] and the Word, so far from being a mere notional nonentity, is “substantival”, “a substance composed of spirit and wisdom and reason”. [17] Hence when Tertulllian speaks of the Son as being “of one substance” with the Father, he means that They share the same divine nature or essence, and in fact, since the Godhead is indivisible, They are one identical being.
On the other hand, the Greek term prosopon and the Latin term persona were admirably suited to express the otherness, or independent subsistence, of the Three. Originally the terms meant “face”, and so “expression” and then “role”, the former came to signify “individual”, the stress being usually on the external aspect or objective presentation. The primary sense of persona was “mask” as worn by an actor in a play, from which it was an easy transition to the actor who wore it and then the character he played. In legal usage, it could stand for the holder of the title to a property, but as employed by Tertullian, the term connoted the concrete presentation of an individual as such.
In neither case, it should be noted, was the idea of self-consciousness at all prominent as is now usually associated with “person” and “personal”. [18]
The very success of the Economic Trinitarianism brought to the surface a powerful reaction in circles which attempted to minimize the Logos doctrine and suspected that the growing emphasis on the triplicity disclosed by revelation imperiled the doctrine of divine unity. This current of thought was chiefly evident in the West; it was called monarchianism because its adherents, as Tertullian put it, “took fright at the economy” and sought refuge in “the monarchy” (from the Greek, monarchia, “one principle”), that is, the axiom that there was one divine source and principle of all things. [19] In the closing decades of the second century, there emerged two forms of teaching that modern historians call by the common name of monarchianism, but are fundamentally different.
1. Dynamic monarchianism, more accurately called adoptionism, was a theory that Christ was a “mere man” (psilos anthropos; hence “psilanthropism”) upon whom God’s Spirit had descended and the Father had adopted as His Son. It was essentially a Christological heresy.
2. Modalistic monarchianism, which was alone designated in third century as monarchianism, was a theory of the Trinity that tended to blur the distinction between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, considering them as modes of God’s one being.
The classification of both of these as forms of monarchianism stems from the assumption that, despite their differences, they were united by a concern for the divine unity, or monarchia. This supposition goes back at least as far as Novatian (c. A.D. 250), who interpreted adoptionism and modalism as misguided attempts to salvage the Bible dogma that God is one. There is no evidence that any of the supporters of modalism also held to adoptionism.
Dynamic monarchianism was a relatively isolated phenomenion with a predominantly intellectual appeal, but the same cannot be said for modalistic monarchianism, which is usually called modalism. This was a fairly widespread, popular trend of thought which could be counted on for a measure of sympathy in official circles; and the driving-force behind it was the two-fold conviction, passionately held, of the oneness of God and the full deity of Christ. What forced it into the open was the mounting suspicion that the former of these truths was being endangered by the new Logos doctrine and by the efforts of theologians to represent the Godhead as having revealed Himself in the economy as tri-personal. Any suggestion that the Word or the Son was other than, or a distinct Person from, the Father seemed to the modalists to lead inescapable to the blasphemy of two Gods (ditheism). As early as Justin Martyr, we read (Dial. 128.3 f.) of objections to Justin’s teaching that the Logos was “something numerically other” (arithmo heteron ti) than the Father. His critics argued that the Power issuing from the Godhead was distinct verbally or in name only, being a projection of the Father Himself. The first theologian to state formally the modalist position was Noetus of Smyrna, who was twice summoned before the presbyters of that city in the closing years of the second century. Our chief authorities for his teaching are his contemporary, Hippolytus, and the fourth-century Epiphanius.
According to them, Noetus chief point was the vigorous affirmation that there was only one God, the Father. As a corollary, he also held to patripassianism, the idea that it was the Father Who suffered and underwent Christ’s other human experiences. He argued that if Christ was God, as Christian faith took for granted, then Christ must be identical with the Father; otherwise He could not be God. Consequently, if Christ suffered, the Father suffered, since there could be no division in the Godhead. To his accusers, Noetus retorted, “What wrong have I done, glorifying one only God, Christ, who was born, suffered and died?” For Scriptural support, his followers appealed to such texts as Isa. 44:6, which proclaimed the uniqueness of God, and John 10:30, 14:8-10 and Rom. 9:5, which seemed to point to the identity of the Father and the Son. They also rejected the Logos doctrine, arguing that the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel must be interpreted allegorically. When Noetius was condemned, being confronted by the presbyters with the Church’s rule of faith, his disciple, Epigonus, came to Rome, where he started a school and found an apt pupil in one Cleomens during Zephyrinus’ pontificate (192-217 A.D.). Summarizing the position of the school, Hippolytus reports that they believed in one identical Godhead Which could be designated indifferently Father or Son; the terms did not stand for real distinctions, but were mere names applicable at different times. Indeed, the Godhead was like the universal monad postulated by the ancient philosopher Heracleitus (c. 502 B.C.), which comprised in the monad itself contradictory qualities, being at once divisible and indivisible, created and uncreated, mortal and immortal, etc.
This is precisely the position, supported with the same texts, that Tertullian combats in his Adversus Praxeam, written about A.D. 213. Who Praxeas was is unknown; the name “Praxeas” may be a nickname, meaning “busybody”. Some have identified him with Noetus or Epigonus, or even with Pope Callistus. Whoever he was, he seems to have taught that the Father and Son were one identical Being (duos unum volunt esse, ut idem pater et filius habecatur), the Word having no independent subsistence and being a mere voice and sound (vox et sonus oris), and that consequently it was the Father Himself Who entered the Virgin’s womb, so becoming, as it were, His own Son, and Who suffered, died and rose again. Thus this unique Being united in Himself mutually inconsistent attributes, being invisible and then visible, impassible and then passible. Yet Praxeas and his associates came ultimately to recognize a duality in the Lord, in the sense that the man Jesus was the Son, while the Christ, that is, the divine element (spiritum, id est deum) was properly the Father. From this it was easy step to the formula which excite both indignation and derision, “So, while the Son Who suffers, the Father co-suffers” (compatitur). Thus modalism held that the Son and Holy Spirit are revelatory and temporal modes of God the Father’s self-revelation. Tertullian sneered that Praxeas by his teaching had “put the Holy Spirit to flight and crucified the Father”.
The simple form of the earlier modalism is evident but it was soon given a more systematic, philosophical form by Sabellius, who was born in Libya and came to Rome towards the end of Zephyrinus’ reign (192-217 A.D), was fiercely attacked by Hippolytus and, after enjoying confidence of Pope Callistus (217-222 A.D.), was eventually excommunicated by him. This later, more sophisticated modalism, called after its author as Sabellianism, tried to meet some the objections to which the earlier form was exposed. Sabellius, we are told by Epiphanius, regarded the Godhead as a monad (his name for it was huiopator) which expressed itself in three operations. He used the analogy of the sun, a single object which radiates both warmth and light; the Father was, as it were, the form or essence, and the Son and the Spirit His modes of self-expression or “dilation” (platusmos) of the divine monad, the Father by process of development projecting Himself first as Son and then as Spirit. Thus the one Godhead regarded as creator and law-giver was Father; for redemption the Godhead was projected like a ray of the sun as the Son, and was then withdrawn; then, thirdly, the same Godhead operated as Spirit to inspire and to bestow grace. Concepts like these suggest that Sabellius was aware of the difficulties inherent in the simpler modalism of his predecessors, and was prepared to use features borrowed from the economic Trinitarianism of their critics. Part of his motive may have been to explain the government of the universe when the Godhead appeared as the Son, and also to obviate the charge of patripassianism. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure of all of the details of Sabellius’ position. One point that seems sure is that the traditional charge that he spoke of the Father, Son and Spirit as three prosopa, in the sense of masks or outward appearances, is erroneous. The term prosopon, as we noticed above, was used by Hippolytus to signify the otherness, or separate subsistence, of the Son from the Father, as revealed in the economy, and it is most unlikely that Sabellius used it with a diametrically opposite meaning. Indeed, Hippolytus clearly implies that for Callistus, whom he regarded as a Sabellian, the Godhead was but a single prosopon, that is, an individual or Person.
The rise of modalism was largely concentrated in the West and at Rome. Yet none of the individuals concerned with it had the standing of an official spokesman. Hippolytus and Tertullian might be described as laymen, while most of the leading modalists were condemned as heretics. It might well be asked what was the attitude of official circles in the Roman church about modalism. In the initial stage modalism was clearly being accepted. This comes out in the attitude of Popes Zephyrinus (198-217 A.D.) and Callistus (217-222 A.D.), both of whom sympathized with the widespread popular reaction against the views of Hippolytus and Tertullian, which they regarded as leading to ditheism, the belief in two Gods. Hippolytus, for his part, considered Zephyrinus an out-and-out modalist, the patron of Cleomenes and the school which collected around him. He described him as “an ignorant and uncultured man”. Hippolytus’ estimate of Callistus was similar. He describes him as a dupe of Sabellius. Some have questioned whether these are unbiased interpretations of their positions. Their statements seem to suggest that while sympathies lay with modalism, they were aware of its difficulties, and were struggling to develop a compromise approach to the problem which, while taking into account the real distinction between the Father and the Word, would stress the truth that even so They were manifestations of one divine spirit and thus avoid the dangers (as they conceived them) inherent in any doctrine of two or three “Persons”. Zephyrinus and Callistus were thus conservatives holding to a monarchian tradition which antedated the whole movement of thought inaugurated by the Apologists.
But very soon, without abating its monarchian bias, the Roman theology was to assimilate all the main features of Tertullian’s doctrine of the Trinity, and even to deepen it in certain respects. This can be seen in the treatise De Trinitas of the Roman theologian Novatian, written about A.D. 250. According to this treatise, the one and only Godhead is the Father, the author of all reality; but out of Him “when He willed, there has been generated a Son, His Word”. This Word is no verbal nonentity (non in sono percussi… aeris agnoscitur), as modalism alleged, but has a subsistence of His own (in substantia… agnoscitur), being a “second Person”. Two points in particular should be noted here.
1. First, Novtian does not tie the generation of the Son to creation, but argues that it is pre-temporal; since the Father is always Father, He must always have had a Son.
2. Secondly, he stresses the community of being between Father and Son. The Son is God inasmuch as He derives His being from the Father, and the Godhead has been transmitted by the Father to Him; there is a communio substaniae between Them.
At the same time, being even more determined to exclude ditheism than to exclude modalism, Novatian endeavors to show that his teaching does not imply a duality of Gods. The deity bestowed by the Father on the Son forever reverts to the Father; and the Son, though a persona secunda post patrem, is only such as Son. Had He been ingenerate or without origin, there would doubtless have been two divine principles; but since He is only other than the Father as Son and owes His being wholly to the Father, there is no division of the divine nature.
Much of Novatian’s language about the Son is strongly subordinationist; the Son is “subject to the Father”, “less than the Father”, and showed Himself “obedient to His Father”. Norvatian makes it plain that this subordination springs from the fact that the Son is by nature derivative, owing His origin to the Father; and we must remember that for Norvatian the word “Father” retains its old meaning connoting the unique Godhead Which is source of all reality. Where he makes an advance on Tertullian, and all previous theologians, it is in his acknowledgment that the Son’s distinction from the Father as a Person is no mere by-product of the “economy”, but belongs to the pre-temporal life of the Godhead. He admits that the Father, as Father, necessarily “precedes” the Son, and that before the Son was “alongside the Father” (cum patre) as a Person, He was “immanent in the Father” (in patre); but the priority implied here seems to be a logical rather than a real one, since he is insistent that the Father always had the Son. While he is far from clearly formulating a doctrine of eternal generation, he is quite explicit in saying that the Son “received the beginning of His generation before all time”, and that when He proceeded from the Father in that act of generation, He was a “substance” or Person; Christ “existed substantially (in substantia, that is, as a Person) before the foundation of the world”.
Novatian’s doctrine of the Spirit is elementary. He regards the Spirit as the divine power which works in the prophets, the apostles and the Church, inspiring and sanctifying; but he makes no mention of His subsistence as a Person.
At the same time that monarchianism was developing in the West, a diametrically opposite movement was under way in the East. This took the form of a frankly pluralistic conception of the Deity which tried, without sacrificing the basic tenet of monotheism, to do justice to the reality and distinction of the Three within God’s eternal being – in other words, to Their subsistence as “Persons”. This new approach, though at first associated with the catechetical school at Alexandria, was destined to make a permanent impression on Greek Trinitarianism as a whole, and on Christian thought generally. The two thinkers responsible for it were Clement of Alexandria (c.150-215 A.D.) and Origen (c.185-c.254 A.D.). Both were profoundly influenced, in their attempts to understand and expound the triune Godhead by the revived, or “middle” Platonism fashionable at this time in Alexandria. Origen was a contemporary of Plotinus (205-270 A.D.), the founder of Neo-Platonism, and had studied along with Plotinus under the middle Platonist philosopher Ammonius Saccas (c.175-c.242 A.D.).
Clement of Alexandria was a moralist rather than a systematic theologian. For him, God is absolutely transcendent, ineffable and incomprehensible; God is “unity, but beyond unity, and transcending the monad”, and yet somehow embracing all reality. This is the Father; and He can be known only through His Word, or Son, Who is His image and inseparable from Him, His mind or rationality. Like the Nous of Middle Platonism and of Neo-Platonism, the Word is once unity and plurality, comprising in Himself the Father’s ideas, and also the active forces by which He animates the world of creatures. His generation from the Father is without beginning (“the Father is not without His Son; for along with being Father, He is Father of the Son”); and He is essentially one with Him, since the Father is in Him and He in the Father. The Spirit is the light issuing from the Word which, divided without any real division, illuminates the faithful; He is also the power of the Word which pervades the world and attracts men to God. Thus we have a Trinity which, though in all its formulation is Platonic, Clement unhesitatingly identifies with Christian doctrine of God. As he writes,
“O wondrous mystery One is the Father of the universe, and one also the Word of the universe; the Holy Spirit, again, is one and everywhere the same.” [20]
He clearly distinguishes the Three, and the charge of modalism, based upon his lack of any technical term to designate Persons, is groundless; and if he appears to subordinate the Son to the Father and the Spirit to the Son, this subordination implies no inequaity of being, but is the corollary of his Middle Platonic conception of a graded hierarchy.
Origen was the most prolific and learned of all Christian writers before the Council of Nicaea, and there is no doubt that he had every intention of being and remaining an Orthodox Christian, but his desire to reconcile the Platonic philosophy with Christianity and his use of allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures led him into some heterodox opinions. Thus, under the influence of Neo-Platonism, he held that God, Who is purely spiritual, the monas [only one] or henas [single one], and who transcends truth and reason, essence and being (in his book against the pagan philosopher Celsus he says, following the mind of Plato, that God epekeinas nou kai ousias [beyond mind and being]), created the world from eternity and by necessity of His Nature. God, Who is goodness, could never have been “inactive”, since goodness always tends to self-communication, self-diffusion. Moreover, if God had created the world in time, if there was ever a “time” when the world was not, God’s immutability would be impaired, which is an impossibility. Both of these reasons are formulated in dependence on Neo-Platonism.
Accordingly, Origen’s Trinitarianism was a brilliant reinterpretation of the traditional triadic rule of faith in terms of the same Middle Platonism. At the apex of his system, as the source and goal of all beings, transcending mind and being itself, he placed God the Father, “altogether Monad, and indeed, if I may so express it, Henad”. He alone is God in the strict sense (autotheos), being alone “ingenerate” (agennatos); and it is significant that Christ spoke of Him (John 17:3) as “the only true God”. Being perfect goodness and power, He must always have had objects on which to exercise them; hence He has brought into existence a world of spiritual beings, or souls, coeternal with Himself. To mediate, however, between His absolute unity and their multiplicity, He has His Son, His express image, the meeting place of a plurality of “aspects” (epinoiai; these represent the Ideas of Platonism proper) which explain His twofold relationship to the Father and the world. These aspects stand for the manifold characters which the World presents either in His eternal being (for example, Wisdom, Truth, Life) or as incarnate (for example, Healer, Door, Resurrection). Being outside the category of time, the Father begets the Son by an eternal act (aei genna auton), so that it cannot be said that “there was when He was not”; further, the Son is God, though His deity is derivative and He is thus a “secondary God” (deuteros theos). The generation of the Son is the result of His contemplation of the Father. And there is the Holy Spirit, “the most honorable of all the beings brought into existence through the Word, the chief in rank of all the beings originated by the Father through Christ”. Here Origen realizes that Christianity parts company with Greek philosophy, relying on revelation alone.
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are, Origen states, “three Subsistents” (hupostaseis). This affirmation that each of the Three is a distinct hypostasis from all eternity, not just (as for Hippolytus and Tertullian) as manifested in the “economy”, is one of the chief characteristics of his doctrine and stems directly from the idea of eternal generation. Origen gives to the word “hypostasis” the meaning of individual subsistence, and so individual existent. The error of modalism, Origen contends, lies in treating the Three as numerically indistinguishable (me diapherein to arithmo), separable only in thought, “one not only in essence but also in subsistence” (hen ou monon ousia alla kai hupokeimeno). The true teaching, on his view, is that the Son is “other in subsistence than the Father” (heteros kath’ hupokeimenon), or even that the Father and the Son “are two things in respect of Their Persons, but one in unanimity, harmony and identity of will”. Thus, while distinct, the Three are from another point of view one; as he expresses it, “we are not afraid to speak in one sense of two Gods, in another sense of one God”.
As seen from the passage just quoted above, Origen sometimes presents the relationship of the Father and the Son as a moral union; their wills are virtually identical. Elsewhere he argues that the Father and Son are one God in much the same way as man and wife form one flesh, and the righteous man and Christ are one spirit. But the Son is the Father’s image, the reflection of His glory. These ideas hardly get to the heart of his teaching which is that the Son has been begotten, not created, by the Father. He is obviously referring to Col. 1:15 (“First-begotten of all creation”). As the Father’s offspring, the Son is eternally poured forth out of the Father’s being and so participates in His Godhead. The Son issues from the Father as the will from the mind, which suffers no division in the process. According to Wis. 7:25,
He is “a breath of the power of God, a pure effluence of the glory of the Almighty”; Origen points out that “both these illustrations suggest a community of substance between Father and Son. For an effluence would appear to be homoousios, i.e. of one substance with, that body of which it is an effluence or vapor”. The unity between Father and Son corresponds to that between light and its brightness, water and the steam which rises from it. Different in form, both share the same essential nature; and if, in the strictest sense, the Father alone is God, that is not because the Son is not also God or does not possess the Godhead, but because, as Son, He possesses it by participation or derivatively. About the Spirit, Origen says,
“He supplies those who, because of Him and their participation in Him, are called sanctified with the matter, if I may so describe it, of their graces. This same matter of graces is effected by God, is ministered by Christ, and achieves individual subsistence (huphestoses) as the Holy Spirit.” [21]
Thus the ultimate ground of the being of Holy Spirit is the Father, but it is mediated to the Holy Spirit by the Son, from Whom also the Holy Spirit derives all His distinctive attributes. It is not altogether fair to conclude from these statements, as some have done, that Origen teaches not a Trinity but a triad of disparate beings, a tritheism, three Gods. But his Trinitarianism does have a strong pluralistic strain. The Three, on his analysis, are eternally and really distinct; They are separate hypostases or even, in his crude-sounding language, “things”. But he attempts to meet the most stringent demands of monotheism by insisting that the fullness of unoriginate Godhead is concentrated in the Father, Who alone is “the fountain-head of deity” (pege tes theotetos). The Son and the Spirit are divine, but the Godhead which They possess, and which constitutes Their essence, wells up from and is derived from the Father’s being. This vision of “the adorable, everlasting Triad”, of which Origen detected an anticipation in the thrice-repeated “holy” of Isaiah’s seraphim (Isa. 6:23), was to inspire generations of later Greek theologians. But as it was formulated by Origen, the underlying structure of his thought is unmistakably borrowed from contemporary Platonism. This is clearly seen in not only in his conception of the whole world of spiritual beings (what he called logikoi or noes) as being coeternal with the Father, but in the thoroughgoing subordinationism which is integral to Origen’s Trinitarian scheme. The Father, as we have already seen, is alone God Himself, (autotheos); so the Apostle John in his gospel (1:1), Origen points out, accurately describes the Word simply as theos, not ho theos. In relationship to the God of the universe, the Son has a secondary degree of honor; for He is not absolute goodness and truth, but His goodness and truth are a reflection and image of the Father’s. The same is true of His activity; the Son is the Father’s agent (huperetes) carrying out His commands, as in the case of creation.
For this reason, he concludes that “we should not pray to any generate being, not even to Christ, but only to the God and Father of the universe, to Whom our Savior Himself prayed”; if prayer is offered to Christ, it is conveyed by Him to the Father. Indeed, the Son and the Spirit are transcended by the Father just as much as, if not more than, They Themselves transcend the realm of inferior beings; and if sometimes Origen’s language seems to contradict this, suggesting that the Son is God from the beginning, the very Word, absolute Wisdom and truth, the explanation is that He may appear such to creatures, but from the viewpoint of the ineffable Godhead He is the first in the chain of emanations. This conception of a descending hierarchy, itself the product of his Platonic background, is epitomized in the statement that, whereas the Father’s action extends to all reality, the Son’s is limited to rational beings, and the Spirit’s to those who are being sanctified.
One of best-known exponents of Origen’s subordinationist strain was his pupil Dionysius (died about A.D. 264), bishop of Alexandria. After having been a student of Origen, he became head of the famous Alexandrian Catechetical School for about fourteen years. In A.D. 247, he was elected bishop of Alexandria. During the Decian persecution, he was arrested but managed to escape to the Libyan desert, where he remained until the death of Decius. On his return he was faced with the problem of how to treat those church members who had apostatized, He advocated lenient treatment of them. He also sought to mediate in the heated dispute over heretical baptism between Cyprian and Pope Stephen. In the persecution under Valerian (257-258 A.D.), he was again banished, but returned to his church in A.D. 260. During his last years, he was much involved in combating Sabellianism. In the late fifties of the third century, he set forth what he considered to be the orthodox position when an outbreak of Sabellianism occurred in the Libyan Pentapolis, which fell under his jurisdiction. Since the rebuttal of modalism was his object, he unusually pushed the personal distinction between Father and Son into the foreground of his presentation; and the Sabellian group was able to find at least one of his letters, address to bishops Ammonius and Euphranor, full of doctrinal indiscretions. The Sabellians made a formal complaint to the Roman pope, who was also named Dionysius (died about A.D. 269), and accused the Alexandrian bishop,
- (a) of making a sharp division, amounting to separation, between Father and Son;
- (b) of denying the Son’s eternity, and stating that the Father had not always been Father and that “the Son was not before He came into existence”;
- (c) of naming the Father without the Son and the Son without the Father, as if They were not inseparable in Their very being;
- (d) of failing to describe the Son as homoousios with the Father; and
- (e) of stating that the Son was a creature (poiema kai geneton), just as much different from the Father in substance (xenon kat’ ousian) as a vine from its vinedresser, as a boat from the shipwright who made it, etc.
- (a) of making a sharp division, amounting to separation, between Father and Son;
There is little doubt that bishop Dionysius had used language unfortunate in itself and in its implications. In the following century Athanasius tried to clear him of the charges, but Basil’s judgment was nearer the truth when he remarked that Dionysius’ anti-Sabellian zeal had carried him to the opposite extreme. Pope Dionysius of Rome issued a concise document which, without mentioning his name, criticized bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, and then went on to expound a positive theology which shows how powerful was the influence of Novatian at Rome. The pope was clearly shocked by the Origen-inspired doctrine of three hypostases, which seemed to him to undermine the divine monarchy or oneness. Those Alexandrian theologians who taught it were, he implied, virtual tritheists, splitting the indivisible oneness of the Deity into “three powers, three absolutely separate hypostases, three divinities”. At all costs, the indivisibility of the holy Monad must be maintained; the Word and the Spirit must therefore be regarded as inseparable from the God of the universe, and must be summed up and gathered to Him. This is the old idea that the Almighty Father (in the old sense of the unique Godhead) can never have been without His Word and His Spirit since They belong to His very being. In harmony with this, the pope argued, if Christ is in the Father (cf. John 14:11), if He is His Word, Wisdom and Power (cf. I Cor. 1:24), then He must always have existed, and it is blasphemous to speak of Him as a creature or to say that there was when He was not.
According to Psa. 109:3 (LXX: “Before the dawn, I begat thee out of my belly”), and Prov. 8:25 (“Before all the hills, he begets me”), the pope continued, His origin was not act of creation, but “a divine and ineffable generation”. In a separate letter, the pope invited his namesake to explain himself, which he did to the pope’s satisfaction.
Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria made an elaborate reply in a letter to pope Dionysius of Rome, in which he restated his position in less equivocal, more cautious terms, although without surrendering any of its essential features. He freely acknowledged the impropriety of some of expressions and analogies, but complained that his teaching had not been judged as a whole; and he skillfully adopted the pope’s language in reformulating his own doctrine.
- First, he repudiated the charge of separating Father, Son, and Spirit. The Three are obviously inseparable, as is demonstrated by Their very titles: a Father implies a Son, a Son implies a Father, and Spirit implies both the source from which and the medium by which it proceeds forth. Even so, his definition of Them as “three hypostases” must be retained, inasmuch as They are three, unless the Triad is to be dissolved.
- Secondly, he affirmed unambiguously that the Son is eternal. God was always Father, and therefore Christ was always Son, just as if the sun were eternal the daylight would also be everlasting; the one cannot be conceived without the other.
- Thirdly, dealing with the allegation that he had not employed homoousios, he pointed out that the term was non-Scriptural. Nevertheless he accepted its meaning, as the figures he had chosen proved. Parents and children, for example, are different people, but are “homogenous” (homegeneis); the plant and its seed or root are different, yet of the same nature (homphue). So the river and its source are different in form and name, but consist of the self-same water. He evidently interpreted homoousios as meaning “sharing the same nature”, in the generic sense, as Origen himself may well have done. His whole object, it would appear, was to correct the false impression, as he judged it, that his doctrine of three hypostases excluded the essential unity of the Three.
- First, he repudiated the charge of separating Father, Son, and Spirit. The Three are obviously inseparable, as is demonstrated by Their very titles: a Father implies a Son, a Son implies a Father, and Spirit implies both the source from which and the medium by which it proceeds forth. Even so, his definition of Them as “three hypostases” must be retained, inasmuch as They are three, unless the Triad is to be dissolved.
Dionysius of Alexandria summarized his position in the balanced formula: “We both expand the Monad into the Triad without dividing It.”
Thus he concedes to his Roman colleague that the Son and Spirit are, as it were, projections of the indivisible divine essence – “and again we sum up the Triad in the Monad without subtracting from It” – that is, the oneness must be acknowledged, but not at the cost of failing to recognize the three Persons.
This incident was more than a mere misunderstanding over terminology. And to a certain extent it was that. For example, the Roman pope inferred, on sound etymological grounds, that the Latin equivalent of hupostasis was substantia, which he had learned from Tertullian, signified, when applied to God, the indivisible concrete reality of the Godhead. Thus God is one substance. To Tertullian substantia (and hupostasis) refers to an objective reality which can be perceived by the intellect. When Tertullian thought about God, he thought of the One being, and therefore, for him, this objective reality was singular. Hence, the pope was shocked when he heard his namesake say that the Godhead was three hypostases, which he concluded meant three Gods, tritheism. Western Trinitarianism, as we noticed above, had long been marked by a monarchian bias. What was clear to the theologians representing it was the divine unity; so mysterious did they find the distinctions within that unity that, though fully convinced of their reality, they were only beginning in the third century, haltingly and timidly at first, to think of Them as “Persons”. In the East, where the intellectual climate was impregnated with Neo-Platonic ideas about the hierarchy of being, an altogether different, confessedly pluralistic approach to understanding the Godhead, had established itself. When Origen thought of God, he saw three Beings, each of whom shared the same nature (homoousia). Thus, for him, the objective reality was threefold. When the Greek-speaking followers of Origen heard about Tertullian’s theology, they were scandalized. And to make matters even worse, when they discovered that the threefold element in God was designated by the Latin term persona, a word whose natural Greek equivalent was prosopon (mask), they understood this to mean that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were no more than symbolic names for the different roles that one God would play in his different activities. Thus instead of three persons, they took it to mean that there was one being who changed masks according to the role that was being played as God was acting as creator, as redeemer or as sanctifier. This notion is not fantasy; it was apparently the view held by Sabellius, who was accused, among other things, of saying that the Father had died on the cross! Tertullian would certainly never have accepted this; in fact his main work on the Trinity was directed against Praxeas who said the same thing as Sabellius. The incident was more than a misunderstanding over words; the disagreement was at its bottom theological and philosophical, about the nature of divine reality, and was destined to manifest itself again in the following century.