From
"The Christian Orthodox Teachings on the True Faith and Its Application to Life"
Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave
Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave
"The Mystery of the Holy Trinity"
Edited by Archimandrite Panteleimon 1954
The concept of God’s oneness and of His immense greatness does not represent fully the Christian teachings about God. Christian faith reveals to us the deepest mystery of the Divinity’s inner life. It represents God as One in Essence but existing in Three Persons.
The truth that God is One and yet Three, distinguishes Christianity from other religions. Not only do the natural religions not know this truth, but also a clear, straightforward revelation of it is absent even in the divinely revealed teaching of the Old Testament. There we have some beginnings, some symbolic, veiled hints, which can be understood in their entire fullness only in the light of the New Testament, which reveals the teaching on the triune God with absolute clarity. Thus, for instance, in the Old Testament there are some statements which testify to the plurality of Persons in the Divinity: “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen 1:26). “Behold, the man has become like one of Us” (Gen 3:22). “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language” (Gen 11:7). There are also some events which hint at the Trinity of Persons in God. Among them are the appearance of God to Abraham in the guise of three wayfarers (Gen 18) and the song of the seraphim, heard by the Prophet Isaiah (Isa 6:3). Finally, we can see how the separate Persons are pointed to in the statements about the Angel of the Lord or the Angel of the Covenant, about the Word and the Wisdom of God, the Spirit of the Lord, and so on.
The dogma of the Trinity, while it is the distinguishing mark of Christianity, serves at the same time as the foundation on which the entire content of Christ’s teachings rests. All the joyful, redeeming truths of Christianity—dealing with the redemption, sanctification, and beatitude of man—can be accepted only when we have come to believe in God as Three Persons, for all these great benefits have been granted to us by the common, combined action of the divine Persons. “The totality of our teaching is simple and brief,” states St Gregory the Theologian. “It is like the inscription on a column, obvious to everyone. These people are wholehearted worshippers of the Trinity!”
It is because of the great importance and the meaning, central to everything else, of the dogma of the Holy Trinity that the Church has always exhibited a pious zeal, a far-seeing watchfulness, a never-wearying care, and an intense effort of thought in keeping this dogma safe and defending it from various heretics.
The Church has given the most precise definition of this dogma, based on St. John 15:26: “God, Single in Essence, is Triple in Persons: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Trinity single and indivisible.” In these few words is expressed the essence of the Christian teaching on the Holy Trinity. But despite this obvious brevity and lack of complexity, the dogma of the Trinity is, nonetheless, one of the very deepest, unfathomable, and inexhaustible mysteries of divine revelation. No matter how much we may strain our reason, we are completely incapable of clarifying to ourselves how three independent divine Persons (not three powers, qualities, or manifestations) of a totally equal Divinity can together form a single, indivisible Being.
The great fathers and teachers of the Church have on many occasions approached this immeasurably deep and elevated truth with their divinely illumined thought. In their attempts to clarify it, to bring it closer to the understanding of our limited reason, they took recourse to different comparisons, taking these now from the phenomena of nature that surround us, now from the spiritual life of man. Some of the comparisons employed are sun, light, warmth (hence the expression “Light of Light,” in the Creed); spring, fountain, stream; root, stem, branch; and reason, heart, will. The teacher of the Slavs, St Cyril, the Equal of the Apostles, in a conversation with Muslim Saracens, talked about the Holy Trinity as follows. He pointed to the sun and said, “Do you see the shining orb in the sky, and the light born of it and the warmth that proceeds from it? God the Father is like the orb of the sun; He has no beginning and is endless. From Him, outside of time, the Son is born, like the light that comes from the sun; and also from Him, the Father, there proceeds the Holy Spirit, as warmth issues from the sun, together with its light. Everyone distinguishes the disc of the sun, its light, and its warmth; but there is still only one sun in the sky. Such is the Holy Trinity: in It there are Three Persons, but God is One and indivisible.”
All these and other comparisons facilitate, to some extent, grasping the mystery of the Trinity. Still, they are only very feeble indications of the Supreme Being’s nature. They leave in us a sense of insufficiency, a lack of correspondence with the elevated subject, for the clarification of which they are employed. They are unable to remove from the teaching on the Trinity that veil of unattainability, of mystery, which envelops it and hides it from man’s reason. In connection with this, there is a very instructive tale about the great Western teacher of the Church, the blessed Augustine. When he was once deep in thought on the mystery of the Trinity and was considering a plan for a written discussion of this dogma, he went to the seashore. There he saw a boy playing in the sand and digging a hole in it. When Augustine asked him what he was doing, the boy replied, “I wish to pour the sea into this little hole.” Then Augustine said to himself, “Am I not doing the same as this child when I attempt to exhaust with my thoughts the sea of God’s infinity and to gather it into the finite limits of my spirit?” Augustine—that great teacher to the whole world who, for his ability to penetrate with his thought the deepest mysteries of the faith, was honored by the Church with the name of the Theologian, and who wrote about himself that he used to speak about the Trinity more often than he used to breathe—also admitted the insufficiency of all comparisons that are directed toward understanding the dogma of the Trinity. “No matter what I contemplated with my reason, no matter what I was eager to know,” he says, “no matter what I used for the enrichment of my mind, or where I searched for a likeness, I did not find anything on earth that could be used for a comparison with the essence of God.”
Consequently, the dogma on the Holy Trinity is the deepest, the most unattainable mystery of the faith. Vain are all efforts to render it completely understandable by our limited reason, to bring it within the boundaries of our thought. “Here is the boundary,” remarks St Athanasius the Great, “of that which the cherubim cover and shield with their wings.”
Nonetheless, despite its remoteness and unattainability, despite its seeming dryness and abstractness, this dogma gives the fullest satisfaction to the thought of the faithful; brings peace and comfort to the heart; and has great importance for our lives, for it can become a force which renews a man and makes him reborn. The teachings on the Holy Trinity elevate and purify the very idea of monotheism, put it on a firm foundation, and remove those important yet insurmountable difficulties which of necessity arose in man’s thoughts in earlier times.
Some thinkers of pre-Christian antiquity, while they rose to the concept of a single Supreme Being, still were unable to solve a question: in what ways are the life and activity of this Being manifested when He is considered by Himself, apart from His relation to the world? Consequently, the Deity was regarded by them as either the same as the world (pantheism); or appeared to be lifeless, locked in itself, a motionless, self-centered principle (deism); or, again, turned into a terrifying, inscrutable fate that ruled over all (fatalism). Christianity, through the dogma of the Trinity, revealed that in the tri-personal Being of God, apart from His relation to the world, there continues a timeless and endless fullness of internal, mysterious life.
As an ancient teacher of the Church, Peter Chrysologos, puts it, God is “alone but not lonely.” In Him there are several Persons that ceaselessly are in unbroken communion with one another: “God the Father is not born and does not proceed from another Person; the Son of God is eternally born from the Father; the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father.” The inner, concealed life of the Divinity has ever consisted in this interrelationship of the divine Persons, but before the coming of Christ it was hidden by an impenetrable veil.
Through the mystery of the Trinity, Christianity has taught man not only to revere God and to be full of awe before Him, but also to love Him. Through nothing other than this mystery, it has brought into the world the elevated and meaningful idea, joyful to every soul, that God is the limitless and most perfect Love. For this very reason, the severe, dry monotheism of other religious teachings, because it does not rise to the revealed idea of the divine Trinity, cannot give rise to a true concept of love as the predominant quality of the Divinity. Love by its nature is inconceivable without an attendant concept of a union, a communion. If God exists in one person, in relation to whom could His love be revealed? To the world? But the world is not eternal like God. The world did not exist always; it appeared in time. In what way, then, could divine love manifest itself in the eternity before the creation of the world? Moreover, the world is limited, and God’s love could not, in reference to it, be revealed in its infinity. The highest degree of love, in order to manifest itself completely, needs the highest possible object. But where is it? Only the mystery of the triune God solves all these difficulties. It reveals that God’s Love was never inactive and unmanifested: the Persons of the Holy Trinity have always been in a ceaseless state of communion and love with one another. “The Father loves the Son” (John 5:20), and the Father calls Him “beloved” (Matt 3:17). The Son says about Himself, “I love the Father.” There is great truth in the brief but expressive words of the blessed Augustine: “The mystery of the Christian Trinity is the mystery of the Divine Love. If you see love, you see the Trinity.” Founded on the dogma of the Holy Trinity is the teaching about God as Love. On this dogma there rests also the entire moral teaching of Christianity, for its essence also consists of the commandment of love. If we did not confess to a belief in the Holy Trinity, we would have neither the Church, which educates us for heaven, nor the sacraments, by means of which the Church sanctifies, strengthens, and leads us into the land of eternal life. The last judgment, the resurrection of the dead, the recompense in the future life to each man for his deeds—all these would be but empty words for us, were it not for the teaching on the Holy Trinity. All these ideas must be admitted only if we believe in God the Father, Who is eternal love and truth; in God the Son, the Redeemer of men; and in God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier and Comforter of the faithful. So very important is this teaching. At the same time, it is also most incomprehensible. Only because of His compassion for our weakness did God vouchsafe to reveal the mystery of the Holy Trinity to us, under the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, we must not understand these names (that is, those of Father and Son) in the same sense as we understand them when they refer to people. Thus the Son of God is also called the Word of God and His Wisdom; but we cannot say this of people. As for understanding how it can be that there are Three Persons in One God, how it can be that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God—this is beyond any comprehension. The Trinity of the Persons is the greatest mystery, hidden even from the many-eyed cherubim, who ceaselessly penetrate the unattainable light of the Deity and draw thence for themselves knowledge and blessedness of every kind. “But where there is a mystery, the reason calls on faith” (Chrysostomos, Horn, 54).
Thus, brethren, our reason must of necessity humble itself and be silent before the mystery of God’s Three Persons and, feeling its own inability to comprehend it, must call faith to its aid. With the assistance of divine revelation, our reason is indeed able to dwell on several truths: that there is a God, the Creator and Supporter of heaven and earth; and that God is One; and our reason can attain to the idea of the necessity of God’s existence and the necessity of His oneness, since God is completely perfect and limitless; for our reason cannot imagine two completely perfect, limitless, or unlimited beings. But even in the light of divine teachings, our reason cannot entirely comprehend the thought that God, single in Essence, is yet triple in Persons. This teaching we must accept on faith [and the warmth it grants the believer], and in that faith reverently worship the Holy Trinity, the One God in Three Persons, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Orthodox Church teaches thus: “God is One in Essence but Three in Persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Trinity One and indivisible.” The divine Essence is not divided, the divine Persons do not merge. The divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is One; therefore all divine perfections equally belong to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is true God, and the Son is true God, and the Holy Spirit is true God; and in the three Hypostases or Persons, there is only One Three-Personed God. The Hypostases or Persons of the Holy Trinity are distinguished as follows: God the Father is not born and does not proceed from another Person; God the Son is eternally born from the Father; the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father. The teaching about the Holy Trinity emerges from the Holy Scriptures, both those of the Old Testament and those of the New. If we look for an indication of it in the New Testament, we find that the Savior Himself, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the only-begotten Son of God, when He sent His disciples and apostles to preach His word, bade them, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (St. Matt 28:19). In the words “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the Lord gave to His Church the briefest symbol of faith, the briefest creed, which contains a condensed teaching about the Holy Trinity.
This teaching is the basis of Christian theology. The entire body of teachings about our salvation through Jesus Christ is at the same time a teaching on the Holy Trinity: God the Father sent His only-begotten Son for the salvation of mankind; God the Son, sojourning on earth, announced the will of His Father, fulfilled the will of His Father, promised to send from the Father the all-holy Spirit, the Comforter, and then ascended to heaven, to His Father; God the Holy Spirit, according to the promise of the Son of God, descended upon the apostles, gave them a perfect knowledge of the mysteries of salvation, strengthened them for their apostolic service, and now ceaselessly remains in Christ’s Church, acting through God’s word and the saving Holy Mysteries (Sacraments), acting for the salvation of those who believe in Jesus Christ. In humble recognition of the strengthlessness of our limited reason, we must accept the mystery of the Holy Trinity with a full infinite faith, but accept it in such a way that this truth should not remain something external, having no relation to us. Instead, it ought to penetrate to the deepest recesses of our spirit, become the best possession of our entire soul, become an active principle which should give direction to our life. Such should be our acquisition of all Christian dogmas, and principally our acquisition of the unattainable mystery of the Holy Trinity.
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