Chapter 2. THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

We have discussed the role of knowledge and faith in Christian doctrine. In this chapter, we shall begin our examination of the Christian doctrine of God. We must outline the historical framework within which the doctrine of God appeared, beginning from the bible, and going on to see how the doctrine took shape through the Patristic period, and finally looking at the significance of the doctrine of God for us.

Christians are not the only ones to talk about God – every religion does so. Even atheism talks about God in order to reject particular conceptions of God. Atheism may wish to reject every notion of God, but it is only possible to reject a conception you can identify. It is not really possible for anyone to avoid the question of God for even if you reject all conceptions of God, you have to describe what it is that you wish to reject.

We are going to examine the concept of God as it has been received by the Church and set out in its teaching, so we will start by examining the history of this doctrine. The Christian faith introduces no new concept of God, but follows the faith of Israel. Christ believed in the God of Israel, so he shared the same faith in the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob and all the Fathers of the Old Testament. But although Jesus Christ addresses the God of the people of Israel, in his person and teaching he also represents a modification of Israel’s understanding of God. We must discover what changes this conception of God underwent as it became faith in the person of Christ.

    Israel’s conception of God consists in the absolute transcendence of God. God exists prior to the world, and we can never relate him to anything of what we see in the world. This is entirely different from the thought of the ancient Greeks, for whom the cosmos gives us knowledge of God. Whether their God was a rational, connective force, that holds the world together in harmony (‘cosmos’ means order and beauty), or a ‘reason’ that allowed them to explain the cosmos, for the Greeks the cosmos shows us something of the nature of God.

For Israel, this is not so. You cannot reach God by studying the cosmos, or tie God to the existence of the cosmos, or refer simultaneously to God and the cosmos as though there were some necessary relation between them. God exists prior to the cosmos, and this is represented by the doctrine of the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo. Although God exists always and forever, the cosmos has not always been in existence. This would be a most strange idea to the Greeks, for whom the cosmos is eternal, even though it is always in process of coming into being. Plato gives us an account of the creation of the cosmos by the Creator-God, who creates from existing ideas and elements in an existing space. The cosmos is made from something that always had existence, and is given its form by a God who is in some way bound up with its existence. For the gods of ancient Greece there is no transcendence in the strong sense found in the faith of Israel.

A second and related factor for Israel is that God is transcendent and utterly free. He is bound by no physical or other needs. Ancient Greek thinkers on the other hand took a different view. Tragic poets such as Euripides, and pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, asked whether the gods were free to do what they wanted and their categorical reply was that they were not. The gods were bound to do what was right, for there was a natural and moral law which the gods were not free to contravene. Heraclitus taught that a single logos sustained the cosmos: if the logos failed, the entire cosmos would vanish; but because this logos is given and the gods observe it, the cosmos does not vanish. Justice was part of this cosmic order. Zeus married Themis (‘Justice’) to demonstrate that even the chief of the gods is not free to act arbitrarily, a theme reiterated by every Greek tragedy.

In the Timaeus Plato describes a God who brings this world into existence by forming it in conformity with the ideas which represent the perfection of the cosmos, and which regulate even the action of God. This God had to give the world a spherical shape because, as Plato explains, a sphere is closest to the form of beauty if he had created an ugly world he would have transgressed against the ideas and the imperatives of justice and beauty.

Israel had quite a different conception of God. There was no thought that God could be constrained by goodness or right, for God acts entirely freely. The Old Testament is full of events that do not appear right, but which are nevertheless commanded by God. God is constrained by no cosmic principle of justice or order.

For Israel God is personal. We could say that God was personal in ancient Greek thought, of course, in that the gods are forces given personal characters. However, when we say that God is personal in the Old Testament we mean that he is acknowledged within relationships between persons. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God can only be understood in relationship with these particular persons whose encounters with God make up the history of Israel and are recounted in Israel’s Scripture. He is never a faceless, supreme power, and he cannot be understood in terms of a mind, or a physical force or a rational origin of existence. This does not tell us anything about the nature of God, but it does tell us that God is always related to specific persons. Israel’s God is in a constant relationship of persons and he summons man to enter a relationship that is person to person.

After transcendence, freedom, and the personal character of God, a fourth aspect of the doctrine of God is the historical character of God’s revelation. God reveals himself and is recognised through his involvement in history, rather than by observation of nature or the cosmos. Greeks did not give up observation of the cosmos on becoming Christians, but the Church insisted that the cosmos only leads towards God in the sense expressed in the psalms: ‘the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the works of His hands’ (Psalm 19.1). The cosmos can tell us only that it was made by someone other than itself. God exists outside the cosmos, his transcendence is decisive, so the relationship of the cosmos to God confessed by the psalms, is an historical rather than a cosmological observation. The works of God’s hands are made evident by the heavens: the world is a creation, which is to say a project initiated by an agent. It is not a matter of nature, governed by laws, such as the principles of harmony, goodness or justice honoured by the Greeks. The world is not approached as nature or cosmos, but as event and history.

Another characteristic of the biblical view of God, which we could call the historical aspect of the revelation of God, is that God reveals himself through his commandments. For Israel, truth in general, and faith in God more specifically, are not a matter of theory for they do not come from observation (theoria) of the cosmos. Truth comes through history, and from God’s interaction with the people of Israel and thus through their experience and history. They are given the law that they are to follow and they respond by following it. These are the factors that make up the biblical understanding of God, and which means that the Christian God is the God of Israel.

Nonetheless, there are certain claims that Christ makes about himself which revise Israel’s understanding of God and which account for the conflict between Jesus and his contemporaries. The Apostles and their communities accepted Christ’s claims, wrote the New Testament and then expounded and interpreted it, bringing into being the growing corpus of the Church’s doctrine of God. Therefore, the issue for us is not whether the Church was right to accept the claims of Christ, but whether these claims still represent Israel’s understanding of God, and thus whether Christ is as he presented himself, the fulfilment of Israel’s understanding of God.

The first claim is that Christ addresses God as Father and that he is able to do so because he alone is Son. The claim is not that anyone can call God ‘Father’, but that Christ does so exclusively. With this claim of unparallelled personal relationship, Christ brings himself into a relationship with God different from that experienced by every other member of Israel, and this represents a change to Israel’s conception of God.

The second claim is that Christ is the final act of God in history. To Israel, God revealed himself in historical events rather than as physical or natural facts. As these acts of God were unfolded by the Church Fathers, they were related to the cosmos and developed as the doctrine of creation. Though the distinction between history and nature is not always easy to define, we can make such a distinction and use the concept of history or nature as seems most appropriate. For Israel the acts of God were historical events rather than facts of nature. Talk about the givens of nature in Israel would raise the charge of idolatry.

To his contemporaries Christ presented the claim that he is the ‘Son of Man’, which in the Apocalyptic literature of the period meant that he is the one who will finally judge history. Only God himself can bring historical time to an end, for Israel, for only God can pronounce judgment on all kingdoms and all history. In the books of Daniel and Enoch the judgment of God is exercised by the ‘Son of Man’, and the Gospel tells us that ‘when the Son of Man comes, seated on his throne of glory’ (Matthew 25.31), he will give his judgment on all kings and kingdoms of this world. Since for Israel this final judgment can only be passed by God, the ‘Son of Man’ is the presence of God to history. No man can pass judgment on any other man, let alone on human history as a whole: only God can give such judgment. Israel never expects to see God, for he transcends the perception of his creatures. But as the ‘Son of Man’, God comes to bring his judgment to all human history. Christ identified himself from the first with the Son of Man and so with faith in the future judgment of all. This created a unique relationship between the person of Christ and God, for Christ maintains that he is the one who will judge the whole history of mankind. The preaching of Christ’s resurrection signifies that, in the mind of the first believers, Jesus Christ is identified with the eschatological Son of Man, who is God come to rule over all human authorities. The Church is created by this new expectation that the eschatological Son of Man, the resurrected Christ will return to bring the rule and judgment of God to all human history.

None of this represents a crisis in the doctrine of God. However, this waiting for Christ’s judgment meant that the first Christians had to explain who they were waiting for and why he was making them wait. It was the need to explain the wait that resulted in the writing of the New Testament. Where is Christ between his resurrection and his return as judge of all kingdoms, and what is now his relationship with God? The answer is found in the teaching of the ascension. Christ sits at the right hand of God: ‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘‘Sit at my right hand’’ ’ (Psalm 110.1). The Christ who sits at the right of the Father enjoys the dignity that, in the theology of Israel, belongs exclusively to God. First, there is worship: ‘every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth’ (Philippians 2.10). No member of Israel can kneel before a creature, and yet this person sits at the right hand of the only God and receives the same praise. How is this the same God when Christ receives the sort of devotion that the leaders of pagan empires demand, but which even under torture and at the cost of their lives, Christians withhold from all other lords? Only God can make such demands as this.

The wait for Christ’s coming adds a third element. We have to ask where Christ is now, and what our relationship with God is in the time before his return. How should we see our relationship with God, now that Christ is seated at the right hand of God in heaven? The answer to this urgent practical question comes with the other ‘Helper’ (paratclete) introduced in the Gospel of John. ‘I will not remain here’, Christ had said, and yet ‘I shall not leave you as orphans’ (John 14.16–18). As Christ is at the right hand of God, the Father has sent another helper, the Spirit of truth.

A new experience of the relationship with God began after Christ’s ascension, with the arrival of this third person, the Holy Spirit. This person verifies the presence of God himself and, and with gifts and demonstrations of power, does what only God can do. The first disciples were compelled to find a place for their experience of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit within their understanding of God. Christ now appeared as this fellowship which breaks through the limits given by nature and creates the Church. The Spirit enables each human being to transcend his limits and go out to meet the ‘other’, regardless of their natural differences. Before the arrival of the Spirit of Christ the world knew of no such community that transcended all the divisions of creation.

This raises the question of whether we can still refer to God as Israel does, without referring to the Son and the Spirit. We have the person of Christ who termed himself ‘the Son of God’, and the person of the Holy Spirit, who makes Christ present to us in history as this fellowship of the Church. Through its experience of this communion the Church was led to confess its faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit arid this trinitarian form eventually became the proper name of God for Christians. It was its own experience which compelled the Church to give an account of this event, in which the constrictions of nature are transcended by the freedom of fellowship in Christ. You may reject the claim Christ is making, and remain with Israel’s form of confession, or you can accept this trinitarian name that conveys this new communion of all creation brought into being by Christ.

This trinitarian name appears in the New Testament, in three forms, two of which are liturgical. The first context is baptism, which involves public confession of God as this Trinity of persons. St Matthew’s Gospel has Christ’s instruction to ‘baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28.19). Some argue from the witness accounts in the Acts of the Apostles that baptism was first performed in the name of Christ rather than of the Trinity and that Justin gives us the first account we have of baptism in the name of the Trinity. However, baptism in the name of the Trinity is present in all books of the New Testament, most clearly the letters of Saint Paul, and so from being a term used in the confession made at baptism the Trinity became the name of God.

The other context in which the trinitarian formula appears is that of the Eucharist. This use is also very early, for we find it at the end of the Second Letter to the Corinthians in the familiar form ‘May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of she Holy Spirit, be with you all’ (2Corinthians 13.13). Scholars have shown that this phrase, with which Paul ends his letters, was the opening of the Eucharistic liturgy of the first churches, so from the very beginning the trinitarian formula has been part of the Eucharist.

Finally, there was also a broader theological context, for we find reference simultaneously to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the letters of the Apostle Paul and the Gospel of John. Thus, a theology of these three persons developed, and it did so without controversy until the Church’s faith began to meet the questions posed by the Greek worldview in the second century.

The question was put in this way. If we are baptised in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as all Christians were by then, what had become of faith in the one God of the bible? What was the status of these persons? How are they related to God? If the three persons are related to God ontologically, doesn’t this make three gods? If we say that the persons are not ontologically related to the one God, why do Christians worship them and attribute to them acts that belong solely to God, like the judgment of history or the creation of this nature-transcending fellowship?

It would not do to say that this is simply an unfathomable mystery. If we simply declared everything to be unknowable, we would have no theology at all. There are mysteries, of course, but they are mysteries that invite us to wonder. They do not prevent thought, but invite it. The Fathers of the Church went to great lengths to show that there is no contradiction between monotheism and the trinitarian God, indeed it is only the doctrine of the Trinity that is able to safeguard the unity of God. We must discover why this is so.

It took many generations to settle the Church’s account of these questions. We can divide the earliest answers that were offered into two sorts. One set of answers refer to the Logos and the Spirit as acts of God in creation and providence. God is one, but in order to create the cosmos he acts as Logos and Spirit. The difficulty with this response was that the trinitarian life of God presupposes the existence of the cosmos, which would mean that the transcendence of God would be lost.

For the second-century Apologists there was little clarity about whether Logos and Spirit are divine or part of creation. They always seemed to appear in relation to creation, but this raised the question of the transcendence of God. The Church was compelled to search for greater clarity, at least with regard to the Logos. Finally, it declared that the Logos belongs to God, not to creation, and so ruled out some of the interpretations of Logos that had been in circulation. God is not triune because he is Creator. The Council of Nicaea (325) made it clear that God is triune quite independently of creation.

The other category of responses we could call ‘modalist’. Here the Son, the Holy Spirit and even the Father were regarded as the modes by which God acted in history, rather than as ‘concrete’ beings. This theory, chiefly represented by Sabellius, became a huge challenge until it was finally rejected. The Church insisted that these three persons are in personal relationships, each of which is different from the others. The Father speaks to the Son, and the Son prays to the Father, and thus they are two ‘beings’. The Church insisted that the difference between these was more than merely functional, and it was not confined to the ‘economy’ of God for man. The question of how three ‘beings’ are not three gods remained, but the Church preferred to face this question rather than accept Sabellius’s theory that there were three personal modes behind which lay God’s single ‘being’.

It was this challenge that was met by the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, whom we turn to next. Though we can admit that the triune doctrine of God has its own complexities, we must not give in to the obscurantism that discourages any intellectual labour in the name of a simple faith. Theology is not the enemy of Christian faith. If we examine these issues with our minds we will find that the life and worship of God become more wonderful to us than if we attempted no intellectual engagement with them.

The Church inherited the baptismal and confessional statement ‘Faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ from the Church of the Apostles. Every Christian made this confession at baptism and, though there were differences of interpretation, the statement itself was universally accepted. The Fathers who inherited this trinitarian confession had to ensure two things. First, they had to exclude interpretations that would lead to idolatry, which meant any interpretation that would distance this confession from the truth of the God of Israel revealed by the Old Testament. Second, they had to show their contemporaries than this formula was meaningful and true. The Fathers were always concerned to demonstrate the meaningfulness of the Christian confession to the world they lived in, for the truth of Christ can never become the possession of any group that is not concerned to give an account of Christ to the world beyond them. The Fathers expounded the teaching of the Church in those categories of thought that brought them into dialogue with contemporary intellectuals, but they also related Christian doctrine to the Christian life with its universal appeal, so that ordinary people could make this faith their own. We must examine this first historically, and then as it relates to our own situation.

The Apologists of the second century made the first attempts to set out the Christian doctrine of God in terms of the Logos. They decided that God projected the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, in order to create the cosmos. There was much disagreement about whether the Logos was uncreated or part of creation. If we say that God became triune or that he acquired the Logos in order to externalise himself and create a cosmos, we link the existence of the Logos to that of the cosmos. One Apologist who pointed in a more promising direction was Theophilus of Antioch (c.180). Theophilus distinguished between the Logos and its outward expression, going beyond Justin to say that, while the Logos may be a projection of God outside himself for the creation of the cosmos, nevertheless it pre-existed within him. Just as we have intentions to which we are able to give verbal expression, so God always has his Logos. Having decided to bring a cosmos into being, he gave external expression to this Logos, and in this way the distinction between God and the world is safeguarded. However, this left the question of whether the inner logos could exist without verbal expression or was compelled to give itself an outward expression.

Another attempt to set out the Christian doctrine of God in terms of the Logos took the form of modalism, for which the persons of the Trinity are roles that God takes on for the sake of creation. God played the role of Father in the Old Testament, the Son in the New Testament, and in our own time the Holy Spirit, adopting these three identities to perform particular functions for us within history. This was the account developed by Sabellius who taught in Rome at the beginning of the third century, and whose teachings became widespread in the West.

The Church reacted intensely against Sabellianism, particularly in the East, which regarded the West as particularly vulnerable to the temptation of modalism. Second-century Apologists declared that the persons of the Trinity are ‘three in number’. However, they insisted that this does not mean that God starts as a unit and then subsequently divides or expands to become three. The one does not take on a form external to itself, for the threeness of God is intrinsic to him. In order to demonstrate this, the Fathers took the crucial step of distinguishing between ‘alone’ and ‘one’.

In philosophical Hellenism, God as understood as a monad, a self-sufficient unit. In the religion of the ancient Greeks, represented in demythologised form by Plato, God was simply one. However, in the Christian account, the oneness of God cannot mean that God is a monad. In first-century Alexandria, Philo, a Jewish thinker thoroughly at home with Greek thought, offered the interpretation that God is the one who is truly alone. His commentary on the verse that speaks of the creation of woman shows what he meant: ‘It is not good for man to be alone; let us make for him a helper in his likeness’ (Genesis 2.18). Philo says that man cannot be allowed to be alone, because God is the only one who is truly ‘alone’ (monos) (Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis II.1.1). That God is one means that he is utterly solitary.

However, in opposition to this view the Church believed that although God is one, he is not a monad. In the Christian doctrine of God the number three represents particular beings in relation with one another, so God is not a solitary being. The insistence, however, on such a distinction between being ‘one’ and being ‘solitary’ would keep Christian doctrine in permanent tension with other philosophical accounts of God. Were Christians talking a peculiar language of their own, or were they able to give a public account that would demonstrate the rationality of their claims? The Fathers were not content to leave any ambiguity.

First of all, the problems were tackled on the level of the vocabulary employed. How were they to choose the terms by which to say that God is three persons who are one, rather than three different aspects of a single unit? Tertullian, writing at the end of the second century, used an expression which proved decisive. God is ‘una substantia, tres personae’. With ‘substance’ he indicated the unity of God, and with ‘persons’ he indicated plurality. Tertullian’s choice of terms was picked up by Hippolytus who translated them for the Greek-speaking Christians of the East. The translation of Tertullian’s terms represented an immense challenge. The Latin ‘substantia’ may be literally translated into Greek as ‘hypostasis’. Both words refer to what is underlying and fundamental and so denote the unchanging being found within or beneath each individual thing. Everything is based on some such unchanging being, which was termed its ‘hypostasis’. Though this Greek term went through many shifts through the centuries, this basic sense was constant. When we say that a rainbow does not have a hypostasis, we mean that it is an ephemeral phenomenon, while a table has a hypostasis, because there is something substantial and enduring about it.

In general, hypostasis was used to denote that single unchanging being that God is. So what about the persons? The Greek word for person, ‘prosopon’, meant aspect or facade. It originally referred to the human face and then to the mask worn by actors the very ritualistic theatre of ancient Greece, which indicated the character an actor was playing. The risk was that this term would continue to suggest a facade, which would mean that persons would be fronts for the essence of God behind or beneath them. So how did this term, taken from Tertullian, come to be accepted in the East? From Origen onwards the East began to replace the term ‘person’ with ‘hypostasis’, and so taught that God had three hypostases, that is to say, three unchanging, underlying realities. Translation of hypostasis into Latin immediately created ‘tres substantinae’. However, Latin speakers who already used the expression ‘una substantia’, could hardly now say ‘tres substantinae’. At stake in this translation issue was the unity and therefore the being of God. How could the Church use the expression ‘one substance’, without creating the impression that the three persons of the Trinity are ‘modes’ or ‘faces’ of the one God without real ‘being’, as Sabellius taught?

The solution to the problem of the persons and unity of God came in the fourth century with the Cappadocian Fathers, and it came through a radical innovation that involved a redefinition of terms. Up until that time ‘hypostasis’ had meant being or substance. The Cappadocians made a new departure, by deciding to make a distinction between these two meanings so that essence and hypostasis could no longer be rewarded as synonyms.

The Cappadocians now said that the meaning of ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ was the same, so both could be used to signify the oneness of God. God is one nature or one substance. From them on the Latin term ‘substantia’ was rendered in Greek not by hypostasis, but by ‘ousia’. We can translate ‘ousia’ either with ‘substance’ or ‘nature’, two English words which can be used as synonyms here. However, they decided that ‘hypostasis’ should be understood to mean the same as ‘person’, so the term ‘person’ now referred to a distinct being, to someone who possessed true and particular being and was not simply the ‘mode’ or ‘manifestation’ of another being.

This was a revolutionary move, though for some reason it has received almost no mention in the history of philosophy. It was possible only because ‘hypostasis’ bore several nuances which allowed this development, so this conceptual revolution was not entirely arbitrary. The term ‘hypostasis’, which had referred to what was most fundamental and unchanging, was now a synonym for person, which consequently was understood as an ‘ontological’ category. Person no longer denoted just a relationship that an entity could take on or the role that an actor would play. For this reason Saint Basil insisted we can only say that God is three ‘prosopa’ when we make it clear that the ‘prosopon’ indicates a distinct and particular entity, and not a ‘face’ or role in Sabellius’s sense.

Now we must turn to the significance of saying that God is one being or one substance. The term substance refers to what is general, or to what is held in common, and so it implies the existence of more than one being. The term ‘human nature’, for instance, indicates that we are all of one sort or one nature, human nature, even though we are each individually a complete human being. Human nature has as many instances as there are human beings. There is a unity to humanity and yet there are simultaneously two, three, a thousand, a million human beings, each of whom exemplifies human nature and represents humanity. However, if there are many humans sharing one human nature, are there many gods sharing a divine nature?

The answer the Cappadocians offered was that, because we humans have been created, our nature is divisible. Human beings are not only distinct, but they are separate, owing to the intervention of time and space between them. Time and space allow us to be perceived as self-existent persons. This means that human nature is subject to mortality: when a human is born, human nature brings forth a human entity which is divided from all other human entities by time and space. Each human person is therefore a separate entity, and thus we have many people. The oneness of the human race seems to be at odds with, and even to be threatened by, the plurality of all these individual persons.

For all created beings, there is a conflict between oneness and manyness, owing to their emergence in time and space. Without space and time everything is in danger of losing its identity. However, the manyness of God is not in conflict with the unity of God since God is not subject to time or space, there is absolutely no connotation of separateness, or of externality and internality for the persons of God. The Cappadocian Fathers said that the analogy of one human nature exemplified by a multitude of distinct human persons could indeed be applied to God, provided that we do not include time and space, and therefore separatedness and mortality, in the analogy. With this condition the question of three different gods disappears.

The next issue we must examine is the relationship of God to being. Does the ‘being’ or the ‘essence’ of God come before these three persons? Does God start as ‘one’ and subsequently become ‘many’? We can ask the same question about humanity. Could it be that humanity comes first, and particular humans came along later? The ancient Greek philosophers believed that human nature, this general thing in which many participate, comes first and is followed by the more particular thing. We all come into existence from a single essence, and from this unity we diverge into separate beings with a myriad forms: on this basis nature comes first, and the individuals who exemplify that nature arrive later. Plato and Aristotle believed that no matter what each one of us is as an individual human being, we are exemplas of a common nature. For Plato, we are exemplas of the ideal human being in which we all participate, whilst for Aristotle we are exemplas of an underlying human nature in the form of the human species from which we all spring. The species precedes the individual, and so, according to Aristotle, particular individuals disappear but the species survives. If the philosophers of ancient Greece are right, ‘nature’ precedes the particular ‘person’.

However, with its doctrine of the Trinity, the Church took an entirely different approach that opened up a new path for philosophy. One single statement made by the Cappadocian Fathers laid the basis for an entire new philosophical project: there is no bare essence, no nature-as-such. Nature exists only in specific instances, so we can only talk about being or essence or nature when there are particular beings. Nature is not more fundamental than any specific instance of that nature: ‘Being’ as such does not come before particular beings. It makes no sense to say that specific human beings spring out of human nature. Each particular human being is fundamental for human nature and for humanity as a whole. The Cappadocians tell us that it is not possible to use the term human nature without including this and that particular person already. We cannot refer to human nature without implying the specific persons.

The philosophical breakthrough represented by the doctrine of the Trinity has profound significance for humanity. If there is no essence as such, and we cannot assume the origin of the human species is a human essence, whether Plato’s ideal human, or Aristotle’s species, what is the origin of each human being? In a letter to Amphilochius, Basil agrees that since a ‘bare’ human essence cannot be the origin of humankind, the chief ontological predicate of a human being cannot be his essence (Letter 235). It must definitely be one particular being, one human. The ancient Greeks said that we derive our existence, and trace our genealogy as particular beings, from a common human nature, However, Christians respond that we each draw our existence from a single person, whom we call ‘Adam’. This specific being, and not ‘nature’, is the cause of our being.

In God, too, it is not divine nature that is the origin of the divine persons. It is the person of the Father that ‘causes’ God to exist as Trinity. However, ‘Father’ has no meaning outside a relationship with the Son and the Spirit, for he is the Father of someone. This plurality and interdependence of the persons is the basis of a new ontology. The one essence is not the origin or cause of the being of God. It is the person of the Father that is the ultimate agent, but since ‘Father’ implies communion he cannot be understood as a being in isolation. Personal communion lies at the very heart of divine being.

Now we are in a better position to understand the expression ‘God is love’. Christianity did not invent the notion that God is love. Plato believed that God is love, in the sense that love is a flow of the divine nature, a flow as involuntary as the overflowing of a cup or a crater. The Church rejected this conception of love as involuntary emotion or passion, and insisted instead that the phrase ‘God is love’ means that God is constituted by these personal relationships. God is communion: love is fundamental to his being, not an addition to it. Because it is directly related to the doctrine of the Trinity, this point has to be given a great deal of clarification.

It is perhaps our usual assumption that we exist first, and then that we love. However, let us imagine that our existence depends on our relationship with those we love. Our being derives from our relationship with those who love us, and if they cease to love us, we disappear. Love is this communion of relationships which give us our existence. Only love can continue to sustain us when all the material threads of life are broken and we are without any other support. If these threads are not reconnected we cease to exist; death is the snapping of the last thread. Love, or communion with other persons, is stronger than death and is the source of our existence. That ‘God is love’ means that God is the communion of this Holy Trinity. God the Father would lose his identity and being if he did not have the Son, and the same applies to the Son and to the Spirit. If we took away the communion of the Trinity to make God a unit, God would not be communion and therefore would not be love.

It is easy to assume that God is love because he loves the world, but the world did not always exist. God did not become love because he loves the world, for this would imply that he became love when the world came into existence. But God is absolutely transcendent, his existence is utterly independent of the world. God is love in his very being. It is not however himself that he loves, so this is not self-love. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit, the Son loves the Father and the Spirit, the Spirit loves the Father and the Son: it is another person that each loves. It is the person, not the nature or essence, who loves, and the one he loves is also a person. Because divine love is a matter of personal communion this love is free: each person loved is free to respond to this love with love.

Our question was whether it is the substance or the person that is most fundamental, in God. We have seen that, in God, essence and person are co-fundamental, neither is prior to the other. Next we must see what significance this has for the doctrine of God, first by seeing what the Cappadocians made of it, then by looking at the very different answer given by Augustine to the question of the divine Trinity and the issues that it has left us with.

We have seen that, by making a distinction between substance and person, the Cappadocians made a vital development in the doctrine of God. These two terms, substance and person, allow us to distinguish between the various ways in which we use the word ‘being’. We can distinguish between saying that God exists, what God is, and how God is who he is.

The Cappadocian Fathers dealt first with the bare fact of God’s existence. To say that God is God is simply to affirm his existence and rule out his non-existence. By asking what God is we are asking about ‘being’ in general. When referring to any existent object, it is one thing to say that it exists, ruling out the possibility that it does not exist, and it is another thing to say what this particular object is. For the Greeks, the question of what relates to the substance, or ousia, of the object, and in the case of God, it refers to the essence of God. The third way of referring to things according to the Cappadocian Fathers is with the question how, or in what way it is what it is. The Cappadocian distinction between what and how was quickly adopted by the Church because it helped to set out the rationality of its teaching about God. Saint Maximus the Confessor argued that ‘what’ corresponds to the ‘reason’, or logos, for which a thing exists, while ‘how’ refers to the way in which it is what it is. These distinctions will help us lay out Christian doctrine with regard to the being of God.

First, that God Is. To say that God exists, is merely to indicate his existence rather than non-existence. The question of God’s existence was scarcely ever asked in the ancient world, so the issue that is so pressing for us was not one that patristic writers had to engage with. The Epicureans expressed doubt about God’s existence, but they did not exercise any significant influence.

Patristic theology and subsequent Christian doctrine uses the verb ‘to be’ when referring to God. The neo-platonism which dominated at the time of the Fathers spoke of ‘One’ as being beyond substance, so the term ‘ousia’ could not be used of the ‘One’, but only of what derives from it. Such negative theology was widespread, and not limited to neo-platonism. Dionysius the Areopagite used the expression ‘hyper-ousios’ (above essence) in order to say that God in himself is above every ontological category. All our categories come from our experience of created reality, but created reality cannot give us any knowledge of God. When dealing with the Greek Fathers, we refer to this as apophatic theology.

The doctrine of God does indeed take us beyond the common nature of things, but this does not mean that we cannot use the concept of being when dealing with God. ‘Apophaticism’ does not mean that we have surpassed the concept of being or gone beyond ontology. In an important passage in ‘On the Holy Spirit’ Saint Basil says, with reference to the phrase of St John’s Gospel ‘in the beginning was the Word’, that no matter how we stretch our intellect, we cannot go beyond the word ‘was’. The verb ‘to be’ is not only permissible in discussion of God, but it applies most directly and uniquely to God, for God is ‘the one who truly is’. ‘Being’ applies primarily to God, so theology is the true ontology. God is not beyond or above the concept of ‘being’, but he is the genuine, the true, ‘being’.

God is ‘the one who is’ and he is that ‘being’ whom we can address in worship and the Eucharist. The beginning of the Eucharistic anaphora that bears St John Chrysostom’s name, makes the formal declaration of the Church that God is the real, the true ‘being.’

It is only meet and right to sing praises unto thee, to bless thee, to magnify thee, to give thanks unto thee, to worship thee in all places of thy dominion. For thou art God ineffable, unknowable, invisible, incomprehensible, the same THOU ART from everlasting.

The expression ‘the same’ was familiar even in Plato’s time, defining ‘being’ as what is stable and permanent. To the ancient Greeks, decay and dissolution was the fundamental problem, as indeed it is for all of us, so ‘being’ is what is constant and immutable. Ontology simply represents our search for stability and permanence.

Division and dissolution turn ‘being’ into ‘non-being’. Whatever has existence now will eventually disappear, so all appearances will ultimately let us down. Even though we call this river the ‘Thames’, and it cannot be anything else but the ‘Thames’, yet, as Heraclitus pointed out, we cannot cross this same river twice. But what enduring being does the river have if it is constantly changing? Like this river we are all constantly undergoing change, affected by processes that, though slower, make us equally subject to flux. What being, or what stability, does any one of us have if we are all heading towards decay and eventual death? Saint Maximus uses the concept of ‘the logos of nature’ to refer to whatever is stable about every being, which gives it its existence and reality. If this stability is removed its existence is threatened. Decay mocks and falsifies everything that exists, turning it into something delusory and finally non-existent. Every entity is penetrated by non-being, which is always wearing away at it until, when it has finally disappeared, it no longer has any reality at all. Non-being ultimately renders everything unreal. But we are hoping to find permanence, and we do find it, only, in God. In the Liturgy of Saint Basil we confess this stable and constant being in the prayer, ‘It is very meet, right arid befitting the majesty of thy holiness that we should praise thee and sing unto thee … who are from everlasting, invisible, searchless, uncircumscribed, immutable’.

It is therefore not true to say that there is no ontology in the theology and life of the Church. We do indeed refer to the being of God, and to his being true ‘being’, the ‘being’ who actually is. This is the significance of the confession that God is: we may really know this. It does not represent an absence of knowledge, and we do not require any negative theology to communicate this. As Saint Gregory Nazianzus pinged out, God is that which may not be doubted.

While our knowledge ‘that God is’ is certain, things are different when it comes to ‘what God is’. The ‘what’ question relates to the essence of a thing. Saint Gregory Nazianzus makes this distinction between ‘what’ and ‘that’ in his Second Theological Oration. He says that we cannot give an answer to this ‘what’ question, for we cannot say what God’s essential being is. We cannot know ‘what’ God is, because to know God in this sense would be to have mastery of God – which would mean that he would not be God. Gregory goes on to show us how difficult it is to know what anything is in its ‘essence’. He argues that if it is difficult enough to discover the mysteries of nature and of man, but the ‘essence’ of God is simply beyond our conception. But what about the angels who are also spiritual beings, or what about the saints who have been made holy? Gregory tells us they can no more grasp the essence of God than we can.

All knowledge comes with an unavoidable margin of wonder and mystery. Essence denotes that stable and unchanging factor in any being whatsoever. But nobody can know the essence of anything, and so nobody knows the essence of God, apart from God himself.

Our third category represents a third way to refer to the being of God. This is the question of ‘how’ something is, and this is perhaps the most significant for theology, because we are able to learn in what way God is who he is. The Cappadocian Fathers distinguish three ways that God is God that correspond to the persons of God. God is God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – these persons indicate how God is.

Arians and Eunomians asked whether the Son is the essence of God or an energy of God. If the Church had replied that the Son is the essence, it would not have been possible to distinguish between the Son and the Father. if they had said that he was an energy, they would have reduced the Son to a creature. Saint Gregory Nazianzus insisted that the Son is neither essence nor energy, but an identity that can be described only in terms of its relationships (Third Theological Oration 16). He says that ‘essence’ is that which is self-subsistent to each single thing. It is that thing in its uniqueness, as it is distinct from every other thing. An ‘energy’ is shared by a number of entities just as relationship is. The essence is self-subsistent, so when we refer to the divine essence, we can do so without referring to any other essence. Though an essence may be held common by any number of beings, we can talk about it without making reference to anything beyond it.

But the person is not an essence. It does not exist without being related to other beings, and it cannot be understood in isolation from all else. When we talk about a person, we can do so only by referring to other beings, even though each person is distinct so that what is particular to this person is found in no other. Every person is unique, unprecedented and irreplaceable, even though he exists only through relation with others. The person is the identity born of a relationship, and exists only in communion with other persons. There cannot be a person without relationship to other persons, so if all the relationships which constitute a person disappear, so does that person. We cannot refer to a person without relating them to something else. Therefore, ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ denote unique persons. Yet, if the Father was without relationship to the Son, there would be no Father, and if the Son was without relationship to the Father, there would be no Son.

In this communion each person has his own personal features, which cannot be transferred. The Father cannot impart his paternity to the Son. None of these personal or hypostatic characteristics, of ‘unoriginate’, ‘begotten’ and ‘proceeding from’ respectively of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, can be imparted or communicated. Each of the persons is a unique and singular identity, If it is replaced by something eke, it ceases to be that identity. The Cappadocians used the term ‘particular’ (idion) to express this.

At first glance, the concept of the ‘particular’ appears to conflict with that of relationship. If we define a person by a relationship, how can we say that the person is entirely unique and particular? And yet, its particularity springs from a relationship for the relationship creates a ‘particularity’ which is non-communicable, and without being in communion, this ‘singularity’ cannot exist. Thus each person of the Holy Trinity is unique and irreplaceable precisely because each is in an unbroken relationship with the other persons. If this communion is severed, that person is lost. Communion, therefore, is a condition for the person, indeed communion creates singularity.

What principles did the Fathers introduce in employing these terms into the Christian doctrine of God? We have seen that the first principle introduced by the Fathers is we cannot know the ‘what’, that is the ‘essence’ of God. The mind cannot grasp this essence, and though this was conceded by neo-platonism to an extent, it was also a basic principle of Greek thought that we can come to know the essence of beings and that the mind can achieve this, by conceiving the idea and then being led to the essence itself.

To know the being of this table, according to Plato, we look for the idea of ‘table’ within this particular table. No matter how much the truth of the table surpasses this actual table before me, our minds reach beyond this actuality to that truth. The more my mind is purified of all materiality, the more it is able to reach the reality, which is what the form is. If we take Aristotle’s view, we look for the essence of the table in this material hypostasis, within which there are certain natural laws that make it a table.

The Eastern Fathers are clear that the essence, the what of God, cannot be conceived or comprehended by the mind. Saint John Damascus said, ‘the Divine is infinite and unintelligible, and only one thing about it is intelligible: its infinity and its unintelligibility’ (On the Orthodox Faith 1). We cannot comprehend an essence in any way.

A second principle, offered by Saint Basil, is that the ‘essence’ (or ‘what’) does not exist without the ‘how’. There is no essence or generality without hypostasis or particularity. The ‘how’ question is as ontologically fundamental as the ‘what’ question: they both refer to what we call ‘being’.

Hellenic philosophy always attributed primacy to ‘being’ in the sense of what is universal. For this reason the Cappadocian Fathers found Aristotle of more use than Plato, because Aristotle distinguished between ‘first’ and ‘second’ substance: ‘first substance’ referred to the specific instance, while ‘second’ refers to the species, and thus to what was general and universal. For example, ‘first substance’ denotes George, John and Basil – these particular persons – while ‘second substance’ denotes humanity as a whole or the human nature which these three have in common.

However, divine essence does not come before the particular hypostases, the persons, because there cannot simply be ‘being’ without hypostases, just as we cannot talk about humankind without implying specific individual people. The same is true of God; one cannot talk about the being of God without referring to the persons who tell us ‘how’ God is God. The divine essence does not precede the persons logically, because the essence never exists without the persons. The being of God cannot he understood without the persons, nor can the persons be understood except as the being of God.

Nevertheless, there is an order and hierarchy to these persons, for their being and existence is a matter of cause. The concept of agency or causality in the existence of God is one of the most important and least recognised areas of Christian doctrine, again introduced by the Cappadocian Fathers, and for very good reason.

First, the issue of causality was introduced as a response to the Platonists, who believed that the procession from one to another, particularly in Plotinus’ system of emanations, was a natural evolution outwards from the One, in a process of degeneration or disintegration. They believed that the One becomes multiple inadvertently, as it breaks up and loses its identity, and this is both an inevitability and a terrible misfortune.

On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers had to confront the claim that the Son is a creature, asserted most publicly by Eunomius of Cyzicus (d.393), who believed that the Father and the essence of God are one and the same thing. Given that the Father is the only one who is unbegotten, Eunornius concluded that whatever is not the Father, such as the Son, originates outside the essence of God. It was for this reason that the Cappadocians made a crucial distinction between the Father and the essence or being of God.

The question was asked whether the Son is born of the Father, or of the ‘essence’ of the Father. Following Saint Athanasius, the Council of Nicaea (325) decided that the Son is born of the ‘substance’ of the Father. If this is so, it is this ‘substance’ which is the source of life, and the Son is begotten by this ‘substance’. ‘Substance’ is productive, and it begets the Son in the same way that any other productive thing gives birth to things other than itself.

When the Cappadocian Fathers introduced the concept of causality, they did so in order to dismiss the idea that the cause of his begetting could be anything other than a person, the Father. The Father is the cause. In this way they distinguished between the Father and ‘substance’. Had they not been able to make this distinction, they would have remained in same position as Eunomius. The Father cannot simply be identified as ‘substance’. The divine ‘substance’ does not produce the trinitatian persons by some inevitable process. The divine life originates in the Father, which is to say in a person, thus the Father is the principal person, while the persons of the Son and Spirit come from the Father.

Athanasius was responsible for the idea that it was the Father’s ‘substance’ that was generative and begets the Son. The Arians challenged him. If the Son is of God’s ‘substance’ rather than of God’s will, surely the Son must he Son out of necessity? Athanasius responded that even though he is not a function of a will, he is not the Son by necessity either. His sonship is willed by the Father and will always be desired by the Father. But it is not just that the Son is willed by the Father. As Athanasius says, the Father wills his own person. He means two things by this. One is that God’s ‘substance’ exists because of the Father. The other is that the being of the Father exists because it is willed by the Father. The Father wills his own existence as person, so his own existence is not thrust on him. Athanasius sets out the issue:

For, just as the Father willed his own person, so the person of the Son – who is of the same being as the Father – is not unwilled by the Son. The Son is wanted and loved by the Father, so we should understand that God’s being is voluntary and willed. The Son is freely desired by the Father, and the Son loves, wants and honours the Father in the same way, and the will of the Father in the Son is one and the same, so we can consider the Son to be in the Father, and the Father to be in the Son. (Third Oration against the Arians 66.)

That the Son of God is ‘of the ‘‘substance’’ ’ of the Father does not mean that he is the Son by necessity. The Cappadocians went on to develop Athanasius’ idea by saying that the Father is the cause of the Son. Since the Father willed to exist as this person, he must have willed that the Son exist as a person too.

Here we have arrived at the limits of ontology. We have asked whether God exists because he intends to, or because he has to, and we have found that he exists because he intends to, and not because he cannot do otherwise. On this principle the Cappadocians named the Father the agent, or ‘cause’, who is responsible for the existence or God. The Father is the agent of his own existence as Father and the existence of these other persons. Existence is the function of persons acting in freedom, and so is in no way a function of necessity.

The Cappadocians tell us that the freedom of God is the freedom of the Father. Saint Gregory Nazianzus attacked the old Platonist conception that God is like a drinking vessel (krater) which overflows, pouring out goodness and life, the sort of analogy conceptualises the natural overflow of a fertile nature, which cannot but give birth to new life (Third Theological Homily: Oration 29.2). Gregory insisted that this analogy makes the Father’s begetting of the Son involuntary, which would suggest that the entire Trinity exists as a natural and necessary consequence of the essence that God is.

The Creed of Nicaea had said ‘begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father.’ At the Council of Constantinople (381) the words ‘of the ‘’substance’’ ’ of the Father were removed, so that our Creed simply says that ‘the Son is begotten of the Father’. The debate that took place between the years 325 and 381 made it evident that the concept of ‘substance’ could make the begetting of the Son a matter of necessity. The accusations made by the Arians and Eunomians indicated that the begetting of the Son was involuntary and unfree, so the Church made this alteration to the Creed in order to rule out all sense of compulsion. The Council of Constantinople ruled that, in order to interpret Nicaea correctly, the concept of freedom had to be secured within the doctrine of God.

The Cappadocian Fathers made some fundamental contributions to the doctrine of God. The first of these was to provide a more appropriate conceptuality, brought about through a change in terminology. They shifted the sense of ‘hypostasis’ from its original sense of ‘essence’, and transferred it to the person, making ‘person’ a fundamental category. The word ‘hypostasis’ implies that something or someone actually exists, for whatever has no actual hypostasis has no real existence. We Greeks still use hypostasis in this sense, for instance in an expression such as ‘these rumours are without hypostasis’, when we want to say that there is no truth in them.

By calling hypostases ‘persons’, the Cappadocians attributed full ontological reality to each of the persons of God. They rejected the view that they are simply different roles enacted by the one and the same being. Then the Cappadocians attributed the cause of God’s existence to the Father, so the existence of God became a matter of personal freedom.

These new terminological and conceptual tools allowed the Fathers to employ analogies in which the persons were clearly complete beings, and so to stay faithful to the tradition they had received. Sabellius viewed God as a being that extended into three separate offshoots each with its separate role, but the assumption was that this plurality would finally contract back into the one again. The belief that God’s being has three extensions is termed ‘modalism’. The concern aroused by the threat of modalism produced very mixed reactions to Nicaea’s ruling for the term ‘homoousion’. Following Athanasius, Nicaea stressed that the Son is born of the essence of the Father: the Son is not an extension of the Father’s essence, but a complete and independent entity.

The Cappadocians insisted that these three persons are indeed three complete entities. They made an important characteristic alteration to one familiar analogy. In the phrase ‘light from light’ the Creed uses the analogy of light to represent the unity of the Father and the Son; just as light emanates rays that cannot be separated from their source, the Son is inseparably one with the Father. The Cappadocian Fathers found that this analogy needs clarification, because just as rays of light could he construed as the extension of the light source, so the Son could thus be construed as the necessary outworking of God. So rather than repeating ‘light of light’, the Cappadocians spoke of three suns or three torches.

We have three complete persons. What is common to these three lights? They have a common energy and substance, for they emit the same heat and light. The particularity and integrity of each person is as fundamental as what is common to them and which gives them their unity.

To refer to this relationship of persons, the Cappactocian Fathers employed another concept to refer to the unity and distinction of each person. This is the concept of ‘perichoresis’. The three persons inhere in one another, so each is found entirely within the other. Each person has his own ontological integrity, and yet they are one. In a letter attributed to Saint Basil we read:

Whatever the Father is, is also found in the Son and whatever the Son is, is also found in the Father. The Son is found in his entirety within the Father and he has the Father in his entirety within him. Thus, the hypostasis of the Son is the image and the likeness by which the Father can be known and the hypostasis or the Father is known in the image of the Son (Letter 38)

The intention here is to set out the teaching of the Fourth Gospel that ‘Whomsoever has seen me, has seen the Father, for I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ (John 14.11). In seeing the Son we see the Father, for the Father is fully present in the Son. The divine substance cannot be broken up; each person possesses the whole being of God. ‘God is not partitioned,’ as Saint Gregory Nazianzus puts it. The divine being is found in full in persons who are distinct from one another, so each person exists within the other persons. We could call this a mystery and refuse to go any further, hut, as with the whole mystery of God, we must attempt to shed light on this too.

How is it possible for one person to be the bearer of the entire being of God? How is it possible for a person to exist within another person, without losing their identity? If we place human persons within other persons, their individuality would be lost. Created nature has a beginning, it moves within the limits of space and time, and space and time divide as much as they unite. Human nature is composite, and it is re-divided as each new person comes into existence, so the human essence is being constantly re-divided. No single person can be the bearer of the entire human essence, for if he were, at his death, all humanity would die with him.

We are all born with this dividing and divisible nature and hence the existence of death, and yet we can understand how a single person can be regarded as the bearer of all humanity. When an army announces its casual ties, for example, it says that there were ten fatalities. For those of us with no personal relationship to them, these are ten individual deaths which scarcely touch us and have no effect on human nature as a whole. We survive them and life goes on. But for the wife and mother of one of these soldiers, the man who has gone now is not one of ten, but one of one, the one and only. He represents life as a whole, so all life has gone with him. The unity of two people is so close, that each regards the other as representative of human being as a whole. When the relationship is person to person, and one person vanishes, our world vanishes with him so it seems that this death threatens the whole world. The murder of a single person is often called a ‘crime against humanity’. The more we regard someone a person, the more we regard them as representative of humanity as a whole. So we can see from our own existence how we could regard all humanity through the life of a single person, as though all the many persons of the human race were also just a single being.

With God, each person of God is the entire being, not a portion of the being of God. But God has no beginning and no mortality, and his being is not divisible. In God, the existence of the one person within the others actually creates a particularity, an ‘individuality’ and an otherness. Because we are made in the image of God we can see intimations of this in our own relationships. Because man is made in the image of God, we can find analogies between God and man, that are based in the relationships of the persons of God. The doctrine of the Trinity gives us the truth of our own existence.

With ‘person’, we refer to the way or mode in which each person of God receives his existence from the others, so that Fatherhood, Sonship and procession indicate the ways in which these three persons exist. The names of the Holy Trinity denote ontological particularity and distinctiveness, not single attributes or psychological experiences. The Father does not come into being: he simply exists as the Father, and he freely brings the Son and the Spirit into existence and does not exist without them. The Son is not the Father, and he is begotten. The Holy Spirit is neither Father nor Son, and he proceeds from the Father. If the Spirit were also begotten of the Father, we would have two Sons. Although we may not be able to say what the difference between ‘begotten’ and ‘proceeds’ is, it clearly indicates that the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Son.

Saint Cyril of Alexandria (378–444) developed the teaching of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, by showing that there is a difference between the terms ‘unbegotten’ and ‘Father’. The Eunomians regarded ‘unbegotten’ and ‘Father’ as synonyms. But Saint Cyril pointed out that ‘Father’ indicates that God has a Son: God cannot be Father without the Son. ‘Unbegotten’ merely signifies that the Father was not born of anyone. Cyril insisted that the positive meaning of Father is that he has a Son. The Father could not be Father if he was without the Son. He is the Father eternally, for he did not become a Father in time, and the consequence is that the Son is also eternally the Son. In the same way, the term ‘Son’ does not just tell us that he is begotten, but that he is the eternal Son of the Father.

The Fathers did not attempt to express the persons on the basis of attributes, but subordinated attributes to the relationships of the persons of God. With the Cappadocian Fathers the doctrine of God was complete and there were no significant further developments. If we want to give a faithful account of the Christian understanding of God we have to learn it from these Fathers of the Church.

We shall now take a look at theological developments in the West. The theologian who put his mark on Western thought and the Western theology of the Trinity in particular was Augustine. Augustine himself was not well known until the rise of the Franks, but thereafter he became the standard-bearer of the Western Church, and eventually the single source from which the West drew its theology.

Saint Augustine’s longest treatment of the doctrine of God appears in his De Trinitate. Augustine wanted to help people to come to terms with this very counterintuitive Christian doctrine of the Trinity, so he was more concerned to make it accessible than to be comprehensive. But when searching for analogies from human existence, Augustine made a decision which was to impact on all subsequent theology. He found his analogy for the persons of God within the single human individual. Augustine found all that he needed to explicate the Trinity within the individual, prior to any consideration of the society of others. Augustine’s intellectual inheritance encouraged him to believe that the most essential thing in a person is the mind. Your mind makes you who you are, so your ability to think and to become aware of yourself thinking is the key to understanding your existence. You may study yourself in complete isolation from whatever is around you, for once you have observed yourself thinking, you may be confident of your own existence at least. With this decision, Augustine opened the way for preoccupation with one’s inner self.

The Cappadocian Fathers believed that a single individual could not possibly serve as an analogy for God. Since God can only be identified through the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, our analogies must always involve a set of particular persons whom we can name, such as Peter, John and Andrew.

If the mind is what is most fundamental about us, Augustine, influenced by Platonic thought, decided that the memory is the most important aspect of the mind. Our entire existence springs from the memory, and everything we know and think about, is stored inside us, in an eternally existing storeroom of truth. Knowledge is simply the recollection of this truth; the etymology of truth (aletheia) is ‘unforgetting’. We discover the truth at the moment that knowledge re-emerges from within us. This makes memory the source of our existence. Augustine was content with the traditional expression the ‘source’ of divinity and the ancient image of a spring from which divinity flows. The Cappadocian Fathers found the traditional image of source insufficient because it suggested that divinity is something that flows out involuntarily.

For Augustine, God is, above all else, mind (On the Trinity, books 8 and 9). The mind is the source of knowledge, and the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, is the knowledge that the mind produces. The Logos was the form which God’s knowing takes. Knowledge comes from memory, and an active mind always expresses what it knows. God is an active mind: he has a Logos, from which his knowledge comes. The knowledge that is the Logos comes from the source that is the Father. But what could this be knowledge of, given that nothing exists other than God? God’s knowledge must he knowledge of himself, and his awareness must be self-awareness. The object of the knowledge of the Logos is the Father, so we have a self-knowledge of God. Another basic platonic tenet is that God is goodness, so the mind must be identical with the Good. Plato maintained that the good draws love and beauty towards itself and that beauty and the good awaken love, Eros. But, if God is all goodness and if there is no goodness other than him, whose love does he arouse? The Logos recognises the Father, and recognises him as the ‘Good’, and thus love of the ‘Good’ is born.

In Augustine’s view, the Spirit is this love of the Son and the Father. The Spirit is a third form of existence, by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. Augustine’s term for the Spirit is ‘nexus amoris’, the bond of love: love is the particular attribute of the Spirit. The Son is knowledge and has knowledge, while the Spirit is love and has love. Augustine had found a way to identify a specific attribute for each of the three persons. By equaling the Father with memory, the Son with knowledge and the Spirit with love, he had described an attribute and specific function for each person.

The Greek Fathers did not believe that we can describe the persons by assigning an attribute to each of them in this way. They do not say anything about the attributes of the Son or to the Spirit, just as they do not attempt to explain the difference between ‘being born of’ and ‘proceeding from’. The Son differs from the Father simply in that he is not the Father, and the Spirit is not the Son and so on.

The Cappadocians believed it is crucial to begin with the person of the Father, and thus with the persons of the Trinity. Augustine however makes the ‘substance’ of God prior, and regards the persons as relations within the substance of God. He affirms first that God exists, and only then turns to the question of how, and therefore of who, God is. As Karl Rahner shows, under his influence, mediaeval dogmatics in the West dedicated one chapter to the one substance of God, a second to the attributes of his substance, and another to the Trinity. Works of theology ever since have listed the attributes of the one God. Augustine’s decision to promote divine substance over the persons of God demotes the question of which God we are referring to. But the question of which God we are talking about is just as important as the question of the existence of God at all. It is the question of how God is that determines which God we are talking about. The Trinity is therefore primary and utterly fundamental to our discussion of God.

We have seen how, in his search for images that would express the doctrine of the triune God, Augustine resorted to the notion of the perfect metaphysical being described by Plato and his successors. We have seen that this perfect being possesses three characteristics, so allowing Augustine to establish analogies for the three persons of the Holy Trinity. The Father he equated with memory, the Son with knowledge and the Spirit with love and will. The Greek Fathers did not identify the persons of the Trinity with particular characteristics, but believed memory, knowledge and love belonged to the persons of the Trinity together. God has one knowledge, one will and love, not three. So we do not have one person representing knowledge, or one person representing love, but love and knowledge are common to the three of them. The Cappadocians insisted that, just as we cannot envisage God through introverted observation of one’s self, so we cannot achieve any image of man simply by interior inspection of one man. Man is not man because of his internal characteristics, whether we identify these as mind, memory, rationality or love. In order to obtain an image of a person, we need to have a communion of more than one person.

In his Confessions and On the Trinity, Augustine portrayed the person as a thinking object. Boethius (480–524) identifies the person with the ‘rational individual’. To Western thought, the person must possess the faculties of rationality, awareness and self-awareness. Descartes (1596– 1650) and Western philosophy in general took self-consciousness to be the attribute that makes us persons. For the Western philosophical tradition ‘person’ means someone with a developed sense of self-consciousness.

This psychological approach to the person gave rise to our contemporary psychology and philosophy of mind with their interest in determining the point at which we first become persons. Is it at conception, or at some point in the development of the foetus? Is it only when one is grown up and has acquired consciousness of one’s self that one becomes a person? So what of those who have no such awareness, or who, by illness or age, lose it? In what sense are they persons? Are those who have no developed self-consciousness to be considered deficient as persons? This whole discussion is generated by this linking of personhood to consciousness in the doctrine of the Trinity.

For Augustine, the psychological categories which give us knowledge of God also make each of us a person, and would do so even if we were the only one in existence. So we have seen that the concept of person is used in quite different ways in Western and Eastern thought. One’s account of God has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of man. But before examining these, we must look more closely at the doctrine of God.

The priority he gave to ‘being’ meant that Augustine identified God with mind and substance (On the Trinity, book 10, 4,18). The Greek Fathers, we have seen, insisted that the Father is the true identity of God. They are faithful to the way Scripture refers to God, as ‘the God, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (2Corinthians 2.3). When the Father is acknowledged as God we are able to understand why the concept of one God is embodied by the Trinity. If the one God is the Father, a relationship is presupposed. The Father has no existence without the Son, and, albeit differently, the Spirit, so these persons are from the very first included in the concept of the ‘one God’. When God is the Father, this Trinity of persons is necessarily included.

At this point we should relate our theology to the life and worship of the Church by asking one fundamental question. When you worship God, who or what are you ultimately addressing? Who or what are you praying to? Are you praying to God in general, to some deity or Divinity or Godhead? Or are you praying to specific persons, to the Father, Son and the Spirit?

Orthodox worship addresses prayers to the Father as God himself. The Holy Trinity cannot be divided of course, so where the Father is, there the Son and the Spirit are too. Yet we pray to a specific person. Many prayers are addressed to Christ and some to the Holy Spirit, or to all three persons at once. But the prayers of the divine Eucharist were originally addressed to the Father. It is clear from the liturgies of the earliest centuries that the anaphora, the offertory prayer, was always addressed to the Father. This is still clear in the Liturgy of Saint Basil where, without precluding the Son and the Spirit, the anaphora is addressed to the Father explicitly. We are addressing a particular person, as we do in the Lord’s prayer, and just as, in his prayers in the flesh, the Son addressed the Father. To the Greek Patristic tradition God is unequivocally the Father. In worship, which is fundamentally what determines theology, we pray ultimately to the Father, from whom the persons of the Trinity come and to whom they direct their own existence.

The Greek Fathers insisted that memory, knowledge, will and love are not individuated between the persons of God but common to them all. They understood that to confer individual psychological attributes to the persons of God may lead to the projection of creaturely characteristics onto God. In their anxiety to avoid such projection many Orthodox theologians have taken refuge in so-called apophatic or ‘negative’ theology which refers to God only by saying what he is not. They want to state that, when referring to the Holy Trinity, the concept of person in no way relates to the human person. But by doing so they have conceded that the Augustinian conception of the person, as the consciousness of the individual, is the only possible view of the person.

In view of the danger of projection that accompanies this ‘personalistic’ conception, many are understandably cautious in speaking about persons, and some believe that such personalism makes it best to avoid using the concept of the person altogether in referring to God. But rather than transferring human experience to God, a faithful theology will take the meaning of person from the trinitarian doctrine of God and transfer it to the human person. This is what we have to do if we are to speak of man as the ‘image and the likeness’ of God.

The doctrine of God is of fundamental importance if we are to understand who we are. Human beings are called to become persons in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity, for this is what theosis is. Created nature will never turn into divine nature, so no human being can become divine in his or her nature, but man can become a person in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity. Here we can see the decisive contribution that Patristic theology can make to the world. It can replace the psychological conception of the person and teach us the meaning of the person from the doctrine of the Trinity. But this requires that we re-learn the concept of the person from the Cappadocian Fathers. This is the uniquely important task given to Christian theology.

Now we turn to the relationship of the eternal Trinity and the economic Trinity. The eternal or immanent Trinity, traditionally called the ‘theology’ proper, refers to how God is in himself. The economic Trinity, traditionally the ‘economy’, refers to how God is for us. The Greek Fathers insisted that the eternal nature of God is altogether beyond our conception or comprehension and added that we may not participate in the ‘substance’ of God. So we can have no theology of God’s ‘nature’.

But although we cannot say anything about God’s ‘nature’ we can speak about the persons of God, and we can even participate in their life. Their life is the life that God intends us to share, so that it becomes our own. We share in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the Spirit. Christ has brought us the relationship he has with the Father, declared that we now belong in this relationship, and that the Father will acknowledge us as his sons. By this event of adoption we enter the life of God, and this participation in the divine life is traditionally called theosis. Thus the life of God is the life that is for us, so we are concerned, not with the essence, but with the eternal personal being of God.

It is entirely true that we are always unable to possess and control God, and this is the insight on which apophatic theology insists. To describe the being of God would be to attempt to come up with a totalising and final description and thereby to define and control him. There is always much interest in apophatic theology, but there is also a risk to it. It is true that we may not talk about the ‘nature’ of God. But we do know that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With regard to the persons, we have this positive knowledge; it is not merely logical or intellectual affirmation, but a living participation in the personal relationships of God. We speak about God by talking about his trinitarian life, rather than about his ‘nature’. The question is then whether the Trinity reveals God’s eternal existence or merely the relationships revealed in the economy of God’s relationship with us.

Again we will take Augustine as our example. Augustine ascribes one particular attribute to the Son, that of the knowledge of God. Whenever the Son reveals himself to us, which is to say within the economic Trinity, he does so as this attribute of knowledge. This makes the Son the cognitive means by which we may reach God, which was the position of the Logos theology of the second and third centuries. The relation of the Son to the Logos in the Gospel of John allowed Justin and his contemporaries to find in Christ the cognitive means by which we can reach God. Justin believed that all ancient philosophers participated in what he called this ‘seminal’ Logos: they all had some share in the knowledge which is Christ. The attribute of communion belongs to the Holy Spirit who reveals God to be communion. The crucial issue is whether the Son and Holy Spirit have these attributes eternally, or whether they take them on in the economy for our sake.

The Greek Fathers avoided giving definite personal attributes to the persons of the Holy Trinity. If they apportioned attributes to each of the persons we would have to say that whatever God is in his eternal being would have to be true of the economy too. In this way we would turn the economy into a necessity to which God was bound, rather than God’s own act made in freedom. If the Son were the Logos or knowledge of God, this knowledge must also permeate the economy if we are to have any knowledge of God. He would have been brought into the economy by necessity through the Son. In mediaeval times it was asked whether any person of the Trinity could become incarnate. Some said that there was no logical necessity by which only the Son could become incarnate. In the twentieth century, Karl Rahner argued that only the Son could have become incarnate, because he alone is the Logos who is self-revelation. Within God eternally, God recognises himself in the Son who is his Logos. So if God wants to make himself known to us in the economy, he has to use the Logos who is the instrument of his knowledge of himself. This would mean that only the Logos could become incarnate. But if the incarnation was due to some eternal personal attribute of the Logos, in what sense is the incarnation free?

If we attribute the economy to particular characteristics of the persons of the eternal Trinity, the economy of God becomes logically determined to some degree. Then it would have to be the Son who became incarnate or there could be no incarnation. On the other hand, if we avoid ascribing the economy to any specific attributes of the persons, perhaps the Son is not the only one who could become incarnate. We must say that the Son freely said ‘yes’ to the Father, and took on this mission. If we attribute the incarnation to freedom, it takes the incarnation of the Son out of the realm of necessity and into the realm of freedom.

When it comes to the Filioque, we will find that Augustine and Aquinas (Summa Theol. 1a 2ae, 4) understood the Son and Logos to be the knowledge or God, and the Spirit to be the love of God. Then the Spirit’s origin must be eternally dependent on the Son because, Augustine believes, we cannot love what we do not know, so knowledge must be prior to love (On the Trinity 10,1). In his view, God cannot love himself without prior knowledge of himself in the Son. This is the consequence of his association of memory and knowledge, and of the assumption that the mind cannot help but express what it knows. When we ascribe particular attributes to the persons we end up defining logical necessities. By not setting out attributes in this way, the Greek Fathers brought the issue of freedom to bear on the question of why the Son, rather than the Spirit, becomes incarnate.

Here we must exercise some caution. In the axiom expressed by Rahner, the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa. But we cannot make the economic Trinity and eternal Trinity entirely equivalent, and equally, we cannot say that the immanent Trinity is one thing and the economic Trinity is entirely another. Then God would seem to be withholding something of himself from us, or even to become entirely unknowable. So what is the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity?

The difference we can identify is that for the immanent Trinity we cannot say anything definitive about the attributes of the persons. Here there must be a proper element of apophaticism. In the economic Trinity we can say specific things about the attributes of the persons, because these persons have taken on these particular tasks and characteristics freely for us. Though the Son is the revelation of the Father (‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’) this does not necessarily mean that the Son has this function and attribute in the eternal Trinity. If the Spirit signifies love and creates communion for us, this does not mean this is due to a specific attribute of the Spirit in the eternal Trinity. The persons take on these attributes freely for our sake, so they relate to the economy, the way God is for us. The differentiation of attributes must be limited to the economy. When it comes to the immanent Trinity, the ‘theology’ proper, we cannot say that one person is love and the other is knowledge. They are not attributes but the operations of persons acting together in freedom, and all the operations of the eternal Trinity are one.

This is equally important with regard to the unity of God. In the immanent Trinity all action is one and eternal. This united action is expressed in different ways within the economy, so the persons do not all do the same thing, although they always act in unison. Where the Father is, there the Son and the Spirit are; where the Son is, there the Father and the Spirit are. But the Son does not perform the work that the Father performs. Whatever the differentiated actions of God in the economy, they are not extensions of differentiations within the eternal Trinity. Western theology, however, has often turned distinctions in the economy into differentiations within the eternal Trinity, which is one reason why it became trapped in the Filioque.

The Greek Fathers’ distinction between theology and economy was most clearly expressed by Saint Basil. In ‘On the Holy Spirit’, Basil defends a doxology of Alexandrian origin which he had introduced to the liturgy in his diocese. The doxology Basil had inherited took the form ‘Glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit’. Basil’s doxology was ‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, with to the Holy Spirit’. He replaced the through (the Son) and in (the Holy Spirit), with ‘and the Son with the Spirit’. Basil’s reason was that the first, Alexandrian, doxology with its use of ‘through the Son’ and ‘in the Holy Spirit’, relates to the economy in which we come to know God through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. There is an order and even a hierarchy here, because the Spirit follows the Son. Basil explained that the ‘Pneumatomachians’ (‘Resistors of the Spirit’), who refused to accept the divinity of the Spirit, used the doxology with ‘in’ the Spirit. They thought that ‘in’ denoted space, which seemed to them to indicate that the Spirit was contained by space, which meant that he was a creature.

Next we must set out the significance of these developments. What purposes does the doctrine of God have? What would change for us if God were not as the Church has taught? Let us begin with the relationship between the being of God and his personal existence.

When a young person says ‘no one asked me whether I wanted to be born’, they are raising the question of freedom. Since they were not asked about it, they see their existence as an imposition on them. This is not such a strange thought, for there is no greater restraint than existence itself. We are fascinated by the moral concept of freedom: we believe that we must be able to choose between two or more options, and we must have our say at every step of our life. We understand freedom as the ability to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But this overlooks the much bigger challenge to our freedom represented by the fact that you cannot say ‘no’ to your own existence, or if you could, you would cease to exist and your freedom would disappear with you.

There is a degree of absurdity about challenging our own existence, of course. We want to ignore or overcome the objectivity of life, but we are unable to do so. But however much we may find it painful to protest against the phenomena forced on as by life, we must not give up the hope of freedom. The reason my freedom appears to cancel itself out is that my existence comes before my freedom. If we said the same of God, we would be creating a theology in which the being comes before the person of God which would make God the least free being of all. But if God is not free to be, how can we hope to be free? If God himself is not free, all freedom is surely an illusion. Whatever we do we should not give up our hope for freedom.

We express our freedom by creating new identities for ourselves. When the teenager protest that he was not asked whether he wanted to come into this world, he is tearing himself free of the identity that he received from his family and his education in order to define himself on the basis of new relationships that represent no restriction on him. Consequently, freedom, by which we identify ourselves with what we ourselves desire, and in which we exist for whatever we desire, is absolutely fundamental. We have been created to be free: freedom is what will finally establish us in the likeness of God. We have to know whether the God in whom we believe, and whose likeness we desire to be, is tied to his existence. Does he exist because he has to exist and cannot but exist? This is what is at stake in theology in the issue of the priority of the persons over ‘nature’.

God is free if it is not ‘nature’ that makes him exist, but he himself as a person. God is free if it is the person of the Father who makes God exist. If the Father wills to be, then God does not exist because he has to, but because he is willing to. This absolute freedom of God is expressed in the specific way of the relationships of the Trinity. If God exists because the Father is willing, we can hope that this freedom is not as impossible as it seems but may turn out to be possible for us too. The logic of theology therefore, overcomes the illogic and absurdity of the only way we know how to exercise our desire for freedom, which is by refusing anything and everything that we are confronted by. Because, for us, existence is a given and therefore a necessary thing, our freedom is exercised only by accepting the existence imposed on us or rejecting it and so denying our own selves. For us there is the possibility, or temptation, of exercising our freedom by saying ‘no’.

Since his existence is not a given thing, God is not obliged to choose whether to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it. For him, there is only one way to exercise freedom, and that is affirmatively. What is there for him to say ‘no’ to? God has the freedom to say ‘yes’. The Father’s freedom is expressed by saying ‘yes’ to the Son, and the freedom of the Son is expressed in saying ‘yes’ to the Father. This is the ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ again, that the Apostle Paul says (2Corinthians 1.19) has come to its in Christ. Since for God nothing is given, there is nothing which he has to refuse. For God, the exercise of freedom does not take the form of a choice, but it is exercised voluntarily, in the form of love, expressed in his trinitarian life. If we apply this to human existence, freedom is not sometimes ‘yes’ and sometimes ‘no’, but only ever ‘yes’. The only way to exercise freedom that demonstrates its freedom, is in love, which is to say, by affirming beings other than yourself. Our freedom therefore consists in saying that we acknowledge that this person exists for us, that we desire them and intend that they become part of our very being. The Apostle Paul tell us that ‘Jesus Christ who was preached among you, was not ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but in him it has always been ‘yes’ (2Corinthians 1.19). God’s ‘yes’ and Christ’s ‘yes’ is the freedom of affirmation, demonstrated in love.

This Trinity of persons is the way God is who he is. The Father freely consents to this Son, wills him and acknowledges him as his Son, freely. God exercises his freedom in love and affirmation when the Father begets the Son, and when he sends the Holy Spirit. This opens up the possibility that we can also exercise freedom, affirmatively, as love. This exercise of freedom transforms us into the likeness of God. The image of God is fulfilled in the self-government of man who though he is able to say ‘no’ says ‘yes’, as God does. This is how we may join those great lovers of God and of man, the holy spiritual Fathers, who have learned to pass beyond their own individual will through submitting themselves to another.

These considerations of human freedom are raised by the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. I hope we can see that, though we have to wrestle with these conceptual complexities in order to set out the teaching of the Church, the subject of theology is straightforward, for it is simply that life with God which is the fundamental experience of the Christian. The whole outworking of the doctrine of the Trinity is comprehended in the experience of the one who is learning the freedom of love that belongs to God.

The Filioque – ‘and from the Son’ – is a clause inserted into the Creed by the Western Church. It declares that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but also from the Son.

There are two aspects to the Filioque. The first is the canonical, which relates to the way the doctrine was advanced in the course of the Church’s history, and the second is the issue of the truth which means that we need to investigate whether this doctrine has a place in the Christian doctrine of God. To comprehend what is at stake theologically, we will again compare the theology of Augustine and the Cappadocians, for the West used Augustine to defend the Filioque, while the Eastern Orthodox used the Cappadocians to reject it.

Let us start with the canonical issue and the history of this clause. The idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father existed in the West even in the fourth century. We find it in Ambrose in a form that created no theological problems. Maximus (Letter to Marinus) in the seventh century found that this term Filioque was employed in Rome, but in a way that was entirely orthodox. So no theological controversy was attached to this phrase before the seventh century, and then it was for reasons of politics that the term became the focus of controversy.

The Filioque was first inserted into the Creed in sixth-century Spain, at the Council of Toledo. King Requarerdos, newly converted from Arianism to the orthodox faith, was looking for ways to reinforce the divinity of the Son against the Arian position. He found the means of doing this in the Filioque, and persuaded the council to insert the phrase into the Creed, in order to strengthen the confession that the Son is equal to the Father. So far, things were more or less innocuous.

The rise of the Franks under Charlemagne created a new political climate. Charlemagne wanted to establish himself at the head of new Roman empire. Of course, the Byzantine emperor regarded Constantinople as the continuation of Rome, and himself as the leader of the Roman empire. Intending to launch a military campaign against Byzantium, Charlemagne adopted the Filioque and declared the Byzantines heretics in order to give his troops a cause to rally to. This borrowed theological term became the focus of a political struggle between the Western and Eastern ends of the Mediterranean.

Charlemagne was also regarded as a threat in Rome itself. Pope Leo III opposed the introduction of the Filioque to the Creed and so found himself on the same side as the Byzantines. Leo had the Creed, without the Filioque, inscribed on two plaques and placed in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Later these plaques were taken down, of course. In a theological conference in Rome on the Council of Constantinople in 1982, a Roman Catholic theologian, Father Yves Congar, suggested that these plaques of the Creed without the Filioque should be restored to their original prominent position, though no such action has yet been taken.

Up until that time, the Filioque had been a purely Frankish cause. But Rome’s advances in Bulgaria had created growing antagonism with Constantinople. In the year 1014, it was agreed that the coronation of emperor Frederick IV take place in Rome on the condition that the Filioque was included in the Creed. For reasons of political expediency Rome conceded to this demand, the Filioque became part of the Creed in Rome and the Western Church has defended it ever since. In 1054, the year of the schism between Rome and Constantinople, the Pope’s anathema, deposited by Umberto in the Church of Hagia Sophia, made the charge that, far from being a Western introduction, it had been the Easterners who had removed the Filioque from the Creed!

In subsequent centuries, Westerners continued to level this charge against the Eastern Church, so the truth of its insertion of Filioque was forgotten in the West. The fight for the justification of the Filioque was now under way. The West drew arguments from Augustine, developed with the aid of Thomas Aquinas, for regarding those who did not accept the Filioque as heretics, and an equally recalcitrant anti-Filioque theology developed in the East, each side throwing the charge of heresy in polemics that endured over centuries.

As a theological issue the Filioque came to the fore in the twentieth century as Russian émigrés in France brought the theology of Slavophiles to the West. The chief representative of this theology, Vladimir Lossky, brought the Filioque back into the centre of debate and this has served to renew the controversy. When we ask about the differences between East and West, the Filioque is usually the first answer given. The canonical issue remains a problem. Does any one Church have the right to insert a new wording in the Creed? The Creed was produced by an ecumenical council, that is a council of the whole Church. No part of the Church can make a unilateral alteration to the Church’s teaching, without the consent of the whole Church. We will come back to this issue.

Having examined the history we must now turn to theological issues around the Filioque. Theological justification of the Filioque began from Augustine’s position that, in the Trinity, as the Logos, the Son represents the knowledge of God, while the Spirit is the love of God. As knowledge comes before love, the reasoning went, the Son comes before the Spirit. On this basis Augustine attributed priority to the Son over the Spirit, and made the Son a source of the Spirit alongside the Father.

A second justification given for the Filioque was that, according to Augustine, the ‘substance’ is prior to the persons of God. One God means the essence within which three relationships subsist, the Father (memory), the Son (knowledge) and the Spirit (love). But, medieval Scholastic theologians would argue, relationships that are complete must be reciprocal, so relationships must come in pairs. The Spirit must originate, not from one person, but from a relationship of two persons. Given that the Son is the only other person, the Filioque is required.

The Reformation brought a different approach. Protestants condemned as metaphysics any theology that speaks of the ‘being’ of God, insisting that we know God solely through his works in history and therefore through the economy. The historical acts of God are the sole source for theology. Their claim was that since the Holy Trinity appears in history in the economy because the Father sends his Son, and the Son sends the Spirit, the Spirit is therefore given to us by the Son. Given that everything we know and can say about God is dependent on what happens in the economy we have to concede that the Spirit is also dependent on the Son, not on the Father alone. The outcome was that Protestants found continuing grounds to support the Filioque.

Protestants found themselves in the same confusion as those fourth-century theologians who were unable to distinguish between the two sorts of procession, ‘proceeding from’ and ‘sent by’. ‘Proceeding from’ relates to the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. The Spirit proceeds eternally and directly from the Father. But in the economy the Son sends the eternal Spirit to us; the Son gives us the Spirit. The Son clearly has something to do with the appearance of the Holy Spirit in the economy.

The Greek-speaking East had used ‘proceeding from’ (εκπορεύεται) only within the immanent and eternal Trinity. But Latin did not make it easy to distinguish between the two. From the fourth century the Greek Ekporeuetai (proceeding from) and pempetai (sent by) were translated into Latin simply as ‘procedere’. From the very beginning, the West used Filioque of both theology and economy and from this came the mutual incomprehension that drove the controversy. When saying that the Spirit originates from the Father and the Son, are we referring simply to the economy, where the Spirit is indeed given by the Son, or is this being projected back into the eternal being of God?

A second area of difficulty lies in the analogies Augustine used to describe the Trinity. To say that the Father is memory, the Son is knowledge and the Spirit is love, is to project onto God from the economy. In the view of the Greek Fathers such arguments give no support to the Filioque. The only thing we can say about the Father, the Son and the Spirit is that the Father is Unbegotten and that he is the Father of the Son; the Son is begotten and is the Son of the Father; and the Spirit ‘proceeds from’ the Father and that he is the Spirit, not the Son. These characteristics, which derive from the very being of these persons, tell us how they are and thus who they are. We cannot say anything about the other characteristics that belong to each of the persons.

We have seen that the East did not set the nature of God before or above the persons. If the Father is God, to make the Son equally the source of the Holy Spirit would be to acknowledge two ontological origins in the Trinity, and thus two Gods. The oneness of God is secured by the Father: he is the only source and cause, from whom God’s entire life and being comes. The Father secures the unity of God. The absolute sovereignty of God is safeguarded by the sole principle (monarchia) of the Father. The Filioque would then represent the introduction of a second source (arché) beside the Father.

How can three persons not be three separate Gods? The answer is that the Son and the Spirit come from the Father and orient themselves entirely to him. He is the source of their being and thus of the existence of the Trinity. The sovereignty of the Father secures the unity and oneness of God. If the Son is a second principle alongside the Father, the sovereignty of the Father would be gone and we would have two Gods.

We have a similar difficulty when we imagine that knowledge comes before love. Here we need to remember what we said about knowledge of persons and knowledge of things. In order to know someone, I need to be in some sort of relationship with them, and every relationship is informed to some degree by love. Augustine’s argument that knowledge comes before love is unfounded. This means that if we are maintaining that the Son is knowledge and the Spirit is love, the Spirit cannot be subsequent to the Son. Knowledge is intrinsically related to love and communion, because we know persons only to the degree that we are in communion with them, which is to say, we love them.

Is there any degree to which we accept the Filioque? Understood in the right way, we may indeed accept the Filioque. The first consideration is to be clear about the difference between ‘proceeding from’ and ‘sent by’ and so maintain the distinction between the eternal and the economic Trinity. It is fine to say that the Spirit depends on the Son in the economy, but it is an entirely different thing to maintain that this relates to the eternal life of God. We cannot talk about any Filioque in the eternal Trinity because the Father is the sole cause of the Spirit. Nonetheless, the Greek Fathers make a distinction that allows a role for the Son in the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit. In ‘That There are not Three Gods’, Saint Gregory of Nyssa says:

We do not deny the difference between Him (the Father) who exists as the causer, and he who is from this causer.

We may get a better idea of how the persons are distinct by agreeing that there is a difference between a cause, and what it causes. The difference between the Father and the Son and Spirit, is that the Father is the cause while the Son and the Spirit are caused by him. The cause is a person, an agent who freely initiates. The distinction between the cause and what he causes is all-important. Gregory continues:

As for that which is caused (the Son), we recognise a further difference. The Son comes immediately and directly from the Cause, whereas the Spirit comes through the one who comes directly from the Cause, that is, through the mediation of the Son.

The mediation of the Son in the procession of the Spirit safeguards the fact that the Son is the only-begotten, that is, that he is the only Son and the Spirit is not another Son beside him. The mediation of the Son does not change the fact that the Spirit has a direct relationship with the Father. Gregory insists that it is this mediatory role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit that preserves the immediate relationship of the Spirit to the Father. As long as we are clear that the Son is not the cause, other roles for the Son in the procession of the Spirit are admissible.

So we have seen that Orthodox theology makes some careful distinctions between the doctrine of the eternal God and the economy of God for man in creation and history.

Within the eternal God, however, the Spirit does not proceed from the Son. In the immanent Trinity we have relationships that are entirely ontological, so the only cause or agent must be the Father. ‘Proceeding from’ (ekporeuetai) relates to the Spirit’s ontological dependence on the Father within the eternal Trinity. To talk about a second cause or agent would be to introduce a second God.

In the economy, it is right to say that the Spirit depends on the Son, is sent by the Son and given by him to the Church. When dealing with the economy, we are not dealing with the eternal relationships of the persons of the Trinity in themselves, but only those relationships that relate to the acts of God for us, and so to the Son’s action of sending the Spirit. So within the economy the term Filioque, by the Father and the Son, cannot be faulted.

We have seen that in part the Filioque controversy was caused by the confusion in the West about two terms, one of which refers to the immanent Trinity and one to the economic Trinity. For the East, this distinction is imperative; if we make this distinction, we are able to accept that the Filioque is true in the economy.

But as the West defined it, the Filioque relates equally to the eternal and the economic Trinity. Can the Filioque not be applied at all to the eternal Trinity? Let us take a look at the issue as it was encountered by patristic theology. In the seventh century, as word was getting around that the Filioque was being used in the West, Saint Maximus was asked for his opinion on this matter. He replied that he had looked into it, and found that the Latin-speaking Romans did not have respective words for expressing the two notions of proceeding from and sent by (ekporeuetai and pempetai), so they used only one word, proceeds and this gave rise to confusion. In the same letter to Marinus, Saint Maximus noticed that Roman Christians referred to Saint Cyril of Alexandria, whose writings seemed to give the Filioque some support in the eternal Trinity. Theodoretus of Cyrrhus responded by saying that if Cyril was talking about the economy, all was well; if not, Cyril was in error.

Cyril did not confine what he said about the Filioque to the economy, but made inferences for the eternal Trinity. He did not use the term ‘proceeds from’, but he did say that the Spirit is eternally manifested by the Son also. Given that the ‘essence’ is common to all three persons, the Son can be said to manifest the Spirit in the being of God. But, in the personal relationship of Spirit to the other two persons, there can be no Filioque, because the person of the Father alone is the cause of the Trinity. At first glance, this appears ambiguous, but as we have seen, Saint Gregory of Nyssa pointed out that a cause is one thing, and whoever is from that cause is another.

Only when person is the cause and the other is from that cause, can we perceive that one person is distinct from another. Gregory says that the only way to distinguish between the persons of the Trinity is by this concept of agency or cause. He continues:

With regard to the person who is from the Cause, we have in there another distinction, whereas with regard to the Cause, it is clear that it is only the Father. When referring to ‘from the cause’, we can recognise a further difference: one of the two originates without mediation from the first, while the other originates with the mediation of the one who originates directly from the Cause. (To Ablabius: ‘That There Are Not Three Gods’ )

The difference between the Son and the Spirit is that the Son comes directly from the Father, while the Spirit comes through the mediation of the Son. Gregory explains that with this mediation of the Son

The attribute of being only-begotten abides without doubt in the Son, and the mediation of the Son, while it guards his attribute of being only-begotten, does not shut out the Spirit from his relation by way of nature to the Father.

This mediation does not remove the direct and immediate relationship of the Spirit with the Father, but we have to identify this mediation so that we do not see the Spirit as a second Son. This does look like a kind of Filioque in the eternal God. Nevertheless, the cause of the Holy Spirit is always the Father for, though the Son mediates, he is no second cause. These nuances maintain the rule of faith that the Father alone is the cause.

In his letter to Marinus, Saint Maximus said he discussed the issue with Christians in Rome and concluded that they did not mean that the Son is the cause, so Maximus said that there was no heresy involved. That was how the situation was left in the seventh century. In later centuries as the Filioque was used by the West as a slogan aimed at the Byzantines, the issue became polarised. The Westerners were no longer ready to concede that the Son is not a cause, with the Father, of the procession of the Holy Spirit and their refusal eventually turned into defiance.

The Council of Florence (1438–39) attempted to heal the division of the Church on this issue. If the two sides had been willing to adopt the term ‘through the Son’ rather than ‘from the Son’, that might have been a basis for agreement. ‘Through the Son’ would have indicated the mediation of the Son that Gregory of Nyssa was looking for. But neither side was willing to make any decisive theological step. The West had already stabilised its own position with the expression ‘from the Father and the Son’, and was not willing to retract it or replace it with ‘through the Son’.

I believe that the Filioque is a matter that the Churches of East and West can resolve. Fresh attempts are now under way, and it will be very interesting to see what progress they make. All we have to do is avoid anything that obscures the principle that, within the Trinity, the Father alone is cause and agent. We can all make our case for our understanding of the place of the Filioque in the doctrine of God, just as the Church did in the age of Maximus.