Trinitarian Ruminations
The Gnostics spoke of God as the Demiurge and the most high God. But for the Gnostics, God the creator is evil, while the Logos and lower beings are not identical to God but are emanations which God uses to create because of his ultimate transcendence of his apathy towards creation. So the Gnostics formed their language of difference between god and his emanations by appropriating a standing language of energia, and dunamis which spoke of the power and attributes of God. Stating that there were differences of energies between the son and the Father, Arius argued that because of this it would be impossible for the Son to be God in the same way the Father was or even at all. For those qualities that would be essential for constituting deity the son or the Spirit could not be without. In light of this the Monarchians explained that there is not difference between the Father and the Son and this applied not only to their energies but also their being or hypostasis. In other words the Monarchians concluded about the identity of being and hypostasis from the identity of the energy in God. It was this that would give way to modalism and sabellianism, which the Father and the Son share all hypostatic properties and because of this are the same person.
Against this the church emphasized the hypostatic properties of the persons, which were not interchangeable and were unique to each one. Hence you had the dictum, whatever is not shared by all, is hypostatically united to 1 of the persons. So while the father and the son have all things in common, the hypostatic properties of Father and Son are unique and as such incommunicable. So the Father really exists and can be distinguished from the Son and likewise the Spirit from the Father and the Son. Hence the hypostatic properties of these two persons of the Holy Trinity are to be understood in terms of the Father being the Father and the Son being the Son and the fact that the manner of existence of the Son from the Father is specified by “birth†whereby the Father begets the Son, and the son is begotten by the Father. TO be born is the sons hypostatic property in relation to the Father, where to ‘give birth’ is the hypostatic property of the Father in relation to the son.
In other words the Trinitarian reality of the God head was a metaphysically established reality via ‘Economia’ which through the history of salvation showed us that God is triune.
The Apostolic Fathers offer helpful insights into the development of Biblical Trinitarian theology; though none explicitly stated the doctrine of the Trinity in its mature form, there were definitely themes which informed later Trinitarian articulation and can be understood from these later formulations to in fact hold seminally the Trinitarian reality. 1 Clement is said by Fortman to speak of the Father, of Christ His Son and the Holy Spirit which were coordinated together in an oath. The Oath is, “As God lives, and the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and the Holy Spirit.†(1st Clement 22:1). Fortman says of the previous, “Christ is not called God, but his divinity is implied by his coordination with God in the oath. Whether he is viewed as Son of God from eternity is not clear. The Holy Spirit is not called God, but His divinity and personality are implied by His coordination with the Father and the Son in the oath as the object of the faith and hope of the elect and in the attribution to him of the Divine function of inspiration.†(Forman, “The Triune God†pg. 38) Here we can see the echoes of scripture and the later dogmatic formulation. SO while someone may ask, was Clement a Trinitarian, we may respond that it would not be anachronistic to call him one because of the origination of his teaching from scripture. But if by the question we think of the doctrinal formulations of the early church, then we would have to appeal to anachronism and state that though in the mature sense no, it would be wrong to say that it is not seen in his writings or that his writing were not in some sense used in the later doctrinal formulations.
Ignatius of Antioch it is said delves deeper into the Trinitarian mystery than his predecessors, but he still did not have anything like a systematic theology developed in regards to the topic. Fortman again expresses that the fundamental methodology that was driving his theological formulations were economic considerations. Recognizing that God was manifest in the person of Christ, a economic consideration will move to structuring articulation from what is revealed in the saving economy to predication about God in esse. While Ignatius was concerned the most with Christ, whom he says was “from eternity with the Father and at last has appeared to us†(Magn 6:1) also reflects on the Holy Spirit and recognizes the Spirit as the principle of the Lords virginal conception and that through the Holy Spirit God confirmed his word to the churches. Fortman again writes, “It has been argued that for Ignatius there is no Trinity before the birth of Jesus, but before the birth there was only God and a pre-existent Christ, who is called either the Logos or the Holy Spirit. There is however, no solid evidence that Ignatius either in intention or in words made any such identification either in his letter to the Smyrnaeans or in that to the Magnesians. On the contrary when Ignatius writes that our God Jesus Christ was born of Mary and of the Holy Spirit, he seems to indicate that before this birth both our God Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit pre-existed distinctly and that there was a Trinity before his birth.†(Fortman, pg. 40)
I would be remiss if I did not look into the Trinitarian thought of Tertullian who is considered by some to have had a fairly profound effect on the Trinitarian thought of Augustine. Tertullian writing against Praxeas, seems to be battling a type of theological Trinitarianism that has affinities for Modalism which collapses the distinctions into each other, from which you derive a Patripassianism and other such heresies. So in his writings you get a direct refutation of this type of thinking and a direct Trinitarian direction that definitely sets the stage for other Fathers to come. Tertullian was the first to use the Trinitas and did a good deal of work in establishing the personal realities of each person. He writes, “The three are three not in condition but in degree; not in substance but in form; not in power, but in aspect; and of one substance, and of one condition and of one power, inasmuch as he is one God.†(AP 2 [PL 2:180]) Here is a foundational statement that reflects what would become standard definitional language in Trinitarian dialogue, that they are three but they are one in substance. As Letham says, “Tertullian coins a new vocabulary, a lasting tradition to the western church.†This is correct the language of Tertullian has been in some ways, with later modifications of course, considered properly orthodox in its formulation of the three persons and the one substance.
Quoting Letham again, he says about Tertullian, “The one God exists in three distinct persons. The names Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not ciphers, referring to the one God under different guises, but represent real, eternal distinctions. The Trinity does not subvert the monarchy. The numerical order and distribution of the Trinity, they assume to be a division of the Unity; whereas the unity which derives the Trinity out of itself is so far from being destroyed, that it is actually supported by it.†(Letham, “The Holy Trinity†pg. 98 Here you can seen Tertullian (through Letham) working to manifest the real ontological distinctions among the three persons while at the same time trying to unite these persons in an un-expressible unity. It is his language here that gives creedal formulation to the Trinitarian echoes that we have looked at thus far in the though of some of the earlier teachers and fathers.
Augustine was the one inheritor of the language, who was able, through use and pervasive theological influence to make it the standard for a large portion of Christendom. It should be noted that Augustine chronologically follows the Cappadocians and others in their theological formulations of person and triadology, and because of his knowledge of Greek (it was not very good) his insights are to some extent (a large extent maybe) innovative in their own way. Not to say that he did not inherit his Trinitarian theology from the deposit of faith that had been handed down through the church, but rather his illustrations and the relationship between the persons given is psychological relationships and the hypostatic relations between the Father Son and Spirit were never articulated in such a way before. It is this that has made him such a profound influence in the history of dogma, and has given his magisterial work, “De Trinitate†a lasting significance that can still be seen today in theological writings on the subject, or the material being produced yearly which gives attention to his thought on the Trinity.
It is said by Fortman that Augustine is not so much a controversialist, but truly contemplative and intensely personal. In the makeup of his work the first 7 chapters are given to establishing the doctrine of the Trinity according to the scriptures and the fathers and the last 8 he gives to analogies in which he thinks will add some light on the issue. Historically the doctrine of the Trinity had been approached from two different ways; one was to emphasize the persons, as it was the economical distinctions of the persons by which anyone even knew what the Trinity was. It was because of the plurality emphasis that a branch of Christendom (Orthodox) has been given the title of emphasizing the plurality at the sake of the unity. There was also the methodology of emphasizing the unity (though not eradicating the plurality) and finding in substance metaphysics a unifying feature that would help the three to coalesce into a unity. Augustine emphasizes the latter, “one divine nature subsisting in three persons.†SO his theologizing started by emphasizing the unity that existed among the persons through the sharing of the one divine nature. Thus in De Trinitate (DT from here on) he will unite the persons in unity of substance, which for Augustine also signifies unity of will (DT 2:9).So at any point in which one of the persons is working, it can also be stipulated that all of the other three persons are working as well. This can be seen in Tertullian’s use of ‘three persons†and “one power.†(A good book to read on dunamis and its use in the Trinitarian formulations is: “The Power of God†by Michael Barnes. Here he looks at Dunamis in its historical context and how exactly this word was employed by theologians to signify unity in the God head.)
Now in light of the theological methodology of Augustine, it has been said (Adolf Von Harnack), that Augustine’s theology represents a more acute form of modalism than it does an orthodox Trinitarian theology. Harnack states that only the mere assertion from Augustine that his theology is not Modalistic does not save it from the charge…any more than my assertion of “being a duck†makes me a duck. Augustine tried to jettison this complaint or at least unwittingly so, through his language of the three being “subsistent relations†within the one essence. Now this does not speak of relations as an ontological category of determinative being, but rather ‘relations’ refers to the distance or the relations that each of the persons sustain to the others. Hence the relation between the Father and the Son is that of Paternity and Filiation, and the relationship between the Father and Spirit and son is from procession. You can see how Augustine structured his theological methodology from a dialectical mindset where each person could and would be distinguished through his dialectical relation to the other persons. Oddly enough it is because of this reality that you find the Spirit in the thought of Augustine proceeding from the Father and the Son, because one again to keep from collapsing the distinctions between the persons into nothing there must be a way (in the thought of Augustine) to distinguish between the Son and the Spirit, hence the relation of origin and procession.
One of Augustine’s most famous illustrations is viewing the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son. Here and throughout the last 8 books of DT there is an emphasis on love and thought which Augustine thinks helps to structure and give illustrative manifestation of the Trinitarian reality. Whether or not one thinks that Augustine succeeded in his attempts, one must acknowledge the depth of his learning and the profundity of his thought on Christendom in general and the west in particular.
