As creatures we possess not only a created nature but personal identity. We think we know instantly what a person is. To judge from what philosophers and psychologists say, you would think that whatever is best in the individual determines what the person is. Whereas the theologian knows that the person is a mystery, intelligible only by the contemplation of the Trinity.
The priestly prayer of Christ in St John’s Gospel puts it in a nutshell: ‘That they may all be one; even as thou, father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us… The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me…’ (John 17.21-22).
However, it was not until the 4th century that the theology of the Trinity was fully developed, in response to two explanations which tended to contradict each other; one that confused the divine Persons, the other that separated them. Between the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea and the second at Constantinople, St Athanasius emphasized the mystery of the essential oneness of the Son and of the Father. In relation to the Father, the Son is homoousios; that is to say, not of the ‘same’ substance – ‘same’ might indicate a mere likeness – but absolutely identical in being.
A little later the Cappadocians – Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa – emphasized, in an antinomic argument, the irreducible difference between the Father and the Son: the Son is identical in substance with the Father, but he is at the time absolutely unique, as also the Father is unique. And it was the Cappadocians who showed that the Holy Spirit, who for long had been confused with the divine presence which he communicates to us, also shares in that ‘consubstantiality’, while remaining absolutely and mysteriously unique. In their desire to do justice to the glory of the living God, the Fathers of the 4th century precipitated a revolution of language and thought.
The great biblical revelation of I and thou, the self and the other, was a difficult notion for ancient philosophy. Sometimes, in the ‘initiatory’ tradition developed by Plotinus, whereby beings return by a process of conversion to their origin, thou and I were obliterated in the impersonal One; sometimes individuals were represented as similar but separate. Traces of this uncertainty can be seen in the vocabulary. The Greek prosopon and the Latin persona alike retain something of their original meaning, which is a theatrical mask. That is why the Fathers left these words to one side, preferring to use a common term but with a new meaning. They took one not from philosophy but from everyday life, where it served to designate a thing, as distinct from other things: hypostasis. We shall translate it as Person, with a capital, to avoid any confusion with philosophical usage.
‘Hypostasis’ was almost a synonym for ousia, a component of homoousios, meaning substance, nature – quite simply, a thing. However, as we have said, the first of these words emphasized distinctness, the second what is shared. The Fathers used ‘hypostasis’ of the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit, each in its incomparable originality. And they called their identity ousia. By this antinomy they defined the very mystery of Love.
Fallen logic opposes or confuses. The dogma of the Trinity suggests the coincidence, in the divine Source, of absolute unity and absolute diversity. Three, here, is a ‘meta- mathematical’ number (St Basil of Caesarea) which, always identical to the One, signifies the infinite transcending of opposition, not by re-absorption in the impersonal, but in the fullness of love, whereby each Person, in his transparent difference, far from vying with the others, gives importance to them. Each is uniquely the means of giving existence to the same Substance, of receiving it from the others and of imparting it to them in what Maximus the Confessor calls the ‘motionless movement of love’, a loving dance in which each effaces himself to give fuller existence to the others, and thereby is fully himself.
So the Trinity, the Identity of Unique Persons, signifies that love is not merely the fulfillment of personal existence but its origin.
~From Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
