The idea of a truly trinitarian anthropology is chiefly associated with St Gregory of Nyssa, the most speculative of the Cappadocians. In little tracts dismissed rather hastily by his detractors as works of philology he attacks the ‘erroneous custom’ whereby Man is spoken of in the plural and God in the singular; in both cases personal plurality is quite consistent with unity of essence. We ought to say that in Christ, the new Adam, ‘Man is unique in all men’ (There are not three Gods, P.G., XLV, 117).
20th century Russian theology has returned to this assertion and refined it, as if to uncover the spiritual imperative, secularized though it may be, that socialism contains. Fr Sergius Bulgakov emphasized ‘the total humanity of every person’. Fr Paul Florensky, who because of his sheer scholarship was allowed to stay in the Soviet Union, remarked that the fundamental difference between a truly Christian view of society and one based on the best intentioned social morality, is that while, according to the latter, people are merely alike, for the former they are in some sense ‘consubstantial’ like the Persons of the Trinity.
When we become living beings, we expand far beyond the limits of our own individuality into the vastness of the Body of Christ, no longer separated in space or time from any other being. Henceforth we carry within ourselves the whole of humanity. In the light of these principles history acquires its true significance. If there is only one human being, then all history is mine, since I am part of an immense communion. If history were only ruins and ashes, the history of death and the dead, why should we find it interesting?
I am reminded of an incident in my childhood, when I was eight or nine years old. The entire world in which I was growing up, including school, was atheistic; it was not so much that God’s existence was denied as that he was radically absent. One day in history, a subject I loved, the master was teaching us about the Emperor Charlemagne, crowned in the year 800, dead in 814. Dead… I suddenly felt dizzy. Dead, I said to myself, all the people in this book are dead. So why should I be interested in history? It was a long time before I found the answer: that history, in the end, is the destiny of humanity with God, and that our God is the God not of the dead but of the living.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
“All that the Father is, we see revealed in the Son; all that is the Son’s is the Father’s also; for the whole Son dwells in the Father, and he has the whole Father dwelling in himself…The Son who exists always in the Father can never be separated from him, nor can the Spirit ever be divided from the Son who through the Spirit works all things. He who receives the Father also receives at the same time the Son and the Spirit. It is impossible to envisage any kind of severance or disjunction between them: one cannot think of the Son apart from the Father, nor divide the Spirit from the Son. There is between the three a sharing and a differentiation that are beyond words and understanding. The distinction between the persons does not impair the oneness nor does the shared unity of essence lead to a confusion between the distinctive characteristics of the persons. Do not be surprised that we should speak of the Godhead as being at the same time both unified and differentiated. Using riddles, as it were, we envisage a strange and paradoxical diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity.” ~Gregory of Nyssa
~Quotation taken from Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
