The God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
A reflection on the doctrine of the trinity in light of Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of monotheism and tritheism.
Disclaimer: This paper was written as part of an undergraduate program and therefore does not meet formal academic standards. Although great care has been taken in the writing of this paper, errors might occur. The lecturing professor has reviewed this paper and scored it 95/100, corresponding to “Outstanding. Exceptionally good performance demonstrating a superior understanding of the subject matter, a foundation of extensive knowledge, and a skillful use of concepts.” Reference to this paper in academic context should be done with caution.
This Saturday, April 24th 2021, marked my first wedding anniversary. Neither my husband nor I could have predicted beforehand that we would get married and live our first year in marriage during extended periods of lockdown due to the COVID-19 virus. Yet our marriage proved itself to be a blessing in these trying times, not in the least because of my husband’s boyish sense of humor. Recently, he jokingly posed the following two questions: 1) If your leg would be amputated, would I still be married to that leg? 2) If I would marry someone with a multiple personality disorder, and that person would find a cure so that they thereafter only had one personality, would that make me a widower? Although these questions may seem absurd at first, they are in fact quite thought-provoking. For what exactly makes a person that person? Is it their body, their personality, something else? Thought experiments like these challenge one to rethink the principles one relies on to define something (like personhood) by taking them to an extreme. This can be both amusing and enriching, but also unsettling when it concerns a fundamental principle on which other theories rely. This is perhaps the reason why Christian trinitarianism is not eagerly subjected to scrutiny, even though confessing ‘one God in three persons’ is by no means self-evident; are Christians monotheists (one God) or tritheist (three persons)? In this essay I am going to explore the perspective of Saint Gregory of Nyssa on the ‘one God’ and the ‘three persons’ in order to give a preliminary response to this question. But first, I am going to clarify the terminology involved in these matters.
St Gregory’s Letter to Peter is perhaps his most well-known work on the doctrine of the trinity. It is not an apology for the doctrine of the trinity, but rather an attempt to clarify the terms found in the mystical dogmas on God’s nature and personhood, especially the terms ousia and hypostasis. (§1) The term ‘ousia’ describes the common denominator distinguishing one category of things or beings from another, e.g. the ‘humanity’ of a human being. This does not imply an exhaustive list of properties, for these will not apply to every particular instance (called a hypostasis) of the ousia. For example, the chairs depicted in figure 1 offer no place to sit whilst still sharing in the common essence (ousia) of chairs, making them recognizable as such.1 (§2)
A hypostasis is thus always marked off by certain identifying characteristics, whereas the ousia is always common and applicable to all hypostases within its category. The right chair, for example, could be marked off by characteristics like ‘wooden, four-legged, three-spindled, skewed, seatless’, which together differentiate that chair (particular) from simply being a chair (common). One can thus never equate the hypostasis with the ousia, for, as a teacher of mine once put it: ‘Michelle is a girl, but not all girls are Michelle’.
According to St Gregory, the same principle may be applied to the divine dogmas, meaning that one can speak of one divinity (ousia) marked off in three hypostases, namely the God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He deliberately calls the Father ‘the God’, for “Gregory does not identify “God” as that which is common, [ousia]. Rather, Gregory stands clearly within the monarchical approach [to the trinity] of Athanasius, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus. It is “the God overall” who is known specifically as “Father,” and the characteristic marks of the Son and the Spirit relate directly to him: the Son alone shines forth in an “only-begotten mode,” while the Spirit, proceeding from the Father, subsists, has his hypostasis, from the Father alone, but is known with and through the Son.”2 Thus, for Gregory the ‘one God’ always refers singly to the Father, even though he simultaneously asserts that “whatever concept you would postulate for the being of the Father, you will think this also for Son, and likewise for the Holy Spirit,” referring to general characteristics such as ‘uncreatedness’ and ‘incomprehensibility’. (§3)
However, in the very same sentence St Gregory acknowledges that “it is useless for the soul to rely on a specially assigned conception [of the being of the Father] because of the conviction that it is above all conception.” (§3) In his letter But Not Three Gods: To Ablabius, he addresses the consequence of relying too rigorously on the conception of one ousia marked off in three hypostases, reacting to the question (here paraphrased): “Why are we not allowed to speak of ‘three gods’ in the one divine ousia, when we ordinarily refer to three men - all sharing one human essence - in the plural?”3 Gregory provides two considered responses to this question, the first being concentrated on what he calls ‘an abuse of language’ concerning words that denote singularity and plurality.4 As a hypostasis is a singular particular instance of a singular common ousia, to speak of multiple (three) singular particular instances (e.g. Matthew, Mark and Luke) would leave the singular common ousia (man) unaltered. It is confusing, therefore, that the noun signifying the singular common ousia (man) morphs into the plural (men) in the case of multiple hypostases. Yet this still leaves the question unanswered, as Gregory himself remarks, for this clarification addresses the problem semantically, but not conceptually, still allowing for a multiplicity in God.5 He therefore takes a different approach in his second considered response, addressing the concept of divinity. Divinity, he argues, refers to the activity of God, rather than - as it is generally understood - to the nature of his being; the term being more akin to ‘farmer’ or ‘shoemaker’ than to ‘humanity’. This implies that God is not composed of three instances of a more general divine nature existing independently from him (allowing for tritheism), but rather that his acts are what it is to be divine. To phrase it differently: “the distinction which characterizes every contingent being, that of essence and existence (potentiality and actuality), does not apply to the self-existent being of God, who does not “have” a certain nature or essence but is who he is—I am who I am—a pure act.”6 Moreover, contrary to the multiplicity existing within a certain class of human activity (e.g. farmers or shoemakers) because of cooperation, “every activity extending from God to creation and named according to [our] manifold conceptions, originates from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit,” meaning that there is no multiplicity within divinity in this regard.7
Christians are thus decidedly not tritheists, but monotheists; specifically trinitarian monotheists. Confessing one God (ousia) marked off in three persons (hypostases) may be confusing without proper disambiguation, but if we adopt Gregory’s view on the terms ousia and hypostasis as clarifying “how Scripture speaks of the commonality and distinction of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, we are led in our contemplation of the trinity “by the Spirit to a knowledge of the Son, who reveals to us the Father” in that specific order.8 For it is impossible to think of the One without the Three. As Gregory’s friend and namesake Gregory of Nazianzen, to whom I will grant the final words of this essay, puts it:
“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of That One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the Rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light.”9
https://philippschmitt.com/work/chair [Accessed on April 23, 2021]
John Behr, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 & 2, vol. 2, The Formation of Christian Theology (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 420.
Gregory of Nyssa, “On ‘Not Three Gods’,” in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc., ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Henry Austin Wilson, vol. 5, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893), 331.
Ibid., 332.
Ibid., 333.
John Behr, “Synchronic and Diachronic Harmony: St Irenaeus on Divine Simplicity,” in: Modern theology 35,3 (2019), 429.
John Behr, The Nicene Faith, vol. 2, 430.
Ibid., 419.
Gregory Nazianzen, “Select Orations of Saint Gregory Nazianzen,” in S. Cyril of Jerusalem, S. Gregory Nazianzen, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, vol. 7, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894), 375.