God as Trinity

And again we quote The Orthodox Way by Archbishop Kallistos (Ware). You can find more information about him and his book in this post .

O Father, my hope:
O Son, my refuge:
O Holy Spirit, my protection:
Holy Trinity, glory to thee.



Prayer of St Ioannikios

O Trinity, uncreated and without beginning,
O undivided Unity, three and one,
Father, Son and Spirit, a single God:
Accept this our hymn from tongues of clay
As if from mouths of flame.



From the Lenten Triodion

God as Mutual Love

“I believe in one God”: so we affirm at the beginning of the Creed. But then at once we go on to say much more than this. I believe, we continue, in one God who is at the same time three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There is in God something analogous to “society”. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or “The One”. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love. Amo ergo sum, “I love, therefore I am”: the title of Kathleen Raine’s poem can serve as a motto for God the Holy Trinity. What Shakespeare says concerning the human love of two may be applied also to the divine love of the eternal Three:

So they loved, as love in twain, Had the essence but in one; Two distinct, division none: Number there in love was slain.

The final end of the spiritual Way is that we humans should also become part of this Trinitarian coinherence or perichoresis, being wholly taken up into the circle of love that exists within God. So Christ prayed to his Father on the night before his Crucifixion: “May they all be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, so may they also be one in us” (John 17:21).

Why believe that God is three? Is it not easier to believe simply in the divine unity, as the Jews and the Mohammedans do? Certainly it is easier. The doctrine of the Trinity stands before us as a challenge, as a “crux” in the literal sense: it is, in Vladimir Lossky’s words, “a cross for human ways of thought”, and it requires from us a radical act of metanoia—not merely a gesture of formal assent, but a true change of mind and heart.

Why, then, believe in God as Trinity? In the last chapter we found that the two most helpful ways of entry into the divine mystery are to affirm that God is personal and that God is love. Now both these notions imply sharing and reciprocity. First, a “person” is not at all the same as an “individual”. Isolated, self-dependent, none of us is an authentic person but merely an individual, a bare unit as recorded in the census. Egocentricity is the death of true personhood. Each becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for them and in them. There can be no man, so it has been rightly said, until there are at least two men in communication. The same is true, secondly, of love. Love cannot exist in isolation, but presupposes the other. Self-love is the negation of love. As Charles Williams shows to such devastating effect in his novel Descent into Hell, self-love is hell; for, carried to its ultimate conclusion, self-love signifies the end of all joy and all meaning. Hell is not other people; hell is myself, cut off from others in self-centeredness.

God is far better than the best that we know in ourselves. If the most precious element in our human life is the relationship of “I and Thou”, then we cannot but ascribe this same relationship, in some sense, to the eternal being of God himself. And that is precisely what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means. At the very heart of the divine life, from all eternity God knows himself as “I and Thou” in a threefold way, and he rejoices continually in this knowledge. All, then, that is implied in our limited under­standing of the human person and of human love, this we affirm also of God the Trinity, while adding that in him these things mean infinitely more than we can ever imagine.

Personhood and love signify life, movement, discovery. So the doctrine of the Trinity means that we should think of God in terms that are dynamic rather than static. God is not just stillness, repose, unchanging perfection. For our images of the Trinitarian God we should look rather to the wind, to the running water, to the unresting flames of fire. A favorite analogy for the Trinity has always been that of three torches burning with a single flame. We are told in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers how a brother once came to talk with Abba Joseph of Panepho. “Abba,” said the visitor, “according to my strength I observe a modest rule of prayer and fasting, of reading and silence, and so far as I can I keep myself pure in my thoughts. What more can I do?” In answer, Abba Joseph rose to his feet and held up his hands towards the sky; and his fingers became as ten blazing torches. And the old man said to the brother: “If you wish, you can become completely as a flame.” If this image of the living flame helps us to under­stand man’s nature at its highest, can it not also be applied to God? The three persons of the Trinity are “completely as a flame.”

But in the end the least misleading ikon is to be found, not in the physical world outside us, but in the human heart. The best analogy is that with which we began: our experience of caring intensely for another person, and of knowing that our love is returned.

Three Persons in One Essence

“I and the Father are one”, said Christ (John 10:30). What did he mean?

For an answer we look primarily to the first two of the seven Ecumenical or Universal Councils: to the Council of Nicaea (325), to the first Council of Constantinople (381), and to the Creed which they formulated. The central and decisive affirma­tion in the Creed is that Jesus Christ is “true God from true God”, “one in essence” or “consubstantial” (homoousios) with God the Father. In other words, Jesus Christ is equal to the Father: he is God in the same sense that the Father is God, and yet they are not two Gods but one. Developing this teaching, the Greek Fathers of the later fourth century said the same about the Holy Spirit: he is likewise truly God, “one in essence” with the Father and the Son. But although Father, Son and Spirit are one single God, yet each of them is from all eternity a person, a distinct centre of con­scious selfhood. God the Trinity is thus to be described as “three persons in one essence”. There is eternally in God true unity, combined with genuinely personal differentiation: the term “es­sence”, “substance” or “being” (ousia) indicates the unity, and the term “person” {hypostasis, prosopon) indicates the differen­tiation. Let us try to understand what is signified by this some­what baffling language, for the dogma of the Holy Trinity is vital to our own salvation.

Father, Son and Spirit are one in essence, not merely in the sense that all three are examples of the same group or general class, but in the sense that they form a single, unique, specific reality. There is in this respect an important difference between the sense in which the three divine persons are one, and the sense in which three human persons may be termed one. Three human persons, Peter, James, and John, belong to the same general class “man”. Yet, however closely they co-operate together, each re­tains his own will and his own energy, acting by virtue of his own separate power of initiative. In short, they are three men and not one man. But in the case of the three persons of the Trinity, this is not the case. There is distinction, but never separation. Father, Son and Spirit—so the saints affirm, following the testimony of Scripture—have only one will and not three, only one energy and not three. None of the three ever acts separately, apart from the other two. They are not three Gods, but one God.

Yet, although the three persons never act apart from each other, there is in God genuine diversity as well as specific unity. In our experience of God at work within our life, while we find that the three are always acting together, yet we know that each is acting within us in a different manner. We experience God as three-in-one, and we believe that this threefold differentiation in God’s outward action reflects a threefold differentiation in his inner life. The distinction between the three persons is to be regarded as an eternal distinction existing within the nature of God himself; it does not apply merely to his exterior activity in the world. Father, Son and Spirit are not just “modes” or “moods” of the Divinity, not just masks which God assumes for a time in his dealings with creation and then lays aside. They are on the contrary three coequal and coeternal persons. A human father is older than his child, but when speaking of God as “Father” and “Son” we are not to interpret the terms in this literal sense. We affirm of the Son, “There never was a time when he was not”. And the same is said of the Spirit.

Each of the three is fully and completely God. None is more or less God than the others. Each possesses, not one third of the Godhead, but the entire Godhead in its totality; yet each lives and is this one Godhead in his own distinctive and personal way. Stressing this Trinitarian unity-in-diversity, St Gregory of Nyssa writes:

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 of nature, 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.

“Using riddles…”: St Gregory is at pains to emphasize that the doctrine of the Trinity is “paradoxical” and lies “beyond words and understanding”. It is something revealed to us by God, not demonstrated to us by our own reason. We can hint at it in human language, but we cannot fully explain it. Our reasoning powers are a gift from God, and we must use them to the full; but we should recognize their limitations. The Trinity is not a philo­sophical theory but the living God whom we worship; and so there comes a point in our approach to the Trinity when argumen­tation and analysis must give place to wordless prayer. “Let all mortal flesh keep silent, and stand with fear and trembling” (The Liturgy of St James).

Personal Characteristics

The first person of the Trinity, God the Father, is the “fountain” of the Godhead, the source, cause or principle of origin for the other two persons. He is the bond of unity between the three: there is one God because there is one Father. “The union is the Father, from whom and to whom the order of the persons runs its course” (St Gregory the Theologian). The other two persons are each defined in terms of their relationship to the Father: the Son is “begotten” by the Father, the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father. In the Latin West, it is usually held that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and from the Son”; and the word filioque (“and from the Son”) has been added to the Latin text of the Creed. Orthodoxy not only regards the filioque as an unauthor­ized addition—for it was inserted into the Creed without the consent of the Christian East—but it also considers that the doctrine of the “double procession”, as commonly expounded, is theologically inex­act and spiritually harmful. According to the Greek Fathers of the fourth century, whom the Orthodox Church follows to this day, the Father is the sole source and ground of unity in the Godhead. To make the Son a source as well as the Father, or in combination with him, is to risk confusing the distinctive characteristics of the persons.

The second person of the Trinity is the Son of God, his “Word” or Logos. To speak in this way of God as Son and Father is at once to imply a movement of mutual love, such as we indicated earlier. It is to imply that from all eternity God himself, as Son, in filial obedience and love renders back to God the Father the being which the Father by paternal self-giving eter­nally generates in him. It is in and through the Son that the Father is revealed to us: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life: no one comes to the Father, except through me” (John 14:6). He it is who was born on earth as man, from the Virgin Mary in the city of Bethlehem. But as Word or Logos of God he is also at work before the Incarnation. He is the principle of order and purpose that permeates all things, drawing them to unity in God, and so making the universe into a “cosmos”, a harmonious and inte­grated whole. The Creator-Logos has imparted to each created thing its own indwelling logos or inner principle, which makes that thing to be distinctively itself, and which at the same time draws and directs that thing towards God. Our human task as craftsmen or manufacturers is to discern this logos dwelling in each thing and to render it manifest; we seek not to dominate but to co-operate.

The third person is the Holy Spirit, the “wind” or “breath” of God. While appreciating the inadequacy of neat classifications, we may say that the Spirit is God within us, the Son is God with us, and the Father, God above or beyond us. Just as the Son shows us the Father, so it is the Spirit who shows us the Son, making him present to us. Yet the relation is mutual. The Spirit makes the Son present to us, but it is the Son who sends us the Spirit. (We note that there is a distinction between the “eternal procession” of the Spirit and his “temporal mission”. The Spirit is sent into the world, within time, by the Son; but, as regards his origin within the eternal life of the Trinity, the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.)

Characterizing each of the three persons, Synesius of Cyrene writes:

Hail, Father, source of the Son,
Son, the Father’s image;
Father, the ground where the Son stands,
Son, the Father’s seal;
Father, the power of the Son,
Son, the Father’s beauty;
All-pure Spirit, bond between the Father and the Son.
Send, O Christ, the Spirit, send
the Father to my soul;
Steep my dry heart in this dew,
the best of all thy gifts.

Why speak of God as Father and Son, and not as Mother and Daughter? In itself the Godhead possesses neither maleness nor femininity. Although our human sexual characteristics as male and female reflect, at their highest and truest, an aspect of the divine life, yet there is in God no such thing as sexuality. When, therefore, we speak of God as Father, we are speaking not liter­ally but in symbols. Yet why should the symbols be masculine rather than feminine? Why call God “he” and not “she”? In fact, Christians have sometimes applied “mother language” to God.

Aphrahat, one of the early Syriac Fathers, speaks of the be­liever’s love for “God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother”, while in the medieval West we find the Lady Julian of Norwich affirming: “God rejoices that he is our Father, and God rejoices that he is our Mother.” But these are exceptions. Almost always the symbolism used of God by the Bible and the Church’s worship has been male symbolism.

We cannot prove by arguments why this should be so, yet it remains a fact of our Christian experience that God has set his seal upon certain symbols and not upon others. The symbols are not chosen by us but revealed and given. A symbol can be verified, lived, prayed—but not “proved” logically. These “given” symbols, however, while not capable of proof, are yet far from being arbitrary. Like the symbols in myth, literature and art, our religious symbols reach deep into the hidden roots of our being and cannot be altered without momentous consequences. If, for example, we were to start saying “Our Mother who art in heaven”, instead of “Our Father”, we should not merely be ad­justing an incidental piece of imagery, but replacing Christianity with a new kind of religion. A Mother Goddess is not the Lord of the Christian Church. [we disagree with this conslusion made by Archbishop Kallistos and refered to this topic in the following post]

Why should God be a communion of three divine persons, neither less nor more? Here again there can be no logical proof. The threeness of God is something given or revealed to us in Scripture, in the Apostolic Tradition, and in the experience of the saints throughout the centuries. All that we can do is to verify this given fact through our own life of prayer.

What precisely is the difference between the “generation” of the Son and the “procession” of the Spirit? “The manner of the generation and the manner of the procession are incomprehensi­ble”, says St John of Damascus. “We have been told that there is a difference between generation and procession, but what is the nature of this difference, we do not understand at all.” If St John of Damascus confessed himself baffled, then so may we. The terms “generation” and “procession” are conventional signs for a reality far beyond the comprehension of our reasoning brain. “Our reasoning brain is weak, and our tongue is weaker still”, remarks St Basil the Great. “It is easier to measure the entire sea with a tiny cup than to grasp God’s ineffable greatness with the

The Two Hands of God

Let us try to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity by looking at the Triadic patterns in salvation history and in our own life of prayer.

The three persons, as we saw, work always together, and possess but a single will and energy. St Irenaeus speaks of the Son and the Spirit as the “two hands” of God the Father; and in every creative and sanctifying act the Father is using both these “hands” at once. Scripture and worship provide repeated exam­ples of this:

1. Creation. “By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the Breath of his mouth” (Ps. 33:6). God the Father creates through his “Word” or Logos (the second person) and through his “Breath” or Spirit (the third person). The “two hands” of the Father work together in the shaping of the universe. Of the Logos it is said, “all things were made through him” (John 1:3: compare the Creed, “…through whom all things were made”); of the Spirit it is said that at the creation he “brooded” or “moved upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). All created things are marked with the seal of the Trinity.

2. Incarnation. At the Annunciation the Father sends the Holy Spirit upon the Blessed Virgin Mary, and she conceives the eternal Son of God (Luke 1:35). So God’s taking of our humanity is a Trinitarian work. The Spirit is sent down from the Father, to effect the Son’s presence within the womb of the Virgin. The Incarnation, it should be added, is not only the work of the Trinity but also the work of Mary’s free will. God waited for her volun­tary consent, expressed in the words, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38); and had this consent been withheld, Mary would not have become God’s Mother. Divine grace does not destroy human freedom but reaffirms it.

human mind.” But, while they cannot be fully explained, these signs can (as we have said) be verified. Through our encounter with God in prayer, we know that the Spirit is not the same as the Son, even though we cannot define in words precisely what the difference is.

3. The Baptism of Christ. In the Orthodox tradition this is seen as a revelation of the Trinity. The Father’s voice from heaven bears witness to the Son, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; and at the same moment the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends from the Father and rests upon the Son (Matt. 3:16-17). So the Orthodox Church sings at Epiphany (6 January), the feast of Christ’s Baptism:

When thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan,The worship of the Trinity was made manifest. For the voice of the Father bore witness unto thee, Calling thee the beloved Son, And the Spirit in the form of a dove Confirmed his word as sure and steadfast.

4. The Transfiguration of Christ. This also is a Trinitarian happening. The same relationship prevails between the three persons as at the Baptism. The Father testifies from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him” (Matt. 17:5), while as before the Spirit descends upon the Son, this time in the form of a cloud of light (Luke 9:34). As we affirm in one of the hymns for this feast (6 August):

Today on Tabor in the manifestation of thy light, O Lord,
Thou light unaltered from the light of the unbegotten Father,
We have seen the Father as light,
And the Spirit as light,
Guiding with light the whole creation.

5. The Eucharistic Epiclesis. The same Triadic pattern as is evident at the Annunciation, the Baptism, and the Transfigura­tion, is apparent likewise at the culminating moment of the Eucharist, the epiclesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit. In words addressed to the Father, the celebrant priest says in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom:

We offer to thee this spiritual worship without shedding of blood, And we pray and beseech and implore thee:
Send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here set forth: And make this bread the precious Body of thy Christ, And what is in this cup the precious Blood of thy Christ, Transforming them by thy Holy Spirit.

As at the Annunciation, so in the extension of Christ’s Incarnation at the Eucharist, the Father sends down the Holy Spirit, to effect the Son’s presence in the consecrated gifts. Here, as always, the three persons of the Trinity are working together.

Praying the Trinity

As there is a Triadic structure in the eucharistic epiclesis, so there is likewise in almost all the prayers of the Church. The opening invoca­tions, used by Orthodox at their daily prayers each morning and evening, have an unmistakably Trinitarian spirit. So familiar are these prayers, so frequently repeated, that it is easy to overlook their true character as glorification of the Holy Trinity. We begin by confessing God three-in-one, as we make the sign of the Cross with the words: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

So, at the very beginning of each new day, we place it under the protection of the Trinity. Next we say, “Glory to thee, our God, glory to thee”—the new day begins with celebration, joy, thanksgiving. This is followed by a prayer to the Holy Spirit, “O heavenly King…” Then we repeat three times:

Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us.

The threefold “holy” recalls the hymn “Holy, holy, holy”, sung by the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision (Isa. 6:3), and by the four apocalyptic beasts in the Revelation of St John the Divine (Rev. 4:8). In this thrice-repeated “holy” there is an invocation of the eternal Three. This is followed, in our daily prayers, by the most frequent of all liturgical phrases, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit”. Here, above all, we must not allow familiarity to breed contempt. Each time this phrase is used, it is vital to recall its true meaning as a giving of glory to the Triunity. The Gloria is succeeded by another prayer to the three persons:

Most Holy Trinity, have mercy upon us. O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our iniquities.
O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for thy name’s sake.

So our daily prayers continue. At each step, implicitly or explicitly, there is a Triadic structure, a proclamation of God as one-in-three. We think the Trinity, speak the Trinity, breathe the Trinity.

There is a Trinitarian dimension also to the most dearly-loved of the single-phrase Orthodox prayers, the Jesus Prayer, an “arrow prayer” used both at work and during times of quiet. In its most common form this runs:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

This is, in outward form, a prayer to the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ. But the other two persons are also present, although they are not named. For, by speaking of Jesus as “Son of God”, we point towards his Father; and the Spirit is also embraced in our prayer, since “no one can say ‘Lord Jesus’, except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). The Jesus Prayer is not only Christ-centered but Trinitarian.

Living the Trinity

“Prayer is action” (Tito Colliander). “What is pure prayer? Prayer which is brief in words but abundant in actions. For if your actions do not exceed your petitions, then your prayers are mere words, and the seed of the hands is not in them” {The Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

If prayer is to be transmuted into action, then this Trinitarian faith which informs all our praying must also be manifest in our daily life. Immediately before reciting the Creed in the Eucharis-tic Liturgy, we say these words: “Let us love one another, so that we may with one mind confess Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided.” Note the words “so that”. A genuine confession of faith in the Triune God can be made only by those who, after the likeness of the Trinity, show love mutu­ally towards each other. There is an integral connection between our love for one another and our faith in the Trinity: the first is a precondition for the second, and in its turn the second gives full strength and meaning to the first.

So far from being pushed into the corner and treated as a piece of abstruse theologizing of interest only to specialists, the doctrine of the Trinity ought to have upon our daily life an effect that is nothing less than revolutionary. Made after the image of

God the Trinity, human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven. In medieval Russia St Sergius of Radonezh dedicated his newly-founded monastery to the Holy Trinity, precisely because he intended that his monks should show toward one another day by day the same love as passes between the three divine persons. And such is the vocation not only of monks but of everyone. Each social unit—the family, the school, the workshop, the parish, the Church universal—is to be made an ikon of the Triunity. Because we know that God is three in one, each of us is committed to living sacrificially in and for the other; each is committed irrevo­cably to a life of practical service, of active compassion. Our faith in the Trinity puts us under an obligation to struggle at every level, from the strictly personal to the highly organized, against all forms of oppression, injustice and exploitation. In our combat for social righteousness and “human rights”, we are acting spe­cifically in the name of the Holy Trinity.

“The most perfect rule of Christianity, its exact definition, its highest summit, is this: to seek what is for the benefit of all”, states St John Chrysostom. “…I cannot believe that it is possible for a man to be saved if he does not labour for the salvation of his neighbor.” Such are the practical implications of the dogma of the Trinity. That is what it means to live the Trinity.