Abstract
The Holy Trinity is the central and most important content of the Christian doctrine of God. This crucial basis of all theological endeavors to present this mystery has been the most difficult to explain and vulnerable to various types of heresies throughout the centuries. It has been necessary for the Church to defend the mystery of the Holy Trinity against the natural tendencies of human reason.1 One has to distinguish the two main reductionist tendencies of the rational faculty of the human mind. The first consists in reducing the Holy Trinity to unity by stressing that there is one God’s essence with three modes of manifestation (the modalism of Sabellius).2 The second was created by Arius, who distinguished God as three separate beings.3 How did the Church respond in order to preserve the constitutive and substantial part of her doctrine? As Vladimir Lossky writes, “The Church has expressed by the homousios the consubstantiality of the Three, the mysterious identity of the monad and of the triad; identity of the one nature and distinction of the three hypostases.”4
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Cf. Michel René Barnes, “The Fourth Century as Trinitarian Canon,” in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community, ed. Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (London: Routledge, 1998), 47–67.
Sabellianism is a theological statement of Sabellius from Libya concerning the Holy Trinity. In this form of modalism, the term prosopon was assumed but only as an appearance or a role. By favoring the term prosopon in relation to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Sabellians assert that the three prosopa were merely modes of the single divinity. Such a presupposition led to the simple conclusion that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were not full persons in an ontological sense. Rather, there is one God, or “one person” in God. If that were the truth, there would not be any possibility for the Christian to establish a real personal dialogue with each of the three persons of the Trinity. What is of the great importance is that the modalistic interpretation of the Trinity caused the unsolved difficulty of understanding the reciprocal relations of the three Divine Persons. Cf. Henri Crouzel, “Modalism,” in Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1048–49;
George Leonard Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1981), 113–15.
Cf. Charles Kannengiesser, “Arianism,” in Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, 90–92; Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 147–56; Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987);
Richard Patrick Crosland Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988);
Franz Dünzl, A Brief History of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Early Church, trans. John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2007), 41–48;
Joseph Lienhard, “The Arian Controversy: Some Categories Reconsidered,” Theological Studies 48 (1987): 415–36.
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 48–49.
Cf. Najeeb G. Awad, “Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood,” Journal of Reformed Theology 4 (2010): 2.
Cf. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 269.
Cf. John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 315.
Cf. Lewis Ayres, “On Not Three People: The Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology as Seen in ‘To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods,’” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (October 2002), 445–74;
Lewis Ayres, “Why Not Three Gods? The Logic of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Doctrine,” in Studien zu Gregor von Nyssa und Die Christlichen Spätantike, ed. Hubertus R. Drobner and Christoph Klock (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 149–63.
On the notion of person in antiquity, see Lucian Turcescu, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–23.
Cf. John J. Lynch, “Prosopon in Gregory of Nyssa: A Theological Word in Transition,” Theological Studies 40 (1979): 728–38. Lucian Turcescu stresses the originality of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of person: “Although some rudimentary concepts of the individual existed in antiquity that Gregory likely used, a more developed notion of person did not exist prior to the Cappadocian Fathers.” See Turcescu, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons, 115.
Cf. Richard Sorabji, “Soul and Self in Ancient Philosophy,” in From Soul to Self, ed. M. James C. Crabbe (London: Routledge, 1999), 8–32.
Gilles Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God, trans. Mathew Levering (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 2011), 103.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, for the first time, affirms the equivalence of the terms prosopon and hypostasis and ascribes a rational or spiritual (and therefore permanent) character to the first. Cf. Giulio Maspero, Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s “Ad Ablabium” (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 120.
Karl Rahner criticized the Western approach to God in Trinity. Cf. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (London: Burns & Oates, 1970), 15–21.
Ibid., 18. Cf. Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation with Special Reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s “Church Dogmatics” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 274–80.
Cf. Lewis Ayres, “‘Remember That You Are Catholic’ (serm. 52,2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000): 39–82;
Michel René Barnes, “Re-Reading Augustine’s Theology of the Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Doctrine of the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56–71.
Maaren Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation: Augustine’s “De Trini-tate” and Contemporary Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 59: Only one time, however, does Augustine literally speak about the Father as the principium divinitatis “or, if you want” deitatis, namely, in book 4: “[H]e did not however say, ‘whom the Father will send from me,’ as he had said whom I will send from the Father (John 15:26), and thereby he indicated that the source of all godhead, or if you prefer it, of all deity, is the Father” (De Trinitate, 4.29).
Cf. Thomas Smail, The Giving Gift: The Holy Spirit in Person (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), 129.
Cf. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 4 (New York: Helicon Press, 1966), 77ff.
Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (San Francisco: Fortress Press, 1981), 18.
Cf. St. Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Graecos, “How It Is That We Say There Are Three Persons in the Divinity but Do Not Say There Are Three Gods.” See English translation by Daniel F. Stramara Jr., The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 41, no. 4 (1996), 381–91. Cf. Cornells P. Venema, “Gregory of Nyssa on the Trinity,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 8, no. 1 (1992), 78–84.
Cf. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 32: “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.”
Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41. Zizioulas’s conviction differs from Lucian Turcescu’s opinion: “The Cappadocians did not state a priority of the persons over the substance, but preferred to keep the two together when worshipping God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.” See Lucian Turcescu, “The Concept of Divine Persons in Gregory of Nyssa’s ‘To His Brother Peter, on the Difference between Ousia and Hypostasis,’” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 42, no. 1–2 (1997), 82.
Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Personhood and Its Exponents in Twentieth-Century Orthodox Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Marry B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 240.
Cf. Kevin Corrigan, Evagrius and Gregory. Mind, Soul and Body in the 4th Century (Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 135.
Cf. Najeeb G. Awad, “Between Subordination and Koinonia: Toward a New Reading of the Cappadocian Theology,” Modern Theology 23, no. 2 (2007): 181–204; “Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood,” Journal of Reformed Theology 4 (2010): 1–22.
See John Norman Davidson Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (London: Continuum, 2006), 181ff.
Cf. Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 204–5.
Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 78–79: “The communion is always constituted and internally structured by an asymmetrical-reciprocal relationship between the one and the many. The reciprocity consists in the many being unable to live as communion without the one, and in the one being unable to exist without the many.”
Basil of Caesarea (St. Basil the Great), Letter 210.5, trans. Barney Jackson, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: T&T Clark, 1894), 251.
This relationship with the Trinity should be supported by worship. Boris Bobrinskoy, presenting the Trinitarian context of Christian worship, writes, “The Church is filled with the Trinity. All Christian worship is an ecclesial—and personal—celebration addressed to the Father, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit. Christian worship, likewise, expresses the gift of knowledge and of the new life which comes from the Father, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit.” See Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), 153.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Krzysztof Leśniewski
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Leśniewski, K. (2016). The Cappadocians’ Stress on the Monarchia of the Father in Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas. In: Dumitraşcu, N. (eds) The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57505-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50269-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)