The Holy Trinity (Research Paper Sample)

The Holy Trinity
Name
Course
Instructor
Date
THE HOLY TRINITY
Introduction
The Holy Trinity has been a subject of research by many individuals and institutions. Some of the earliest personalities to grapple with the concept of the Holy Trinity were Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory was a 4th century theologian, as well as the Archbishop of Constantinople. He was most prominent during the Patristic age, where he was considered the most accomplished rhetorical stylist.
Gregory of Nazianzus had a significant impact on Trinitarian theology, especially among the Greek and Latin speaking theologians. He is commonly referred to as one of the Cappadocian Fathers, alongside Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great. Gregory’s views on the trinity were by far the most prominent. Nevertheless, he had been largely ignored by scholars until recently when there arose widespread interest in his views on the Trinity.
The Holy Trinity embodies the existence the three divine entities, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is in keeping with both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament reveals the existence of the Father, and begins to hint to that of the Son. The New Testament completes the picture of the Holy Trinity by revealing the existence of the Holy Spirit, which the disciples receive on the day of Pentecost. He is instrumental in the understanding of the Trinity.
Gregory’s Contribution to the Trinity
Saint Gregory of Nazianzen has had the greatest impact on the study of the Trinity. This is because he paints a grandiose picture that shows the unfolding of the revelation of the Trinity in the history and the pedagogy of God who reveals itself in it (Ayres, 2004). The Old Testament, he writes, proclaims openly the existence of the Father and begins to proclaim, in a veiled manner, that of the Son. The New Testament proclaims the Son openly and begins to reveal the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Now, in the Church, the Spirit reflects his manifestation and the glory of the Blessed Trinity are confessed. God, according to Gregory, measures out his manifestation, adapting it to the times and the receptive capacity of men (Williams and Wickham, 2002).
 This threefold division arises from three different periods: that of the Father, in the Old Testament, that of the Son in the New and that of the Spirit in the Church. Saint Gregory’s distinction refers to the order of the manifestation, not of the being or acting of the Three Persons, who are present and act together throughout the span of time.
In the Tradition, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen has received the appellative, the Theologian, precisely because of his contribution to the clarification of the Trinitarian dogma. His merit is to have given Trinitarian orthodoxy its perfect formulation, with phrases destined to become common patrimony of theology. The pseudo-Athanasian symbol “Quicumque,” composed about a century later, owes much to Gregory of Nazianze.
The main contribution of the Cappadocians in the formulation of the Trinitarian dogma is that of having clarified the distinction of the two concepts of ousia and hypostasis, substance and person, creating the permanent conceptual base with which faith in the Trinity is expressed (Meredith, 1995). It is one of the most grandiose innovations that Christian theology introduced in human thought, developed from it was the modern concept of persons as relationships.
The weak side of their Trinitarian theology was the danger of conceiving the relationship between the one divine substance and the three hypostasis of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit on a level with the relationship that exists in nature between the species and individuals, for example, between the human species and individual men; thus, exposing themselves open to the accusation of tri-theism
Gregory of Nazianzen attempts to respond to this difficulty, asserting that each one of the three Divine Persons is not less united to the other two than he is united to himself. For the same reason, he refutes the traditional similitude of source, stream, river or sun, ray, light. In the end, however, he admits candidly that he prefers this risk to the opposite one of modalism. He avers that it is better to envisage the idea of the Trinity rather than risk blasphemy.
The orthodox refer to Gregory as the father of the Trinity. This corresponds perfectly with his human personality. Gregory was a man with a heart that was even greater than his mind, a sensitive temperament to the point of excess, so much so as to procure for himself not a few disappointments and sufferings in his relations with others, beginning with his friend Saint Basil.
It is in his poetic production, above all, that his enthusiasm for the Trinity is revealed. He uses expressions such as “my Trinity,” “the dear Trinity.” Gregory was in love with the Trinity. He wrote that since the day in which he gave up the things of the world to consecrate his soul to luminous and heavenly contemplations, when the supreme intelligence drew him and set him down far from all that is carnal, and from that day his eyes had been dazzled by the light of the Trinity. This, perhaps, explains
Suffice it to compare these words with the technically perfect but cold words of the “Quicumque” symbol which was once recited in Sunday’s Divine Office to realize the distance that separates the lived faith of the Fathers from the formal and repetitive one that was instituted after them, even if the latter also carried out an important task.
The Importance of the Trinity
Now, as usual, some reflections on what the Fathers can offer in this field for a renewal of our faith. It is well-known that Western theology has always had to defend itself from the risk opposite to that of tri-theism from which, we saw, Gregory of Nazianzen had to defend himself, that is, the risk of accentuating the unity of the divine nature, to the detriment of the distinction of the persons.
In this area the deistic vision of Descartes and the followers of the Enlightenment was able to develop, which does not consider the Trinity at all but concentrates solely on God, conceived as Supreme Being or as “the divinity.” Kant came up with the noted conclusion, according to which from the Trinitarian doctrine, taken literally, it is not possible to draw anything practical. It is a mystery irrelevant for the life of men and of the Church.
The Latin vision of the Trinity leaves itself open to this deistic deviation, and it contains the most effective remedy against it. On this front, credit goes to Augustine for having based his discourse on the Trinity on John’s words: “God is love”. God is love: because of this, concludes Augustine, he is Trinity! Love implies one who loves, that which is loved and love itself. In the Trinity the Father is he who loves, the source and principle of everything; the Son is he who is loved; the Holy Spirit is the love with which they love one another.
All love is love of someone or something, just as all knowledge, is knowledge of something. Love is not given “to a void,” without object. Now who does God love, to be defined love? Man? But then he would be love for some hundreds of millions of years. The universe? But then he would only have been love for some tens of billions of years. And before who loved God to be love? The Greek thinkers and, in general, the religious philosophies of all times, conceiving God above all as “thought,” could answer: God thought of himself; he was “pure thought,” “thought of thought.” But this is no longer possible the moment in which it is said that God is first of all love, because “pure love of himself” would be pure egoism, which is not the highest exaltation of love, but its total negation (Behr, 2004).
And here is the answer of revelation, made explicit by the Church with her doctrine of the Trinity. God has always been love, ab eterno, because before an object existed outside of him to love, he had in himself the Word, the Son whom he loved with an infinite love, that is, “in the Holy Spirit.” This does not explain how unity can be contemporaneously Trinity, but it is enough at least to intuit why unity in God must also be plurality, also Trinity.
A God who was pure Knowledge and pure Law, or pure Power would certainly have no need to be triune (this, in fact, would greatly complicate things); but a God who is first of all Love does, because with less than between two, there cannot be love.” The world– wrote de Lubac – needs to know this: the revelation of God as Love upsets all that it had conceived of the divinity (Kelly, 1977).
Love is certainly a human analogy, but it is, undoubtedly, the one that best enables us to cast a look on the mysterious profundity of God. Seen in this is how Latin theology integrates Greek theology, and the two cannot do without one another. The concept of love is almost totally absent from the Trinitarian theology of the Orientals who prefer to use the analogy of light. We must wait for Gregory Palamas to read, in the Greek ambit, something analogous to what Augustine says on love in the Trinity.
Some today would like to set aside the dogma of the Trinity to facilitate the dialogue with the other great monotheistic religions. It is a suicidal operation. It would be like removing a person’s spinal cord to make him walk faster! The Trinity has so imprinted itself on theology, the liturgy, spirituality and the whole of Christian life that to renounce it would mean to initiate another completely different religion.
What should be done, rather, as the Fathers teach, is to bring this mystery from the books of theology to our life, so that the Trinity is not just a ...