The Incomprehensibility of God, Unity and Trinity, and The Trinity: Formation of Dogma
The Eastern Church Fathers approached the Living God through prayer, purification and the revelation of the God in the Old Testament as the Holy Trinity in the New Testament. There are a handful of important eras in which they worked: the apostolic teachings and apologists of the 1st – 3rd c., the Trinitarian disputes in the 4th c., the Latin disputes in the 11th c. and the “procession” of the Holy Spirit, the essence and energies dispute between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria in the 14th. At the heart all of these disputes and teachings was the revelation of faith that God is One and God is Triune in Persons. The Eastern Church Fathers drew out and contemplated this truth deeply. The first section of this chapter covers the “incomprehensibility” of the Holy Trinity. This key truth can be traced from the Old Testament into the New Testament and contemplated by the Eastern Church Fathers. Although we can now understand the threefold nature of a person (soul, body, intellect/nous), the Trinity is a mystical union that can only be revealed by God Himself.
St. John Chrysostom writes that “the root of all evil” grew out of the teaching that God is easily understandable, and that we can reach God through rational theology as well as philosophical reasoning, inquiry and argumentation. According to the tradition of the Church, we can experience and pray to God, but that does not imply that we can grasp for the knowledge of God on our own terms and for ourselves. The Enlightenment in Europe had this very notion of God’s comprehensibility or that an individual illumination was possible. Since human reason was already a light, as some argued, this intellectual light was capable of reaching and achieving a kind of mystical knowledge and self-enlightenment through various forms of rationality. Before the “torches of philosophy” searched for rationalistic enlightenment in Europe, St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria argued over these similar issues.
In the 4th c., the Trinitarian formulations occasioned more technical terminology in the East, but they were not required without a need, according to Metropolitan Hilarion. He explains that the early Christians primarily defined themselves by holy communion in the Eucharist rather than identifying themselves according to certain works of theology. The Trinitarian wording, however, became a great help because the Church wanted to distinguish itself from counterfeit Christianity and show true Christianity, mostly since the Holy Trinity is a part of the Church’s mysteries and teachings, such as baptism, chrismation, catechesis and the Creed, liturgical prayers and doxology. The Church Fathers, then, had to untangle the theological mess made by others who say that they are Christians and representing the Church. Before 1054 AD, the Eastern Church Fathers knew about the filioque in Rome. Some of the strong reactions against the Latin teaching of the “procession of the Holy Spirit” may have been due to the fact that the East had already hammered out the terms in councils and disputes dogmatically. On the one hand, western Christians claim that the filioque defended against Arianism, and on the other hand, eastern Christians tended to see the addition as unnecessary and leading to inconsistent teachings. These issues have a very practical application for Orthodox Christians. The teachings of the Eastern Church Fathers show us how to approach and speak about the Holy Trinity so that we might also be purified, pray truthfully and commune with the Living God.