Chapters on Trinity
Fr. Sergei Bulgakov

Content

⤊ 1. Chapters on the Trinity

Man cannot, by his own powers, know God unless He Himself reveals Himself to him. Revelation about God, entering into reason, rends the fabric of its constructions as something new for reason, as something supernatural. And yet, by illuminating grace, it is sewn into reason, soothing its anxiety, making reason intelligible to itself, liberating it from its own aporias.¹ If, in its content, revealed doctrine exceeds the proper powers of reason, then as the resolution of reason’s own questions and the removal of its enigmas, it answers reason.

The revelation of the pre-cosmic Divinity to man is, in this sense, human, conformed to man. In other words, within the nature of spirit and the structure of reason, within its natural problematic, there are contained the postulates of revealed doctrine about God, the possibility of its reception. The Image of God in man, though darkened by sin and error, is the ontological foundation of Revelation. Anthropology is the natural foundation of theology. Of course, it is incapable of replacing Revelation, but it renders its reception possible.

The human spirit itself contains the postulates of the Trinity of the Godhead; its seal rests upon it. These postulates must be brought to light.

⇑ A. Aporias of Natural God-consciousness

↑ A. Divinity as Absolute Object: Pantheism or Cosmic Godhood

Man finds himself in the world as within a certain coherent fullness, an all-unity that contains within itself and grounds man himself. The world is the ideally real All: as the intelligible world of ideas—the intelligible foundation of the world (Platonism)—and at the same time real all-being, nature eternally giving birth and being born. This All is contemplated as beauty, experienced as moral world-order, contains everything in everything, as totality or universality. Outside this All, beyond its limits—emptiness, outer darkness.

Substantia sive Deus, natura sive Deus [Substance or God, nature or God—Latin] (in Spinoza), organism (in Aristotle); mechanism of causality (in the materialists); the one immovable of Parmenides or the flowing one of Heraclitus and the evolutionists; living substance (in the hylozoists); nature as Godhead, monistic in Spinoza or pluralistic in Leibniz²—and so forth.

And man floats and dissolves in this ocean of universal life: both he himself and everything within him and outside him is Divinity, and nothing exists outside the Divinity or apart from it. But what then is this? There is not even “us,” just as there is no God. Everything fades, sinks, descends to the bottom of the ocean—smoothness, stillness, and silence: neither light nor darkness, eternal nothingness, the nirvana of unconsciousness.

Seeking to know God in the world, we have lost ourselves; we have been swallowed by the quicksand of this facelessness. We cannot include the idea of the Absolute Object, or of the world, within the idea of God, although our cosmic experience, our cosmic self-consciousness, testifies in favor of this path; for along this path we arrive at self-negation, at metaphysical suicide.

Such is the insurmountable aporia of naturalism or pantheism, of God-consciousness as absolute objectivity: in it the ultimate nihilism of nirvana is realized; the self-consciousness of Buddhism has frozen in the convulsions of this aporia.³ The absolute objectivity of the world proves to be in contradiction with the subjectivity of our being.

↑ B. Divinity as Absolute Subject

Our I is likewise inseparably united with God. By his hypostatic face man is turned toward the Divine; losing ourselves, we lose God as well, and in our God-seeking we must firmly hold fast to ourselves. In the balance of cosmic godhood an error has been committed, namely that our I has been cast aside—an I which rises to its full stature in defense of its violated rights.

The I is indissoluble, yet it is indefinable. All attempts to define or describe the I (as aseitas or perseitas, integritas, independentia)⁴ concern particular aspects of the special experience of the I, of personal self-consciousness, which can only be named, indicated by a verbal gesture (a pronoun). The I is indefinable because it is absolute: everything exists in it, in the rays of its sun, which is the source of light and shadow, forms and colors, and therefore cannot itself be defined by them.

For this reason the self-consciousness of the I is not provable, but only showable. The I is I, and nothing more; it looks into itself and determines itself by itself. It is not subject to time, for it stands above time; it knows neither origin nor destruction, is eternal and abides. Every human I is, in a certain sense, pre-cosmic and absolute: it is the eye of eternity, through which alone time can be seen; within it is eternal day and no immersion into nirvana. (States of sleep and unconsciousness interrupt empirical self-consciousness but introduce no rupture in the self-identity of the I.)

The I contains everything in itself and for itself (if not in actuality, then in possibility). By this the cosmic autonomy of pantheism is undermined, the pantheistic self-sufficiency of the All: it exists only in the I and for the I; in a certain sense it itself is the I, since it stands in relation to the I and therefore must be expressed in the terms of the I. Such an expression of the world in the terms of the I, given by Fichte, is the non-I: the world is non-I insofar as it is posited in distinction from the I, as its object.

Man can never renounce the I and step outside its magical circle, for beyond it lies death. For us, however, death remains an abstraction or a mystery. It does not exist for the I; the I knows everything, but does not know death and can accept it only by analogy with sleep, as an interruption of the I that does not violate its self-identity. Such is the nature of the I.

Yet its closest examination also leads to aporias.
⇡ a) The I and the World: Subject and Predicate, Subject and Object.

For all the formal absoluteness of self-consciousness, the I cannot be satisfied with itself; it thrashes within the mirrored cage of its solitude, from which it strives to break into the world and merge with it: I–I–non-I–I… The attempt to understand the world solely as non-I (that is, in essence again as I—its mode or variant) does not succeed, for it leads to nothing but the mirror-reflection of the I within itself.

Within this there is no world as a reality lying not only in the I (as non-I or as its boundary), but also outside the I beyond the I. There is no object, but only the designation of its place within the subject, on the condition that this object exists. Yet the object itself—its unconscious or extra-conscious mass—remains dead and dark without the sun of the I kindled above it.

The world exists, has being, only for the I and in the I, as its non-I—yet not as a mirror image, but as a real one. How can the I break through to reality, shatter its mirror barrier, acquire the world, actualize the non-I as an objective possibility?

In this case the I becomes not only non-I, but also some A; the subject acquires a predicate, the subject receives a name. I am A; the I has A, which exists for the I. Over the abyss yawning between absolute subject and absolute object, a wondrous bridge is erected: is, being, the uninterrupted flow of becoming, of life. The I lives in the world, the world lives in the I and for the I. The world of being arises.

In the development of the absolute subject three points are marked: subject, object, and being—subject, predicate, and copula. Yet between them there is still no mutual grounding. They are given to one another, they call for one another, but they cannot help one another. These are mysterious symbols, a cryptogram of the Divinity in tri-unity.^5,6

The self-actualization of the I, the overcoming of its illusoriness, leads beyond the I and thereby renders impossible the position of absolute subjectivity.

Having followed this path to the end, we encountered an aporia:
⇡ b) The Antinomy of the I within Itself.

Yet, returning from the non-I, from non-being, into itself, into its bare, self-positing I, the absolute subject encounters here as well an aporia, runs up against an antinomy. As Fichte showed, the I is not given, but posits itself; it is not a datum but a deed—actus purus,⁷ a pure act of self-positing.

In this the absoluteness of the I manifests itself: it posits itself, gives itself to itself, depends on no one and is conditioned by nothing in its being. Such is the appearance of the I from the act of self-positing.

However, we have already touched upon one boundary of the I, where it encounters givenness and thus meets a limit to its self-positing: this is the realm of the non-I. Yet a boundary is also revealed within the I itself. As self-positing, as its own act, the I is self-sufficient, self-contained: I am I, am I, and so on.

And yet, this very self-positing of the I, as I, proves to be non-exhaustive, insufficient even for the I itself. Within it there appears a self-division, a self-splitting. The I looks into the I and itself within itself not directly, as it might seem, but indirectly: the I becomes conscious of itself as I only through the non-I, which, however, this time is not a predicate, not the external boundary of the I, not the world, but a non-I that is also an I, a co-I, that is, thou.

Without thou, or co-I, without I in another, the I is incapable of knowing or actualizing itself in its self-consciousness. The I does not exist, does not actualize itself, does not appear in the power of its being as the unique one, as Stirner considers it to be.⁸ In uttering I, we silently co-utter thou. I am I only in relation to another I, or to thou, which is, as it were, the shadow of the I. But real, opaque being does not exist without a shadow.

To hear thou within the I is decisive both for philosophy and for theology. This is a living miracle, a flight over the abyss—the wings of the soul, the kiss of the spirit, the seal of Divinity in the interconnectedness of every I with thou.

How is it possible to know thou, that is, a non-I which is nevertheless also I, another I, co-I, thou? How does one pass from I to thou? This transition can be accomplished by the I only from itself—for in the world of being there is no thou; there are only things, objects.

Thou can be known only by an I which opens itself within the I, realizes itself in another, mutually reflects itself: every I is thou for another I, and conversely is I for itself; there is I–thou and thou–I. Thou exists in the I and with the I, yet not as an object, not as a non-I, but as a non-I – I, as object–subject.

There is no absolute, self-sufficient I: it is revealed that the self-positing of the I includes within itself the co-positing of thou. The personal pronoun exists not only in the first person, but also in the second. Without thou, the I itself is invalid even in its own self-positing.

Yet the I posits itself, whereas thou it only co-posits or pre-posits, as its presupposition. Through this, the I reveals itself as absolutely-relative. The I exists by self-positing, if thou – outside-of-I exists, although I is posited together with it.

Thus, the I itself inherently manifests the antinomy of I and thou: I–thou–I. The direction of the line of the I depends not only on its own striving—from I to I, to I, and so on—but is also determined by the perpendicular thou. This one point has two dimensions.

But even this is not yet sufficient for the realization of the I, for the fullness of its self-positing. If the I needs thou, then mere mirror-like self-reflection—this I, and likewise this thou, this mutual I–thou—is still insufficiently affirmed. It requires not only thou–I or I–thou, but also thou–he.

Why? Because only then does this thou abide, no longer confined to the self-reflection of the I, when the co-I also passes over to another thou, to a co-thou. But this affirmed and abiding thou, which definitively testifies to the self-realization of the I, to its reality, is already, in relation to the I, he—or thou standing in the shadow, though always capable of stepping forth from it.

I–thou is an event of encounter, in which mutual positing of one another, mutual reflection, is realized. I–thou exists in this encounter as something still wavering, uncertain in its lack of full affirmation. But it becomes abiding and stable through the presence also of he: I–thou (that is, another I to which I am directly addressed) and he–thou (yet another I, to which neither the first nor the second I is directly addressed)—that is, neither I nor thou, yet one that is connected with them, co-exists with them, and can at any moment take the place of either.

In this sense, he is the guarantor of I and thou. In the triangle I–thou–he, the I can occupy the point of any angle, standing on one line with thou and on another with he. Thus, the real subject is a certain unity, a tri-unity of three persons: first, second, and third (the mystery of the grammar of the personal pronoun).

I am not the unique one, but the first person, to which the second and the third are conjoined. In these three, the self-consciousness of the I, its self-positing, is exhausted. This closed tri-unity exhausts the absolute subject, although it contains within itself the possibility of opening and self-repetition into a multiplicity according to the schema of tri-unity.

This tri-unity—I as I–thou–he—is not an external juxtaposition, mechanically linked as “I and thou and he,” but an inner, binding, threefold self-consciousness of the I, a unity that reveals itself in three. The genius of language expresses this multi-unity of the I in the plural we, which in turn serves as the foundation for you and they.

Great is the mystery of we: how is a plural possible from I? In its immediate self-consciousness, the I is one and may even seem unique, without doors or windows, an inaccessible yet inhabited island. We is not merely a grammatical form, but a true revelation in language and in the nature of the I, which exists only under the presupposition of I.

The I is not solitary, but sobornic (conciliar); not unique, but multi-unified—and of this the genius of language bears witness, fearlessly declining the personal pronoun in the plural. The absolute subject is the I in unity with other I’s; it is I–we (the categories of you and they have a similar meaning and can be understood only in the light of we).

We is ontological love within the I, a love that lives not only in itself, but also in thou and in he, since love is precisely life in another and by another. And yet, in the self-determination of the I, this very fact constitutes an aporia leading to an antinomy, because for the I, the co-positing of I–we and I–thou (and thou–he) is an antinomy.

The aporia consists in this: the I, which posits itself and is in this sense an absolute act—actus purus (pure act)—in reality proves incapable of accomplishing this self-positing, is not master of itself, because it lacks the power, through the act of its self-positing, to co-posit thou and he, and can only postulate them.

Thus, absolute self-positing turns out to be conditional, that is, non-absolute: the I exists for itself insofar as thou and he exist, yet their being or non-being does not depend on my I. My I, as a self-positing that is completely transparent, becomes incomprehensible, unrealizable, contradictory.

The I leads beyond the I.

↑ C. The Subject in Relation to Everything or to the World (“The Unique One and His Property”).

The absolute subject possesses the world in an absolute manner. The world is its self-revelation. The absolute subject loves itself and contemplates itself in the world with an absolute and self-sufficient love. Yet in this being-for-itself, this possession-for-itself and only for itself, there lies a boundary against which our thinking of the absolute stumbles.

If the absolute subject is one, then it is also solitary in its possession of all. Love for oneself through one’s own revelation is a limit-case of metaphysical egoism and, at the same time, a form of limitation: an incapacity to go out of oneself, a certain ontological poverty and impoverishment. Any power that knows itself as sobornic (conciliary) is richer than this mono-hypostatic absolute, exhausted by its own absoluteness, which has nothing to do with itself, no one to whom and nothing for which it might reveal itself, and no one to love.

This luciferian, self-interested self-love (which Spinoza somehow failed to sense in his Deus sive Natura [God or Nature—Latin]) destroys the dignity of the absolute, makes it a toy of its own egoism, and even deprives it of life. One cannot love only oneself, live only in oneself and only for oneself, closing oneself off, never going beyond oneself.

In loving oneself and what is one’s own, one must love not oneself. Given an object of absolute love, one can love not only with personal love, but in one’s own love not oneself, but another.

Only such love is free love, knowing no boundaries. Just as the I does not exist in its uniqueness, but is the shadow of a certain we, so too absolute love is not given to an absolute, mono-hypostatic, solitary subject, but demands the overcoming of the boundaries of metaphysical egoism.

As the I is a function of multi-unity, of sobornost’ (conciliarity), so the absolute relation to the world requires liberation from metaphysical uniqueness. A God-despot, an autocrat, a self-lover exhausted in self-closure, possessing the world only for the satisfaction of egoism, knowing no equal within Himself, is not God.

Thus there arises the postulate of a Divinity which, being one insofar as this follows from its absoluteness, would at the same time be not one, but sobornic (conciliar) within itself. The concept of the absolute as world-possessor therefore also leads to an aporia, for it proves contradictory.

It must simultaneously satisfy the demands of unity and of multi-unity: the former belongs to the absoluteness of being, the latter to the absoluteness of the mode of possession. Such are the postulates.

⤊ 2. God as the Absolute Subject or Person

The postulates of religious consciousness can be satisfied only by revelation. Reason inevitably encounters aporias and is driven into antinomies; and this bears witness either to the inaccessibility of the doctrine of God for reason, to a certain fatal illusionism into which it thereby falls (Kant), or else to the fact that reason can find an exit for itself only on the ground of revelation, which, though surpassing the capacities of reason, nonetheless explains its aporias and fulfills its postulates. It must be said that only the revealed doctrine of the Holy Trinity contains within itself the resolution of all the difficulties of natural knowledge of God and provides an exit from its aporias. It is the answer to the postulates of reason, which, by virtue of human God-likeness, can come to rest only in this doctrine.

Revelation is super–rational in the sense that it cannot be discovered by the powers of reason itself, on the basis of its logical constructions. Yet it can be given to reason as a certain spiritual fact or religious experience, one that is receivable by reason though exceeding it—not contrary to reason, but super–rational. Reason strives by its own powers to understand and know the entire universe as something immanent to itself, beginning from itself and ending with itself. Here, however, it is given to reason to understand itself in the light of divine revelation. For, in a certain sense, all knowledge has a rational, experiential, empirical basis: reason is only the counter and registrar of givens, though it is self-legislating. In the revealed doctrine of the Holy Trinity it likewise encounters a given which bears witness, before reason itself, to its relativity. Yet to see one’s own limit and relativity already means to perform an act of self-knowledge.

Revelation bears witness, first of all, to a personal God, to God as Absolute Subject. The personality of the Godhead can be only an object of revelation. Reason is capable, by its logic, of establishing various “attributes” of the Godhead, if it exists—various qualities of the Divine that follow from the concept of it. However, the personality of God, like Its very being, cannot be deduced from any concept, since personality in general—the I—stands on the far side of concepts and definitions, as the subject of all predicates: it is defined, yet indefinable; it is disclosed, yet inexhaustible.

From the I to another I, or to a thou, there leads no logical bridge of deduction: every thou for the I is always a kind of revelation, an experiential fact, an encounter, a going-out of oneself into the other. So too the divine I can be for man a divine revelation, a divine condescension, by whose power God speaks of Himself to man as I and grants man to speak to Him as Thou. The divine I is correlated with the created, is placed in a single row with the human I, as one of the I’s or one of the thou’s.

From the standpoint of unbelief one may speak here of a crude anthropomorphism in representations of the Godhead, importing into it personal limitation and naïve human likeness (from Spinoza to Feuerbach).⁹ However, in that case the enigma of human personality itself remains undisclosed, for it is assumed to be intelligible without any foundation. In reality, the very possibility of divine condescension—the encounter of the personality of the Godhead with the personality of man—bears witness to the real God-likeness of man as the bearer of the hypostatic image of God.

God’s I on the lips of God, addressed to man, and the human Thou addressed by man to God, are the direct expression of this God-likeness. God speaks with man, and man speaks with God: upon this is founded the prayerful communion of man with God, this ever-accomplished for man act of divine condescension and of personal divine revelation. Prayer is the encounter of man with God face to face, as I with I–Thou.

The personal character of the Godhead is also characteristic of the majority of pagan, unrevealed, and in a certain sense false religions, in which, however—amid the distortion and obscuring of religious truths by various human admixtures or “psychologisms”—there is nevertheless contained a reflection of God-likeness, indelibly inherent in man. Man, being in his hypostatic countenance a natural icon of the Divinity, does not part with it, but honors it even in paganism, clothing his religious experiences in hypostatic form. Yet, speaking objectively, here we are indeed dealing only with anthropomorphisms, projections of one’s own I into the sphere of the vague experiences of paganism.

Only in the God-revealed religion does a real encounter of God with man take place. God reveals Himself to man first of all as Absolute Subject, as Person, as the Existing One, as Jehovah. Exodus 3:14: God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” I AM, the Hypostasis. I AM: to this hypostasis belongs self-revealed divine being. Exodus 20:2: “I am the Lord your God”; Deuteronomy 32:39–40: “See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god besides Me… I lift up My hand to heaven and say, ‘As surely as I live forever!’”

The self-revelation of God as Person, as Absolute Subject, runs through the entire Old Testament and is consummated in the New, where the personal God-human self-consciousness of Christ—His divine consciousness, inseparably bound up with divine sonship, with His address to the Person of God the Father—fully reveals God as a conciliar personality.

Yet it is precisely here that the antinomies of the created I are concealed; before the face of the Divine Subject all the aporias become manifest.

The created, human I is conscious of itself simultaneously (as is shown with complete clarity in Fichte) as I (absolute) and as I (relative), and it is exhausted by this contradiction within itself. As the self-positing I, it is super–temporal and super–experiential; it is a sun illuminating everything with its light. But as I it is not self-sufficient, not self-grounded, because it needs a thou, seeks its grounding in other I’s lying outside it, and thus is bound to the non-I (in a manner more intimate than Fichte himself discerned).

Yet other I–thou’s likewise cannot sufficiently ground the I. Each of them, not being grounded in itself, refers onward to another, and that again to another; thus there arises a bad infinity, for each I, like the other, is equally powerless and helpless with respect to its own self-grounding, and therefore also with respect to grounding another. There results an infinite running in place away from oneself that cannot come to rest. The I steps onto a wavering plank over a bog, which cannot bear its weight and itself sinks into the mire unless the I immediately moves onto another, equally wavering plank, and so on; and there is no exit from the bog, no firm ground. The antinomy of the absolutely-relative I is resolved by a bad movement in a bad infinity—that is, it is not resolved at all.

It is evident that our I can ground itself, attach itself, lean only upon the Absolute Subject who grounds Himself. Only from the truly Absolute I, from God, does our I draw strength, life, and being. It becomes a genuine, real I only by gazing into the divine I, knowing itself as image, as reflection of the divine sun. Every reflection is also a sun, though a created one, as a repetition of the one, absolute sun. God is the absolute I who kindles by Himself the light of my human I. He is for it also the absolute Thou, who thereby affirms for me and through Himself my own I; for before the face of another, unconditional I, which is for me at the same time non-I, Thou, my own I also receives reality.

Personal self-consciousness is a great revelation of Divinity within us, the I within I and thou. These repetitions or reflections of the Absolute I, in their multiplicity, form a hierarchy of beings, a living ladder.

In this light of the I, pagan polytheism—the idea of a multiplicity of personal divine beings—acquires a special meaning and significance. It is insufficient to see here only a helpless anthropomorphism that multiplies gods on the grounds that the number of men is multiple. No, polytheism also bears witness to a deeper helplessness of the I in self-grounding, which forces it to slide from one thou to another. In the realm of absolutely-relative I’s our I can neither ground itself nor come to rest, because there are many of them. Herein lies both the possibility and, to a certain extent, even the justification of polytheism within the limits of natural religious self-consciousness.

Even henotheism¹⁰ (which differs little from monotheism) is not superior: it arbitrarily stops at one deity where a multitude of them is fundamentally possible. From among many relative I’s, one alone is selected—somehow, but without sufficient grounds—although it is in no way higher than the other possibilities. Polytheism is a victim of “transcendental illusion,” insofar as it seeks to resolve qualitative difficulties quantitatively; henotheism does not even notice these difficulties and does not attempt to save itself by illusion. Polytheism is overcome not from the outside, but from within—not by henotheism, but by monotheism, the religion of the absolute Divine personality.

Thus, religion in general begins where the human I encounters the divine I as Thou; or, conversely, where God, the Divine I, addresses man as thou. It is a dialogue of man with God in prayer and of God with man in revelation. Prayer is therefore an indispensable characteristic of religion—where there is no prayer, there is no religion (although there may be contemplative or mystical immersion). The great but impersonal it extinguishes the I and thereby extinguishes religion, which always and invariably presupposes the clear light of self-consciousness, even when freed from the limitations of createdness, even in deification.

When man, becoming “god by grace,” lives the divine life, he nevertheless preserves personal self-consciousness, without which there is no place for love (of which more below). In this sense religion is a personal affair, which takes place only between persons—God and man. And if every exit from the solitary island of the I to another I is logically inexplicable, then this passage from the I to the divine I—Thou is a thunderous, unceasing miracle.

⤊ 3. Properties of the Absolute Subject

The question once again returns to us concerning the difference between henotheism and monotheism—between an arbitrary, unproven unity of God and a unity that is inwardly justified and grounded. Under what conditions does the Absolute Subject exist, such that He may truly serve as the principle and foundation of relative subjects? He must contain within Himself those very conditions which the relative subject possesses outside itself and in reference to which it seeks its own grounding beyond itself.

The I does not exist without thou and he; it is revealed only in thou and you. It is sobornal (conciliar) in its consciousness, while remaining singular in its existence. For this reason, it necessarily requires an exit from itself and seeks its foundation beyond itself. Yet this very non–self-sufficiency is precisely what renders it relative.

In the Absolute Subject, this non–self-sufficiency and this relativity must be overcome. He Himself must be everything required for His own existence. The Absolute I must be within Himself and for Himself the Absolute Thou, and the Absolute He; He must be within Himself and for Himself also the Absolute We and You. Is such an unthinkable and unknowable mode of being realizable? Does there exist an Absolute Subject who is simultaneously I–Thou–He and also I–We–You?

Revelation teaches of the Absolute Subject as the Trihypostatic God, and this teaching is precisely that which answers the postulates disclosed in our own self-consciousness of the I. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which surpasses the limits of what is known to us and comprehensible by reason, fully responds to these postulates of personal self-consciousness. The Absolute Subject is a Trihypostatic Subject, one and multiple in His trihypostatic being, realizing personal self-consciousness within the depths of the divine life of the One Subject in all its forms. Unity as Trinity, and Trinity as Unity—the triune being of the Divine Spirit—is the answer to all postulates and the resolution of all aporias.

This possibility is equally unrealizable both within the confines of closed personal self-consciousness and its religious correlate, henotheism, and within personal self-consciousness that breaks open and goes beyond itself, together with its religious correlate, polytheism. The former postulates a strict and closed monotheism; the latter advances the idea of Olympus, a family of gods, in which resistance to monotheism is expressed, along with the incapacity, by its own powers, to emerge from the aporias of personal self-consciousness and its dialectic. Yet in both cases there are contained postulates of triunity, which are wholly fulfilled in the ecclesial dogma of the Trihypostatic God.

The properties of this dogma are such that, on the one hand, it affirms the non-mono-hypostatic character of the Godhead (thereby overturning the mono-hypostatic monotheism of henotheism, for example in Islam or in anti-Christian Judaism), while at the same time affirming the unity of the Trihypostatic God as the Absolute Subject. In Old Testament Revelation, already in the opening chapters of Genesis, we encounter a striking fact: God is spoken of both in the singular and in the plural—more precisely, in a singular-plural form, representing a wholly unique fusion of the two into something higher: a many-in-oneness, a triunity.

If we do not content ourselves with flat rationalistic interpretations that see here merely influences of pagan polytheism or a product of religious syncretism, but instead listen attentively to the mysterious revelation of these texts, we shall discern here a living revelation of the I (as well as Thou and He). First of all, God is spoken of here in the plural—Elohim—with a clear indication of a single God. Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Genesis 3:22: “Behold, Adam has become like one of Us.” Genesis 11:6–7: “Come, let us go down and confuse their languages.” Genesis 18:1–3: “The Lord appeared to Abraham (by the oaks of Mamre), and behold, three men were standing before him” (further on, there is an impersonal alternation and interweaving of singular and plural forms).

This I–We applied to the Person of God discloses the mystery of the nature of the Absolute Subject, in whom the I is realized as a many-in-one unity. In the New Testament this unity is revealed more fully and precisely as trihypostatic being, as the Most Holy Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity are depicted, on the one hand, as each possessing their own hypostatic being—the Father and the Son throughout the Gospels, especially in John; the Father, the Son, and the Spirit-Comforter in the Lord’s farewell discourse—distinct in their manifestation and action: at the Theophany, at the Transfiguration of the Lord, at Pentecost. And the same is abundantly attested in the apostolic epistles.

⤊ 4. The Super-rationality of the Dogma of the Trinity

Before dwelling upon the properties of each individual hypostasis in concreto [in concrete—Latin], it is permissible to pause first upon hypostaticity as such, in abstracto [in the abstract—Latin]. In a certain sense one may say that the triplicity of the Absolute Subject, or tri-hypostaticity, logically precedes the determinations of the individual hypostases in their concrete mutual relations as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In a certain sense, it can be said that the trinitarity of the Absolute Subject, or tri-hypostatizedness, logically precedes the definitions of the individual hypostases in their concrete relationship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This tri-hypostatizedness is a primary given, which is realized and concretized in the Holy Trinity.

Catholic scholastic theology set itself a false task—one that has partially infected Orthodoxy as well—namely, that of grounding the individual hypostases of the Holy Trinity in their concrete mutual distinctions, in hypostatic relations. Meanwhile, such a task is false, because tri-hypostaticity is rooted in the very nature of the Absolute Subject and therefore requires no concrete justification whatsoever. The dogma of the Holy Trinity proclaims that the one God exists in three hypostases, possessing an indivisible and one essence; all are of equal dignity, and each of them is the one true God (cf. the definitions of the Creed of St. Athanasius).¹¹

Sometimes the dogma is interpreted in such a way that triplicity is referred to the hypostases, while unity is referred to the nature. From this it is directly inferred that the dogma is fully rational, since triplicity and unity are understood in different respects.¹² However, such an interpretation excessively adapts the dogma to discursive determinations. Trinity may be understood as tri-unity both with respect to essence and with respect to hypostasis. The Divine Person, the Divine Subject, is not triple (as is involuntarily admitted by such an interpretation), but triune. The Absolute Hypostasis is tri-hypostatic and one—Trinity in unity; therefore the divine essence is likewise triune and one, insofar as it is realized in the triune Subject. Otherwise, tri-unity would be established for the three only through their relation to a triune essence, while in the hypostases themselves there would be not tri-unity but mere triplicity.

If attention is fixed solely upon the Absolute Subject, upon the Tri-hypostatic Person, then only the equal dignity of all three hypostases has force here, for which even the order of their mutual relations has no significance: “And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal”… If, however, we focus on the Divine nature, then the Divine unity receives full force here: “The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one Godhead, equal in glory, co-eternal in majesty. As the Father is, so is the Son, and so is the Holy Spirit: yet not three gods, but one God”. Yet these are only different aspects of one and the same dogma. Unity and triplicity are not distributed here in such a way as to be joined without interference, as though by a common possession of one essence by three; for such a joint ownership of a common object by three, of course, establishes not unity but only triplicity—threeness, a threefold repetition of one and the same (that is, it presupposes either tritheism, homoiousianism, or modalism).¹³ On the contrary, unity and triplicity mutually intersect in three directions, as in a cross, establishing tri-unity: the triplicity of hypostases in the unity of the tri-hypostatic Godhead, the equality 3 = 1, in one direction; and hypostaticity in relation to one—not common to all (as rationalism involuntarily substitutes), but one—essence, the equality 1 = 3, in the other direction. Three I’s, a We in one I; and a triune I in one nature—the problem of three in one and one in three. Here lies the limit of reason, marked by the antinomy of tri-unity.

Super-rationality, however, is not anti-rationality. Here the postulates of reason are satisfied—postulates that are recognized separately, yet cannot be fulfilled by the powers of reason taken together, but lead to a rational antinomy. Such precisely is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity before the tribunal of reason. We have already identified the postulates of reason: (a) God is one, as personal Spirit, possessing one hypostasis and one essence; (b) God cannot be mono-hypostatic, for the absolute hypostasis is realized only in the fullness of I–Thou, and the divine being cannot reconcile itself with mono-hypostatic possession by God of His own nature, with metaphysical solitude and egoism. On the one hand stands the postulate of strict monotheism; on the other, the contradictoriness of mono-hypostaticity, leading to its negation. The dogma unites both postulates: unity, though not solitude; uniqueness, but not isolation; singleness of personhood, though not mono-hypostaticity. One must preserve the full force both of unity and of non-solitude, without dulling the edge of the antinomy; for in the antinomy lies the power of the dogma, its higher rationality, which is revealed precisely in its correspondence to the highest postulates of reason. Any attempt to tip the scales to one side, to disturb the equilibrium of the dogma, fatally leads to heresy.

There are two poles of the antinomy: on the one side, unitarianism or monarchianism,¹⁴ and on the other, tritheism, which abolishes monotheism and transforms trinity into a kind of Olympus. Monarchianism has existed from the first centuries of Christianity to the present day. It has numerous and diverse forms. It expresses itself in subordinationism, which establishes inequality within the Holy Trinity, resulting in the subordination of one hypostasis to another: the Father above the Son, and the Son above the Holy Spirit; thus an hierarchy arises within the Godhead, and divine dignity belongs only to the Father. Or monarchianism expresses itself in modalism,¹⁵ in which the hypostases are only different and successive modes of manifestation of the one-hypostatic Godhead (Sabellianism). This heretical adaptation of the dogma to the demands of discursive understanding removes the antinomy at the price of an essential one-sidedness—which is precisely what heresy (αἵρεσις) fundamentally means—in the doctrine of God. Opposed to monarchianism (or unitarianism) stands tritheism, which transforms the three hypostases into three separate gods. As a direct formulation this doctrine has not enjoyed wide influence or acceptance, but in a concealed form it may insinuate itself involuntarily even into ostensibly orthodox constructions.

Thus the dogma of the Holy Trinity must be affirmed in its full force: one God in three hypostases; God-Trinity, speaking of Himself equally as I and as We; Trinity-One God, wherein each hypostasis—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is perfect and true God. Thus we obtain a series of dynamic equalities, inadmissible to discursive reason, which appear as inequalities when grasped statically: one God—Holy Trinity; God—Father; God—Son; God—Holy Spirit. Not three gods, but one God; yet each hypostasis, as well as the Holy Trinity itself, is the one true God, who is neither diminished in the individual hypostases nor increased in the three. Before this super–rational (dynamic) equality, counter-questions fall away as impious and ill-conceived—such as whether there is a difference between the Godhead of the Holy Trinity and that of an individual hypostasis—for here the very notion of greater or lesser is inapplicable.

Does not the doctrine of the Holy Trinity introduce the discursive category of number? Is not the sacred threeness a number? Do we not count the Godhead, thereby subjecting it to crude rational determinations? What is number? On the one hand, it is the most external, discursive category for the external, formal-abstract apprehension of the world: the unit, as the foundation and primary element of every number, a certain unity of an object marked in consciousness. In the unity of the object is reflected the unity of our “transcendental consciousness”;¹⁶ the unit is the mirror of our mono-hypostatic I, which, however, by virtue of its inner self-consciousness, goes out of itself and passes to thou, he, they—out of I becomes we, you, they. In short, on the basis of the self-revelation of the I, both singularity and multiplicity are known. The I possesses the capacity to know not only unity, but also the relation of unity and multiplicity. It passes from one to the other, to a series of unities-units: one, one, one… Through this “and,” which is introduced by the I and belongs to the I, multiplicity is formed as multi-unity, as number. The very emergence of number, its possibility, points to the conciliar nature of the I described above. Number, therefore, having not merely a subjective-discursive but also an objective-transcendental nature, rooted in the conciliarity or multi-unity of our mono-hypostatic I, also represents the principle of the structure of the world as a multi-unity crowned by man.

The world is, in a certain sense, number—and moreover, human number, corresponding in its emergence to the structure of the human I. Counting, formal, abstract number, with which arithmetic deals, has as its foundation concrete number. There is a power of number, a mystery of number, its individuality.¹⁷ Number is the principle of the structure of objective time, of becoming.¹⁸ Counting, or abstract number, is a function of concrete number. It is not the counted that is determined by number; rather, number itself arises from the multi-unity of being. In its ultimate foundation it is an image of the conciliar human I. Man is a microcosm. But is this human number applicable to the divine threeness? Is it also a number? Insofar as the Divinity is supramundane, transcendent to the world, It is not definable by a human number. But insofar as man bears within himself the image and likeness of God, and human number is a symbol and likeness of the Divine super–number, it finds its foundation therein. Tri-unity is not human number, although it is expressed in its language: such a number as 1 = 3 or 3 = 1 does not exist. Man knows only its elements: 1.1.1.3,; but he is incapable of realizing tri-unity in thought otherwise than by successively dwelling upon each of the components (hence the natural tendency toward unitarianism and tritheism). Yet, at the same time, in this lies the foundation of number. It is not the Godhead that is determined by number, but number and counting are elevated to the divine first principle, to the Super-Number, which for man is disclosed also in the language of number. God, existing in the Holy Trinity, is not one as a numerical unit, but one as the negation of all number and counting (monotheism is not henotheism). Plotinus’ τὸ ἕν¹⁹ is not a number, but lies beyond every number, and divine unity excludes every possibility of enumeration. (And when unity is ascribed to God in a relative sense—“I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods besides Me”—this is an anthropomorphic determination, accommodative to man.) The Divine tri-unity is not number as discursive multi-unity. In the latter either the unit dominates, or an indivisible element resistant to all mutual interpenetration, or else the sum that absorbs the three. Divine threeness is not the sum of three addends, but their indivisible tri-unity and oneness: one God, not counted three times, but thrice one. God is holy—and holy, holy, holy is God. God is holy, but also holy, holy, holy God. Here is the boundary of number, but not its beginning.

The same applies to the question of ordinal numbers: the first, second, and third hypostases. In this enumeration the role of number in divine tri-unity is felt by us most tangibly. However, we speak of the order of the hypostases only in relation to human inability to comprehend super–temporal and supra–ordinal being. Order is connected with the discursiveness²⁰ of our thinking, which is incapable of combining multiplicity otherwise than by either merging it into a multi-unity or dividing it into separate elements and moving from one to another, thereby establishing their order. Ordinal number has only subjective, anthropomorphic significance—counting, not numerical. In the eternal life of the Godhead there is no first, second, or third Person, for each is first, second, and third. This order arises only in the realm of God’s revelation to man, which has its times and seasons, its first, second, and third. In particular, this includes the successive revelation of the three hypostases of the Godhead in the Old and New Testaments. The face of the Most Holy Trinity, turned toward man and revealing itself to him, assumes ordinal determinations in the language of human number, which nevertheless has its foundation and justification in the sacred

Thus, the application of number in the determination of the Divinity does not give rise to any special objections or doubts. If theology is in principle possible at all—that is, teaching about God in the language of human concepts and words—then it is permissible, of course in due time and place, to employ all the means of human concepts, including numerical ones. Number as such, the category of “how many?”, exists abstractly, in separation from other determinations, only in logic. In reality, only concrete, qualitatively determined number exists—that is, numerical determination fused with qualitative determinations. Abstract number, like abstract time and space as empty forms of perception, does not in general exist. Likewise, the Divinity, in the doctrine of which we employ numerical concepts, does not thereby become commensurate with abstract, discursive number, which is a fiction of our discursivity, the product of the weakness of our reason in thinking the concrete. Similarly, the Divinity, in the doctrine of which we use numerical concepts, does not thereby become adequate to the abstract, rational number, which is a fiction of our discourse, a product of the weakness of our reason to think concretely. Its use, however, is legitimate insofar as it is grounded in that which in itself is above number.

⤊ 5. The Trihypostatic I. The Absolute Divine Subject

As has been shown, the I discloses itself only in reflection toward thou and he, we and you; it is not self-enclosed, not solitary, but conciliar (sobornal) in its self-actualization. Yet of our created I one must say that, in the disclosure of its conciliar nature, it not only reveals itself by going out of itself and beyond itself, but is also limited by this very movement; for it becomes evident that it itself exists only insofar as there is a non-I or an outside-of-I, that is, thou or he. In disclosing itself, it recognizes its own boundary, and within the absoluteness of self-consciousness it recognizes the relativity of its being.

Within the I itself, which is a certain act as self-positing, there is disclosed a given-ness that is no longer an act, although it enters into the self-positing of the I as its condition. In the I there is revealed a contradiction between act and given-ness: on the one hand, within the I there are self-posited and encompassed by it I, thou, we, and you, and in a certain sense one may say: I–thou–we–you; yet at the very same time the I is distinct from thou and he, unequal to them. The I thus becomes given to itself.

But the Absolute, the Divine I, in its absoluteness cannot be limited by anything. It knows no given-ness; it must be pure act, continuous and wholly transparent to itself in its self-positing. In it there is no place for any non-I as boundary or limit; and yet it must not be poorer than the relative I in the disclosure of its conciliarity. And the Absolute I is conciliar, that is, it necessarily co-posits within the act of self-positing both thou, and he, and we. But it is evident that these co-positings are not for the Absolute I a given-ness, nor a fact, nor a non-I; on the contrary, they remain act, or likewise I.

Can there be such an I which, in its conciliarity, knows thou, he, we, and yet knows them not as non-I but as I itself, in differentiated reiterations? Can the I fulfill for itself the function of non-I (thou, he), remain I within non-I, be at once I in thou and in we? Only under this condition will the I be absolutely realized and self-posited, because conciliarity, as the condition of the reality of its self-disclosure, will be united with the self-being (perseitas [per se—Latin], aseitas [being–from–itself—Latin]) of self-positing. Our created, absolutely-relative I, by its very contradictoriness, leads beyond itself, for it is unintelligible from itself. It postulates an absolute I, of which it is an image and repetition. To this I it attaches itself as to its foundation; from it it becomes intelligible.

Precisely to this postulate of our self-consciousness there corresponds the dogma of the one yet tri-hypostatic Subject, of the Holy Trinity, of the one Godhead in three Persons. The one Godhead is Personal Spirit, a Hypostatic Subject, whose personality is disclosed, actualized, and lives in three Persons. The Divine I is Thou and He (and Thou), yet Thou and He (and Thou) within it are not non-I: I–Thou–He (and Thou–We–I). The I is affirmed together with and simultaneously with Thou and He, as a triunе I; yet Thou and He are within the I also I. Each I, in the act of its triune being, is for itself and for the other simultaneously I, Thou, He (and Thou), and We. Among the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity there is not one that would not possess, in equal measure, all three modes of the I (as I, Thou, He, We), nor is there one that would be only I, or only Thou, or only He (and Thou). All three Hypostases are equal in honor, equal in hypostatic dignity.

In relative hypostases, personal pronouns are always distributed non-identically: the I, over against itself, encounters thou (or he), which for it is already not its own but an alien, impenetrable I; and each I is for another I likewise an impenetrable (though reflective) thou. By contrast, in the Divine Person each I is wholly transparent to the other, yet, being I, is at the same time also Thou and We. Divine hypostaticity is the absolute act of self-positing, in which there is no given-ness whatever, no outside and no not. The Divine I is wholly actualized in itself; it is self-sufficient in tri-unity. The fullness of the self-disclosure of the I requires hypostatic tri-unity—unity in Trinity and Trinity in unity—while the reality of self-positing requires the absoluteness of each of its acts, a real Trinity in real unity.

It is incorrect to admit an open or concealed modalism in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity—not only in the teaching concerning hypostatic distinctions, where it has already been disclosed and rejected by ecclesial consciousness, but also here, in the doctrine of the tri-unity or tri-hypostaticity of the Absolute Subject. The three hypostases must not be understood merely as modes or moments in the self-positing of the one I, which would then be the sole possessor and subject of this triad of its own posits. With such an understanding, what results is not Trinity in unity but only unity in Trinity; not tri-unity but a threefold self-positing of the one I. Such an I, strictly speaking, remains closed and solitary, alone; it cannot say of itself We; it does not know Thou. Trinity, as Subject or Person, is genuinely I and We: three I’s and at the same time one I; and each I, every hypostasis of the Most Holy Trinity, is the divine I, and We, and Thou. As We, the Divine Trinity is I disclosing itself in I–Thou–He, I–We, three I’s.

Once again we encounter not a discursive-static but a dynamic equality: the Holy Trinity is the one true God; the tri-hypostatic Godhead is the one personal Spirit, one in three and three in one. Here the rational law of static identity—A = A—is violated; instead, a dynamic law of equality in differentiation is revealed: A, B, C = A, B, C, with all possible permutations. Thus the I of each hypostasis, as God, is equal in honor and equal in unity. In the absolute I–We all three I’s are not distinguished, yet neither are they fused: they are identified without mutual absorption, abiding in indivisibility and without confusion. The triangle of I, having at its vertices I, Thou, He, may be rotated about its axis to the right or to the left, such that the positions of the individual vertices change; yet this change of relations is without significance: in every position it corresponds to the I, both in each of its angles taken separately and in all three taken together.

Thus the Divine I realizes its absoluteness by disclosing itself in tri-unity, yet without admitting into itself any non-I. The I is grounded and affirmed as I, Thou, He, We, everywhere remaining I. The I becomes other to itself within the bounds of itself. For created spirit this is only a postulate; absolute Personality is revealed as an I that discloses itself in the reciprocity of I, that is, in hypostatic love.

God is Love—love not as a “property,” but as the very essence. From love and through love one may approach the contemplation of the mysteries of God. And the tri-hypostaticity of the Godhead can be understood only as the pre-eternal act of Love: it establishes the tri-unity of the Divine Subject as the pre-eternal reciprocity of Love. And the tri-hypostatizedness of the Godhead can be understood only as a pre-eternal act of Love: it establishes the triunity of the Divine Subject as a pre-eternal reciprocity of Love.

Our isolating, mono-hypostatic, egoistic I is bound to other I’s by the necessity of its own being; yet even in the very conciliarity of consciousness there is already enclosed within the I a force of division and repulsion. Thou is for my I not only a co-I but also a non-I, though one possessing the nature of an I; thou is an alien I, in a certain sense a counter-I. This contradictory expression (for the I is for us the most immediate and in no case something alien) nevertheless accurately expresses our relation to thou and he. This alienness may melt away, the barrier may grow thin, when the “alien I” becomes for us no longer alien but native, near, beloved: love thy neighbor as thyself (Matt 19:19). Yet for the human being love is only a property, a state, a capacity, not the very essence, which nonetheless remains self-love. Therefore, for us the boundary between I and thou is ontologically insurmountable, though it may be modally overcome; thou nevertheless always remains non-I.

In the Godhead, by the act of love-reciprocity, this boundary is ontologically overcome and annulled; in tri-hypostaticity the other I, the Thou, is already I, and each of the three I’s is I not only in itself but also in the others and for the others. The whole difficulty for the human mind in apprehending the mystery of the tri-hypostaticity of the Godhead lies not in the threefold form of the I (for this threefoldness, as conciliarity,²¹ is accessible even to created and human self-consciousness), but in the tri-unity of the tri-hypostatic I, which consists in the perfect transparency of one I for another I, in hypostatic self-sacrifice, in the expression of oneself as I only through another, for another, with others, and in another. Thou here is loved not merely as an I; it already is I, it is identified with it. This self-identification of oneself with another shatters the self-enclosure of the subject and at the same time renders the I self-grounded and absolute. Such is tri-hypostaticity as the act of Divine love, by which the distinction between I and Thou is simultaneously preserved and We is posited, and at the same time the opposition between I and Thou is aufgehoben, and thus the I is posited as absolute, inwardly completed and grounded. The Absolute Divine Subject is hypostatic Love.

In the Trinity, as the Absolute Tri-hypostatic Subject, there exists no order of hypostases, which are given in the one absolute act of the self-positing of the I. Each hypostasis is absolute I and at the same time absolute Thou and absolute We. Here, in the hypostatic relation, there is no “origination” of hypostases one from another, but only their mutual self-positing. The tri-hypostaticity of the Absolute Subject, the Person, the Living God, is in a certain sense already a priori to all theological teaching concerning the Holy Trinity and the individual hypostases. Theology may expound how tri-hypostaticity is disclosed, but not how it arises. In the failure to keep this presupposition in view lies the principal doctrinal deficiency of Catholic theology, which proceeds as though this a priori of tri-hypostaticity did not exist, as though it could and should be discovered and demonstrated a posteriori,²² from relations, rather than the reverse.

⤊ 6. Hypostasis and Ousia, Person and Essence

God is Spirit. To spirit there belong personality and nature. Our hypostatic I is not exhausted by bare self-consciousness, by sheer self-reflection: I–I–I–I… It lives within itself, has the source of its life in its own depths, and its life is the unceasing self-disclosure of its own profundity and inexhaustible possibilities. I simply does not exist without this depth, without this nocturnal darkness from which images of being continually emerge—new possibilities of it. This incomprehensible and indissoluble union of the self-conscious I with its nature or content, admitting of no further grounding, expresses the very essence of personal spirit, its character as hypostatic being,²³ that without which it does not exist.

The I realizes itself as knowing: I know—knowledge is accomplished in the I, in self-consciousness. It is also willing: I will—volition takes place in that same I, in the unity of its self-consciousness. It is also creative: I create, and this creativity is the evident disclosure of the depth of the I, of its nature. The life of the I is its unceasing self-creation and self-revelation, in which it proves to itself ever old and ever new: “your youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s” (Psa 103:5). Living, the I becomes (wird—Ger.), and this becoming is the law of its life.

In this sense the life of the I is an unceasing arising—not from nothing or from emptiness, but from the depths of the I itself. Speaking Aristotelianly, in the entelechy of the I there is a constant passage from the possible—dýnamis (δύναμις)—to the actual—enérgeia (ενέργεια).²⁴ Life is expressed in new, not-yet-actualized—more precisely, not-yet-fully-actualized—possibilities. In them the I comes to know itself, develops, is strengthened, grows—or, on the contrary, weakens and languishes. Death interrupts this self-creation of the I; yet death for the I lies beyond the bounds of its vital self-consciousness, because it knows itself as supratemporal and eternal. Nevertheless, the temporal enters into the inner life of the I and fills all its pores. Consciousness is discursive, because life itself is discursive: for it stagnation, stoppage, is death; it tolerates no rest. Yet discursivity is at the same time relativity, incompletion, fragmentariness.

Thus, in the essence of spirit one distinguishes the hypostasis and its nature or essence, the subject and its content—the I and the mine. The I have the mine as its possession. But this mine does not belong to it in actu;²⁵ it only becomes so. Therefore, for the I its own nature, the mine, appears as something in a sense unknown to itself, undisclosed—a certain it into which the I is immersed, while remaining inseparably bound with it. In the I there is constantly present and realized something “subconscious,” pre-conscious and super-conscious; the light of the I illuminates only a limited space around itself, leaving the whole expanse in half-shadow. The nature of the I is mē on (μὴ ὄν)—non-being,²⁶ potentiality actualizing itself in time. In this sense one may say that the I does not possess the mine, its own nature and possession.

As a given, the I’s own nature presents itself to the I not only as an act of the I, but also as a fact of the I, in the full contradictoriness of this union. As self-positing, the I can be realized only by its own act, that is, absolutely, a se et per se [from itself and by itself—Latin];²⁷ but as given, the I appears to itself as a product or fact: the mine slips from the power of the I; in it its own nature is present as the subconscious, only as possibility, not as possession. In this sense the life of the I is qualitatively temporal, by virtue of its discursivity; it is only pierced by individual rays of eternal life, in which the I fully possesses itself and its life as it possesses its own self-consciousness.

The contradictoriness of the I as absolutely-relative is disclosed not only in its hypostatic self-determination—as at once act and fact, self-positing and givenness—but also in the mode in which the I possesses its nature. As we recall, the I is for itself unique, yet not solitary. Its nature is conciliar (sobornaya). With itself, though outside itself, it co-posits other I’s, has them as its own presupposition. In what relation, then, does the proper life of the I stand to these I’s outside the I—to the other I’s, to thou, he, we, you, they? Undoubtedly it stands to them in some relation, simply because it cannot fail to stand in some relation, since these other co-I’s are given together with the I as its companions or shadows. The givenness of life that is realized in the I and becomes for it mine is simultaneously a co-givenness, a common givenness also for the co-I’s, for them; it becomes thine, ours, yours, theirs—a single common life of many.

How is this commonality or unity to be more precisely determined? On the one hand, it is precisely one life of many, experienced by many I’s in their communion, in their conciliar unity, as the one nature of all I’s—life as such—and in it all find themselves consubstantial, homoousios (ὁμοούσιος).²⁸ If this homoousian character of all I’s were not presupposed as something self-evident, then the one—and for each the only—I would become severed and solitary. But then the I itself would be destroyed; by virtue of its conciliarity it cannot remain alone—it is extinguished outside relation to co-I’s. The I itself is co-I; and thus it lives in what is its own and, as not-its-own, in ours, yours, theirs. For it, life is an enacted many-in-one, the consubstantiality of many—homoousianity. And yet this homoousianity has its boundary, because each I, though not solitary, is for itself unique; it knows its co-I’s as non-I, distinguishes itself from them without identifying with them. For it, these other I’s are many non-I’s in distinction, in opposition to the I. Unable to identify with them, it also cannot forget them, separate from them, truly isolate itself. It is for itself always given together with them and is therefore compelled to have with them, if not one life, then at least a common life—a similar, even identical life of many—which, however, my I, and by its pattern every other I, has separately, for itself and in its own way.

What results is not a consubstantial but a like-substantial life of many, homoiousios (ὁμοιούσιος). Homoiousianity signifies the repetition of what is similar, yet without any possibility of fusing this similar repetition into unity. However similar two objects may be, they nevertheless remain forever two; and their similarity, mentally bracketed, cannot in the least bring them together. For that, not similarity but unity is required—not homoiousianity but homoousianity.

Thus the life of the created I proves to be contradictory and unintelligible from within itself. In the conciliar nature of the I there is ineradicably laid down the postulate of homoousianity, which is realized only as homoiousianity—opposed to homoousianity and yet postulating it. Similarity is intelligible only as a reflection of many-in-one, not conversely: many-in-one cannot be understood on the basis of similarity. Thus number, multiplicity, is something other and new, not contained in each individual unit nor in their external juxtaposition—1, 1, 1, 1…—but is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1…, where this “+” is the uniting force of number. By virtue of it, each 1 proves to be a co-unit of each number—lives in it and from it receives its qualitative determination—so that number consists of units, yet as many-in-one it exists independently of the units and grounds them (the opposition between homoiousianity and homoousianity in the history of philosophy was expressed in Platonism and Aristotelianism, which understand the universal concept, to katholou (τὸ καθόλου) [the whole thing—Greek], the former as the One lying at the basis of all, the latter as the repetition of many).

⤊ 7. Hypostasis and Ousia. The Person and Essence of God

The nature of created spirit, absolutely relative and unintelligible from itself, becomes absolutely intelligible only from the Absolute Spirit, who imprints Himself upon relative spirit through the postulates of absoluteness. The distinction between hypostasis and ousia, taken in itself, contains nothing that would fail to correspond to the absoluteness of the Divine Being; and according to Revelation, God is a Personal Being, possessing within Himself infinite life. Deuteronomy 32:40: “For I lift up My hand to heaven and say: I live forever.”

The correlation and inseparability of hypostasis and ousia we have come to know within the nature of created, relative spirit. Yet there we encounter insurmountable difficulties and contradictions which clearly cannot pertain to the Absolute Spirit. To Absolute Being the definition of life as arising, becoming, or process is inapplicable. The life of the Godhead is eternal life, in which nothing changes and nothing is added, but all is contained in a single, eternal act; there is absolutely no place for temporality or origination. With God “there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end” (Psalm 102:25–27), And again: “For you are God ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever existing, yet ever the same, you”  (from the Eucharistic prayer of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom).

Eternal life signifies that everything proper to the Godhead belongs to Him inalienably, is inseparably bound to His personal self-consciousness. Even in the personal self-consciousness of created spirit eternity is impressed: the I possesses self-consciousness as unoriginate and supratemporal. In the Absolute Spirit, however, His personal self-consciousness is co-posited with His vital self-determination as eternal life. But this also means that eternal life—inseparably fused with personal self-positing and included within it—contains nothing arising, unfinished, or imperfect, no potentiality, nothing meontic. Therefore it is in no sense and in no degree a given for the Absolute Spirit, as a nature or necessity inherent in Him and determining Him. No: it is wholly, entirely, and through and through act, in which there is no fact, no givenness, no product. Nature in the Godhead is His eternal life, self-determination, self-positing, actus purissimus [purest act – Latin]. The Divine Person Himself is the sole source of His ousia, or life. Divine life is hypostatically transparent, and absolute self-consciousness encounters no boundary in any givenness. Hypostatic self-positing and ousial, essential, vital self-determination are here one and the same identical act; in the life of the Divinity there is nothing that is not fully actual. Hypostasis and nature, so palpably distinct in created spirit, are united in the Godhead in the divine act of absolute self-positing: He Who Is, Yahweh, I Am that I Am.

But if this is so, what then does the patristic distinction between hypostasis and ousia signify precisely in the Godhead? This distinction, of course, in no way presupposes their separation, nor even a certain opposition, as occurs to some degree in created spirit, which knows its nature and knows itself in its nature, finding itself therein as a givenness for itself and, to a certain extent, as a task imposed upon itself. Such a distinction, and in such a sense, cannot exist in the Godhead, in whom there is no such opposition, but rather a complete unity of self-consciousness and essence, act and fact, self-positing and self-determination, self-consciousness and self-knowledge and self-revelation. In this sense the Godhead stands beyond the opposition of hypostasis and ousia, personality and nature, self-positing and givenness—or what is the same, freedom and necessity, act and fact. This very distinction is the work of abstraction, of human conceptual reflection (epínoia) (ἐπίνοια) [thought—Greek], without which the human mind cannot approach an understanding of Divine Life or realize its own thought concerning it. The positive concept of ousia, as distinct from hypostasis, is the vital self-revelation of personality, which is not mere bare self-consciousness—I am I am I…—but concrete, living, self-filled being that opens itself from within: I Am that I Am, Jehovah, I Am the One Who Is, the Living God.

From this follow certain further dogmatic determinations. Nature (phýsis, φύσις) in the Godhead is distinguished from His hypostasis; yet it can neither be separated from it nor, still less, opposed to it. There is no nature without hypostasis, nor any nature outside hypostasis (anhypostatos, άνυποστατος); on the contrary, the entire life of the Godhead is hypostatized (enypostatos, ένυπόστατος). Every dogmatic construction which fails to distinguish hypostasis and nature in the Godhead, as well as one which covertly or overtly divides and opposes them, contains an error within itself.

Thus, in contrast to created spirit, which possesses within its own nature a givenness that is wholly unknowable even to itself, in the Godhead there is no place for anything unknown, for darkness (or the bythos, βυθός²⁹ of the Gnostics), for any givenness and the corresponding imposed necessity. Nature here is wholly transparent to self-consciousness and is realized by it in an absolutely exhaustive manner. If Aristotelian concepts are applied here at all, one must say that in divine entelechy dýnamis (δύναμις) and entelecheia (έντελέχεια) completely coincide, and there is nothing possible that is not actual, while in and over all shines the all-seeing eye of Personal Self-consciousness. There is no place here for any it, for anything subconscious, for any object standing over against the subject. Such a fusion of hypostasis and nature is inaccessible to created spirit, because within itself it finds them only in opposition. Yet for it, life itself consists precisely in the constant overcoming of this opposition, in the identification of act and fact, in self-creation. This creative and self-creative element of its spirit, as fundamental, is recognized by the human being within himself. He overcomes the opposition of I and not-I in the creativity of life, and this is the image of the Absolute Spirit in created being, the breath of life which the Creator Himself breathed into His creation (Genesis 2:7). Life is self-revelation and self-creation even for created spirit, yet not in a single eternal act, but in temporal becoming, which becomes intelligible only from its supratemporal foundation. The life of created spirit is a ray from the single source of Life, the Living God. In the Godhead all life is hypostatic through and through, and the hypostasis lives; life and self-consciousness are inseparable.

⤊ 8. The Consubstantial Trinity
(τρεις υποστάσεις — μία φύσις)

The conciliar character (sobornost’) of self-consciousness raises, in turn, the question of the conciliar character of life. The life of the Godhead is the primordial prototype of conciliarity, precisely as a tri-hypostatic life. How, then, is this tri-hypostatic character to be understood: as a single triune act, or as the communion of three within the One? The dogmatic definition finally formulated by the Cappadocians speaks of the one divine essence with three hypostases, or of the consubstantiality and indivisibility of the “holy and consubstantial and life-giving and indivisible Trinity.” This formula first of all rejects likeness-of-essence and tritheism, by which the indivisible Trinity is dissected into three separate subjects, each possessing its own particular life. The life of the tri-hypostatic subject is one; yet this one life is tri-hypostatic.

The Absolute Subject exists in the triune unity of tri-hypostatic being. The divine I posits itself as a triune I, in which, by a single act, I, Thou, and We are co-posited as I. The triune subject possesses its nature and actualizes its life as a triune I. He lives in Himself, as the Holy Trinity lives in the Unity and the Unity in the Trinity. This life is one, as the life of a single subject, yet it is also conciliar, for it is the life of the Triune Subject. Here full homoousianism is realized in the sense that the Triune Subject possesses one life or one essence. He possesses it as One, yet not as solitary, but conciliarly, tri-hypostatically. This one essence is neither tripled nor multiplied. Although the triune I is really three I’s (each of which is for the others both Thou and We), these I–Thou’s do not limit one another as non-I’s, but mutually penetrate one another. Each I in the triune I of the Most Holy Trinity possesses essence or life as I, but not as co-I, since co-I includes an impenetrable barrier of non-I, whereas in the tri-hypostatic I each I is perfectly permeable to the others by the power of love; therefore they constitute not a society of three, but a triune I. Therefore, the single nature or life belongs not to society as an I, composed of individuals similar to one another in an Omiusian sense, but to the triune, inwardly soborny I. Such three hypostases, which form a complete subject, possess a truly one (and not merely similar) life.

The nature of the Godhead is actualized for Him in one eternal act, which is fully hypostatic, being completely transparent to personal self-consciousness and identified with it. The one divine I exists in three hypostases, which do not abolish the unity of the I, since each hypostasis is I. This I is wholly identical for all the hypostases as their eternal, self-positing triunity. Corresponding to this actual unity of self-consciousness is the actual unity of the divine nature (physis, φύσις), or essence (ousia, ούσια), or life. If these determinations are considered statically rather than dynamically, from the standpoint of fact rather than act, an evident contradiction appears between threeness and oneness, between the nature of the three and of the one. Yet here a living triunity is realized, to which both unity and threeness belong equally. The former is expressed dogmatically by the definition μία φύσις, the latter by τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις.³⁰ The nature of the Godhead is really one, just as the divine I that possesses it is one and knows no non-I or co-I with respect to itself. And yet tri-hypostaticity signifies the reality of three hypostases as living centers. Each hypostasis is an I that possesses its own from itself, though not for itself. It does not oppose the other two as co-I or as another I, but identifies itself with them. Thus the conciliarity of life is fully realized—something that for created spirit remains an unattainable, yet not removable, postulate.

The subordinate and relative truth of homoiousianism, as applied to conciliarity, is preserved only in the fact that threeness in the dogma of triunity must be affirmed no less than unity. Therefore each hypostasis possesses its nature also for itself, and all three hypostases possess it—not only in their identification, but also in their distinction; not only in unity, but also in threeness. Threeness and unity must be affirmed with equal force. Dogmatically this is expressed by saying that the Most Holy Trinity is one true God, and that each of the hypostases is one true God, and that all are equal in honor and equal in divinity: one nature in three hypostases, and in each hypostasis the entire fullness of the divine power, the whole essence of the Godhead, is wholly contained. The divine hypostases possess their nature both in Тheir unity and in Тheir distinction, and in both cases this possession is personal. The I, though disclosed in concrete unity with co-I or We, nevertheless remains I, in which there is no non-I. Here communion is unity, and unity is communion: one life and nature, yet at the same time common—the life and nature of the Three Hypostases. This is the one, absolute conciliarity of being.

This conciliarity also has its own mode of conciliar existence. The one nature and life of the Godhead is not the self-determination of the Three, of the tri-hypostatic unity in abstracto, in which each hypostasis indifferently takes the place of another. Such indifference or equal dignity befits the hypostases as such, that is, personal self-consciousness: the I of each hypostasis is an equally divine I, actualized in its triunity as the triune I. Likewise, personal possession of one’s nature by each hypostasis—one in the triunity and triune in the unity—is identical and equally divine. Yet here more concrete modes emerge of how the divine Persons possess their nature. In this concreteness there appear hypostatic properties or distinguishing marks, which in no way abolish the equal dignity and equal divinity of the hypostases, but establish qualitative relations and an order (taxis, τάξις) among them. This pertains not to the tri-hypostatic self-consciousness of the Absolute Subject as such, but to His possession of His nature, to the intra-divine life. The conciliarity of the tri-hypostatic subject is realized in the fact that He possesses the one nature in a threefold manner. The hypostases are not only personal centers of the tri-hypostatic personality, but also distinct modes of possessing the one nature—tropoi tēs hyparxeōs (τρόποι της ΰπάρξεως) (St. Basil the Great). From this distinction of modes of possession, from the concreteness of divine life, arise the hypostatic properties and relations: “the hypostasis is the distinctive mark of each mode of existence” (ἡ ὑπόστασις τὸ ἰδιάζον τῆς ἑκάστου ὑπάρξεως σημεῖόν ἐστιν) (St. Basil the Great, Ep. 28:3).³¹

Personal spirit actualizes its nature as its life, its depth, its self-revelation. If its nature does not stand before it as some given datum unfolding itself (as is the case with created spirit), but is its personal life, the fullness of its personal self-consciousness in a single personal act, then this act is accomplished simultaneously in three senses or meanings: spirit is for itself both that which is revealed (from the unrevealed state of depth), that which reveals (in the act of manifesting its depth), and that which has been revealed (as accomplished self-revelation). These three acts of self-determination constitute the one life of spirit. The life of spirit is an unceasing self-revelation to itself, a threefold and triune act that necessarily possesses being in itself and for itself. The one who is revealed (the subject) has a word about himself (the predicate), which is the expression of his own being (the copula). Silence—Word—Life: Father—Son—Holy Spirit.

In the life of a uni-hypostatic subject, this self-determination of spirit—while retaining the threefoldness of its moments—is realized through a temporal process, in flowing life. One and the same subject is for himself at once an unexplored mystery and depth, then reveals himself to himself in thought and knowledge, in word, and finally actualizes his word, his content, through a creative act as a new self-determination. In discursivity, an alternation of these moments is possible, while spirit retains in its self-consciousness awareness of itself as the living unity of this threefold self-positing. None of these moments can be eliminated without destroying the very being of spirit. Spirit is the actually accomplished unity of self-positing, a dynamic identity of subject, predicate, and copula. The life of spirit is always a self-revelation that contains a certain content, and in this content the being of precisely this self-revealing spirit is expressed.

In created spirit these moments are accomplished within personality, but not personally; they appear as states of personal life. In divine life, however—which is an eternal, absolute act—there is no place for a discursive alternation of the three moments; on the contrary, they are given simultaneously and absolutely. At the same time, they are not states of spirit as givens, for they are not states or data, but acts. The life of the divine Spirit, in its absoluteness, is realized as a threefold, triune personal act. The self-determinations of spirit—as originating principle, content, and creative actualization—are here necessary and personal self-determinations, for in divine life everything is personal and essential to the end, in the inseparable unity of hypostasis and nature. Thus the threefoldness of spiritual self-consciousness in the Godhead is expressed in the distinction of the modes of the three hypostases, in which the intra-spiritual relations, the self-relations of spirit, its life, are manifested. The hypostases in the Godhead express divine self-relation; they are personal relations within absolute spirit. In this sense they are absolute relations, as the structure or nature of the Absolute.

One should not be troubled by the apparent contradiction in the expression “absolute relation.” The concept of absoluteness is opposed not to relation, but to relativity or conditionality. Relations within the Absolute that express its life are also absolute, for they are conditioned by nothing other than the Absolute itself in its self-revelation. In this sense each hypostasis in the Holy Trinity is absolute, though they are mutually relational. And the Holy Trinity itself is not only the unity of the Absolute, but also a certain absolute relationality of the Absolute. In our discursive reason, relations exist as a product of discursivity, but this does not apply to the essence of relations themselves. Our reason thinks the Absolute only in comparison with the relative, that is, in relation, as something relative. Therefore the Fathers do not necessarily define the divine hypostases as tropoi tēs hyparxeōs (τροποι της υπαρξης ηταν σχεσης ονοματα)³² or as names of relations. The absence of relations is equivalent to abstraction, or to the absence of concreteness in the understanding of the Absolute; on the contrary, in concrete form the Absolute is conceived as an order of absolutely existing relations within the depths of the Absolute—as its spiritual nature or structure.

⤊ 9. The Holy Trinity as Love³³

The Divine Spirit reveals Himself, and this revelation is His Word. This Word, however, He does not possess as a non-hypostatic content of His own, as some something. For such a something—a state or given datum—has absolutely no place in the Absolute Subject, who knows only the personal act. And such a personal act occurs in the begetting of the Word: the Divine I (the Father) begets His Word as another I expresses Himself in another, identifies Himself with Him, beholds Himself in this I as in His own image; and this other I in turn, gives Himself back to the One who begot Him, as His Word.

And this accomplished revelation of the Father in the Son is recognized—yet again not as a state or datum, but as a new personal act of self-positing: the Father knows the Word as His revelation, and the Son knows Himself as the Word of the Father, in a new hypostatic act of self-positing, in the Holy Spirit, as amor unitivus amborum³⁴ (Blessed Augustine).

Revelation through the Other, knowledge of oneself as Other, possession of oneself as Other—such a relation, in which Each exists only for the Other and in the Other, identifies Himself with the Other—such a life in the Other is Love. Love is not a property but the very essence of God; the substantial relation of the Triune Subject is love, as mutuality and mutual self-renunciation, as sacrificial love. For to express oneself only in another, to express by oneself only the other, to actualize oneself only in another, to create only in another and for another—this is the sacred circle of sacrificial love. Here sacrifice is of oneself and of what is one’s own: one’s I is expressed in other I’s. Yet this sacrifice, by its own power, gives absolute fullness of life: the Absolute Subject possesses Himself in an absolute manner. He is free from all limits (non-I) within His personality and free in the fullness of His life.

It suffices for a moment to oppose to the all-radiant Trinity the mono-hypostatic absolute, which would have everything for itself. It could possess this only as a given datum or object, that is, as a non-I, which would belong to it as its content but would not be itself, and thus would inwardly limit it. On the other hand, it would possess this in solitude, for itself alone, while everywhere it would be confronted by the boundary of non-I, of emptiness, in which it would suffocate from loneliness and isolation. Thus it is clear that the idea of absolute mono-hypostaticity leads to evident impasses, from which only tri-hypostaticity delivers us, wherein life is self-giving and self-finding.

Thus, the nature in the tri-hypostatic Godhead is a single life as a single threefold act: the self-positing of the I through another I, the love of God for Himself as Other. This self-positing, in one respect, gives the tri-hypostatic unity of the Absolute Subject; in another, it gives His one natural essence. The Holy Trinity is the essential, eternal act of reciprocity in self-renouncing love, which finds what is given in mutual self-giving (if one might apply here this somewhat vulgarized term, one could say that substantial reciprocity is genuine, ontological altruism).

The Godhead lives, that is, reveals itself to itself in self-knowledge and self-inspiration, in love for itself—as a Tri-hypostatic Subject, in whom each hypostasis expresses itself not through itself, but through the other hypostases, and in this alone has its unique expression. Our I possesses a certain ontological egoism: its very being is bound up with this self-positing and self-affirmation—I am I—although it already knocks at another I, hears and knows of its presence, and therefore of its own non-absoluteness, its non-limitlessness. The Divine I, in the act of self-positing as I, goes out of itself and posits itself in another I, and thereby abolishes every distinction and manifests itself as absolute.³⁵

But such self-positing of oneself in another and through another is Love as an effective act, the ontology of love. God is love, and as Love He is the Holy Trinity. Love is the affirmation of oneself and of one’s own, not by self-assertion but by self-giving—self-positing through self-renunciation—the highest power and the highest blessedness of love. And if the Cross is the symbol of sacrificial love in general, then the Holy Trinity is the cruciform power of mutual self-renunciation within the depths of the tri-hypostatic Subject. And the Holy Cross is a symbol not only of our salvation, but also of the very life of the Holy Trinity. Hence the place and veneration accorded to the Cross and to the power of the Cross in Christian piety become clear (in the canon to the Holy Cross it is said of the Cross that it is “the image of God, sign-bearing for the world,” “the sign of the incomprehensible Trinity,” “the three-fold Cross, for it bears the tri-hypostatic image of the Trinity”).

Cruciform mutual self-emptying and cruciform mutual fulfillment express the life of the tri-hypostatic Godhead both in relation to hypostatic self-consciousness and to natural self-revelation. God is Living Love, and this means sacrificial Love, Love that finds itself in sacrifice, and therefore eternal Life; for Life is Love, just as Love is Life (and every deficiency of love is also a deficiency of life).

The power of the Cross is at the same time boundless divine Might, by which every limitation is overcome not only outside, but also within oneself and in one’s own self-actualization. Only tri-hypostatic Love is absolute Being, in relation to which every mono-hypostaticity is limitation.

The graphic image of the Cross is the intersection of two perpendicular lines, formed by three points • • • or ∴ which are joined by straight lines drawn through them ⏉ or conversely ⏊ or simply ✟.

The point of intersection is the point of these points. In it they are united, each preserving its own place, for without this condition the point of intersection itself would not exist, in which they are identified in a certain dynamic unity. The image of the Cross thus truly is “the tri-hypostatic image of the Trinity.” It is an immediate symbol, a direct icon of tri-hypostaticity. Hence its universality and its power, akin to the power of the Divine Name. By this image we sign the Cross in blessing, and its sanctifying power acts even without words. And in the human being, in his bodily form, the Cross is inscribed as the sign of the Holy Trinity, in whose image he was created. The Cross is the image of God-Love, and therefore of divine love for the world—it is the instrument of its salvation.³⁶

⤊ 10. Analogies of the Trinity in Nature and Humanity

The Triunity of the Godhead lies beyond the limits of human experience by reason of the mono-hypostatic character of man. The egoistic isolation of the human I can be melted into Divine love only in a gracious, supernatural order—by the power of deification. “We will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (John 14:23), the Lord promised; and this indwelling of the Holy Trinity signifies a gracious liberation from the bonds of mono-hypostatic existence through participation in the divine trinitarian life and the overcoming of human limitation—“eternal life,” the beginning of which we may already know here and now in gracious anticipations and foretaste.

In theological reflection on the Holy Trinity, however, the question arises: how can we bring this dogma nearer to our consciousness? From what has been said above, only one answer follows: through self-knowledge of our God-like spirit, through those postulates of self-consciousness which, though not realizable by it, are nonetheless ineradicable from it—postulates laid within it prior to all experience, and to which the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes the response. The “conciliarity of consciousness” is a fundamental fact of transcendental consciousness; it renders the self-positing of the isolated I (and with it, isolated experience) contradictory and unrealizable. Yet this fact becomes intelligible and even necessary in the light of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Through the postulates of self-consciousness our spirit goes forth from itself and beyond itself to meet the revelations of its Prototype. In connection with these postulates—which are the wings of the spirit, its transcendent possibilities—the experience of love and the path of love are given meaning, for this alone leads beyond the boundaries of mono-hypostatic existence.

The Holy Trinity is the intelligible sun standing in the heaven of our soul, which by its light makes the soul itself visible to itself: “In Thy light shall we see light”—and the light of our own soul as well. “Let the radiance of Thy light be marked upon us, that in it we may behold the unapproachable Light.” Sharply distinct from these postulates of trinitarity, present within our self-consciousness, are the likenesses, comparisons, and analogies laboriously sought by theologians in order to approximate the incomprehensible mystery of tri-hypostatic being to our consciousness. The common feature of the method of analogy—dealing with the natural or psychological world and not addressing self-consciousness directly—is that all such analogies commit an ignoratio elenchi:³⁷ they miss the point. Instead of tri-hypostaticity and consubstantiality in the Holy Trinity, they merely illustrate the threeness or triplicity of certain phenomena or relations—in other words, they are all “off topic.”

Thus there arises a whole series of analogies proposed for explaining the dogma of the Holy Trinity that in fact have no relation to it, since in these comparisons the tertium comparationis³⁸ is absent—namely, the hypostatic character of the phenomena being compared. To this category belong, for example, such comparisons as: the sun, a sunbeam, and light; the root, trunk, and fruit of one and the same tree; a spring, a source, and a stream, inseparably united and yet distinct; fire, brilliance, and warmth. The number of such comparisons might be further multiplied, but of them all it must be said that they are entirely irrelevant and contain no elucidation of the tri-hypostaticity of the Godhead—just as, in general, phenomena of the spiritual world cannot be comprehended through phenomena of the physical world.

Still worse, perhaps, are such comparisons as these: “every body has three dimensions—breadth, length, and depth; time consists of past, present, and future; in the spiritual world, every truth presupposes the presence of three conditions: free action, law, and the agreement of free action with law.” (Macarius Bulgakov, I. 209). To these comparisons applies the severe and general verdict pronounced upon them by Gregory the Theologian.³⁹

Even more dangerous are the comparisons borrowed from psychology. Here a confusion arises between the psychic and the spiritual. In phenomena of psychological life there is no greater degree of spirituality than in phenomena of the physical world, despite their interior character. Hence it is false and dangerous to enter upon the path of psychological comprehension of the Holy Trinity, to psychologize the dogma of trinitarity. Yet rationalism is irresistibly drawn toward the path of dogmatic psychologism. Thus it defined itself in Catholic scholasticism, which represents a sharply pronounced psychologism and anthropomorphism in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.⁴⁰ This path was set for it by the greatest representative of Western theology and, in certain respects, its founder—Blessed Augustine—in his treatise De Trinitate.⁴¹ This remarkable work proved, in some respects, fateful for Latin theology as a whole.

Augustine openly seeks the key to understanding the Holy Trinity in the psychological constitution of man, in the interrelation of his psychic faculties. The human spirit is depicted by him as mind, the knowledge by which it knows itself, and the love by which it loves itself and its knowledge (mens et notitia, qua se novit, et amor, quo se notitiamque suam diligit). A similar meaning attaches to the distinction of memory, understanding, and love or will (memoria, intelligentia et dilectio sive voluntas). Books IX and X of De Trinitate are devoted to these psychological analogies.

On the basis of the entirely correct thought that there is in man, who is the image of God, a certain trinity (trinitatem in homine, qui imago Dei sit, quandam inesse), Augustine makes this incorrect psychological analogy. According to it, thought, knowledge, and the love with which it loves itself and its knowledge are shown to be equal to one another and of one essence. He argues that if I love something, there are three: I, what I love, and love itself. For I do not love love unless I love one who loves; for there is no love where nothing is loved. Therefore there are three: the lover, what is loved, and love. And if I love nothing but myself, are there not two: what I love and love itself? For the lover and what is loved are the same when one loves oneself, just as loving and being loved are one and the same when one loves oneself. (L. IX. Cap. 2, 2). Thus the mind, when it loves itself, shows a certain trinity: the mind and love. To these two a third is added when the mind knows itself through itself, which is the foundation of love; for if it does not know itself, it does not love itself. Augustine turns this analogy in various ways, showing that the three are one and equal, the same in substance yet distinct in relation, inseparable, of one essence, each in itself and each wholly in the others.⁴²

Another trinity in man Augustine finds in the triunity of memory, understanding, and love or will. For there are not three lives, but one life; not three minds, but one mind; consequently, not three substances, but one substance. Their unity is disclosed in such expressions as: I remember that I have memory, understanding, and will; I understand that I understand, will, and remember; I will that I will, remember, and understand; and I remember my entire memory, understanding, and will.⁴³

It is not easy to penetrate the precise meaning of Augustine’s analogies. They share the common feature that they take as their basis certain activities or capacities of the human soul, which through abstraction are transformed into something like essences or persons and almost personified. Mens, cogito, amor: mens⁴⁴ in this triad is neither clearly spirit, subject, or bearer, nor merely an intellectual power. In the first interpretation, the spirit obviously cannot be compared with its own activities—cogito and amor; in the second, it relates to cogito as a general capacity to a particular actualization of that same capacity, as potency to act, and thus in essence does not differ from it. In a similar way memoria and intelligentia differ as two modes of one and the same capacity: intelligentia is the realized capacity of memoria, or conversely, memoria is the result of intelligentia, so that they may be arranged in either direct or reverse order.

Still greater perplexity is caused by Augustine’s use of amor, which he posits as a third between the lover and the beloved, amare et amari. Yet in love, as an activity of the soul, there is precisely no such third; it is a verbal abstraction describing an activity that is entirely exhausted in amare et amari. (Hence Augustine’s assertion is also incorrect that even in self-love there are two: the lover and love itself.) Even stranger and more erroneous is his identification of caritas sive voluntas⁴⁵—one of the fateful identifications for Western theology. As psychological states, will and love are entirely distinct capacities; moreover, will may with good reason be placed prior even to mens as its primary source, as is done in voluntaristic metaphysics and psychology. In that case, Augustine’s triads are turned upside down.

In any case, there is scarcely any need to insist upon the approximate and inexact character of the comparisons made by Augustine, since he himself, in Book XV of De Trinitate, reveals their inadequacy. The properties of mind, self-knowledge, and self-love belong to man, but they are not man himself, not his person; whereas the Holy Trinity, whose image is here indicated, is God Himself (VII, 11). Likewise, memory, intellect, and love belong to the person but are not the person itself. One may say that one person has these three, but is not these three. By contrast, in the supreme simplicity of that nature which is God, although God is one, there are nevertheless three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in illius vero summae simplicitate naturae quae Deus est, quamvis unus sit Deus, tres tamen personae sunt Pater et Filis et Spiritus Sanctus (с. XXII, 42).⁴⁶ Augustine further points out that whereas in the human spirit memory, intellect, and love constitute mutually complementary yet distinct capacities, in the Holy Trinity all these belong to each of the three hypostases individually and collectively (VII, 12).

Thus Augustine himself arrives at the conclusion of the dissimilarity between the triad of human psychic powers he proposes and the Holy Trinity: just as the image which is man, having these three, is one person, so the Trinity is not such; rather, there are three persons—the Father of the Son, the Son of the Father, and the Spirit of the Father and the Son, nес quemadmodum ista imago est quod est homo habens illi tria una persona est, ita est ilia Trinitas: sed tres personae sunt Pater Filii et Filius Patris, et Spiritus Patris et Filii (с. XXIII, 43). These differences Augustine attributes to the inevitable disparity between the trinity that is in man and the Trinity that is God, disparitas trinitatis quae in homine est a Trinitate quae Deus est.⁴⁷

But once this disparity is granted, does anything at all remain of the comparison? The tertium comparationis reduces to a triadic schema of the soul’s capacities; yet this triadicity is itself clearly artificial and unstable in content, and it contains no postulate of trinitarity in the depths of our spirit. Augustine here falls into anthropomorphism. Cognition in man is one capacity of the soul among others—memory, will, sympathy (“love”)—but in these psychological capacities one cannot see an image of the Holy Trinity. It is of course legitimate to find in man’s capacities for knowledge and love traits of the image of God; yet one must distinguish between man’s general God-likeness and the tri-hypostatic image inscribed within him. Augustine’s schemata do not clarify this relation but obscure it and lead onto a false path. In the various capacities belonging to us there is no postulate of trinitarity—for example, of cognition as hypostasis—just as such a postulate is not contained in mens, or memoria, or voluntas.⁴⁸

In this anthropomorphism lies the danger of interpreting the Holy Trinity on the basis of functions or activities of the soul—of seeking the postulates of trinitarity not in hypostatic human self-consciousness and not in the capacity for love embedded in its conciliar self-consciousness, but in its particular capacities and activities. The teaching of Blessed Augustine can be understood in this way: just as the human soul possesses the capacity to know and to will—reason and will—so these same powers belong to the Godhead, which possesses them hypostatically. In this case, trinitarity is grounded not even in the human spirit, but in human psychology. In Augustine himself this deviation is not yet present, but it became manifest in the subsequent development of his doctrine.

Anselm of Canterbury, following Augustine, regards the Son as self-knowledge and the Holy Spirit as self-love of the Supreme Spirit. Classical expression, however, is given to psychologizing, anthropomorphic theology by Thomas Aquinas, whose views remain foundational for all Catholic theology to this day (with its explicit or transformed Augustinianism). Similarly in the Godhead, where this exists in its most perfect prototype: there exists activity and fulfillment relating to external things, and an immanent procession—the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Similarly in the Godhead, where this exists in its most perfect prototype: there exists activity and fulfillment relating to external things, and an immanent procession—the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. These two processions in God are determined by the two functions of spirit: knowledge and will (intellectus et voluntas, which, of course, without further discussion, is equated with love).

The Summa Theologiae (qu. XXVII, art 3) distinguishes two kinds of processions in the Godhead: the procession of intellect—the Word—and the procession of will, that is, the procession of love, processio intellectus – verbum, et processio voluntas, sc. processio amoris. Secundum quam amatum est in amante: sicut per conceptionem Verbi res dicta vel intellecta est in intelligente. Unde et praeter processionem Verbi ponitur alia processio in divinis, quae est processio amoris.⁴⁹ This view, with only isolated exceptions, became common to all scholastics, who concur in understanding generation and procession as immanent acts of knowledge and will in God.⁵⁰ Catholic theological manuals explicitly state that there are only two processions in God, because there are two faculties: intellect and will—the number of faculties immanently operative in God, ex numero facultatum in Deo im'manenter operantium. Intellect and will are the proximate principles of the divine processions, Intellectus et voluntas sunt principia proxima divinarum processionum^51,52. This axiom has become the starting point even for modern, sometimes refined, theological reflection.⁵³

With this psychological framing of the question, a metabasis eis allo genos⁵⁴ occurs, since the discussion now concerns not tri-hypostaticity as such, but the properties of its images. Knowledge and will appear as the hypostatic Son and Holy Spirit. Thus what is clarified is not tri-hypostaticity itself, but the properties and significance of the individual hypostases—and even this clarification, of course, cannot be considered satisfactory. First of all, as already noted, the third place accorded to will is unjustified, since as primal will it ought to occupy the first place. Secondly, either Sabellianism or subordinationism is introduced: the first hypostasis possesses the second and third as its attributes or properties (just as substance in Spinoza’s system has the attributes of thought and extension), and their hypostatic co-equality becomes unjustified. Connected with this teaching is another doctrine, that of the hypostases as relations within the Godhead—specifically, relations of origin (see the excursus).^55,56

⤊ 11. The Holy Trinity, as a Trinitarian Relationship

The substantial act of the divine life is love, and divine love is concretely tri-hypostatic: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Trinity must be understood, first of all, as a triune act, as a threefold interrelation. All determinations of the hypostases are such threefold relations. The human mind, by reason of its discursiveness, which compels it to decompose the triune act into dyadic relations and then to assemble the Holy Trinity from units and dyads, is incapable of possessing an intuition of trinity, which it involuntarily substitutes and simplifies. Yet it must be conscious of this limitation of its own, which closes to it the threefold dimension. All determinations of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity must therefore be understood as triadic.

Accordingly, fatherhood expresses the relation of the first hypostasis not only to the second but also to the third, and also to itself (ἀγεννησία): the Father is Father not only for the Son whom He begets, but also for the Holy Spirit, who, although not Son, nevertheless proceeds from the Father; His relation both to the Son and to the Holy Spirit is determined precisely by fatherhood. Fatherhood consists not only in the begetting of the Son, with which it is usually wholly identified, but also in the bringing forth of the Holy Spirit. The first Hypostasis is Father not only for the Only-begotten Son, but also for the Holy Spirit whom He brings forth, who nevertheless is not Son to Him. One must not suppose that the Father, over and above and apart from fatherhood, is also a proboléus (Προβολευξ),⁵⁷ the one who brings forth the Holy Spirit, personally combining these two properties—paternitas and spiratio activa⁵⁸—and that only the poverty of human language forces us here to resort to a single name, “Father.” No: fatherhood is one and indivisible in both its manifestations. The Trinitarian formula—“in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”—knows only the Father and does not, beyond this, know a separate “Bringer-forth,” a proboléus, προβολευς (an auxiliary notion of theology). Likewise the Lord says of the Holy Spirit: “who proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26), and not: “from the Bringer-forth.” The Holy Trinity is the pre-eternal fatherhood that exists in itself and reveals itself, as a threefold act of mutual love.

But the Son, too, is Son not only for the Father but also for the Holy Spirit, although He is not begotten from Him. Sonship is not merely being begotten of the Father, but also the being of the Father’s Son for the Holy Spirit. The second Hypostasis is Son in relation to both Hypostases—not only to the first but also to the third—and also to itself: the Holy Trinity is in itself begottenness, revealing power, sonship, as a threefold act of mutual love.⁵⁹

Likewise the Holy Spirit is Spirit, proceeding from the Father and proper (ἴδιος) to the Son.⁶⁰ His hypostatic procession from the Father is united with a likewise hypostatic relation to the Son. In His hypostatic mode He is related both to the fatherhood of the Father and to the sonship of the Son, uniting them in Himself. His being must be understood as threefold inspiration: the Holy Trinity is the eternally existent holy self-inspiration, as a threefold act of mutual love.

Thus the Holy Trinity is an absolute threefold interrelation, the concrete unity of fatherhood, sonship, and inspiration: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—the Most Holy Trinity, the one, true God. The Triunity, the sacred threeness of the Absolute Subject, is here realized in a concrete act which human thought involuntarily adapts to itself by considering it successively in various relations. Theology, in treating the question of the Holy Trinity, is bound to remember this involuntary error of discursive reason, and must not turn this sorrowful necessity—of considering triunity piecemeal—into rationalistic self-assertion. This happens when reason proceeds not from the postulates of self-consciousness but from ready-made rational schemas. Then it falls into the temptation of making the mystery of the Holy Trinity rationally comprehensible, of “grounding” it, decomposing it and recomposing it.

⤊ 12. The Holy Trinity as a Single Principle

God is love, and the Holy Trinity is the tri-hypostatic act of love as a single life. This single life—nature, essence—is actualized in a triune hypostatic act. Loving one another mutually, the Three Hypostases accomplish one act of love, in which they reveal their own essence. The Most Holy Trinity must be understood as a triune act of reciprocity, in which, by the power of hypostatic love, the one life is revealed—not as a “system of processions,” such as it is in Catholic doctrine, but as a single relation constituted by mutually self-revealing hypostatic love. “Procession” in the Holy Trinity is only one of the modes of this reciprocity, by no means the only one. Divine life is actualized as a single act of tri-hypostatic mutual revelation. This mutual revelation is a hypostatic act of love that is self-surrendering and that realizes itself in the other and through the other. There is One who reveals and One who is revealed; yet this mutual revelation is not a simple reflexive juxtaposition of one through another, but an act of mutual love.

Begetting and procession are acts of inner love, in which the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten of the Father; and this begetting, in both senses alike, is an act of mutual love. Begetting and procession are acts of inner love in which the one life of the Godhead—that is, Love—is expressed. One and the same life, or nature, or essence exists in a threefold manner in personal revelation. The Three Hypostases are here no longer merely three hypostatic centers, mutually equal and indistinguishable, but in one indivisible act they receive their hypostatic determinations: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Procession” does not exhaust this triune relationship: the Son is begotten of the Father, yet He exists as Son also for the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, yet as proceeding Spirit He exists also for the Son; the Father is Father not only for the begotten Son but also for the proceeding Holy Spirit.

The question of “processions” has been assigned an altogether inappropriate place as the sole hypostasis-constituting principle, whereas procession is only one moment of hypostatic relations that presuppose alongside themselves other moments as well. A doctrinal apriorism that establishes a law according to which hypostatic being is equivalent to procession is entirely arbitrary and, moreover, fails to take into account that relations of direct procession exist only between two—the Father and the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit (even with the filioque⁶¹ this relation remains between the Father and the Son in their unity and the Holy Spirit)—whereas all hypostatic mutual determinations must necessarily be threefold by virtue of the Trinity of the Godhead. Hence relations of procession are only one element of this integral complex. (Therefore, for the Catholic, the relation between the Son as such—apart from the filioque—and the Holy Spirit is not exhausted by relations of procession alone.) To reduce hypostatic being merely to relations of procession is to impoverish and distort the fullness of the triadic mutual determination.

In general, the question of “procession” in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity requires special clarification in view of the abuses of this concept. The Hypostases are equal and co-honored. Consequently, there can be no talk of procession in the sense of origination. Procession can be understood only as a mode of hypostatic relation, in the sense of an act, not a fact—of an eternal relation of one to another, but not of origination. Here one misunderstanding must be removed, which may arise from insufficient attentiveness to terminology. The point is that among the holy Fathers—the Father Himself being without beginning and without cause—is usually called the cause, the principle, the aitia, causa, while the hypostases that are from Him are called caused, aitiatai, causatae (in the dogma of the filioque Catholics even distinguish principium principatum and principium inprincipatum).⁶² It is obvious that here the term causa—aitia cannot be understood in the sense of relative causality, whereby an effect mechanically follows from its cause and is brought into existence by it: the mechanism of causal connection is the very foundation of universal relativity (in Kant), and such causality cannot be transferred into the divine life, where there is no mechanism and no origination. Evidently, the term here has meaning not in the sense of causality, grounding, or origination, but in the sense of an originating principle of self-determination. (Therefore, for example, expressions such as that of St. John of Damascus (Expositio fidei, I, 8), that “the Son and the Spirit have from the Father even being itself”—auto to einai, αύτό τό είναι—must be understood not literally, but in accordance with the overall sense of the saint’s teaching; for taken literally they would signify origination after the manner of creatures.)

Causality in mutual relation signifies origination, principle, subject. The revealing principle, which in its revelation posits being for the one who reveals and the one revealed, is the first cause—without cause, unbegotten, without beginning. In the sense of divine eternity and self-existence, all this can be repeated of the entire Holy Trinity and of each Hypostasis, which is true God. Yet in the intra-Trinitarian relations there must necessarily be a principle (aitia) and its manifestation. (Otherwise one would have to introduce into the understanding of the Holy Trinity an indifference, whereby all the Hypostases would indifferently alternate in their relations and thus lack any mutual correlation; but this obviously diminishes the Godhead, for it introduces into its life amorphousness and the absence of genuine, concrete unity.) If the divine life is the self-revelation of the Godhead, it is necessary that the Revealing One, the subject or substrate, be one alone, in relation to whom the revealers exist. This is, strictly speaking, not so much causality as mutual conditioning, and at the same time mutual distinction. The Hypostases are equal in honor, but distinct in the mode of actualizing the one divine fullness. To be without cause and to be caused—anaitios (αναίτιος) or aitiatos (αιτιατος)—means to differ not in dignity, but only in the mode of being. All three Hypostases possess and actualize the one life, but differently, in a triune relation.

The understanding of the Holy Trinity as a sum of processions disintegrates It into two acts, or else composes It out of two acts or dyads. There is no place for such an understanding in patristic literature, where, on the contrary, another principle is emphasized with particular force: the comprehension of the Holy Trinity not as a system of processions, but as monarchy (single principle). The monarchy of the Holy Trinity is a common and cherished thought of the holy Fathers: St. Athanasius the Great, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. John of Damascus,⁶³ in different words, express the common idea: “one principle, and not two principles, in the Godhead; hence monarchy in the proper sense.” St. Athanasius the Great says: “One God—the Holy Trinity, because the Son and the Holy Spirit refer to one cause.” According to St. Gregory the Theologian (Or. 29, §1), “the nature from three is one—God; and the unity is the Father (henōsis ho Patēr, ενωσις о Πατήρ), from whom and to whom the others are referred” (cf. Or. 42, §15). From this truth a deviation toward subordinationism is possible, prefigured by Origen⁶⁴—the placing of the Hypostases in an unequal, hierarchical relation and their diminution in comparison with the hypostasis of the Father. Avoiding this deviation, one must firmly maintain the principle of the equal honor of the Hypostases, which does not contradict monarchy.

The principle of monarchy, in the light of which the whole Holy Trinity is the self-revelation of one divine principle—namely, the Father—in three Hypostases, establishes the unity of the Holy Trinity as a triune act. This act is not exhausted by relations of procession, for the second and third Hypostases are related to one another on a different basis than mutual procession; their unifying principle is the common origin from the Father and the distinct manner of that origin. The entire Trinity receives its single center in the Father. He is the self-revealing Godhead, who reveals Himself through the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. In Him begins the order of the Hypostases (of course, not in time, but in being); in Him have their origin the Hypostases that reveal Him—the Son and the Spirit. He Himself, however, is only revealed, not revealing. In this sense God the Father is often called simply God, as it were God in the pre-eminent sense (ho Theos, ὁ Θεός), sometimes even self-God, first-God (auto-Theos, prōto-Theos, αυτο–Θεος, πρώτο Θεος, Deus princeps). This principle of monarchy in the Godhead must be sacredly preserved as the biblical and patristic foundation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. From it Catholics have departed in a concealed way (as already reproached by Patriarch Photius), for they shifted the center of gravity in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, replacing the firm and clear teaching of monarchy with the doctrine of two processions in the Godhead. It is precisely monarchy that makes all hypostatic relations one triadic act, binds them together, and grounds them. A trinitarian understanding based on monarchy is altogether different from one based on a system of relations or processions. The Trinity, as the sum of two pairs of relations, is not a triunity, which is the unity of three in one—the revelation of the one through the second and the third. In defining the Holy Trinity there is a necessary “and”—que—but Catholics place it in the wrong place. It should not be in the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit a Patre Filioque, but in the doctrine of the procession from the Father of the Son and the Holy Spirit (filii et Spiritus Sancti),⁶⁵ or in the doctrine of the revelation of the Father through the two.

The Holy Trinity as monarchy is the revealing Father. In the Father there exists the entire fullness of the Godhead; therefore the same divine fullness exists in the Hypostases that reveal Him—the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Trinity there is no process, no self-becoming, into which the doctrine of the Trinity as a system of relations and processions transforms It. According to that doctrine, God arises—albeit eternally—in His processiones; God becomes Himself only here, as the outcome of origination. By contrast, in monarchy the entire fullness of the Godhead is contained in the Father and is fully communicated—more precisely, fully preserved—in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.

The special place of the Father as the first Hypostasis in the Holy Trinity is connected with this significance of His as the revealing principle. This does not violate the equal honor and equal divinity of all the Hypostases, but establishes a distinction among them. Sometimes Scripture expresses this distinction in words that seem to signify inequality and give occasion to subordinationism. Such are the words of the Savior: “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), which gave rise to Arianism. However, the word “greater” can be interpreted not as a denial of equal honor, but in relation to mutual revelation: the Father is revealed in the Son, but not vice versa. As St. Basil the Great says, “the word ‘greater’ in no way expresses superiority of essence… it must be understood in the sense of principle and cause” (III, 48). But in this sense only the Father can be said to be greater; it cannot be said either of the Son or of the Holy Spirit, whether in their relations to the Father or in their mutual relations.

The principle of monarchy secures the understanding of the Holy Trinity as triunity; conversely, the principle of a system of relations dissects It or introduces process—even into eternal relations—that is, introduces a concealed subordinationism. According to the Catholic understanding, the Father first begets the Son and only together with Him wills the Holy Spirit; consequently there is a before and after, two acts, two self-determinations not intrinsically unified. Hence there is no identity of the divine nature of the Hypostases, for the Father alone cannot be related to the Holy Spirit, just as the Son alone cannot. And the Holy Spirit likewise lacks an immediate relation to the Father and to the Son individually. By virtue of such complexity of relations, they cannot be regarded as equally honored and equally divine, and therefore the Holy Trinity is not a consubstantial triunity but a metaphysically complex formation. To avoid this complexity—which transforms trinitarianity into a process of becoming in the Godhead—and to preserve triunity, it is necessary to maintain that one and the same nature or essence, in its simplicity, is possessed by all three Hypostases. This is possible precisely through monarchy. The Father makes His nature and life the possession of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The monarchy of the Father is the unity of nature, equal honor, equal divinity. The Father is the foundation of the Most Holy Trinity within Itself in a concrete act. He communicates His nature or essence; it is not that the essence is communicated through the Father and the Son as some impersonal substance in which hypostases merely arise. The monarchy of the Father therefore affirms the personal character of the tri-hypostatic act and removes the possibility of concealed impersonalism. Monarchy makes the Holy Trinity what It is: the tri-hypostatic act of the God who is love. God is love, and by the power of this love He is the Holy Trinity. God-Love loves Himself with tri-hypostatic love: the love of the Father for the Son and the Holy Spirit; further, the love of the Son for the Father and the Holy Spirit; and the love of the Holy Spirit for the Father and the Son.

For the Catholic doctrine, God is an absolute system of relations, an absolute relationship; only substance, nature, “it” is unrelated; the hypostases are relations and correlations. As a consequence, there arises a peculiar difficulty—clearly exposed in the doctrine of Schell—in the understanding of the divine Hypostases and, in general, of the personality of God, which is lost in this universal relationality. By contrast, the principle of monarchy sets a boundary to this hypostatic relativism by affirming the unique Personality of the Father and, in relation to Him, the personal realities of the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in this tri-hypostaticity it manifests a conciliar—i.e., absolute—personality, closed in upon itself. The personality of God is Love, that is, realized conciliarity, tri-hypostaticity; and the life of God is Love, that is, the one life of the Three as One, or of the One as Three. Personality and persons in God are not relations, but the Absolute Subject, hypostatically revealing itself in three correlated centers, co-absolute. This “absolute relation” is a correlation within the Absolute—and moreover not within an impersonal, but within a personal Spirit.

For Catholic doctrine (as in Schell), the arising of relations through processions is the self-grounding of the Godhead, and into this understanding there is introduced the idea of causality and necessity. God—reasons Schell—is causa sui; this does not mean blind chance or arbitrariness, nor the denial of causality, but self-causation and self-groundedness. God is necessary for Himself, or proves Himself as a “logical necessity” in the second hypostasis through self-knowledge, and as a “moral necessity” of self-end in the third hypostasis through will. This transforms God into a metaphysical principle subjected to the necessity of self-grounding. Yet the concept of necessity, in whatever sense, is inappropriate and impious when applied to God. God is without cause not in the sense of blind chance or arbitrariness, but in the sense of freedom, or of the overcoming of causality, in a positive rather than a negative sense: self-groundedness in actu,⁶⁶ self-being or self-grounding, abolishes the opposition between freedom and necessity. Likewise, the concept of purpose is inapplicable where self-end and self-fulfillment are realized in a single act of life. Both freedom, as the being of God, and His self-sufficiency are nothing other than the disclosure of love as the being of God. In love the very opposition between freedom and necessity, causality and arbitrariness, is wholly overcome: here reigns a single power that renders the free attraction of love a kind of fatum—yet a fatum that utterly abolishes itself in the blessedness of loving self-determination. In love all teleology is likewise overcome; for on the one hand love is the highest striving and goal, and at the same time it is the moving, effectuating power. By love both causality and purposiveness are transcended. God is absolute precisely as love—or, put otherwise, only love is absolute—and therefore the Absolute contains within itself mutuality; it is reciprocity; it is act, not fact. Only Love has its ground in itself and is therefore free from any ground; only Love finds within itself its end, its meaning, and its justification. Relative love is relative precisely insofar as it proves and justifies itself; absolute Love has nothing outside itself. God loves Himself in the Holy Trinity, and this intra-trinitarian act of love contains within itself its own freedom and its own end. A mono-hypostatic absolute, if such could be conceived, would have to show itself or justify itself—before itself or before creation—and ground its rights. Proof and teleology are the task and destiny of every isolated, egoistic existence; they are abolished in love.

Schell (and in essence Catholic doctrine as a whole) understands the Holy Trinity as the self-grounding of the Godhead through knowledge and will: through knowledge God proves Himself to Himself in the logical necessity of His being and thereby becomes causa sui in a logical sense; through will God arises for Himself in ethical necessity, as His own end. This conception, following Eckhart, Böhme, and Hegel,⁶⁷ understands the Godhead as a dialectic, a process in which each subsequent stage of development, corresponding to a hypostasis, more fully actualizes God—Gott wird⁶⁸—in a trinitarian process. Here the personal character of this “self-grounding” recedes into the background, while the “content” of the personal act acquires predominant significance. Hegelian teaching on trinitarianity as dialectic in the Godhead, as the dialectical process of the Godhead itself, coincides in its basic idea with the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity as processions and relations. The very idea of the self-grounding of the Godhead must be decisively rejected, for it necessarily leads to a dialectical modalism. Absolute personality knows no self-grounding; it stands above cause and end. It does not require proof of its truth, for it is truth itself; it does not require self-justification, for it is life in holiness and beauty. Such is God in His nature, one in all the hypostases: He hypostatically reveals Himself, but does not ground Himself. At the basis of every grounding (in truth) and justification (in holiness) lies that which is itself free, beyond grounding or proof and justification; and to this principle, lying beyond causality and teleology, the categories of cause and end—even with the prefix “self”—are inapplicable: self-causation and self-end. Internal causality and teleology do not apply to the Godhead, which is Spirit and, as Spirit, is freedom. This means that the life of the Godhead is not some dialectical “it,” not a dialectical process, but a personal act of self-positing. It is true and living insofar as it is personal and absolute, that is, Love. It is Truth and Life because it is personality. Absolute personality is neither “blind arbitrariness” nor “chance,” for both are merely special cases of causality, wherein its obscurity or indeterminacy is registered. Here, however, what is meant is a complete incommensurability with the frameworks of causality and end. Thus God is not entelechy, as a self-final cause (in Aristotle), since entelechiality likewise introduces a higher law of necessity for God; but God is above all necessity. He is Absolute Personality, and in this personal, actual being all causality is consumed. Therefore God is truth, from which all truth flows, yet which is self-evident in itself and accountable to no logical necessity. God is Holiness, from which all purposiveness flows, yet which is itself free of purpose. For this reason the categories of knowledge and will, introduced into theology by Catholic doctrine following Augustine, are wholly inapplicable to the triune Godhead. Knowledge is a function of created, limited, developing consciousness, just as willing is. Knowledge and will always presuppose some ignorance and some unfulfilledness. God, however, knows because He knows; God does not will, because He lives unconditional life; God does not think, because He is Wisdom. God does not self-ground, because He self-reveals. The Second Hypostasis is not knowledge but the Word of God: the Word speaks itself, reveals itself, but does not know. It is not knowledge and becomes knowledge only for created, limited being. The Word about itself, self-speech, is not an act of cognition. The Third Hypostasis is life in itself, that is, holiness and beauty; but here there is nothing to will, no place for will, which always presupposes a lack. Will, in this sense, is a sign of weakness, of incompleteness.

Thus, the fact that the Son is the Word does not mean that in Him there takes place a knowledge of God that would not otherwise have occurred. And the fact that the Holy Spirit is the life-giving Spirit does not mean that in Him alone the life of the Godhead is realized. Each Hypostasis possesses the entire divine essence, wisdom, and life—neither more nor less than another. This is precisely what the dogma of consubstantiality and equal divinity of all the Hypostases signifies. The distinction of hypostatic determinations does not pertain to content or essence, but entirely to the mode of personal possession thereof. God possesses Himself and reveals Himself in a personal act. Therefore, in distinguishing the Hypostases, the logical emphasis must be placed not on content or nature, but on personality: the Word, not as God’s self-knowledge, but as the divine Hypostasis, the personal act of self-revelation; and the Holy Spirit, not as God’s self-willing, but as the personal act of the life of self-revelation brought to fulfillment. In other words, in none of His determinations does God become for Himself an object or a given datum, an object of knowledge or will. Everywhere He remains Personality, for whom His essence has a thoroughly transparent, personal character. Not a synthesis of knowledge and will, into which rationalistic anthropomorphism transforms Him, but the tri-hypostatically self-revealing Subject—living tri-hypostaticity, that is, Love. Love alone abides when knowledge is abolished and faith ceases, for only love expresses the essence of the tri-hypostatic God. Thus, we repeat once more, the Augustinian application of knowledge and will to the Godhead is anthropomorphism, and its psychological analogies are the primary source of psychologisms and distortions in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

But let us return to the initial theme: the Holy Trinity as Love is revealed only under the principle of the monarchy of the Father’s hypostasis, in which the three Hypostases, as the triune subject of divine love, are present in their threefoldness without disintegrating into dyads or creaturely relations. The Trinity, as the revelation of the conciliarity of I is, if one can put it this way, a priori of trinity, which is concretely fulfilled in inter-hypostasis relations, and not vice versa – it is not these relations that are a priopi, giving rise to tri-hypostaticity. To be sure, this logical distinction is achievable only by abstraction of thought; nevertheless, it is achievable for the sake of correct perspective. And this presence of three persons as such is realized only under monarchy; it disappears under dyarchy or anarchy in the Holy Trinity.

⤊ 13. Tri-hypostaticity and consubstantiality

God, existing in three hypostases, possesses one single nature, one consubstantiality. Such is the dogma. How, then, are triunity and consubstantiality to be correlated? Here two false deviations are possible. One inclines toward dissecting the indivisible Trinity and transforming It into a society of three, each possessing an identical yet not the very same nature (homoiousianism combined with tritheism). The other inclines toward transforming the Holy Trinity into a quaternity,^69,70 in which the three persons jointly possess a certain fourth essence (quaternitas, tetradism), as in the doctrine of Gilbert de la Porrée,⁷¹ condemned by the Council of Reims in 1147.^72.73 At times the Fathers employ the expression that the Son is begotten “from the essence of the Father” (such a formulation even appeared at the First Ecumenical Council: γεννηθεντα εκ Πατρος, μονογενή, τουτεσιν εκ της ουσία του Πατρος⁷⁴), but it was later removed from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. This expression was intended solely to exclude the creaturely origin of the Son by the will of the Father and to affirm His essential generation. The same thought is expressed in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol by the words: Light from Light, true God from true God.

The primary question, therefore, must be posed: do the hypostases in the Holy Trinity proceed from a hypostasis—namely, the Father’s—or from the essence, or from their inseparable unity? First of all, the second possibility must be rejected, namely that hypostases could arise from the essence, or within an essence taken apart from hypostasis. True, no one formulates this view explicitly. Yet it unquestionably constitutes the latent and implied foundation of the Catholic doctrine of persons as relations. The Catholic principle—omnia in divinis sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis oppositio⁷⁵—presupposes precisely such a pre-hypostatic or supra-hypostatic unity, within which and from which hypostases arise.

The same presupposition is introduced, though in subtler and more veiled form, by the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. Here it is assumed that there exists a certain fund of divine substance, deitas (a pious yet ambiguous term sometimes employed by Catholic theologians), which is distributed as follows: from its fullness the Father first expends the power of generation, by which the Son comes to be, and to Him is communicated the remaining unexpended substance, including the vis spirativa.^76,77 From this remaining portion of the fund, jointly possessed by the Father and the Son, they together bring forth the Holy Spirit, who receives the already expended fund, lacking both vis spirativa and vis generativa, and therefore neither begets nor spirates.

This conception finds various expressions among Catholic theologians.^78,79 In general, however, it introduces an unmistakable subordinationism—not with respect to hypostases, but with respect to their natural properties: the Father possesses substance plus vis generativa; the Son, substance plus a single vis spirativa; the Holy Spirit, mere substance without any power of procession. We repeat: Catholic dogmatics explicitly denies the existence of a divine essence existing alongside or above the hypostases (cf. the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215), and yet in fact the existence of such a substantial fund—that is, a quaternitas—is implicitly introduced by the doctrine of the filioque.⁸⁰

Any differentiation in the nature of the hypostases—such as that introduced by the doctrine of the filioque with its two-tiered structure (Father; Father-and-Son; Holy Spirit)—introduces a principle of essence or nature that exists, to some degree, independently of the hypostases. But this directly contradicts the dogma: the one essence of the three hypostases, ταὐτὸν κατ’ οὐσίαν (Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 30, 20; Or. 31). Therefore, no differentiation whatsoever in the nature of the three hypostases—even with respect to the possession of powers—can be admitted.

Personal distinctions do not pertain to the identical essence but to the mode of its possession; they are confined to personal relations, ἴδιον τῶν ὑποστάσεων — κοινὸν τῆς οὐσίας (Basil the Great, Ep. 210). They exist not in the essence, though neither apart from it. Precisely this thought led Photius of Constantinople, in his treatise De Mystagogia Spiritus Sancti, perhaps with some verbal imprecision, to formulate his thesis: ει δε αίτιος ω Πατήρ των εξ αυτόν, ου τω δε λογω υποστασεως, Pater quidquid ex se ut ex causa producit, ratione personae, non autem ratione naturae producit..⁸¹ Against this, Catholic criticism (Hergenröther) rushes through an open door, proving that there exists neither an anhypostatic essence nor an ousia-less hypostasis. Hardly would a theologian as learned as Photius have required instruction on this point from the Greek Fathers. Photius’ intent was different: in understanding the hypostases, one must proceed not from differences in nature—Deus or deitas—but from differences of hypostasis. Photius’s idea is that with the unity and identity of the nature of all three hypostases, one cannot seek the source of their distinctions in the essence; the origin of hypostases must be understood otherwise—not from nature, though not without nature.

By this maxim the possibility of those logical leaps from ousia to hypostasis—so characteristic of Catholic relationalism, especially in filioquism—is eliminated. In this sense, Photius’ blow struck precisely at the heart of the matter. It is curious that his thought was confirmed at the Lateran Council of 1215, which established that distinctiones sunt in personis et unitas in natura (Denz. 432).⁸²

This brings us to the most general and fundamental question requiring clarification—a question that arose already in the thirteenth century in connection with the teaching of Peter Lombard. In his Sentences⁸³ he asked: whether the Father begets the divine essence or the Son himself, or whether the essence begets the essence, or is itself neither begotten nor begetting? An Pater genius divinam essentiam, vel ipsa Filium, an essentia geniut essentiam, vel ipsa nec genita est?⁸⁴ This is the question of the origin of the hypostases in the Holy Trinity, or, equivalently, of causality within the Godhead.

One may understand this origin as emergence: the Father, possessing the divine essence, begets the Son from it and thus begets His essence, and thereafter spirates the Holy Spirit, likewise with His essence. This yields a society or family of three and leads to homoiousian tritheism and distortion of the dogma. How, then, is consubstantiality to be preserved? Peter Lombard answered that the divine essence as such neither begets nor is begotten, for which he was accused by Joachim of positing a quaternity. The Fourth Lateran Council sided with Peter Lombard and offered a resolution—imperfect in form, yet fundamentally correct.

The Council's decree inappropriately names the Divine essence quaedan summa res, which is truly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, set ilia res non est generans, neque genita, nec procedens, sed est Pater qui generat et Filius qui gignitur, et S. S–s, qui procedit. Licet igitur alius sit Pater alius Filius, alius S. S–s, non tamen aliud… Patet ergo quid sine alia diminutione Filius nascendo substantiam Patris accepit, et ita Pater et Filius habent eandem substantiam: et sic eadem res est Pater et Filius, nес non et S, S–s.^85,86

Despite the imprecision and crudeness of the barbarian Latin terminology, one can grasp the fundamental idea here: the substance or essence of God does not exist as a given, a certain “it” or foundation, Deitas, but is entirely fused with the hypostasis, existing only as a hypostatic act; therefore, substance is not generans, but Pater est generans, it is non genita – Filius gignitur…⁸⁷ and so on. Therefore, it is simply impossible to speak of essence in opposition to hypostases: the hypostatic act permeates essence to the core.

Consequently, a divine person can “proceed” only directly from a divine person, for otherwise there would be nothing from which it could proceed. To invoke complex constructions—Patre Filioque, wherein Father and Son are undifferentiated—is to contradict this maxim and to retreat from personalism.

Yet in all three hypostases there is not a different essence but one and the same, one divine life. Hence the Lateran formulation that “the Father from eternity, by begetting the Son, gave Him His substance” (Pater ab aeterno generando Filium suam substantiam ei dedit) is incorrect (and the link to John 10:29 is unsuccessful)⁸⁸ for it suggests that substance itself begets or that it is a transferable datum—leading inevitably to homoiousianism and repetition within the Godhead. Therefore, there can be no talk of any transfer of essence in this triune personal act. It is inappropriate to speak of transfers where there is direct identity.

The divine personality is conciliar; as absolute, it is realized tri-hypostatically—as a triune I, equally real in plurality and in unity. Triunity, understood thus, is the realization of personality. But it can also be understood in another direction, as the realization of the divine essence and life. Absolute Spirit lives out His essence tri-hypostatically—not as a datum, but as act; and the property of this act is to be simultaneously personal and substantial.

Such complete interpenetration of personal self-consciousness and the depths of spirit is foreign to created spirit, which is marked by a certain distinction between person and essence, consciousness and subconsciousness, though this distinction is continually overcome in the creativity of life. The absolute fusion of person and essence in the Godhead—distinguishable only in thought (ἐπίνοια)—constitutes the foundation of the doctrine of consubstantiality, the identity of divine life in the three hypostases.

If it is sometimes said that the Son is begotten from the essence of the Father and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the essence of the Father,⁸⁹ this serves only to deny any difference of nature, not to posit parallel repetitions. Rather, the three hypostases differ “not by essence but by the distinguishing property of each hypostasis,” possessing “one simple essence in three perfect hypostases,” and “mutually indwelling one another” with “identity of essence.”⁹⁰ They are three modes of life of the One Tri-hypostatic Personality.

God the Father possesses His essence and lives His absolute life in an absolutely personal manner. This means that He reveals to Himself His own essence by a personal act of love—by begetting the Son—and actualizes His essence by a personal act of love—by spirating the Holy Spirit. He lives His life in Others and through Others; and this is precisely His personal, and therefore tri-hypostatic, revelation.

Thus one cannot say that the Father begets and spirates from His essence, for there is no essence apart from personal self-revelation and personal life. This essence is the personal act of self-consciousness through generation and procession. In this sense it is correct to say that substance itself neither begets, nor is begotten, nor spirates, nor is spirated (non gignit, non gignitur, non spirat, non spiratur)—but only “the Father who begets and spirates” (Pater qui generat et spirat).⁹¹

In the same manner the other hypostases also exist, as personal centers that are entirely equal in dignity. God the Son lives out His divine life—His essence—whether as the One who reveals (actively) the Father, or as the One begotten of Him and receiving the Holy Spirit. His begottenness in no way alters the fact that He abides as a Perfect Person, possessing His own essence, identical and one with that of the other hypostases, though in His own proper mode; and the same must be said of the Holy Spirit.

This identity of the divine essence is realized in the three hypostases, which, while differing in the mode of their self-consciousness as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, possess one life and one essence, so that “each of them is one with the other no less than with itself.”⁹² The one life is a substantial act of love—God is Love.

How, then, should one answer the question that arose in the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was addressed at the Fourth Lateran Council, namely: is the Son begotten of the person or of the essence of the Father? The question itself must be removed as false and merely confusing, for such an “either–or,” just as much as an “and–and,” simply does not exist, and therefore the question admits of no answer. All three hypostases in the Holy Trinity mutually reveal one another through one another, and thereby mutually manifest to one another the one divine essence—but in a hypostatic manner. Any notion of an essence existing above, beneath, or behind the hypostases and forming their impersonal foundation must be rejected as incompatible with the concept of Absolute Spirit.

(For this reason it is possible only in an improper and inexact sense to speak of the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit from the essence of the Father—solely in order to exclude the idea of their origin from non-being, that is, their creatureliness, as is customary in the language of the Fathers.)

In affirming the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity, the principle of monarchy (unity of origin) acquires particular significance—“which constitutes the equal dignity of unity.” Thus, continues Gregory of Nazianzus, “the Monad, having moved from its beginning into duality, came to rest in triunity; and this for us is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”⁹³

The unity of the divine essence or life is established by the unity of the first principle. The Father is the primordial essence, which reveals itself in the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are bound to the Father by hypostatic origin. In this sense—and only in this sense—it may be said that the Father Himself is that divine life or essence which is revealed and lives in the Son and the Holy Spirit, who have their origin from Him. To disturb or restrict this principle is to introduce confusion into the understanding of hypostasis and essence.

With the monarchy of the Father—consisting in the fact that from Him proceed the Son and the Holy Spirit, the former through generation, the latter through procession—the entire life of the Holy Trinity acquires a thoroughly personal character, and the very possibility of opposing personality to essence falls away. For personality is essence, and essence is personal principle; and the one essence necessarily exists triune, in a tri-hypostatic act.

But once this monarchy is shaken, either chaos is introduced into the understanding of the Holy Trinity—if we were to suppose that each hypostasis proceeds indifferently from any other (a supposition which, it seems, no one has yet actually made)—or else dualism is introduced. In this case two imprecise principles are admitted (as was rightly noted by Photius of Constantinople in his first argument): first the Father, and then the Father-and-the-Son. The Holy Trinity then appears no longer as the living self-revelation of the one tri-hypostatic Subject, but as a system of relations.

At the same time, such a view presupposes a division between nature and hypostasis to such an extent that their distinction and even opposition becomes possible. Thus the Father and the Son together spirate the Holy Spirit not in that in which they are distinct—namely, in their hypostatic opposition—but in that in which they are identical and one, that is, obviously, in an essence remaining above their personal self-determination, some common datum. By this, the doctrine of the relation between person and essence in the Godhead is undeniably destroyed (and this in contradiction to the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council). The procession of the Holy Spirit thus becomes not a personal act—which can only be procession from a Person, that is, from the Father—but an impersonal event in the life of two.

Even Catholic doctrine itself admits that two, as two, cannot spirate the Holy Spirit. But if two cannot do this in their duality, then neither can they do it in that in which they are one, and therefore impersonal. Otherwise one would have to posit yet another dyadic hypostasis of Father-and-Son and thereby quadruple the Trinity. Hence once again it is necessary to affirm the patristic principle of monarchy in the Holy Trinity, by which the false path of theologizing with the introduction of impersonalism is excluded.

Attempts to peer behind the person in order to see substance lurking behind it are out of place here. It is true that in the Godhead there exists neither hypostasis without essence (ανούσιος) nor essence without hypostasis (ανυπόστατος), but in the Godhead they are perfectly fused and inseparable, and are distinguished only by conditional human abstraction.^94,95 Essence is entirely transparent to personality. Therefore even the Catholic a Patre Filioque cannot signify some impersonal or supra-personal being in which the Father and the Son, while differing in different ways, would nevertheless not differ at all. From this it follows that no substantial que⁹⁶ can exist between the Father and the Son apart from the common consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity. Likewise, the notion that the Father transmits to the Son a special capacity for spirating the Holy Spirit does not correspond to the divine triunity.^97,98

The three hypostases, as personal centers, exist in themselves distinctly, without any que, and at the same time they are consubstantial and inseparable; and the whole Holy Trinity is the monarchy of the Father as the non-derivative first cause, the primal source. And in this sense—and precisely in this sense alone—it may be said that the entire Holy Trinity is the Father, revealing Himself in the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is expressed in the words: “My Father is greater than I” (Gospel of John 14:28), spoken in the solemn discourse concerning the return to the Father. This “greater” does not limit the equal dignity or equal divinity of the hypostases, but firmly establishes their relation as source and that which proceeds, as revealer and that which is revealed. This relation runs like a red thread throughout the entire Gospel of John, which speaks continually of the relationship between the Father and the Son.⁹⁹ This “greater” precisely signifies the monarchy of the Father as the foundation of the divine triunity.

⤊ Excursus. The Doctrine of Hypostasis and Essence in Eastern and Western Theology

In the doctrine of the Holy Trinity two aspects are distinguished: the doctrine of the one nature, physis (φύσις) or essence, ousia (οὐσία), of the Godhead, and the doctrine of the three hypostases. The former aspect raises no particular difficulties; all the difficulties are concentrated in the latter.

In the Word of God and in ecclesial Tradition the personal character of the Godhead is firmly established. God the Father speaks of Himself: I; God the Son speaks of Himself: I; and of the Spirit the Comforter: He. The whole Holy Trinity, in unity, speaks of Itself: I and We. This personalism of revealed teaching concerning God, which in advance excludes any impersonalist conception, constitutes the foundation of patristic doctrine concerning the Holy Trinity. That doctrine attempts to express the dogma in the language of religious philosophy, in metaphysical concepts, to give it a logical formulation. Such an attempt to translate ecclesial dogma into the philosophical language of its own time is represented by the teaching of the Cappadocians and of St John of Damascus concerning the Holy Trinity, a teaching that played an immense historical role in the development of the dogma. A parallel attempt is represented by the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity, which received its most finished expression in the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas.¹⁰⁰ Both conceptions rest upon the philosophy contemporary to them and borrow from it the corresponding logical categories. For the Eastern Fathers this philosophy was Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Neoplatonism—though predominantly Aristotelianism; in Western scholasticism Aristotelianism even predominates almost exclusively. The veil of ancient philosophy clearly lies upon the patristic formulations of Trinitarian doctrine, and if one does not discern this veil, it is difficult to understand their content correctly. Ancient philosophy retains an imperishable power within Christian theology, yet it also has its limits. In any case it is no more than a means for patristic theologizing, and it would be incorrect, together with the kernel, to cherish also the shell itself, failing to distinguish historical form from content.

Ancient philosophy, even in its highest achievements, does not know the problem of personality as such; philosophically it does not notice the self-conscious I, it does not “marvel” at it. It knows and is interested in personality not as I, but rather as a concrete individuality in which this I is clothed. One may say that it knows personality not in personal self-consciousness, not in the form of the first-person pronoun, but only as he or it, as an object or a thing—not as subject but as predicate. Yet personality, although it admits of predicative determination, is not exhausted by it and is not even constituted by it. Ancient philosophy asks of personality not who but what or of what kind. The list of Aristotelian categories, reproduced in the Dialectic of St John of Damascus, contains no category of personality at all: (1) substance, (2) quantity, (3) relation, (4) quality, (5) time, (6) place, (7) position, (8) state, (9) action, (10) passion. The characteristic of ancient philosophy is thingness or objecthood, objectivity rather than subjectivity. Kant imagined himself a philosophical Copernicus on the grounds that he discovered the world of transcendental forms of cognition, whereas antiquity fixed its gaze upon the world of objects, without noticing the observer himself. To be sure, in practice the I enters our life and our thought so deeply that it is always implicitly presupposed in our judgments and cannot be eliminated. This is true also of ancient philosophy, and all the more of patristic philosophy, which is marked by the spirit of biblical personalism and Christian theism. But it is one thing to make use of something without noticing it, and another to subject it to critical reflection: in this consists the task and creative work of philosophy. Although ancient and patristic philosophy in practice always distinguishes where the matter concerns an individual as a person and where as an object, the philosophical means at its disposal allow it to understand personality only as a special kind of thing or individual, an atomon (ἄτομον). It knows personality only in the light of the opposition between the universal and the particular.

It is well known that the understanding of the universal (to katholou, το καθολοv), or, in Plato’s language, of ideas, occupied the central place in the problematics of both Platonism and Aristotelianism. For Plato, ideas—the universal—possess true being, whereas the particular, the manifold, the thingly, is doxa (δοξα),¹⁰¹ mixed with non-being, appearance, contingency, and subjectivity. For Aristotle, true being belongs only to the concrete, in which alone the universal exists (hence in Aristotelian terminology the concrete is prote ousia, πρώτη ουσία, while the universal is deutera ousia, δεύτερα ουσία). What is most important, however, is that despite this disagreement there remained a common feature: the fundamental and determining opposition in metaphysics is that of the universal and the particular, not that of the personal and the impersonal. Personality is therefore regarded, like any concrete or individual, as an individual; but an individual is not only a human being—this mountain and this diamond are also individuals. An individual is the particular in which the universal exists. It can be a substance or “hypostasis” if it exists in itself, and it can be accidental if it depends upon symbebēkos (συμβεβηκος),¹⁰² accident. Undoubtedly, in its existence personality is an individual, a concrete particular. Empirically, every human person represents a qualified instance of the human genus and in this sense is an individual. But not conversely: not every individual is a person. Everything that exists has general, generic features and individual, particular ones (symbebēkos, συμβεβηκος); in this sense Mont Blanc is individual, and so is the Volga River and so on. Personality as such is not exhausted by this opposition. Yet this opposition is the sole category used to establish hypostatic being, which is wholly equated with individuality.

We see this with full clarity in St Basil the Great, in Letter 236 (228) to Amphilochius, where a definition of hypostasis and essence is given: “Essence and hypostasis differ from one another in the same way as the common differs from the particular (to koinon pros to kath’ ekaston, το κοινον προς το καθ έκαστον), for example, as ‘living being’ (ξοων) differs from ‘this particular man’.”

From the letter to Gregory his brother (38):

“Some names, applied to things that are many and numerically distinct, have a certain common meaning; such, for example, is the name ‘man’… Other names have a particular meaning, by which is understood not the commonality of nature in what is signified, but the delineation of some object by its distinguishing property, which has not the least community with what is of the same kind; such, for example, are the names ‘Paul’ or ‘Timothy’… Therefore we assert the following: that which is properly named is expressed by the term hypostasis… Hypostasis is not an indefinite concept of essence, which, because of the commonness of what is signified, comes to rest on nothing, but rather a concept which, by visible distinguishing features, depicts and circumscribes in some object the common and the indeterminate.”

(This relation is clarified by the example of the definition of Job: 1) “there was a man”—the common, indeterminate; 2) “a certain one”—particularity; 3) country, place, name.)

From Letter 214 (206) to Terentius the Comes:

“Essence stands in the same relation to hypostasis as the general to the particular. For each of us both participates in being according to the common concept of essence, and by his properties is precisely this or that particular man.”

Thus the distinction of hypostasis or personality coincides entirely with the distinction between the universal and the particular—and nothing more. Below we shall see how these categories are applied to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

We find nothing different in St John of Damascus, in whose writings Eastern theology receives its generalized expression. In his philosophical treatise Dialectic, which represents a popularization of Aristotelianism, as well as in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, we encounter the same Aristotelian doctrine of essence and hypostasis as in St Basil the Great. According to John of Damascus, hypostasis is substance (ousiai, ουσια, hypokeimenon, υποκειμεον) together with accidents (symbebēkota, συμβεβηκος), which properly constitute the individuating principle.

In the Dialectic, chapter V, on sound: “Inseparable accidents are called characteristic properties (charaktēristikon idiōma, χαρακτηιστικον ιδίωμα), for these differences constitute the hypostasis or individual” (an Aristotelianism already anticipating the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas). “Two hypostases cannot fail to differ from one another in accidents, insofar as they differ numerically. It should be noted that the characteristic properties of these accidents characterize the hypostasis” (ch. XXX). Entirely in the spirit of Aristotle it is said (ch. XLII) that “only hypostases or individuals exist in themselves. In them are contemplated both substance and essential differences, and species, and accidents. Simple substance is contemplated equally in all hypostases, animate and inanimate, rational and irrational, mortal and immortal.” “The holy Fathers by the names hypostasis, person, individual denote one and the same thing: namely, that which, composed of substance and accidents, exists in itself and independently, differs numerically, and expresses a certain individual, for example Peter, Paul, or a particular horse” (sic!, ch. XLIII).¹⁰³

In the work On Heresies (no. 83), St John of Damascus expounds the Church’s teaching in the following terms: “They hold that nature is the common definition of the being of things of the same essence, for example, the definition of every man as a rational, mortal animal, manifesting mind and understanding; for in this respect no man differs from another. Essence and nature are considered one and the same; hypostasis, that is, person, is called the independent existence of each nature, or, so to speak, a description composed of those distinguishing features by which individuals of the same nature differ from one another.” “These the teachers of the Church called hypostases, and also persons.” Likewise in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book III, chapter IV: “Essence, as genus, is common, while hypostasis is particular. Yet it is particular not because it possesses one part of nature and not another, but because it is particular numerically, as one of the indivisibles that make up an entire series… Persons differ from one another not in essence, but in accidental properties, which constitute the distinguishing features… For hypostasis is defined as essence together with accidental characteristics.”^104,105

Since the universal exists only in the particular and the individual, and since real being belongs only to the latter, there follows the conclusion that there is no nature that is non-hypostatic or extra-hypostatic; conversely, every nature is hypostasized. As Leontius of Byzantium (fifth century) says—who in a certain sense sums up the Cappadocian teaching: A nature, that is, an essence, cannot ever exist without hypostasis… Those that are of one nature are called consubstantial, and the definition is said to be common; but hypostases are those which are the same according to nature, yet differ numerically (ανυποσταιος μεν ους φυσς, τουτετιν ουσία, ουκ αν εη ποτε… φυδεος μεν μιας κυπιος λεγεταλ τα ομουσια, καγον ο λογος λεγεται κοινος υποστασεος δε δροξη τα κατα την φυσις μεν ταυτα, απιθμω δε διαφεροντα) (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 86, Contra Nestorium et Eutychem, lib. I, col. 1280).¹⁰⁶

Thus one may say that the concept of hypostasis in ancient and Greek thought is predominantly physical in character.¹⁰⁷ It extends even to inanimate objects (a torch, a tree, a house, a heap of stones—in general, the individual, atomon, ατομον). It arises not in relation to a self-conscious and in this sense hypostatic personal spirit, but in relation to objects in which the universal principle, nature, is specified—nature which never manifests itself outside such specification. If we designate nature by A, its real, hypostatic existence will be expressed in sums (more precisely, condensations): (A + a), (A + b), (A + c), and so on. Since nature is always enhypostatic (ενυποστατος) and the anhypostatic (ανυπόστατος) does not exist, it may be said that the genus, or nature itself, exists only in the abstraction of human thought, which extracts the common term from all these magnitudes. In this essentially Aristotelian understanding of the relation between genus and species, there is no place for consubstantiality (homoousia, ομουσια), but only for similarity of substance (homoiousia, ομοιυσια), which is established by abstracting thought. Already from this it is clear to what difficulties this scheme leads in the problems of anthropology and theology. In the former it fragments the unity of the human race into individuals (atomoi, ατομα), abolishing the unity of mankind in Adam, ancient and New¹⁰⁸—that is, it undermines the foundations of Christology and soteriology.

In the latter it leads to tritheism, that is, to the dissection of the Holy Trinity into three hypostases conceived as individuals in whom the nature of the Godhead exists. The unsatisfactoriness of this scheme lies precisely in its objective-physical character, by virtue of which it proves insufficient to grasp the distinction between hypostasis and nature where alone it truly exists—namely, in the human spirit, or more generally in self-conscious spirit.

This very same scheme of distinguishing essence and hypostasis as universal and particular, as a certain specification, is applied by the Greek Fathers of the Church also to the doctrine of the divine hypostases in the Holy Trinity.

St Basil the Great teaches: “Whatever concept you have acquired in the distinction between essence and hypostasis among us, transfer this to the divine dogmas and you will not err” (cf. Ep. 38). “Essence stands in the same relation to hypostasis as the universal to the particular; for each of us both participates in being according to the common concept of essence and by his properties is precisely this or that particular man. So also in God the concept of essence is common; hypostasis, however, is mentally apprehended in the distinguishing property of fatherhood, or sonship, or sanctifying power” (cf. Ep. 214). “Therefore we confess one essence in the Godhead and do not define the concept of being differently, but we define hypostasis in particular, so that our thought of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit may be without confusion and clear. For if we do not represent the distinctive marks of each Person—namely, Fatherhood, Sonship, and Holiness—but confess God under the common concept of nature, it is impossible for us to set forth the doctrine of faith soundly. Hence, applying the distinctive to the common, one must confess the faith thus: the Godhead is the common, Fatherhood is the particular. Combining these, one must say: I believe in God the Father. And likewise in confessing the Son, one must combine the particular with the common and say: I believe in God the Son. And in the same way concerning the Holy Spirit, combining the proposition according to the same pattern, one must say: I believe also in God the Holy Spirit, so that both the unity may be perfectly preserved by the confession of the Godhead and the distinctiveness of the Persons confessed by the differentiation of the properties attributed to each Person” (cf. Ep. 236). “The distinctive mark of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit is that He is known after the Son and together with the Son and has being from the Father… The Son, however, as the only Only-Begotten shining forth from the Unbegotten Light, has nothing in common, by His distinctive marks, with the Father or the Holy Spirit, but is known alone by the mentioned characteristics. And the One who is God over all has that distinctive mark of His hypostasis that He is Father and that His being is not from any cause” (cf. Ep. 38). “Each Person is represented to us distinctly by His own proper marks.” “Our discourse has revealed in the Holy Trinity both the common and the distinctive: the concept of commonality is referred to essence, while hypostasis is the distinctive mark of each Person.”¹⁰⁹

Likewise in St John of Damascus we read: “The three holy hypostases are distinguished from one another only by hypostatic properties, being distinctly distinguished not according to essence but according to distinguishing property” (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, I, 4). The thought of the holy Fathers is perfectly clear and convincing insofar as it concerns the concrete distinction of the three hypostases. Yet it moves within the sphere of impersonalist concepts. The personal character of the hypostases, of which they know only gnōrismata, distinguishing marks, is for them a fact that they dogmatically accept, but to which they nevertheless give no proper place in their theological constructions. In doing so they also fail to include within these constructions the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity, the divine triunity. Needless to say, the holy Fathers confess with the greatest force the truth of the unity and consubstantiality of the tri-hypostatic God: one nature in three intelligible, perfect, and self-subsisting hypostases, distinguished numerically in deity (μιαν φυσιν εν τρισιν ιόιοτησιν νοεραις, τελε ιαις, καο εαυτας υφεστοσαις, απιθμω διαιπεταις θοτητι) (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration XXXIII, 16). Yet even this affirmation has for them a purely dogmatic character and rests upon the teaching of the Church, but is not contained within their own conceptual schemes (which not only give no place to this teaching, but to a certain degree do not correspond to it). In St Basil the Great, in place of a theological deduction of divine triunity, we find only comparisons, which of course lack logical cogency: the divine Trinity is explained by the analogy of the rainbow, in which hypostatic properties shine in different colors within the unity of a single ray of light. St John of Damascus, in order to preserve triunity, resorts to such an interpretation of the distinction of hypostatic Persons that it loses its reality: “Each of the hypostases is one with the others no less than with itself; for the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in all things except unbegottenness, generation, and procession; they are not divided in thought, for we know one God, but we perceive in thought the distinctions only according to properties, that is, fatherhood, sonship, and procession” (Brief Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, I, 8).

The scheme of relating hypostasis to nature as the particular to the universal, grounded in hypostatic distinctions, if consistently carried through, could lead to tritheism and to homoiousia, similarity of substance, in place of homoousia, consubstantiality; but needless to say, the holy Fathers do not follow it to that conclusion.¹¹⁰

The “physical,” object-like character of hypostasis renders this concept wholly unsuitable for grasping the notion of personality as such. At best, it deals only with a property of personality, with a sign or manifestation that reveals or accompanies personality, but is not personality itself. The concept of hypostasis, as it is given in patristic Aristotelianism, is impersonal, although its principal task consists precisely in apprehending hypostasis as person. One may further say that within it personality and individuality are completely identified, whereas individuality as such by no means yet contains personality. Anything whatever may be individual: a diamond, a house, a river, a country, a dog, a horse, and so forth, and yet possess no personality whatsoever. To define personality solely on the basis of a personal property is what logic calls ignoratio elenchi. Persons are distinguished from one another first of all precisely as persons, simply as different I’s, and only thereafter, on the basis of this distinction, are distinguishing marks established. The fundamental peculiarity of ancient thought consists in the fact that it passes by personality without noticing it. This impersonalism has as its consequence the general inadequacy of patristic philosophical means for the doctrine of triunity. The revealed doctrine of a personal, and moreover tri-hypostatic, Godhead, drawn from revelation, is set forth in it with complete purity and firmness, to such an extent that the teaching of the Cappadocians became the norm of ecclesial doctrine. Yet the religious-philosophical categories employed therein on the basis of ancient philosophy now possess only historical significance.

The category of hypostatic or individual (atomon, ἄτομον) being, when applied to the distinction between genus and species, has the consequence that it fragments and multiplies the genus and abolishes it, transforming the unity of the genus into a logical abstraction, and in place of many-in-oneness and consubstantiality substituting multiplicity, a collective, similarity of substance. The very concept of the universal (to katholou, τὸ καθόλου), repeated in the many, here presents an insoluble riddle. Plato taught that only the universal, the genus, exists, and that there is no individual; Aristotle objected that only the individual exists, while the universal is a thought. The unity of the human race in Adam presents an insoluble riddle; the unity of the human race in Christ, the new Adam, and consequently the possibility of the redemption of all humanity in Him, likewise becomes incomprehensible if both Adam and Christ are only individuals, one among many. In the same way, the Holy Trinity within these categories is conceived as three persons distinguished solely on the basis of hypostatic properties; but to unite them into a triunity proves as difficult as it is to unite human multiplicity into unity.

Hypostases do not exist because there are hypostatic properties; rather, these properties appear as expressions of the being of self-subsisting hypostases. In other words, there does not exist some supra-hypostatic or even non-hypostatic being in which hypostases arise together with distinguishing properties, such that they are allegedly these very properties or relations—as scholastic theology explicitly teaches. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity must proceed from the fact of tri-hypostaticity, as the conciliarity of I within the absolute, self-sufficient Subject, and not derive hypostases from properties or intra-divine relations, as both Eastern theology, in the person of the Cappadocians, and Western theology, in the person of blessed Augustine followed by scholasticism, have done. The Absolute Subject, the conciliar, tri-hypostatic I, is already in itself a certain absolute relation within the absolute. It cannot but be tri-hypostatic, prior to and independently of any properties. And it possesses a certain self-being even when abstracting from these properties (it goes without saying that such abstraction can be effected only in thought, epinoia, επίνοια). The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, apart from fatherhood, sonship, and sanctification, are three completely equivalent and similar I’s, true hypostatic faces of the one hypostatic Absolute Subject, each of which says of itself I, of the other Thou, and We. And this I, as such, does not even depend upon the hypostatic mode of being: existence itself (hyparxis, υπαρζις) does not depend upon the mode of existence (tropos tēs hyparxeōs, τροπος της υπαρξεος);¹¹¹ it logically and ontologically (though not chronologically) precedes it. Properties in themselves do not condition hypostases, but only express their concrete interrelation within the unity of tri-hypostatic being. If we consider them in pure hypostaticity, there will be no hypostatic difference between them: each hypostasis in its hypostaticity is equivalent, is I for itself, thou and he for the other hypostases, and we together with them; and through this triunity each hypostasis individually, as well as the three hypostases in unity, is the hypostatic face of the Absolute Subject. In this sense the trinitarian axiom may be expressed thus: all hypostases are equally hypostatic and indifferent in this their equal hypostaticity, and hypostatic properties do not play a decisive role in this hypostatic self-determination. Three suns united into one sun: each sun is such a sun as the other, none exists separately from the others, and yet each expresses the tri-hypostatic sun. The dogma of tri-hypostaticity contains precisely such a teaching in the first instance, and only in its further development is added the additional doctrine of hypostases as also differing from one another by hypostatic properties.

Every human being is individual and differs from others, possesses his “hypostatic properties,” although in the empirical being of man these express not eternal metaphysical relations but only the mode of spatial and temporal existence. Yet it is erroneous to think that personality is grounded precisely in individuality. In order to possess individuality as a sum of personal properties, one must first of all exist personally; and the hypostatic being of man logically and ontologically precedes the concrete qualification of his being, just as the subject precedes the predicate; it is that substratum (hypokeimenon, υποκείμενον) to which properties belong, like the trunk of a tree with its branches and leaves. And as hypostases they may be said, without exaggeration, to be identical: every human I enters into the many-in-oneness of the all-human I (thou, he, we, you) according to the image of the tri-hypostaticity of the Divine Person. Personal relation, the recognition of a human hypostasis in man, refers first of all to this universally identical I, to which individuality accrues in such a measure that in practice I and individual are inseparable.

However, the interrelation of the divine hypostases within the Divine Subject would be abstract and incomplete if it were limited to and exhausted by their identity and the indifference flowing from it. This would be so if the life of the hypostases were exhausted by their pure subjectivity, by hypostatic self-determination as such. But this self-determination is accomplished not only in the relation of I to I within the depths of the I itself, but also in its relation to its own nature in tri-hypostatic life. And it is precisely this relation that concretely individualizes the hypostases as tropoi tēs hyparxeōs (τροποι της υπαρξεως), as modes of the one divine life: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It establishes personal properties and interrelations. Only one error must be avoided: transferring personal properties into the predicate, making them distinctions within the life itself, within the nature of the Godhead, for this life and nature remain one, and hypostatic distinctions do not touch this unity of nature and life. They indeed belong to hypostasis and refer to how each hypostasis has this one life: as the Father who begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit, as the begotten Son, and as the proceeding Holy Spirit. This distinction must be unfolded more fully in a special doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In doing so, one must distinguish hypostatic origin of one hypostasis from another from origin in the sense of coming-to-be. The latter is wholly inapplicable to divine life and pertains entirely to created being, where coming-to-be is origin from non-being, from nothing, that is, creation, or the manifestation of the content of what is created. In this latter sense it is subject to the law of causality, in which every phenomenon has a cause and stands in causal dependence upon it as a condition of its existence. The concept of cause may here have a twofold meaning: transcendental or metaphysical, and immanent-empirical. In the first case, cause is an absolute initiation or creation out of nothing; God is the “cause” of the world as its Creator (in other words, the world arose without cause if causality is understood in the empirical sense). Strictly speaking, this concept of cause contains within itself its own dialectical dissolution or self-negation of causality through freedom. In the second case, causality is the necessary connection of antecedent and consequent grounded in the constitution of the world: causa aequat effectum, everything is predetermined. This axiom would have unconditional validity if the world with its causality were unconditional. But since its causality itself arose from non-causality through a free creative act, it is limited by that very act, and the axiom causa aequat effectum holds only under the condition rebus sic stantibus.¹¹²

Neither concept of causality, it is evident, is applicable to the eternal nature of the Godhead; and if it is said that the Father is the cause (aitia, αίτια) of the other two hypostases (alongside, incidentally, other images such as pēgē (πηγη), source, and the like), this expression should not, of course, be understood in the strict philosophical sense: it has a figurative meaning for the designation of special inter-hypostatic relations. The same meaning attaches to the expression “procession” of hypostases. As co-eternal, they of course do not “proceed,” and this expression, in the poor and insufficient human language available, merely points once again to the special character of these relations.

The Aristotelianism manifested in the teaching of the Eastern Fathers did not receive further development here and even contributed to the affirmation of the biblical teaching of the tri-hypostaticity of the Godhead, which was indirectly strengthened by the Christological controversies, especially by the Chalcedonian dogma, where the one hypostasis of the Logos in its self-subsistence is correlated with two natures in Christ. Subsequently, the development of the doctrine of triunity in the East, insofar as it was connected with Christology, came to a halt. It was renewed—not directly but indirectly—in connection with pneumatology, beginning in the tenth century, with the treatise De Spiritus Sancti Mystagogia of Patriarch Photius, in connection with the question of the filioque. These controversies extend in Byzantine literature up to the fifteenth century, to the very fall of Constantinople. They contain valuable indications concerning the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

But if Aristotelianism among the Eastern Fathers merely concealed within itself the possibility of impersonalism and relativism in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, that possibility became an actuality in Western theology—essentially beginning already with Blessed Augustine, passing through the whole of Scholasticism, reaching its summit in the person of Thomas Aquinas, and continuing in contemporary filioquist theology. One common style is characteristic of all Catholic theology in its teaching on the Holy Trinity: it is marked by a one-sided essentialism in Trinitarian doctrine and by a corresponding impersonalism.

Thus, in a brief and general schema, the course of reasoning in Catholic theology may be set forth as follows. God is conceived here as a certain single absolute essence; yet within it there arise and subsist certain relations in the Absolute which, like everything in God, are not accidental but substantial. These real relations are precisely what are called hypostasis or person. The dogmatic axiom of Catholic theology is expressed in the decree pro Jacobitis of the Council of Florence (Denzinger, 703): in the Godhead omnia sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis oppositio, and sola relatio multiplicat Trinitatem¹¹³ (John the Theologian at Florence). Thus, in the initial determination, a personal character is not attributed to the Godhead as such. Catholic theology proceeds from essence, from a certain faceless it, the unum, and in this it is impersonalist. Personality in the Godhead—namely, the three hypostases—arises within this essence as immanent divine relations.

The reality of these relations is grounded in their substantiality, as modes of substance (if one may so express it, although Catholic theology itself does not so phrase it), such that originally there exists only this one substance, while these modes exist for the distinguishing intellect: S. Theol. I, q. 21, a. 2, c.: relatio realiter existens in Deo est idem essentiale secundum rem, et non differt nisi secundum intelligentiae rationem, prout in relatione importatur respectus ad suum oppositum, qui non importatur in nomine essentiale. Pater ergo quod in Deo non est aliud esse relationis et essentiale, sed unum et idem.¹¹⁴ Thus, in understanding the hypostases as relations in the Absolute, the self-subsistence and self-groundedness of the self-positing I are eliminated, and it appears merely as a mode of the Absolute.

The doctrine of the hypostases as relations—and moreover as only relations—belongs among the darkest and most difficult teachings of Catholic theology. “There must be in God a real distinction, but not in relation to the Absolute, that is, to the essence, in which there is the fullest unity and simplicity, but in relation to the relative.”^115,116 Yet this relation in the Absolute is not accidental (for there is no place for accident in the Godhead, where everything is essential), but essential, and it exists in the same manner as the divine essence exists. Consequently, just as the Godhead is God, so divine fatherhood is God the Father, who is a divine person.

Thus, a divine person signifies a relation as existence.^117,118 Several persons are several relations, mutually subsisting and really distinct.^119,120

This identification of relation with person, which has acquired the force of a centuries-long hypnosis in Catholic theology, strikes one by its arbitrariness. Why must a relation or a distinction necessarily be a person, a hypostasis? And wherein, within this correlation, lies the source of a new self-consciousness, that is, of hypostasis? For according to this logic, it is precisely in the differentiating power of a distinguishing relation that the hypostatization of the Godhead is rooted—while outside this differentiation the Godhead would be hypostatically supra- or extra-hypostatic (something akin to the Unconscious, that is, wholly without hypostasis, in Hartmann).¹²¹ Personality thus arises in the Godhead as a result of its immanent interrelations, as a mode, and therefore does not constitute the primordial, absolute principle of spirit, without which spirit does not exist. This relativization of personality, its reduction to a symptom of the Absolute, signifies a metaphysical Sabellianism—and even something worse, since the latter at least was not impersonalism. Thus there emerges a formula that equally destroys both the triunity and the tri-hypostatic character of the Godhead: propter hoc quod in divinis est una essentia, dicitur Deus unus; propter hoc autem quod tres sunt personae, dicitur Deus trinus.^122,123

Since hypostasis is regarded as relation, it is directly equated with its hypostatic mark, it is this hypostatized mark: Paternitas subsistens est persona Patris; et filiatio subsistens est persona Filii (S. Th. I, q. 30, art. 11).¹²⁴ How does this substitution of hypostasis for distinction or property occur? What is meant by hypostasis? Following Aristotle, Catholic theology defines hypostasis as πρώτη οὐσία—individual, self-subsisting being—in contrast to δεύτερα οὐσία, which exists only in abstraction, namely nature, quidditas.¹²⁵ Hypostatic being is concrete, whereas nature is an abstraction (and yet in Catholic theology it is precisely nature, essentia, that is accorded absolute being); as individual, it is incommunicable (incommunicabilis), and personality, in distinction from nature, is defined precisely as this individual and incommunicable mode of being, which in this sense constitutes a completion (complementum) of nature (persona constat ex essentia et proprietate,¹²⁶ John the Theologian), while nature itself is its foundation. Thus, the divine nature or substance, insofar as it is common to the three persons—or, what is the same, the divine essence taken absolutely (secundum esse absolutum)—is not called hypostasis or person, since the divine nature or essence is common to the three persons, whereas personality is incommunicable. “But we can and must call the three relations, which thus constitute the divine being, persons or hypostases” (Henrich, Lehrbuch der Katholischen Dogmatik, I, 197, §§58, 479–82). Relationes in divinis, etsi constituant hypostases et sic faciant eas subsistentes, hoc tamen faciunt inquantum sunt essentia divina. Relatio enim, inquantum est relatio, non habet quod subsistat vel subsistere faciat (S. Th. q. 8, a. 3, ad 7).¹²⁷

Here, at this decisive turn, Catholic thought makes a logical leap that is in no way justified—precisely in equating these distinctions or relations in the Absolute with persons. Relations, just as personal properties (notiones), are not persons and are not equal to persons. Personality is before all else and after all else a self-conscious, self-positing I, which alone can possess individual traits or properties at all. But properties as such, however real they may be by virtue of their being in the Absolute, do not become persons, I’s, if there was no place for such an I in the Absolute itself.^128,129 This deduction, or this equation, has no force or persuasiveness whatever. One may say of them whatever one wishes: they are modes in the Absolute, attributes possessing the full force of its reality—but not persons.¹³⁰ If the Godhead in its absolute essence is conceived solely as absolute nature, φύσις, a predicate without a subject, deitas, then it is vain to seek this subject, this personal self-consciousness, within its own attributes. Divine personality is not a relation, to which rationalistic Scholasticism reduces and debases it; it is just as primordial and absolute as divine nature itself.^131,132 All theology of the hypostases as relations is false.

And this fundamental error of Catholic theology leads it to further distortions. According to Catholic doctrine, hypostases are established not by just any relations, but only by relations of origin (relationes originis), and among these only by relations of opposition.^133,134 Only here does real distinction exist, not merely ideal distinction (distinctio rationis ratiocinatae). On this basis, only three relations—fatherhood, sonship, and passive spiration—constitute the three hypostases: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If one entrusts oneself to the logic of this doctrine of relations as the basis of hypostatic distinctions, one cannot but be struck by the arbitrariness and inconsistency of such a restriction, dictated, of course, by ecclesiastical dogma. First, why does active and passive generation yield two distinct hypostases rather than one corresponding to them? And if active and passive generation establish two hypostases, why does the same not occur in spiratio activa and passiva, where a hypostasis is established only on one side, spiratio passiva?¹³⁵ To this there is and can be no answer on the basis of the doctrine of hypostatic relations. Nor can there be an answer to another question: why are only relations of origin, and moreover only in opposition, hypostasis-constituting, while other relations lack this property? This arbitrariness is especially evident in the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and from the Son. One of the decisive arguments in favor of this teaching is that, if there were no relatio originis, no relation of origin, between the Son and the Spirit, these hypostases would not be distinguished from one another; consequently, the procession of the Spirit from the Father alone would be insufficient to distinguish Him from the Son. This latter consideration is wholly untenable even from the standpoint of the theory of relations. Why should a hypostasis, once arising in one place through relation to the Father, not preserve its being also in relation to the Spirit, given that they are united by a single essence? Moreover, in order to establish a real distinction of the Spirit from both the Father and the Son, it would be necessary for the Spirit to proceed from the Father and to proceed from the Son separately, which would result in a doubling of the third hypostasis. Catholics, of course, do not take this path. They teach the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son (filioque) as from one principle—not in that in which they are distinct, but in that in which they are one (that is, in the essence?). But in that case, strict consistency of the theory of the arising of hypostases from relations of origin, from the opposition of two principles, must necessarily lead to the conclusion that in spiratio there arises not only one hypostasis but two: alongside the Spirit, there would arise from spiratio activa yet another, special, new, or composite hypostasis of the Spirator, of Father-and-Son, the Father-Son. Catholic doctrine never draws this conclusion, because it would directly contradict ecclesiastical dogma. The Spirit is distinguished from both the Father and the Son, although, according to Catholic teaching, He proceeds from neither the one nor the other separately, since in the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son they are not distinguished individually. Hence, the being of hypostases for one another is possible even apart from the ground of origin.

The schema of deriving hypostases from relations has its general philosophical source in ancient impersonalism, which is wholly inadequate as a philosophical means for expressing tri-hypostaticity; its dogmatic source lies in stubborn filioquism, for the support of which this schema was specifically devised. The very idea of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son—not in their hypostatic distinction, but in their unity and indifference—is itself essentially impersonalist. The Godhead, under this understanding, is something, quaedam res, a certain “it,” in which relations arise and intersect in different directions: along one line (Father–Son), along another line (Father-Son–Spirit). The very possibility of conceiving a “Father-Son” bears witness to this impersonalism.

From this there follows yet another consequence of this impersonalist relativism in the understanding of the hypostases. If the hypostases are nothing other than relations existing only ad invicem,¹³⁶ then no triadicity can in any way arise from them; there remain only two hypostatic pairs (dyads): Father and Son (I), Father and Holy Spirit (II), which do not admit of any further summation. Indeed, from the relation of generatio activa and passiva¹³⁷—or, what is the same, paternitas and filiatio—there arises the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father; but this arising bears no relation whatsoever to the Holy Spirit, for whom, accordingly, neither the Father nor the Son, in their mutual relation and in the distinction that emerges therefrom, simply exists. In a similar manner, according to Catholic filioquism, neither the Father nor the Son, as such, stands in a direct relation to the Holy Spirit, because for the Holy Spirit they exist in their essential unity and not in their hypostatic distinction. In other words, the line of distinction of the third hypostasis from the totality of the first two lies in a different plane from the mutual distinction of the first and second hypostases. Thus, relativism—and the filioquism grounded upon it—destroys the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, substituting for it a doctrine of a dual unity of two relations (I) and (II) within a single divine being.

Within this teaching, the fundamental question remains wholly unresolved: how are relations hypostatized? what makes them hypostases? Moreover, it must further be noted that not all relations are hypostatized, but only some. Thus, for example, by the relation of generation two hypostases are hypostatized, Father and Son, ad invicem; but in the relation of spiratio, likewise ad invicem, only the Holy Spirit is hypostatized, whereas the dyadic unity of the Father and the Son, as well as each of them separately, does not receive a new hypostatic being or self-determination. Yet, for some reason, only the relation of generation retains its force here, although in this case it is not it that is operative, but the relation of spiratio. The theory of the mutual relations of the hypostases ad invicem turns aside from the straight path before a dogmatic obstacle and thereby reveals its own inadequacy.

All these inescapable difficulties arise from the initial impersonalism (which was fully laid bare in German mysticism—from Eckhart to Böhme—with its explicit doctrine of a primordial Urgottheit in which hypostases, the world, and humanity arise). Here the one essence (substance) is primary and productive, while the tri-hypostatic personality is derivative, arising within the depths of the Absolute.¹³⁸ Yet the dogma of the Holy Trinity teaches otherwise: it affirms the eternal, co-equal presence in the Godhead both of the tri-hypostatic personality and of the consubstantial life belonging to it. Within this co-equality it is impossible to make one primordial and the other derivative (of course, in the ontological sense). The Absolute Spirit is tri-hypostatic, possessing a single essence. The divine hypostatic I, in each of the hypostases and in their tri-hypostatic unity, must be understood in its absoluteness, in self-positing, and not in the relativity of arising. The subject (and subjects) of relations exist prior to these relations; relations are posited by them, not the other way around. And without this primordial givenness of the hypostases, they cannot arise in any relation whatsoever (which is indirectly confirmed even in Catholic doctrine, insofar as not all relations in it lead to the emergence of new hypostases). There exists a subject, or subjects, of relations, and only in them and through them can these relations exist. To produce subjects from relations—rather than relations from subjects—is the fundamental and greatest error of Catholic doctrine, upon which the entire theology of the filioque both stands and falls.

Indeed, its principal and decisive argument consists in the claim that, if the Holy Spirit did not proceed from the Father and the Son, there would be no relation between the Spirit and the Son, and therefore the Spirit would not be distinguished from the Son—in other words, could not arise for Him. Consequently, the hypostasis of the Spirit, outside such a relation, would seem not to exist at all—just as the first two hypostases, prior to any relation, are held not to exist—whereas in truth such relations are only their manifestation to one another (and by no means their mutual interpenetration). If this fundamental impersonalist presupposition of Catholic theology in its doctrine of the Holy Trinity is rejected, then the filioque in its Catholic interpretation likewise collapses; for this doctrine was developed and elaborated primarily as a means for filioquism, and only for it is it needed. Outside of it, it becomes an intelligent superfluity even for Catholic theology itself. The axiom in divinis omnia sunt unum, ubi non obstat relationis oppositio is false and must be replaced by its opposite: in Deo omnia sunt trinum, et haec est causa relationis oppositionis.¹³⁹ Likewise false is the other axiom, relatio oppositorum multiplicat Trinitatem; rather, it must be said conversely: Trinitas multiplicat relationes.¹⁴⁰ By this the foundation of the theology of “processions” (processiones), which constitutes the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is abolished.¹⁴¹

From this there follows yet another general conclusion of primary dogmatic significance. If the hypostasis of the Godhead is triune, if its tri-hypostaticity is but the manifestation of the conciliar nature of the I, the realization of the Absolute, self-sufficient, and self-enclosed Subject, then all relations of the hypostases must be understood not as paired, dual relations, but as triadic relations. In the triune Godhead everything is triadic. Each hypostasis, while existing in itself and for itself in an unconditioned, absolute manner, exists at the same time in relation to the other two—in a certain absolute correlation corresponding to the nature of the Conciliar I, the Absolute Subject. Only on the basis of this absolute relation, rooted in the being of Personality as such, do relative relations arise—relations belonging to the concrete life of the consubstantial Godhead, wherein the three hypostases are not merely “I–I–I” in co-equality, equivalence, and indifference, but are also concretely: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And each of these concrete determinations establishes intra-trinitarian relations.

1
Aporia (from Greek: difficulty, perplexity) is an insoluble problem, usually arising from a contradiction between the totality of sense data and their rational analysis; within Kantianism, it denotes the contradiction into which reason falls when it attempts to transcend the limits of the immanent, that which is given in experience. According to Kant, the antinomies of pure reason are aporetic in character: propositions in which concepts of the absolute—applicable exclusively to the noumenal world, the world of things in themselves—are applied to the world of experience, in which only the transient, the finite, the non-absolute is present. In the present context, Bulgakov has primarily in mind the Kantian interpretation of aporias as antinomies. In general, the Kantian doctrine of the inaccessibility of the noumenal world to pure reason exerted an enormous influence on the formation of Bulgakov’s philosophical system; indeed, it may be asserted that virtually the entire system was constructed precisely as an argument in polemical opposition to Kant.

2
Substantia sive Deus, natura sive Deus (Lat.)—“substance as God, nature as God”—is one of the fundamental theses of Spinoza’s philosophy. From Spinoza’s point of view, substance–nature–God, as causa sui, the cause of itself, excludes the existence of any other originating principle; extension and thought, which in Descartes appear as independent ontological substances, are, according to the Dutch philosopher, merely attributes of the one substance.
Aristotle’s organism—Bulgakov most likely has in mind Aristotle’s well-known definition of nature in the Metaphysics: “nature (physis, φυσις)… in the primary and proper sense is substance (ousia, ουσία), namely, the substance of those things that have within themselves a principle of motion as such” (V.5, 1015a 13–15). Nature is both “first matter,” lying at the foundation of each body, and form as the result and fulfillment of every motion. The concept of form itself is a reworking of Plato’s notion of the idea as a transcendental prototype of the thing, which, according to Aristotle, becomes immanent to the thing. Precisely this makes possible the interpretation of nature as causa sui in the spirit of Spinoza.
The mechanism of causality among materialists consists in the total mutual conditioning of phenomena and the rigid determination of events: the “objective connection between individual states of the kinds and forms of matter in the processes of its motion and development” (Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary, Moscow, 1988, p. 511), accepted in effect by all materialist systems of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, including Marxism, and permitting—according to the adherents of this doctrine—an explanation of the “material unity of the world.” In the Russian philosophical tradition, a critique of materialist determinism was already undertaken by Vladimir Solovyov. Bulgakov’s classification of this tendency as a form of pantheism is rather acute, since it points to the immanent contradictions of a system that seeks to ground, “materialistically,” what is in essence an ideal unity of the cosmos.
Parmenides (sixth century BCE), a representative of the Eleatic school and a disciple of Zeno of Elea, taught that the One, or sphairos (sphere), “has not come to be, is imperishable, whole, unique, motionless, and endless”; “it is all together, one, continuous”; it “stands in need of nothing” (DK B 8.4–5, 5–6, 33; trans. A. V. Lebedev). The sphairos is grasped by the “way of truth,” whereas existent being is the “world of opinion,” a mixture of being and non-being.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 540–480 BCE): the entire philosophical system of Heraclitus is founded upon the primacy of the “one” over the “many.” Only the “one” is true and real; it is “this Cosmos” and at the same time the sole true God. The doctrines of Parmenides and Heraclitus have much in common; Bulgakov, however, opposes them, proceeding from the fact that Parmenides’ sphairos is immobile, whereas the name of Heraclitus is associated in the history of philosophy with the dictum panta rhei—“all flows”—interpreted in the sense of the development of the Cosmos.
Hylozoism (from Greek hylē (υλη), matter, and zōē (ξωη), life) is a philosophical term introduced in 1678 by the English philosopher Ralph Cudworth to designate a number of natural-philosophical conceptions—primarily those of the ancient Greek Presocratics (Anaximenes, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and others)—in which, in his view, the universal animation of the universe was affirmed.
Leibniz (1646–1716): in his principal works (New Essays on Human Understanding, Theodicy, Monadology), the world of truly existing beings (as distinct from the sensibly apprehended world of phenomena) consists of an infinite number of active, ensouled substances—monads. All the actions of the monads are interconnected and pre-established; they form an ascending hierarchy among themselves. The sensible world is only an imperfect expression of the world of monads; thus, Leibniz’s conception reveals a certain affinity not only with Platonism but also with the system of Parmenides.

3
Nirvana (literally: extinction) is the central concept of Buddhism and denotes the ultimate goal of human existence—liberation from rebirth. Unlike all European concepts of salvation, it signifies not the maximal unfolding of the personal potential of the I, but, on the contrary, the disclosure of its real non-existence; not the overcoming of the world or the transfiguration of creatureliness, but its “sublation.” The opposition between “life” and “death,” “extension” and “thought,” proves in this case to be inappropriate; nevertheless, in European (including Russian) interpretations of this concept there is almost always present the idea of the immanence of the Absolute to human consciousness in the conception of Nirvana and in Buddhism as a whole.

4
Aseitas (Lat.)—“being-from-itself”; a term of medieval scholasticism defining God as absolute self-sufficiency and perfection through Himself.
Perseitas, from per se (Lat.)—“through oneself.”
Integritas (Lat.)—“faultlessness, integrity, wholeness; totality.”
Independentia (Lat.)—“independence,” non-derivation from anything else.

5
“Die Tragödie der Philosophie”—in 1925 this work was intended for publication by the Prague publishing house Plamya (“The Flame”); the publication did not take place, but two years later the work appeared in German translation (A. Kressling):
S. Bulgakow. Die Tragödie der Philosophie. Darmstadt, 1927.
In Russian, the work was published only in part:
S. N. Bulgakov, “On the Nature of Thought,” Vestnik RSKhD, 1971, nos. 101–102, pp. 87–104;
S. N. Bulgakov, “The Philosophical Meaning of Triunity,” Questions of Philosophy, 1989, no. 12, pp. 87–96.
The complete Russian original was published in: S. N. Bulgakov, Works, 2 vols., vol. I, Moscow, 1993 (supplement to Questions of Philosophy).

6
See my “Die Tragödie der Philosophie”. Darmstadt, 1927.

7
Actus purus, also actus purissimus (Lat.)—here: “pure act,” “most pure act.”

8
Max Stirner—in ”The Ego and Its Own” (1844), Stirner quite literally “turns inside out” (W. Windelband) Fichte’s doctrine of the absolute I, asserting that the sole actuality, the sole reality—as opposed to the abstractness of generic concepts (including “humanity,” “spirit,” “idea,” indeed “the other” in general)—is the singular existence of the concrete personal individual (in this case, Stirner himself), who constructs the world in his representation and will.

9
Spinoza opposed, in particular, belief in a personal God to the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis), which he regarded as the foundation of true religion.
Feuerbach (1804–1872), in ”The Essence of Christianity”, proclaimed the anthropological meaning of religion.
Bulgakov quite rightly points to the logical connection between Spinoza’s rationalist and pantheistic interpretation of God and Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism.

10
Polytheism is a type of religion based on belief in many gods; henotheism is a form of polytheism that recognizes many gods while singling out one principal deity around whom religious cult is centered.

11
“And the catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father infinite; the Son infinite; and the Holy Ghost infinite. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal.”…“And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal.”

12
Cf., for example, Metropolitan Makarii, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 1, §29, pp. 201–205 (3rd ed., 1868).

13
A play on words becomes evident upon closer inspection: beyond the usual usage of in abstracto and in concreto in the sense of “in general—in particular,” “individual hypostases—hypostaticity as such,” these terms were also employed to describe the relation between essence and hypostasis, deriving from Aristotle’s doctrine of first and second substance (substantia abstracta et concreta; prōtē ousia—deutera ousia, πρώτη ουσία – δεύτερα ουσία), which was in turn utilized by the Cappadocian Fathers to define the Christian concept of “hypostasis.”

14
Monarchianism was a Christian heretical movement of the late second and early third centuries. Its principal representatives were Theodotus, Artemon, and Praxeas. It was condemned by Pope Victor. Monarchians proceeded from the dogma of the unity of the Godhead and on this basis taught that the trinity of Persons in God is incompatible with this unity; accordingly, they denied the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, who were regarded merely as forms or modes in which God appears to the world.

15
Modalism, a heretical movement of the third century, received its most complete development in the teaching of Sabellius (hence Sabellianism). Modalists affirmed one essence in God, while interpreting the hypostases of the Trinity merely as images or forms of the divine manifestation of Jesus Christ. The heresy was condemned in 261 at the Council of Alexandria.

16
“Transcendental consciousness,” “transcendental unity of apperception” are Kantian philosophical terms employed by Bulgakov. In general, the “transcendental unity of apperception” designates that unity of consciousness in which the synthesis of sensible intuition with the categories of the understanding is accomplished and which serves as the foundation for the constitution of the laws of natural science. The phenomena of given existence presented to us in experience are thus phenomena of consciousness.

17
This is partially disclosed in the Revelation of St. John: “Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666” (Rev 13:18).

18
This is indicated by sacred times and seasons: the seventy weeks in the prophet Daniel, the three times fourteen generations in the genealogy of Jesus, and other numbers and times in the Bible (Acts 1:7).

19
τὸ ἕν (Gr.)—“the One”—is the central concept of the philosophy of Plato and, later, of Plotinus. Plotinus (third century CE): the principal content of his philosophizing is the interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of the One, above all in the versions set forth in the dialogues Timaeus and Parmenides. According to Plotinus, the One is not being, nor a genus of being; it precedes being, yet is co-present with all that exists, is thought, and is, as the principle of all. Unlike many other Platonists, Plotinus interprets the One as Good and Light, which later made it possible to employ his doctrine within theological constructions (so-called theological Neoplatonism, above all in the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite). The category of number in Plotinus (as in Plato) appears as an intermediate stage between the One and Intellect—the second moment of the Triad as the principle of intelligible categoriality.

20
Discursivity (Lat. discursus) is a multivalent term whose principal meanings include movement, circulation; military maneuver; expansion, branching; conversation, dialogue. In medieval theological Latin, the derivative discursivus came to mean discursive, rational, based on inference rather than on experiential data. This latter meaning is retained up to the rationalist philosophy of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: discursivity is understood as the limited sphere of the rational, the instrumental domain of the understanding (but not of reason).

21
Sobornost’ is one of the most important categories of Russian philosophy beginning with the Slavophiles. Introduced by A. S. Khomyakov, for whom the ecclesial council (sobor) is a symbol of “unity in multiplicity,” a synthesis of freedom and unity. Various interpretations of sobornost’ are associated with the phenomenon of the commune or choral principle (K. S. Aksakov), with the concept of all-unity (“the one exists not at the expense of all or to their detriment, but for the benefit of all”—Vladimir Solovyov). For the Eurasianists—Bulgakov’s opponents in the 1920s—a peculiarly interpreted notion of sobornost’ served as the basis of self-identity and opposition to the West. Bulgakov’s inclusion (following Florensky) of the philosophical category of sobornost’ into the very fabric of theological discourse marks a rethinking of the ecclesial notion of catholicity, impossible without an analysis of intra-Trinitarian terminology.

22
A priori (Lat.)—knowledge existing prior to experience and independently of it; a posteriori (Lat.)—knowledge derived from experience. Bulgakov employs these predominantly Kantian terms to criticize theories of relations among the Persons within the Trinity insofar as they rationalize those relations; in this case, the sphere of experience is identified with the sphere of discursive thinking as such.

23
This was not noticed by Fichte, who considers spirit only in the aspect of abstract self-consciousness, as the I; hence the content of the I, the life of the I, inevitably falls for him into the category of the non-I, whereas the nature of spirit is not non-I, if only because it is disclosed in the I.

24
According to Aristotle, pure possibility of a thing is matter, potency; form, or entelechy—eidos, morphē, “what-it-is,” or essence (essentia)—is the realization of this potency. Bulgakov often employs not so much the Aristotelian as the Humboldtian interpretation of Greek concepts: since for Bulgakov one of the fundamental forms of divine manifestation is the sphere of Trinitarianity as the primal proposition, he makes use of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s doctrine of language as activity (energeia, ενέργεια), rather than as the product of activity (ergon, εργον).

25
In actu (Lat.)—“in act,” “in actuality.”

26
μή ὄν (Gr.)—“non-being” as deficiency or absence of being; in Plato’s philosophy, matter as the “receptacle and nurse” of the idea. Following Solovyov, who interpreted μή ὄν in The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge as pure possibility or potency of being, Bulgakov uses this concept primarily to ground his sophiological construction, distinguishing it from οὐκ ὄν—absolute non-being in the Christian ontological model.

27
A se et per se (Lat.)—“from oneself and through oneself.”

28
Homoousios, ὁμοούσιον (Greek) (consubstantiality) and homoiousios, ὁμοιούσιος (similar in essence) are two key terms of early Greek patristics. They originate from the so–called Arian controversies of the 3rd–4th centuries, when the Trinitarian terminology was being constituted. The particle “ομο” in Greek indicates the common possession of some object or quality, hence homoousios (ὁμοούσιον) i.e., the existence of subjects that possess the same essence (See: M. E. Postnov. History of the Christian Church. Kyiv, 1991, pp. 345–347).
It was in this form that the term entered the Nicene Creed, denoting the relationship of the Persons (hypostases, hypostasis, υποστασις) with respect to the Essence (ousia, ουσία) of the Trinity, in particular, clarifying the relationship between the Son's and the Father's hypostasis.
Followers of Arianism (Eusebius of Nicomedia, Theognis of Nicaea, Patrophilus of Scythopolis, and others) actively opposed the adoption of the Nicene Creed at the Councils of Antioch in the 3rd–4th centuries, insisting on their version of the relationship between the hypostases of the Trinity, described using the term homoiousios (ὁμοιούσιος) – similar in essence.
The confrontation between the followers of the Nicene Creed and the Arians was not only of a church nature, but also had a fairly large socio–political resonance. From a theological point of view, the problem was resolved thanks to the activities of representatives of the so–called Cappadocian, or Neo–Nicene circle (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa), and the adoption at the Second Ecumenical Council of the so–called Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed, which enshrined the term homoousios (ὁμοούσιον) as dogmatically correct.

29
βυθος (Greek) – “depth, abyss, chasm”. In Gnosticism – the unknowable and indefinable depth of the Divine.

30
τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις – μία φύσις (Greek) – “three hypostases – one nature”. The problem of defining the relationship between the divine essence, φύσις or οὐσία, common to all three hypostases, and ὑπόστασις – those personal distinguishing attributes by which the Persons of the Trinity receive their independent existence – became a central problem for representatives of the Cappadocian school of theology.
A number of prominent theologians of the mid–20th century (Fr. G. Florovsky, Vl. Lossky, Archpriest J. Meyendorff, etc.) believe that this – the Cappadocian – interpretation of the relationship between essence and hypostases is the basis for a correct doctrine of personality.

31
ἡ ὑπόστασις τὸ ἰδιάζον τῆς ἑκάστου ὑπάρξεως σημεῖόν ἐστιν (Basil the Great, Epistle 28:3) (Greek) – “Hypostasis is the distinctive mark of each particular mode of existence,” or: “The difference between the hypostases is the difference between the modes of possessing [the essence].”
Saint Basil the Great (c. 329–379) was a Greek Church Father, a representative of the Cappadocian theological school. His main works include the treatise “Against Eunomius” in three books, dedicated to the defense of the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity; “On the Holy Spirit,” “Monastic Rules,” as well as discourses, sermons (homilies), and letters. The central problem for St. Basil was the problem of the consubstantiality of the hypostases of the Trinity.

32
τροποι της υπαρξης ηταν σχεσης ονοματα (Greek) – “Names are designations of the modes of existence, that is, of relation” (cf. Letter to Gregory his brother, Ep. 38 [= 43]; To Amphilochius, Ep. 236).

33
There is a clear typo in the first publication: chapter 8 is followed by chapter 19.

34
Amor unitivus amborum (Lat.) — “the love that unites both.”

35
From this it follows that the one life, or the one nature, of the Godhead is wholly permeated by its tri-hypostatic character; thus, while remaining one, it is threefold in its mode of being, and the hypostases themselves are the modes (tropoi, τρόποι) of the one divine life. This point must be emphatically stressed, since rationalism, in its effort to evade discursively the incomprehensibility of the dogma, simplifies and distorts it, without thereby rendering it intelligible.
One widespread exposition of the dogma asserts that the contradiction between triunity and unity is resolved very simply: triunity pertains to the hypostases, unity to the nature; consequently, in different respects God is triune and one, and thus everything becomes rationally transparent. In this view, the Trinity is likened to a joint-stock company of three persons jointly owning a certain property—that is, pure homoiousianism is preached under the guise of homoousianism (or tritheism, if the emphasis shifts toward threeness; or Sabellianism, if it shifts toward unity).
Regrettably, such reasoning can also be encountered in Orthodox dogmatics. For example: “The principal difficulty here appears to consist in how one may think of God as both one and triune at the same time. The ancient teachers of the Church did not conceal such difficulties from themselves; yet they did not consider it appropriate to suppose any contradiction here. Why? Because they knew very well that the Christian doctrine of the triune God does not require us to think God as one and triune in the same respect, but requires us to think Him as one in one respect and triune in another—namely, one with respect to the Godhead, and triune with respect to the three who exist in God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Bishop Sylvester, Essay in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. II, Kiev, 1888, p. 589).
A similar rationalistic presentation is found in Macarius (Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. I, p. 204): “Christianity teaches that God is one and at the same time triune, not in the same respect but in different respects: one in essence, triune in persons; one concept is given to us of the divine essence, another of the divine persons, and these concepts do not in the least exclude one another. Where, then, is the contradiction? If Christianity taught that God is both one in essence and triune in essence, or that there are both a Trinity and a single person in Him, or that person and essence are identical, then indeed there would be a contradiction.”
In both cases, the real triunity of the Godhead—both in personal being and in nature—is entirely overlooked and replaced by a mere union, or rather a community, of Three.

36
“The cross of Jesus, formed from the enmity of the Jews and the fury of the pagans, is already an earthly image and shadow of this heavenly Cross of love” (Metropolitan Philaret, Sermon on Good Friday, Words and Speeches, Vol.I. p. 94).

37
Ignoratio elenchi (Lat.) – “ignorance of the refutation”; a situation in which, when constructing a logically correct argument, either something is proven that cannot be proven, does not need proof, or is not the subject of the argument, or something is refuted that should not or cannot be refuted.

38
Tertium comparationis (Lat.) – a criterion for comparison, a common basis for two objects being compared (literally: “the third term of comparison”).

39
“Whatever I may contemplate in my love-guided mind, wherever I seek a likeness for this, I find nothing earthly to which the divine nature could be applied. And if some likeness is found, far more escapes it, leaving me below together with that which was chosen for comparison… Finally I concluded that it is best to abandon all images and shadows as deceptive and far removed from the truth” (Oration 31).

40
Unfortunately, Orthodox theology is easily infected by the rationalism and psychologism of Catholic theology. A typical example: “The Most Holy Trinity is reflected in us: (a) in the three constituent parts of our being—spirit, soul, and body; (b) in the three principal powers of our spiritual nature—mind, will, and feeling” (M. Macarius, op. cit., vol. I, p. 211).

41
De Trinitate (“On the Trinity”) — a treatise by Blessed Augustine (354–430), one of the four “Doctors of the Catholic Church” (to whom Thomas Aquinas would later be added as a fifth). This treatise contains a grounding of the trinitarian structure of the human person, understood as isomorphic to the Personhood of the Creator.

42
On the basis (tota in totum, Lat.) of the essentially correct idea that “the Trinity in man is an image of that which exists in God,” Augustine introduces an incorrect psychological analogy. According to it, thought, knowledge, and the love by which thought loves itself and its knowledge are identical with one another and one with the expressed essence. He argues that if I love something, “there are three: I, that which I love, and the love itself.” But “to love love” does not mean “to love the one who loves”: where there is no love, there is no one to love. Thus there are three: the lover, the beloved, and love. Where then are there neither “I love” nor “myself”? Is it not in that of which we speak, which is both “I love” and “love”?—the lover who loves, and also that which is loved. Thus there is the lover and the beloved; there is the “what” and the “who” of love (Bk. IX, ch. 2). In this way, the mind loves itself as thinking and loving… Augustine turns this construction from various sides, showing that “the three are one and identical, substantially related to one another, indivisible, united by an essence that is simple in itself and wholly integral and common.”

43
Quoniam non sunt tres vitae—sed una vita (Lat.) — therefore not three lives but one life; not three minds but one mind; consequently, not three substances exist but only one substance (Book X). Their unity is expressed in formulations such as “to remember oneself,” which truly contains memory, intellect, and will; the power of thinking is joined to the power of remembering, and the power of willing is bound to remembering and thinking; in sum, there is a remembering intellect and a willing memory (Book IX).

44
The importance and multifaceted nature of these Latin terms (mens, cogito, amor, memoria, intellegentia) requires establishing their precise, “dictionary” meaning;
mens: mind, thought, reason; prudence, discretion; consciousness, conscience; courage; anger, passion; representation, memory; opinion, view; intention, desire.
cogito: to think, reflect, ponder, reason; to hold an opinion; to imagine, conceive; to plan, contrive.
Amor: love, passion, desire.
Memoria: memory, the ability to remember and recall; thought, idea, consciousness, and even event and record.
Intellegentia: understanding, reason, cognitive power, capacity for perception; concept, representation, idea; perception, sensory knowledge.
As we can see, with the help of these categories, often almost synonymous, Augustine attempts to express shades of meaning that were often not distinguished in ancient culture.

45
Charilas sive voluntas (Lat.) — “charity, or will.”

46
In illis—Spiritus Sanctus (Lat.) — “In them—the Holy Spirit” (XXII, 42): “…from this it truly follows that there is one simple and common divine nature, as it were one as God (the one in God), and three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

47
Nec quemadmodum – Deus est (Lat.) — “And how is it – God is”: “just as man, as the Image of God, consists of three elements in a single person, unlike in the Trinity: the three persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (XXIII, 43). Augustine attributes these differences to the inevitable distinction between the trinity that exists in man and the trinity that exists in the Godhead.

48
The thoughts of Blessed Augustine were adopted by St. Demetrius of Rostov; (Search, II, ch. 18): “The soul is the image of God, because it has a threefold power, yet a single nature. The powers of the human soul are these: memory, reason, and will. By memory it resembles God the Father, by reason God the Son, and by will God the Holy Spirit. And just as in the Holy Trinity there are three Persons, yet not three gods, but one God; so also in the human soul, although there are three mental powers, yet there are not three souls, but one soul.”
In response to this analogy, I would like to put forward the directly opposite thesis: memory, reason, and will, as mental faculties, have no relation to the image of the triune nature in man.

49
Summa – processio amoris (Lat.) – “Summa Theologica,” question 27, part 3 distinguishes two kinds of “processions”: the intellectual procession – the Word, and the procession of the will, and the procession of love… The second, as the lover is in love: so for the inner content of the Word, the things thought are contained in thought. Thus, both the proceeding Word, in other words, is contained in the divine, and so is the procession of love.”
The term “process” is incorrect for Orthodox theology; Bulgakov uses the word “procession” for the translation of this term, however, for evaluating the relationships between the Persons of the Trinity in Catholic theology from an Orthodox perspective, the term “process” in the Divinity is more often used. See, for example:
Vl. Lossky. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Dogmatic Theology. Moscow, 1991;
V. Rozhkov. “Essays on the History of the Roman Catholic Church”, Очерки по истории Римско–Католической Церкви. М., 1994.

50
Schwane. Dogmengeschhichte der mittleren Zeit. p. 177.

51
Theologiae Cursus Completus, t. VIII, Paris, 1841; Wiltassius, De Trinitate, pp. 528, 546.

52
Ex numero – divinarum processionum (Lat.) — “From the number – of divine processions”: from among the distinctions in God that are internally operative. Intellect and will are the immediate grounds of the divine processions.

53
Cf. Schell, Katholische Dogmatik, vol. II.

54
Μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος (Greek) — “Transition to another gender” (a Greek term calqued into Latin logic).

55
Orthodox Thought, I.

56
In the text published in the “Proceedings of the Orthodox Theological Institute”, section 10 is followed by the date (June 1925) and the text of an “Excursus.”

57
Προβολεύς (Greek) — “Emitter,” “One-who-brings-forth”; one of the divine names, energetically correlated with the Divine Essence.

58
Paterndas elspiraiio activa (Lat.) — literally, “fatherhood and active spiration.” The latter category, the most controversial from the Orthodox perspective, is connected with the special position of the hypostasis of the Father in relation to the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit.

59
This principle finds recognition even in Catholic theology (Schell, vol. I, p. 81), although theological practice there does not consistently correspond to it.

60
A closer and more precise account of the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son will be given below, in the special chapter on the Holy Spirit.

61
Filioque (Lat.) — literally, “and from the Son”; an addition to the Creed adopted in Catholicism, signifying that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son. First formulated in 589 at the Council of Toledo. The presence of the filioque is one of the principal dogmatic differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which led to the division of the Churches in 1054.

62
Principium principiatum and principium inprincipiatum (Lat.) — literally, “a principled principle” and “an unprincipled principle”; terms of scholastic theology.

63
St Athanasius the Great (Athanasius of Alexandria, c. 293–373), bishop of Alexandria from 326, Father of the Church. Principal works include Against the Gentiles, On the Incarnation of the Word, and especially the Apologies. His greatest merit lies in his decisive role in the formation of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and in the struggle against Arianism.
St Gregory of Nyssa (c. 332–394), Greek Father of the Church; together with his elder brother St Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen), he formed the core of the Cappadocian circle. Central for him were problems of trinitarian terminology, exegesis, and the doctrine of divine names.
St Maximus the Confessor (580–662), Father of the Church. Principal works include the Ambigua, Mystagogy, Chapters on Love, and Gnostic Chapters. A key participant (and victim) in the Monothelite controversy.
St John of Damascus (c. 675–749), Greek Father of the Church. Principal works include The Fount of Knowledge, Three Treatises Against the Iconoclasts, and Sacred Parallels. His theology is inseparable from the Chalcedonian dogma of the two natures in Christ and from the defense of icons, and is marked by a pronounced Aristotelianism, especially in his use of the doctrine of first and second substance.

64
Origen of Alexandria (c. 182–254), Greek ecclesiastical writer. Principal works: On First Principles, On Prayer, Against Celsus, and extensive exegetical writings. His theology represents an attempt to synthesize ancient philosophy—especially Neoplatonism—with the intuitions of Revelation. Despite his profound influence, he was condemned as a heretic at the local Constantinopolitan council of 553.

65
Filii el spiritus sancti (Lat.) — “of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

66
In actu (Lat.) — actually, in act, in reality.

67
Johannes Eckhart (Meister Eckhart) (c. 1260–1327). His central idea is the existence, alongside the triune God, of the Godhead (Gottheit, Urgottheit), absolute, quality-less, and impersonal. Knowledge of God is possible through the uncreated “spark,” consubstantial with God.
Jakob Böhme (1575–1624): principal works include Aurora and The Great Mystery. His doctrine of the Ungrund (“abyss”), the Godhead in God, and of the world as a dynamic unity of opposites, is close to Eckhart.
Hegel (1770–1831): despite the radical panlogism of his system, its connection with German mysticism—especially Eckhart and Böhme—is undeniable. Bulgakov devotes considerable attention to Hegel, viewing his philosophy as one of the “abstract principles” of European thought as a whole.

68
Gott wird (Ger.) — “God becomes.”

69
This question was raised in the teaching of Joachim of Fiore, who opposed the judgments of Peter Lombard in his Sentences: quoniam quaedam summa res est Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus… Accusing Lombard of introducing a quaternity into the Trinity, Joachim himself fell into tritheism, interpreting the unity of the hypostases as quasi-collective or merely analogical, as many people constitute one people or many believers one Church.

70
Joachim of Fiore (c. 1132–1202): principal works include The Concord of the Old and New Testaments and An Exposition of the Apocalypse. Of particular interest is his doctrine of the three historical “states” of the world: the age of the Father (Old Testament), of the Son (New Testament), and of the Holy Spirit (to begin, according to Joachim, in 1260), in which the Church of Peter, oriented toward power and possession, would be replaced by the Church of John, founded on freedom, love, and peace. This historiosophical conception exerted a strong influence on Vladimir Solovyov and on the thinkers of the “new religious consciousness” of the early twentieth century (Berdyaev, Merezhkovsky, etc.).
Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160), medieval scholastic theologian; principal work: Four Books of Sentences.

71
Gilbert of Poitiers (Gilbertus Porreta, c. 1076–1154) — a medieval theologian and philosopher, representative of the School of Chartres. After the death of Bernard of Chartres he served as chancellor of the School (1126–1137); from 1142 he was Bishop of Poitiers. His principal works are The Book of the Six Principles and commentaries on Boethius.

72
In the definition of this council it is stated: divinitas sit Deus et Deus divinitas.

73
Divinitas sit Deus et Deus divinitas (Lat.) — “Divinity is God, and God is divinity.”

74
γεννηθεντα εκ Πατρος, μονογενή, τουτεσιν εκ της ουσία του Πατρος (Gk.) — “Begotten of the Father, Only-Begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father.”

75
Omnia in divinis sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis oppositio (Lat.) — “All things in the Divine are one, where no opposition of relations intervenes.”

76
(Theologiae cursus completus, p. 529):
“The Son is generator through intellect; and since He Himself is the infinite terminus of this intellection, He exhausts that faculty, so that it cannot produce anything further. But the faculty of will is not yet conceived as exhausted, being posterior. Since therefore the Son receives this will, unexhausted, as the same which the Father possesses, He, together with the Father, produces by that same act the Holy Spirit. For since the procession of the Son precedes the procession of the Holy Spirit, the Son received from the Father a fecund will, by which He rightly produces the Holy Spirit no less than the Father does.” (p. 637)

77
Vis spirativa (from spiratio, “breathing”) — the power of spirating or breathing-forth;
vis generativa (from generatio) — the power of begetting;
deitas — the Godhead as a single substance, the substantiality of the Divine.
These are terms of medieval theology intended to define the relations among the hypostases of the Trinity: the first concerns the relation between the hypostasis of the Father and the hypostasis of the Son in relation to the Holy Spirit; the second concerns the relation between the Father and the Son. The last term is best compared with related early-scholastic terms such as Deus (God, one in three Persons) and Divinitas (Divinity as a predicate of deitas).

78
Ratramnus speaks explicitly of the deitas unita Patris et Filii, from which the Holy Spirit proceeds (cited in Hergenröther, Migne, ser. gr., t. 102, col. 479). Ioannes Theologus (Flor. 18) asserts that the substantia Patris et Filii est principium, per quod spiratur Spiritus Sanctus, the principle by which the Holy Spirit is spirated, and that Father and Son are the spirators (ibid., col. 480).
Sometimes this thesis is expressed more cautiously: not deitas but Deus. Thus, according to the theologian’s reasoning, the Holy Spirit proceeds either insofar as God is Father or insofar as God is God. If the former, then the Holy Spirit would be the Son — which contradicts Revelation; if the latter, then He proceeds also from the Son, since no sign can be conceived by which the Father is God and the Son is not equally God (Hergenröther, ibid., col. 478).
The unavoidable conclusion is this: either Deus designates merely a fund of substance from which the Holy Spirit proceeds, or Deus is a general designation under which the Holy Spirit Himself also falls — and consequently He would proceed from Himself.
The same character marks the foundational argument of Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 36, a. 4, obj. 1):
“If one attends to the spirative power, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son insofar as they are one and spirating by one power, which signifies nature with a property. Nor is it unfitting that one property be in two supposita that share one nature.”
This notion of virtus spirativa as natura cum proprietate undoubtedly corresponds to a certain natural fund of powers and possibilities in the Godhead, which different hypostases possess differently, or within which they arise as relations. A similar line of reasoning is found in Billuart, who maintains that the Father communicates to the Son His nature together with an unexhausted power of spiratio, having exhausted only the vis generativa, so that for the Holy Spirit no power of procession remains.

79
Ratramnus - procession (rus., dat.) — "Ratramnus directly and speaks about (the one Godhead of the Father and the Son), from which proceeds the Holy Spirit… John the Theologian asserted that (the essence of the Father and the Son is the first, from which the Holy Spirit proceeds, the are the foremost guides of the Spirit. Sometimes this thought is expressed more cautiously - not the Godhead, but God, In the first case, the Holy Spirit would be the Son, in the latter case, because the Father is the God, and the Son is also the God. definition, under which the Spirit of the Holy Spirit fits, therefore, He and from Himself the moon is Undoubtedly, such a character has a fundamental argument of Thomas Aquinas ("Summa Theologia". T. I, question 36, part 4, objection 1)". The following is a not quite exact quote from "Summy Theologia", in which the indicated passage looks like this: Dukha, St. The Spirit comes from the Father and the Son together, since they are one; but this is not the unity of nature, since then for St. The spirit would have had one way of origin - from Himself, as he is of the same nature with them. However, they (i.e., the hypostases of the Father and the Son. - Note. Comm.) are united by a single force. It is clear that a single force does not arise from two subjects. Thus, St. The Spirit comes from the Father and the Son, taking into account the differences between one and the other. From Bulgakov: If you carefully consider spiritual energy, the Spirit of St. it occurs from the Father and the Son, therefore there is a single and energetic breath, which is designated as nature in possession. And it is not appropriate for a single force to be in a dual opposition , since it possesses a single nature). This concept of spiritual energy as nature in possession undoubtedly corresponds to some natural fund of forces and opportunities in the Godhead, which they possess in different guises or in which they arise, as relationships. Similar reasoning in (Billarta), where it is indicated that the Father transmits His nature to the Son with the unspent power of spirit creation, which was spent only by the power of birth, for the sake of St. There is no longer any force of departure from the spirit.
Ratramnus (beginning of the 9th century — after 868) — a medieval theologian, the main composition — "Against the objections of the Greeks", dedicated to the refutation of the patr. Fotmya (see note 58).
Ioannus (as in Bulgakov) Theologian — possibly, there is in sight Ioann Parijsky (1260–1306) — monk–Dominican, doctor of the University of Paris, theologian–aristotelic of the school of Aquinas.
Joseph Hergentreter (1824–1890) — Catholic church historian. Apparently, in this and subsequent cases, his fundamental three-volume work "Photius, Patriarch von Konstantinopel" (1867-1869), devoted to the problem of the division of the churches, is cited.

80
The Fourth Lateran Council opened in early November 1215. Its principal concerns were ecclesiastical reform (discipline, ethics, administration) and the evaluation of various heretical teachings from the standpoint of the Roman Church, especially the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore. The Council’s principal document (Firmiter credimus) was promulgated on 1 June 1217.

81
εἰ δὲ αἴτιος ὁ Πατὴρ τῶν ἐξ αὐτοῦ, οὐ τῷ δὲ λόγῳ ὑποστάσεως — Pater quidquid ex se ut ex causa producit, ratione personae, non autem ratione naturae producit (Gk., Lat.) — “The Father, in producing from Himself as from a cause, does so by reason of Person, not by reason of nature.”
St Photius (d. c. 890), Patriarch of Constantinople, states this in his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, entirely devoted to the question of filioque. For Photius, the relations among the hypostases do not constitute the self-being of the Persons; the distinction between the Son as begotten and the Spirit as proceeding suffices to judge filioque a false construction, since the Father does not require the Son in order to bring forth the Spirit.

82
Distinctiones sunt in personis et unitas in natura (Lat.) — “Distinctions are in the Persons, and unity is in the nature.”

83
“The Sentences” — that is, The Four Books of Sentences by Peter Lombard.

84
An Pater generat divinam essentiam, vel ipsum Filium; an essentia generat essentiam, vel ipsa nec genita est (Lat.) — “Does the Father beget the divine essence, or the Son Himself? Does the essence beget essence, or is it itself unbegotten?”

85
The addition ab utroque procedens is made; but how such an ab utroque is possible under this conception remains unknown — indeed, it is directly impossible.

86
The conciliar decree unfortunately speaks of the divine essence as a certain “sum of nature,” which is truly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet itself neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds, since it is Father who begets, Son who is begotten, and Spirit who proceeds. Thus it is taken now as Father, now as Son, now as Spirit, and nothing else remains. Consequently, the Son receives the substance of the Father by generation without division, and Father and Son thus possess one substance; likewise the nature is Father and Son, but not the Holy Spirit.
(Added in a footnote: “and proceeds from both,” but how this is possible under such an understanding remains unexplained.)

87
Not generans, but Pater est generans; it is not begotten — Filius gignitur — “Not it begets, but the Father begets; it is not begotten — the Son is begotten.”

88
Pater ab aeterno generando Filium quam substantiam ei dedit — “The Father from eternity begets the Son by giving Him His substance” (with an unfortunate reference to John 10:30: “I and the Father are one”).

89
St. John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, I, 8.

90
Ibid.

91
Non gignit, non gignitur, non spirat, non spiratur, but only Pater qui general et spirat (Лat.) — “the Holy Spirit does not give birth, is not born, does not bring forth, not the bringing forth of the Holy Spirit, but only the Father, who gives birth and guides the Spirit.”

92
Ibid.

93
St. Gregory the Theologian, Word 29.

94
Only in created being does a real discrepancy exist between personality and substance: substance is the womb of existence, and at the same time the unillumined darkness (not-I), which constantly reveals itself in the I, enters into self-consciousness, and this is created life. The opposition of hypostasis and essence appeared as an auxiliary logical tool in the age of Arian controversies, and the very concept of omoosios has, above all, a negative meaning. It rejects the Arian ουχ εξ ουσίας του Πατρος, and this definition did not acquire a positive significance in the history of dogma. It is significant that the expression ομοουσιος in the Creed is not applied to the Holy Spirit; here, the expression "proceeding from the Father" suffices. Furthermore, the concept of essence (ουσία) is used in the Chalcedonian dogma in the comparison of the divine nature with the human nature, i.e., also correlatively: Christ, in the unity of the hypostases, unites the two natures. This same comparison, in the dogma of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, develops into the doctrine of two wills and two activities in Christ, divine and human.

95
οὐχ ἐξ οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός (Gk.) — “not from the essence of the Father.”

96
Que (Lat.) – a particle or conjunction, most often translated as “and,” “but,” “namely,” “or.” The use of this adversative conjunction in this context instead of the unifying conjunction “et” – “and” shows that we are talking about the ontological difference between the Father and the Son instead of ontological unity.

97
A flagrant violation of this principle is found in the formula of the Council of Florence, where the division of hypostasis and ousia is directly introduced, the elimination of which constitutes the very heart of the dogma of the Holy Trinity: Spiritus Sanctus ex Patre et Filio aeternaliter est, et essentiam suam suumque esse subsistens habet ex Patre simul ex Filio… Et quoniam omnia, quae Patris sunt, Rateripse Unigentio Fitio suo gignendo dedit, praeteresse Patrem, hoc ipsum quod Spiritus Sanctus procedit ex Filio, ipse Filiusa ftitre aeternaliter habet (Denz. 691). The false view of the relationship between hypostasis and essence is also expressed in another formula of the Council of Florence, in the Decretum pro lacobitus, where we read: Haec ires pereonae sunt unus Deus et non tres Dii: quia trium est una substance, una essentia, una natura, una divinitas, una immensitas, una aeternitas, omniaque sunt unum, ubi nonobviat relationis oppositio (D. 703). The formula: trium est una substance, instead of: tres sunt una substance, is not precise and not even directly correct, otherwise the idea of ​​some trans-hypostasis givenness constituting the common property of the three is disguisedly introduced. Such community is not consubstantiality, not an identity of life; rather, it is a kind of co-ownership that presupposes an object of co-ownership, or, once again, a given. And this understanding is further supported by the idea of ​​omnia sunt unum, where there is no relationship of opposition. This false axiom became the foundation of Catholic impersonalism.

98
Spiritus Sanctus – oppositions (Lat.) – “The Holy Spirit is eternal from the Father and the Son, and has its own self-existence from the Father and at the same time from the Son… And since everything that is the Father, that passes to the Son begotten by the Father, that proceeds , is of the Father, so the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, since the Son is co-eternal with the Father Danz, 691. The false point of view on the relationship between hypostasis and essence is also expressed in another formula of the Florentine Council, in the Decree to the Jacobites, where we read: Moreover, the three hypostases are one God and not three Gods: because the Trinity is one substance, one essence, one nature, one divinity, one infinity, one eternity, all are one, except for hypostatic relations (D. 703). The formula “Trinity is one substance” instead of “three are one substance” is not precise and not even directly correct, otherwise the idea of ​​some kind of trans-hypostatic givenness, constituting the common property of the three, is disguisedly introduced… And this very understanding is supported by the following, where the idea of ​​all being one is directly introduced, where there is no relationship of opposition.”
Council of Florence (1431 - 1445) – at this Council an attempt was made to resolve the dogmatic contradictions between the various Christian churches, including between the Catholic and Orthodox. The Council was convened on the initiative of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Martin V and began its work on February 1, 1431 in Basel, where the first 25 sessions were held, however, due to the death of Pope Martin (d. February 20, 1431) and certain changes associated with the beginning of the pontificate of Eugenius IV, the activities of the Council were resumed only at the beginning of 1438 in Ferrara, where the Orthodox Church joined the Catholic Church, and then, already in Florence (since January 1439), representatives of other Christian churches (Armenian, Coptic, Bosnian, Syrian, Maronite (Cypriot), etc. At the session of July 6, 1439 in Florence, a decree was adopted on the unification of the Roman and Greek churches, which did not, however, give the desired effect from either the political or dogmatic points of view. view. The last session of the Council took place in Rome on August 7, 1445. In the domestic research tradition, it is customary to distinguish between the Councils of Basel and Florence both because of the difference in their programs (for example, the main tasks of the Council of Basel were not so much the tasks of uniting the churches, but the need to determine the position of the church on the movement of Jan Hus and the Taborites), and because of political problems (the conflict with the Council of Basel of Pope Eugene VI, the proclamation of the antipope Felix V, etc.). Decretum pro Jacobitus is a document intended to consolidate the dogmatic unity of the Roman Catholic and Antiochian (Jacobite) churches. Jacobites (or representatives of the Antiochian church) are Syrian Monophysites who did not recognize the decrees of the IV Council of Chalcedon of 451 on the two natures in Christ. The name comes from the name of Jacob (Jacob) Baradaeus, Bishop of Edessa from 542, who founded the Monophysite hierarchy.

99
The same relation applies to the Holy Spirit: “He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is Mine” (John 16:14–15). The Father is revealed in the Son, and the Son is proclaimed by the Spirit — yet all is the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. In this sense one may understand St Basil’s saying that “the Son is the image of the Father, and the Holy Spirit the image of the Son.”

100
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) – major works: Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Pagana, also called Summa Philosophiae.
St Thomas’s doctrine of essence, formulated in Books I–II of the Summa contra Gentiles and in Book I of the Summa Theologiae, is in general based on the Aristotelian antithesis between the potential—open to change and marked by unfinishedness—and the actual, the principle of order and determinacy (“pure potentiality” [matter] and “pure actuality” [God] constitute the two poles of being), as well as on Aristotle’s distinction between first and second substance, interpreted as substance and accident. This interpretation later became dominant not only in the doctrine of the Catholic Church but also as a commonplace of early modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza).

101
δόξα (Gk., pl. δόξαι), opinion, is one of the most important categories of ancient Greek philosophy, introduced by the founder of the Eleatic school, Parmenides. In Parmenides’ system the “world of doxa” — “the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true certainty” (B 1, 30) — is opposed to the “world of truth” (ἀλήθεια), which is the identity of being and thinking, the thinking of what is. It should be noted, however, that the world of truth and the world of opinion do not differ in fact: they are one and the same world, but apprehended by different subjects — the perfect divine or the imperfect human. Unlike the eternal and immovable world of truth, the world of doxa is in a state of continual becoming, being a mixture of being and non-being, truth and falsehood, and is directly connected with the sphere of language, which names the one Being by many names. Parmenides’ constructions exerted enormous influence on philosophy as a whole and in particular on Plato, who introduced the distinction between the world of ideas and the world of becoming. Plato, however, unlike Parmenides, proposed to regard the world of becoming as a likeness, an imprint of the paradigm — the intelligible world — as the “other” of the world of ideas, a cosmic embodiment of the Platonic triad of the One, Intellect, and Soul. Plato’s doxa is therefore rather a synonym for the sensible motley of the world, prior to its true apprehension in knowledge, than a symbol of non-being.

102
Συμβεβηκος (Gk.) — a term going back to Aristotle (the category of “accident”), used in the theology of St Basil the Great to denote the “accidental” or secondary characteristics of hypostases, as distinct from their properly “hypostatic” characteristics, i.e. those directly connected with the divine essence.

103
The following judgments (ch. LXVI) are marked by a substantial personalism: “The hypostatic union yields one composite hypostasis, which has entered into union with nature, while the differences of the natures participating in the union and their proper natural properties are preserved unconfusedly and immutably. The hypostasis, however, in relation to itself has no hypostatic difference, since the differences of each of the natures entering the union are transferred to it — differences by which each is distinguished from things of the same species. Thus it is, for example, with body and soul. From soul and body there arises one composite hypostasis (sic!), say Peter or Paul; yet in it both complete natures are preserved — the nature of the soul and the nature of the body — and their specific differences likewise are not confused.”

104
The same distinction is expressed by the Latin scholastic Boethius as follows: τὰ κατ’ οὐσίαν μὲν τοῖς καθόλου δύνανται, ἐν τοῖς κατὰ μέρος ὑφίσταται — est essentiale in universalibus quidem esse possunt, in solis vero individuis et particularibus substant (Migne, Patrologia Latina, t. LXIV, Boethius, t. II, De duabus naturis Christi, col. 1344). Boethius formulated the definition of hypostasis adopted by scholasticism: persona est naturae individua substantia.

105
Substantia (Lat.) — This is substantia – “The Latin scholastic Boethius expresses this distinction thus: there is the essential in the universal, and at the same time there is a power that truly exists only in the individual and particular. (Ming, Latin series, vol. 44, Boethius, vol. 2, 1, “On God and the Dual Nature of Christ”, column 1344) 1. Boethius is the author of the definition of hypostasis accepted by scholasticism: a person is an individual substance of a rational nature” (trans. T. Yu. Borodai). Boethius (c. 480–524) – main works: “Commentary on Porphyry”, “Consolation of Philosophy”, “Book on the Trinity”, etc. Boethius’s constructions had a huge influence on the formation of Latin patristics and scholasticism.

106
Leontius of Byzantium (d. 590) — an Eastern Christian theologian, a follower of Origen. Principal works: Against the Nestorians and Eutychians, Thirty Chapters against Severus of Antioch, Against the Monophysites. In Leontius’ work, the critique of Monophysitism rests on precise conceptual and terminological innovations; in particular, he introduced the term ἀνυπόστατος (“non-hypostatic”), applicable in cases where it is necessary to fix the moment of the union of essence (οὐσία) with hypostasis, which makes it possible to speak of the composite hypostasis of Jesus Christ.

107
Cf. Loofs, Leontius von Byzanz, Leipzig, 1887, p. 63 (Texte und Untersuchungen III, 1–2).

108
An exception in this respect is St Gregory of Nyssa, who in his doctrine of genus and species clearly inclines from Aristotelianism toward Platonism, though without carrying it through consistently: “As there are many gold staters but one gold, so in human nature there are many individual men — for example, Peter, James, and John — yet the man in them is one… no one will fall into the supposition of a plurality of humanities or imagine that many human natures are signified, since the name of the nature is expressed in the singular.”
“And just as by the words people, crowd, army, assembly, all are named in the singular, though each name implies a multitude, so too man, in the strict sense, may properly be called one, although many are found who belong to the same nature” (To Ablabius: That There Are Not Three Gods, IV).

109
Cf. also St Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius, etc., 130.

110
The same thought may be confirmed by the history of Christology, in particular by the Chalcedonian dogma, which consists in the recognition in Christ of two natures — divine and human — in the one divine hypostasis of the Logos. The concept of hypostasis available to Eastern theology does not in itself make it possible to expound this dogma. St John of Damascus, summing up Eastern patristics, speaks of the “composite” hypostasis of Christ as uniting the hypostatic properties of the two natures (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III, 7).

111
ὕπαρξις does not depend on τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως (Gk.) — “existence itself (the very being of the person) does not depend on the mode of existence.”

112
The axiom causa aequat effectum has force only under the condition rebus sic stantibus — the Latin citations in the Russian text are inaccurate. Correctly: the axiom causa aequat effecta (“the cause is adequate to the effects,” i.e. “all is predetermined”) is valid only under the condition rebus dictantibus (“as the things themselves require”).

113
In the Godhead omnia sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis oppositio, and sola relatio multiplicat Trinitatem — “In the Godhead all things are one where the opposition of relations does not intervene, and only relation multiplies the Trinity.”

114
S. Th. — et idem (Lat.): “The real hypostatic relation existing in God is a second essential nature, or a second intelligible relation; it is revealed in the relation introduced from the standpoint of hypostatic distinction, but not introduced into the names of essence. Therefore the Father, who is in God, is not merely hypostatic distinction and essence, but both.”

115
Hypostasis is defined as relative: St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 28, art. 3: “It is necessary that there be in God a real distinction, not according to absolute reality, which is essence, in which there is supreme unity and simplicity, but according to relative reality.”

116
Hypostasis is defined as relative: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Section I, Question 28, Part 3: It is necessary that in God there be a real distinction, not as a second absolute nature, which is essence, but as the Sum of simple unities, as a second relative nature.

117
Relatio autem in divinis non est sicut accidens inhaerens in subjeeto, sed est ipsa divina essentia: unde est subsistens, sicut essentia divina subsistit. Sicut ergo Deitas est Deus, ita paternitas divina est Deus Pater, qui est persona divina. Persona igitur divina significant relationem ut subsistentiam. (ST I, q. 29, art. 4).
“Relation in the Godhead is not an accident inhering in a subject, but is the divine essence itself; hence it is subsistent, just as the divine essence subsists. Therefore, as the Godhead is God, so divine paternity is God the Father, who is a divine Person. Thus the divine Person signifies relation as subsistence.”

118
Relatio – Qu. XXIX, art. IV (Lat.) – “Thus, relations in the Deity itself are not accidents contained in the subject, but are the divine essence itself: that is, self-existence, therefore, the divine essence is self-existent. Thus, therefore, the Deity is God, and the paternal divinity is God the Father, who is also the divine hypostasis. Thus, the divine hypostasis is designated through relation and self-existence. – Question 29, part 4.”

119
Qu. XXX art. II; plures personae sunt plures relationes subsistens ab invicem realiter dislinctae. Realis autem distinctio inter relationes divinas non est nici oppositions rciativae. Ergo oportet duas relationes divinas oppositas ad duas personas pertinere. Paterninas ergo et filiatio, cum sint oppositae relstiones, ad duas personas ex nesessitate pertinent. Paternitas ergo subsistens est persona Patris; et filitatio subsistens est persona Fiiii.
ST I, q. 30, art. 2: “There are several persons are several subsisting relations really distinct from one another. But the real distinction between divine relations is not merely a relational opposition. Therefore it is necessary that two opposite divine relations pertain to two persons. Therefore paternal and filiation, since they are opposite relations, pertain to two persons by necessity. Therefore subsisting paternity is the person of the Father; and subsisting filiation is the person of the Son.”

120
Qu. XXX Art. II – Filii – “Question 30, Part II… the multitude of hypostases is a multitude of distinctive relationships, truly distinct from one another. The very real differences between the divine hypostases are nothing other than hypostatic relationships. Therefore, two hypostatic relationships must belong to two hypostases. Consequently, fatherhood and sonship, since they are hypostatic relationships, necessarily belong to two persons (hypostases). Consequently, the distinctive existence of fatherhood is the hypostasis of the Father, and the distinctive existence of sonship is the hypostasis of the Son.”

121
There are two famous philosophers named Hartmann: the neo-Kantian philosopher Nikolai von Hartmann (his main work was “New Paths of Ontology" (“Neue Wege der Ontoligie”, 1842) and Eduard von Hartmann, the author of the so-called philosophy of the unconscious – an irrationalistic concept close to the constructions of Schopenhauer and the early Schelling. For E. von Hartmann, the doctrine of the unconscious is a kind of synthetic in relation to Hegel's panlogism and Schopenhauer's voluntarism; the “absolute spirit” is “unconscious”, “will” and “idea” are equivalent attributes that are in constant interaction. Undoubtedly, here Bulgakov has in mind precisely E. von Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious.

122
Qu. XXXVI, art, IV: The Father and the Son are one in all things, and there is no opposition of relation between them.
Qu. XL, art. I: Person and property are the same thing; yet they differ in reason; personal properties are the same as persons, in the same way that the abstract is the same as the concrete; for they are subsisting persons. Thus paternity is the Father himself, and the Son is the Son, and the procession is the Holy Spirit. But non-personal properties are the same as persons in another way of identity, in the same way that what is attributed to God is his essence. Thus therefore the common spiration is the same as the person of the Father and the person of the Son, not that it is one person subsisting by itself; but just as one essence is in both persons, so also is one property.
Qu. XL, art II: Persons are the relations themselves subsisting…

123
Propter – trinus. (Lat.) – Because – three – “Since there is one essence in the deity, God is one; since there are three persons in him, God is triune.”
Question XXXVI, art. IV: – relationis oppositio (Lat.) – opposition of relationship – “Question 36, chapter 4. The Father and the Son are both one, in which there is no difference in their hypostatic relations.”
Question XL, art. I: – properitas (Lat.) – speed – “Question 40, part I. Hypostasis and energy are one and the same thing, and yet differ in secondary relations; the hypostatic energies are the same in the hypostases, and the relation that is in the abstract is the same in the concrete; for they are personal self-existence, as paternity is also the Father, and sonship is the Son, and procession is the Holy Spirit. The energies themselves are not hypostases, but the hypostases coincide with secondary relations, which, as attributes of God, are this essence. Thus, the common spiritual creation is one and the same in the hypostasis of the Father and in the hypostasis of the Son, but not one hypostasis has self-existence from itself, but one essence is in two hypostases, and also one energy.”
Question XL, art II: persons are themselves subsisting relations… (Lat.) – “hypostases are also self-existent relationships…”

124
Paternitas subsistens est persona Patris; et filiatio subsistens est persona Filii (S. Th. I, qu. 30 art. 11) (Lat.) – “Fatherhood is the hypostasis of the Father, and sonship is the hypostasis of the Son.” (Summa Theologica, Vol. I, Question 30, Part II).

125
πρώτη οὐσία, δευτέρα οὐσία (Gk.) – The first and second essence (according to Aristotle);
quidditas (Lat.) — “whatness,” one of the fundamental categories of scholasticism, designating the formal actualization of being.

126
Persona constat ex essentia et proprietate (Lat.) — “The hypostasis consists of essence and property (power, energy).”

127
Relations in the Godhead constitute hypostases and thus produce subsistence, while the divine essence remains indivisible (ST I, q. 28, ad 7).

128
In Catholic theology, Boethius's definition is commonly repeated: A person is an individual substance of rational nature (persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia—Latin), but it is so ambiguous and unclear that it itself requires definition. Apparently, the logical emphasis is on the word "individua."

129
Persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia (Lат.) — A person is an individual substance of rational nature – the famous statement of Boethius: Boethius. Against Eutyches and Nestorius // Boethius. “Consolation of Philosophy” and other treatises. Moscow, 1990. P. 175.

130
This consciousness sometimes breaks through even in Catholic theology. Henrich asks himself in what sense the designation “person” is common to the three persons, and answers: “it goes without saying, only in our concept, insofar as we express in the common concept the incommunicable being in itself and by itself, which is inherent in each of the three persons in their own way of being, Father, Son, and Spirit” (cf. S. Th. 1, q 30, ar. 4c (199). It is clear that the very essence of the person is not seen here – the self-conscious I, which is triune in the Divinity and similar in each of the Divine Persons. Cf. also Schell, Kath. Dogmatik, Bd. III, pp. 55, 65. On the contrary, cf. Bd. II. II. 1–10 Abth.

131
In the same Heinrich (l, p. 199) we find the following judgment: in God, “personality and being are not really different, but only ratione rationata… both are in fact identical… God is an absolute being, and he has rationem absoluti… but it is not the same being that has relationem relativorum”, “The divine being, taken absolutely (secundum esse absolutum), is not designated by person or hypostasis” (197).

132
The same Heinrich has hypostasis.

133
S. Theol., q. 28, art. III: there must be a real distinction, not indeed according to the absolute thing, which is the essence, in which there is the highest unity and simplicity, but according to the relative thing.
Ibid. q. 29 an. IV But the relation in the divine is not as an accident inherent in the subject, but is the divine essence itself; whence it is subsisting, as the divine essence subsists– Therefore as the Being is God, so the divine paternity is God the Father, who is the divine person, therefore the divine person signifies relation as subsistence.
Ibid. q. 30 art. II: Several persons are several subsisting relations really distinct from one another. For the real distinction between divine relations is nothing but relative oppositions. Therefore it is necessary to attribute two opposite relations to two persons. Therefore paternity and sonship, since they are opposite relations, pertain to two persons by necessity. Therefore, subsisting paternity is the person of the Father, and subsisting filiation is the person of the Son.

134
S. Theol. – relativam (Lat.) – see note 80. Ibid. q. 29 art. IV subsistentia (Lat.) – see note Ibid. q. 30 art. II – persona filii (Lat.) – see note 82.

135
Spiratio activa and passiva (Lat.) – spiratio (i.e., the spiritualization, procession, and entry of the Holy Spirit. It is very difficult to find an adequate Russian-language term; it is no coincidence that Bulgakov himself uses a tracing from the Latin: spiratio) active and passive.
Hence, Spirator – literally: Spiritual Guide, Leader of the Holy Spirit – a false construction that, according to Bulgakov, arose in Catholic dogmatics due to the Filioque.

136
Ad invicem (Lat.) – alternately, in turn, mutually.

137
Gene ratio activa and passiva, or, what is the same, pateritas and filiatio (Lat.) – “birth (generation) active and passive, or, what is the same, fatherhood and sonship.”

138
This view has a talented and interesting, albeit obscure, metaphysical exposition in Schell. Die kathol. Dogmat., BD II. Space does not allow for a critical analysis.

139
In divinis – oppositionis (Lat.) – “in the Divinity, community is one, but does not contradict hypostatic relations – is incorrect and must be replaced by the opposite: in God, community is trinity, and that is precisely why it is the cause of hypostatic relations.”

140
Relatio – relationes (Lat.) – “the relationship of opposite multiplies the trinity, and it should be said the opposite: the trinity multiplies the relationships .”

141
Cf., for example, even such a serious theologian as Scheeben, Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, 1, 2–tes Buch, N 120.

See also

• 1000 years. Christ the King. Bulgakov, Sergei
• 1000 years. Kingdom of God will come. Berdyaev, Nikolai
• Communism. XX Century. Russia. Communism in Russia. Berdyaev, Nikolai

Links

• Wikipedia: Sergei Bulgakov

Bibliography

• "Sergei Bulgakov" on Google Books