Over the past few years, I
have provided a number of selections from Eastern Orthodox scholars/theologians
concerning 'the monarchy of God the Father' and the doctrine of
the Trinity. In this post I expand some of the excerpts, and add a few more.
Boris Bobrinskoy (The Mystery of the Trinity, 1999) -
The
paternity of the Father is unique, ineffable, perfect, not only the mystery of
the relation between the Father and the Son, but also the archetypal foundation
of all human fatherhood, source of the perfect grace coming from on high, from
the Father of lights (Jm 1:17): "For this reason I bow my knees before the
Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Page
262).
Following
the Cappadocians, the patristic tradition differentiates in the mystery of the
Father between His "absolute," negative property of being
ungenerated, and His "relative" and positive property of Paternity.
The
proprium of the Hypostasis of the Father is to be "without cause,"
without "beginning." These negative terms carry all the weight of the
Uniqueness of the Father, who is the only one not to receive His origin in the
divinity from another Hypostasis. But these terms do not suffice, and the
concept of "Ungenerated" specifies still more the unique character of
that One who does not have origin.
"The
Father is uncaused (anaitios) and ungenerated (agennētos); He is
not from another, but He has being from Himself [i.e. autotheos]; and
whatsoever He has, He does not have from another." [3]
3. St. John Damascene, De
fide orthodoxa, I.8, PG 94:821D. (Page 263)
...the Father is not only
"uncaused" and "ungenerated," but he is the
"cause," the "principle" (archē) not only of the being
of creatures, but also of the trinitarian Hypostases of the Son and of the
Spirit. (Page 264)
St.
Gregory Nazianzen said, "I want to call the Father greater (than the Son);
this expression "greater" refers to cause, not to essence, because to
those who are like essence (tōn homoousiōn) there is no greater or less
in the point of essence.) [5]
5. Oratio XL., In
sanctum baptisma, 43, PG 36:419BC. (Page 264)
Causality, then, belongs
properly to the Father. This is the fundamental principle of the
"monarchy". (Page 265)
The Monarchy of the Father
proclaims, by necessity, the nontemporal origin of the Son and the Spirit. (Page 265)
The Father is the sole
cause of the Godhead... (Page 266)
Thus, the oneness of God
is placed not only on the level of the nature common to the Three, but on the
basis of the personal relation or origin from the Father. (Page 266)
Vladmir Lossky (Orthodox Theology, Eng. trans. 1978, 2nd
ed.) -
The term
"monarch" for the Father is current in the great theologians of the
fourth century. It means that the very source of divinity is personal. The
Father is divinity, but precisely because he is the Father, He confers it in
its fullness on the two other persons. The latter take their origin from the
Father, μόνη ἄρχή, single principle, whence the term
"monarchy," the divinity-source," as Dionysius the Areopagite
says of the Father. It is from this indeed that springs—this that is rooted—the
identical, unshared, but differently communicated divinity of the Son and the
Holy Spirit. (Page 46)
John Meyendorff (Byzantine Theology, 2nd ed, 1983) -
The same personalistic
emphasis appears in the Greek Fathers' insistence on the "monarchy"
of the Father. Contrary to the concept which prevailed in the post-Augustinian
West and in Latin Scholasticism, Greek theology attributes the origin of
hypostatic "subsistence" to the hypostasis of the Father—not
to the common essence. The Father is the "cause" (aitia) and
the "principle" (archē) of the divine nature, which is in the
Son and in the Spirit. What is even more striking is the fact that this
"monarchy" of the Father is constantly used by the Cappadocian
Fathers against those who accuse them of "tritheism": "God is
on," writes Basil, "because the Father is one." (Page 183)
John Zizioulas (Being As Communion, 1985) -
Among the Greek Fathers
the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological "principal" or
"cause" of the being and life of God does not consist in the one
substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the
Father. The one God is not the one substance but the Father, who is the
"cause" both of the generation of the Son and the procession of the
Spirit. (Pages 40, 41)
John Behr -
So how can Christians believe
in and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and yet claim that
there is only one God, not three? How can one reconcile monotheism with
trinitarian faith?
My comments here follow
the structure of revelation as presented in Scripture and reflected upon by the
Greek Fathers of the fourth century, the age of trinitarian debates. To avoid
the confusion into which explanations often fall, it is necessary to
distinguish between: the one God; the one substance common to Father, Son and
Holy Spirit; and the one-ness or unity of these Three.
The Father alone is the
one true God. This keeps to the
structure of the New Testament language about God, where with only a few
exceptions, the world “God” (theos) with an article (and so being used, in
Greek, as a proper noun) is only applied to the one whom Jesus calls Father,
the God spoken of in the scriptures. This same fact is preserved in all ancient
creeds, which begin: I believe in one God, the Father…
“For us there is one God,
the Father… and one Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 8:6).
The proclamation of the
divinity of Jesus Christ is made no so much by describing Him as “God” (theos
used, in Greek, without an article is as a predicate, and so can be used of
creatures; cf. John 10:34-35), but by recognizing Him as “Lord” (Kyrios).
Beside being a common
title (“sir”), this word had come to be used, in speech, for the
unpronounceable, divine, name of God Hiself, YHWH. When Paul states that God
bestowed upon the crucified and risen Christ the
“name above every name”
(Phil 2:9),
this is an affirmation
that this one is all that YHWH Himself is, without being YHWH. This is again affirmed in the creeds.
“And in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God… true God of true God.”
According to the Nicene
creed, the Son is
“consubstantial with the
Father.”
St Athanasius, the Father
who did more than anyone else to forge Nicene orthodoxy, indicated that
“what is said of the
Father is said in Scripture of the Son also, all but His being called Father”
(On the Synods, 49).
It is important to note
how respectful such theology is of the total otherness of God in comparison
with creation: such doctrines are regulative of our theological language, not a
reduction of God to a being alongside other beings. It is also important to
note the essential asymmetry of the relation between the Father and the Son:
the Son derives from the Father; He is, as the Nicene creed put it, “of the
essence of the Father” – they do not both derive from one common source. This
is what is usually referred to as the Monarchy of the Father.
St Athanasius also began
to apply the same argument used for defending the divinity of the Son, to a
defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit: just as the Son Himself must be
fully divine if He is to save us, for only God can save, so also must Holy
Spirit be divine if He is to give life to those who lie in death. Again there
is an asymmetry, one which also goes back to Scripture: we receive the Spirit
of Him who raised Jesus from the dead as the Spirit of Christ, one which
enables us to call on God as “Abba.” Though we receive the Spirit through
Christ, the Spirit proceeds only from the Father, yet this already implies the
existence of the Son, and therefore that the Spirit proceeds from the Father
already in relation to the Son (see especially St Gregory of Nyssa, To
Ablabius: That there are not Three Gods).
So there is one God and
Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, and one Holy Spirit, three “persons”
(hypostases) who are the same or one in essence (ousia); three persons equally
God, possessing the same natural properties, yet really God, possessing the
same natural properties, yet really distinct, known by their personal
characteristics. Besides being one in essence, these three persons also exist
in total one-ness or unity.
There are three
characteristics ways in which this unity is described by the Greek Fathers. The
first is in terms of communion:
“The unity [of the three]
lies in the communion of the Godhead”
as St Basil the Great puts
it (On the Holy Spirit 45). The emphasis here on communion acts as a safeguard
against any tendency to see the three persons as simply different
manifestations of the one nature; if they were simply different modes in which
the one God appears, then such an act of communion would not be possible. The
similar way of expressing the divine unity is in terms of “coinherence”
(perichoresis): the Father, Son and Holy Spirit indwell in one another, totally
transparent and interpenetrated by the other two. This idea clearly stems from Christ’s
words in the Gospel of John:
“I am in the Father and
the Father in me” (14:11).
Having the Father dwelling
in Him in this way, Christ reveals to us the Father, He is “the image of the
invisible God” (Col 1:15).
The third way in which the
total unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is manifest is in their unity of
work or activity. Unlike three human beings who, at best, can only cooperate,
the activity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one. God works, according to
the image of St Irenaeus, with His two Hands, the Son and the Spirit.
More importantly,
“the work of God,”
according to St Irenaeus, “is the fashioning of man” into the image and
likeness of God (Against the Heretics 5.15.2),
a work which embraces,
inseparably, both creation and salvation, for it is only realized in and by the
crucified and risen One: the will of the Father is effected by the Son in the
Spirit.
Such, then, is how the
Greek Fathers, following Scripture, maintained that there is but one God,
whose Son and Spirit are equally God, in a unity of essence and of
existence, without compromising the uniqueness of the one true God. (From the
online article, The Trinity: Scripture and the Greek Fathers - link
- bold emphasis added)
Thomas Hopko -
... in the Bible, in the
creeds, and in the Liturgy, it’s very important, really critically important,
to note and to affirm and to remember that the one God in whom we believe,
strictly speaking, is not the Holy Trinity. The one God is God the Father. In
the Bible, the one God is the Father of Jesus Christ. He is God who sends his
only-begotten Son into the world, and Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
Then, of course, in a parallel manner, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the Spirit of God,
that the Holy Spirit, being the Spirit of God, is therefore also the Spirit of
Christ, the Messiah, because the Christ is the Son of God, upon whom God the
Father sends and affirms his Holy Spirit. (From the online transcript of the
podcast, The Holy Trinity - link)
Grace
and peace,
David
