TRINITY. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity can be best expressed in the words "The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they are not three Gods but one God . . . for like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself (singillatim) to be God and Lord, so we are forbidden by the Catholic religion to say that there be three Gods or three Lords" (Quicunque vult). Though this doctrine was one of the first to be dealt with by modern methods of "comparative religion" (as long ago as when Gibbon wrote, "300 s.c., The Logos taught in Alexandria, A.D. 97. Re vealed by St. John")—and though it is natural to ask its relation to certain triple arrangements of Pagan deities, to Jewish doctrines of "Wisdom" and the "Word," to the Hegelian triad "The Idea: Nature : Spirit"—it is probably less well adapted to this treatment than other Christian doctrines. At any rate the first step is to discover what, in using this prima facie paradoxical language, the Christian Church believed itself to be asserting.
Here a common misunderstanding must be cleared away. "The Creed"—it has been suggested (see Hibbert Journal, xxiv. No. I) —"means that there is only one being that can, with strict theo logical correctness, be called 'God,' viz., the Trinity as a whole; but each of the three persons can be called 'God' in a looser sense." This suggestion is offered as a short method of "rendering con sistent" the statements of the Creed. But the paradox is not thus lightly to be got rid of. Plainly the Church did not regard itself as lowering the conception of the Father, so that He should become merely one Component of a Divine Whole. "The Father," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "is as great as the whole Trinity," and ex plains that in such matters "greatness signifies perfection of nature and pertains to essence" (Summa Theol. xxx. 1, xlii. 4).
Catechumenos, sec. 8) "of fire as a father, light as a son. See: we have found coevals : and it is easy to see which begets which." The meaning of these comparisons is plain. They teach that the whole Divine nature or essence is in each of the Three Persons. The impress, for example, is a full reproduction of the character of the seal. They teach also that the Divine persons are inseparable. We are dealing both with a "generical" and a "numerical" unity (cf. Aug., F. and S., sec. 4; Modern Churchman, vol. xv . 12, 675-7; Webb, God and Personality, 69n).
Thus, side by side with language declaring that Father and Son are each in the full sense God, there is other language—not in tended to be inconsistent with the former—which implies that the Son is "necessary to the completeness of the Godhead." The Son, we are told, is not "external" to the Father (Athan., Dis course I., ch. v.), does not "accrue" to the Father from without, but is "of the Substance of the Father." If the Son, it is argued, were not eternal, the Father would not always be Father, and this absence of fatherhood, it is implied, would be a defect (cf. the words consortium, solitaries, S. T. xxxi., 2 and 3). What is the value of these speculations? They cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the context in which they grew up. This context may be summed up in a sentence. Christians, who were willing to die for Monotheism, deliberately held Jesus to be worthy of full Divine worship; and offered the phrase Consubstantialem patri as the intellectual justification of this attitude. In contact with the "Spirit" (who was held to speak in the heart of the indi vidual Christian) they believed themselves to be in contact with God. In contact with Jesus as Master, they likewise found them selves in contact with God; but with no divided allegiance, since they conceived the Universe—in spite of its manifest evils—as the work of the Father of Jesus Christ, and so the embodiment of the same Holy Will which expressed itself most clearly in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit.