In this article I have been exploring the ideas of our “Fathers in the Faith” with regard to the Eastern Church’s ideas about the role of Christ as our Savior. If Athanasius and Cyril, by defending the divinity of Christ and the unity of his being, provided Christian spirituality with its essential basis, their names and their messages remained somewhat controversial even after their deaths. One of the major reasons for the bitter theological debates that followed was that zealous followers of the two great masters tended to freeze their doctrines into verbal formulas. These were accepted literally and out of the context provided by the spiritual experience of the catholic (meaning universal and not the western Church) tradition and the theology of the masters themselves. The struggle of Athanasius centered on the Nicaean creed and, in particular, the Greek term homoousios (which means consubstantial), used in that creed to affirm the common divine “essence” or “substance” of the Father and the Son. But the same term was used by Sabellians or modalists, who indeed interpreted “consubstantiality” as incompatible with the Trinitarian revelation of God. For Sabellians, to say that the Father and the Son are of “one essence” meant that God was not three persons, but a unique essence with only three aspects or “modes” of manifestation. Thus, the Nicaean and Athanasian formulation of the Christian experience – true as it was in its opposition to Arianism – needed further terminological and conceptual elaboration. Indeed Athanasius and the Fathers realized that all words have nuances and they were extremely careful to find the exact words to express what they, and therefore we Christians believe about God. In the Trinity there are, according to our belief, three distinct and complete Persons and the Son and the Spirit and not just different and unique manifestations of the One Father-Creator.

Indeed the needed elaboration was provided by the Cappadocian fathers with their doctrine of the three divine hypostases, or really distinct persons. It did not imply any disavowal of Athanasius but actually a more sophisticated and nuanced use of Greek philosophical terms. Indeed the Cappadocians – truly better versed than Athanasius in ancient Greek thought – were more successful than he was in showing the incompatibility between biblical trinitarianism and Greek philosophical categories!