In the last issue of this article, I began sharing information about how the Church sees the unity that exists within the Trinity. As you know, the idea of the Trinity finally emerged in the Christian community when the Church Fathers finally began to truly      understand who Jesus is. Once the Church knew Jesus to be God Himself incarnate as a human, they had to conceive a new understanding of God Himself.

The first issue they had to deal with is how to still maintain that there is only ONE God – they couldn’t   revert to polytheism, the approach of pagans, and yet they believed that Jesus, Who was also human, was also God. Then, after they became aware of the Holy Spirit, they had to find some way in which they could maintain monotheism and yet   account for Jesus and the Holy Spirit. As I shared in the last Bulletin, the Greek Fathers reasoned that truly the function of the divine Persons corresponds to the place each occupies in the bosom of the Trinity. They were able to devise a statement which states that while there are Three Persons in the Godhead, there is only ONE God.

Spiritual writers have always preferred the Greek way expressed in traditional formulas which summarize it in two movement, one downward: the Father creates man through the Son and sanctifies him in the Spirit; the other upward: man gives glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This, the Fathers, said is the royal highway of human deification. St. Basil wrote: Thus the way of the knowledge of God lies in the One Spirit through the One Son to the One Father, and conversely, natural goodness, inherent holiness, and royal dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit.

It should be noted that this approach created no religious problems as did the Latin concept where the Persons remain in the background. However, it had to wrestle with the problem of the oneness of God which seemed to be unveiled here in an entirely new and mysterious manner, as the unifying force of divine love.

As the Eastern Church has always maintained, we cannot comprehend God with our human intellect. All we can truly say about God is what He is not. So the Eastern Church sought to speak about the function of each Person in the Godhead and not define God, if that makes any sense. The Church came to know the function of each Person through experience. The Church had a memory of Jesus and also felt, in a real way, the movement of the Holy Spirit and from Judaism they knew God as Creator.                          Христос Воскресe