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of God itself, which reflects itself in its revelation, and can be understood only so far as it manifests itself in its works and words. The divine nature thus came to be conceived, not as an abstract, blank unity, but as an infinite fulness of life; and the Christian idea of God (as John of Damascus has already remarked), in this respect, combined Jewish monotheism with the truth, which lay at the bottom of even the heathen polytheism, though distorted and defaced there beyond recognition. Then for the more definite illustration of this trinity of essence, speculative church teachers of subsequent times appealed to all sorts of analogies in nature, particularly in the sphere of the finite mind, which was made after the image of the divine, and thus to a certain extent authorizes such a parallel. They found a sort of triad in the universal law of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; in the elements of the syllogism; in the three persons of grammar; in the combination of body, soul, and spirit in man; in the three leading faculties of the soul; in the nature of intelligence and knowledge, as involving a union of the thinking subject and the thought object; and in the nature of love, as likewise a union between the loving and the loved ("ubi amor, ibi trinitas," says St. Augustine). These speculations began with Origen and Tertullian; they were pursued by Athanasius and Augustine, and by the scholastics and the mystics; and they are not yet exhausted. For the holy Trinity, though the most evident, is yet the deepest of mysteries, and can be adequately explained by no analogies from finite and earthly things.

The theological activity of the ante-Nicene, and even of the Nicene period, centred around the divinity of Christ, while the divinity of the Holy Ghost was far less clearly and satisfactorily developed, and was not made the subject of special controversy at all, until the middle of the fourth century, in the dispute with the Macedonians or Pneumatomachians. Hence in the Apostles' Creed only one article (credo in Spiritum Sanctum) is devoted to the third person of the holy Trinity, while the confession of the Son of God, in six or seven articles, forms the body of the symbol. The reason is VOL. XV. No. 60.

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because the Christological article precedes the pneumatological article in the order of the Christian consciousness, and consequently also in the order of doctrine history. With this connects itself the fact that the Christological dogma was first and chiefly assailed by the early heresies, Ebionism which denied the true divinity of the Saviour, and Gnosticism which denied its true humanity; also by the two classes of Monachians or Unitarians, who either denied the divinity of Christ, like the Ebionites, or sunk it in the divinity of the Father, so as to destroy the proper personality of the Son.

In either dogma, however, we should well remember, that the belief of the ante-Nicene church here is to be inferred by no means simply from express doctrinal passages of the ecclesiastical writers which bear testimony to the divine character of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The whole worship and practical life of ancient Christianity, up to the apostolic age, furnish as strong an argument for the true belief, as the logical statements. Thus the doctrine of the divinity of our Lord is clearly implied in the custom of the early Christians to sing hymns to Christ as God, which is testified by the heathen governor Plinius under Trajan, and the synod of Antioch, which deposed Paul of Samosata; in the act of baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; in the celebration of the eucharist, or the atoning sacrifice of Christ as the Mediator between God and man and the only source of salvation; in the weekly celebration of his resurrection; in the annual festivals of Easter and Pentecost; in the catechetical use of those early creeds; in the use of emblems and symbols which represent the mystery of the cross; and finally in the martyrdom of so many hundreds and thousands of professors, who would never have sacrificed their life for a mere man.

If we allow these facts their proper weight, the testimony of the ancient church in favor of the divinity of Christ and also of the Holy Ghost, will appear to us far more strong, decided, and overwhelming, than if we take in view merely the express logical statements of the Fathers. For these, it

must be confessed, fall short of the clearness and precision of the Nicene system, and exhibit to us a gradual growth of the church in the knowledge of these divine mysteries.

We now proceed to the patristic statements of the trinity itself. As the doctrines of the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost were but imperfectly developed in logical precision in the ante-Nicene period, the doctrine of the trinity founded on them cannot be expected to be more clear. We find it first in the most simple Biblical and practical shape in all the creeds of the first three centuries (regulæ fidei, kaVÓVES Tηs TiσTEWs); for these, like the Apostles and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, are all based on the baptismal formula, and hence arranged in Trinitarian form. Then it appears in the Trinitarian doxologies used in the church from the first, such as occur even in the epistle of the church of Smyrna on the martyrdom of Polycarp. The sentiment that we rise through the Holy Ghost to the Son, through the Son to the Father, belongs likewise to the age of the immediate disciples of the apostles (in Irenæus, adv. hær. V. 36. 2). Thus far the influence of philosophy upon this doctrine is of course beyond supposition. It began with the apologists.

Justin Martyr (died a. D. 166) repeatedly places Father, Son, and Spirit together as objects of divine worship among the Christians (though not as being altogether equal in dignity), and imputes to Plato a presentiment of the doctrine of the Trinity. He was the first to develop the idea of the Logos on the ground of the prologue to the Gospel of John. He distinguishes in the Logos, that is, the divine nature of Christ, two elements, the immanent (Móyos evdшádeтos), or that which determines the revelation of God to himself, and the transitive (Дóyos πроpоρiós), in virtue of which God reveals himself to the world. The act of the procession of the Logos from God he illustrates by the figure of generation (yevvâv, yevvâoda, comp. the Johannean expression, the only

1 C. 14, where Polycarp concludes his prayer on the scaffold with the words: Μεθ' οὗ (i. e. Christ), σοι καὶ Πνεύματι ἁγίῳ ἡ δόξα καὶ νῦν καὶ εἰς τοὺς μέλλοντας αἰῶνας. Comp. at the end of c. 22: Ο κύριος Ιησ. Χριστός ᾧ ἡ δόξα, σὺν Πατρὶ καὶ ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων.

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begotten), without division or diminution of substance; and in this view the Logos is the only and absolute Son of God, the Only begotten. The generation, however, is not with him an eternal act, grounded in metaphysical necessity, as with Athanasius and in the Nicene orthodoxy, but proceeded from the free will of God. This begotten Logos he conceives as a hypostatical being, a person numerically distinct from the Father. To his agency, before his incarnation, Justin atributes the creation and preservation of the world, all the theophanies, i. e. with him Christophanies of the Old Testament, and also all that is true, rational, and good in the heathen world. In his efforts to reconcile this view with monotheism, he at one time asserts the moral unity of the two divine persons, and at another decidedly subordinates the Son to the Father. He is therefore, as Semisth in his valuable monograph has satisfactorily shown, neither Arian nor Nicene; but his whole theological tendency was evidently towards the Nicene orthodoxy. He likewise broke the way to orthodox pneumatology, although he is far yet from reaching the full idea of essential coequality. In refuting the charge of atheism, raised by the heathens against the Christians, he says (Apol. I. 13), that the Christians worship the Creator of the universe, in the second place (èv devrépa Xopa) the Son, in the third rank (év tpítη táğe) the prophetic Spirit; thus placing the three divine hypostases in descending gradation as objects of worship.

The other apologists of the second century mark no decided progress either in Christology or pneumatology.

Athenagoras confesses his faith in Father, Son, and Spirit, who are one κaтà dúvaμiv, but whom he distinguishes as to Táğıs, in subordinatian style.

Theophilus of Antioch (about a. D. 180) is the first to denote the relation of the three divine persons' by the term triad.

Origen (a. D. 180-254) conceives the Trinity as three concentric circles, of which each succeeding one circum

2 cós, λóyos, and σopía, by which, like Irenaeus, he means the Holy Ghost.

scribes a smaller area. God the Father acts upon all created being; the Logos, only upon the rational creation; the Holy Ghost, only upon the saints in the church. But the sanctifying work of the Spirit leads back to the Son, and the Son to the Father, who is consequently the ground and end of all being, and stands highest in dignity, as the compass of his operation is the largest. Origen spent the main force of his speculation on the Christological problem. He felt the full importance of this fundamental article, but obscured it by foreign Platonizing speculations, and wavered between the homoousian or orthodox, and the subordinatian theories, which afterwards were brought out in their full antagonism in the Arian controversy. On the one hand, he brings the Son as near as possible to the essence of the Father; not only making him the absolute personal wisdom, truth, righteousness, and reason (avroσopía, avтoaλndera, αὐτοδικαιοσύνη, αὐτοδύναμις, αὐτόλογος, etc.), but also expressly predicating eternity of him. He first clearly propounds the church dogma of the eternal generation of the Son. Generally he makes it proceed from the will of the Father, but he represents it also as proceeding from his essence, and thus in one passage at least (in a fragment of his Comm. on the Hebrews), he already applies the term opoovσios to the Sun, making him equal in substance with the Father. But on the other hand he distinguishes the essence of the Son from that of the Father; speaks of a ἑτερότης τῆς οὐσίας Oг TоÛ ÛπÒ KELμÉVov, and makes the Son decidedly inferior, calling him merely Deós without the article, i. e. God in an inferior sense (Deus de Deo), also devrepos deós, but the Father God in the absolute sense, ó Deós (Deus per se), or avτόθεος, and πληγή and ῥίζα τῆς θεότητος. Hence he also taught that the Son should not be directly addressed in prayer, but the Father only through the Son in the Holy Ghost.

Irenæus, after Polycarp the most faithful representative of the Johannean school (died about A. D. 202) keeps more within the limits of the simple biblical statements, and repudiates any à priori or speculative attempts to explain what

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