1. "Elohim" - for a simple Jew, a form of reverence, respect (a sample of which can be seen in Russian in the appeal to "you" to respected persons); for the divinely inspired writer the prophet Moses, the plural of the word contained, in addition, undoubtedly, a deep mysterious meaning of insight into the truth of the Trinity in God; no one can doubt that Moses was a pure monotheist and, knowing the spirit of the Hebrew language, would not have used a name that contradicted his belief in one God.

2. "God of gods" is an expression that contrasts faith in the true God with the worship of idols, which those who worshiped them also called gods, but which for the Jews were false gods. This expression is freely used in the New Testament by St. Paul. Saying: "there is no other God but the One", he continues: " For although there are so-called gods, either in heaven or on earth, since there are many gods and many lords, yet we have one God the Father, from whom are all things, and we are for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom everything and we"(1 Cor. 8:4-6).

3. "The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" is an expression that speaks only of the chosenness of the Jewish people as the "heir of the promises" given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Christian Truth of the Oneness of God Deepens the truth of the unity of the trinitarian.

Dogma of the Holy Trinity

God is one in Essence and three in Persons. The dogma of the Trinity is the main dogma of Christianity. A number of great dogmas of the Church and, above all, the dogma of our redemption are directly based on it. Because of its special importance, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity constitutes the content of all the creeds that have been used and are being used in the Orthodox Church, as well as all private confessions of faith written according to different occasions pastors of the Church.

Being the most important of all Christian dogmas, the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is at the same time the most difficult for limited human thought to assimilate it. That's why about no other Christian truth, the struggle was not so intense in history ancient church, as about this dogma and about the truths directly connected with it.

The dogma of the Holy Trinity contains two basic truths:

1. God is one in Essence, but Trinity in Persons, or in other words: God is Triune, Trinity, Consubstantial Trinity.

2. Hypostases have personal or hypostatic properties: The Father is not begotten. A son

born of the Father. The Holy Spirit comes from the Father.

We worship the Most Holy Trinity with one undivided worship. In the Fathers of the Church and in worship, the Trinity is often called unit in the Trinity, Trinitarian unit. In most cases, prayers addressed to the worshiped one Person of the Holy Trinity end with a doxology to all three Persons (for example, in a prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ: As you are glorified with Your Father without beginning and with the Most Holy Spirit forever, amen.)

The Church, turning prayerfully to the Most Holy Trinity, calls on Her in the singular, and not in the plural, for example: For You (and not You) praise all the powers of heaven, and You

(and not to you) we send glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and forever

centuries, amen...

The Christian Church, recognizing the mystery of this dogma, sees in it a great revelation that elevates the Christian faith immeasurably above any confession of simple monotheism, which is also found in other non-Christian religions. Dogma -

three Hypostases - indicates the fullness of the mysterious inner life in God, for God is love, and the love of God cannot only extend to the world created by God: in the Holy Trinity it is also turned into the Divine life. Even more clearly for us, the dogma of the three hypostases indicates the proximity of God to the world: God is above us, God is with us, God is in us and in all creation. Above us is God the Father, the ever-flowing Source, according to the expression of the church prayer, the Foundation of all being, the Father of bounty, who loves us and cares for us, His creation, we are His children by grace. With us is God the Son, His birth, for the sake of Divine love, who revealed Himself to people as a Man, so that we know and see with our own eyes that God is with us, sincerely, i.e. most perfectly "partnered to us" (Heb. 2:14). In us and in all creation - by His power and grace - the Holy Spirit, Who fulfills everything, Giver of life, Life-giving, Comforter, Treasure and Source of blessings. Three Divine Persons, having eternal and eternal being, are revealed to the world with the coming and incarnation of the Son of God, being "one Power, one Being, one Divinity" (stichera on the day of Pentecost).

Since God, by His very Essence, is all consciousness and thought and self-consciousness, then each of these tripartite eternal manifestations of Himself by the One God has self-consciousness, and therefore each is a Person, and Persons are not simply forms, or single phenomena, or properties, or actions; The Three Persons are contained in the very Unity of the Being of God. Thus, when in Christian teaching we speak of the Trinity of God, we are talking about the mysterious inner life of God, hidden in the depths of the Godhead, revealed - ajar to the world in time, in the New Testament, by the sending down from the Father into the world of the Son of God and the action of the miraculous, life-giving, saving the power of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

O The Trinity of Persons in God with the Unity of God in Essence

1. Evidence from the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament

The truth of the trinity of God is only veiledly expressed in Old Testament, only ajar. The Old Testament testimonies about the Trinity are revealed, understood in the light of the Christian faith, just as the Apostle writes about the Jews: " ... until now, when they read Moses, the veil lies on their hearts, but when they turn to the Lord, this veil is removed ... it is removed by Christ"(2 Cor. 3:15-16 and 14).

The main Old Testament passages are as follows:

Gen. 1:1 etc.: the name "Elohim" in the Hebrew text, which has a grammatical plural form.

Gen. 1:26: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, and after the likeness of "The plural indicates that God is not one Person.

Gen. 3:22 "And the Lord God said, Behold, Adam has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil "(God's words before the expulsion of the forefathers from paradise).

Gen. 11:6-7 before the confusion of tongues at the pandemonium - "One people and one language for all ... Let's go down and mix their language there".

Gen. 18:1-3 about Abraham - "And the Lord appeared to him at the oak forest of Maura ..., (Abraham) lifted up his eyes, and, behold, three men stand against him ... and bowed down to the ground and said: ... if I have found favor in Your eyes , do not pass by Your servant" - "You see,

instructs bliss. Augustine, Abraham meets the Three, and worships the One ... Seeing the Three, he comprehended the mystery of the Trinity, and bowing

as the One, confessed the One God in three Persons."

In addition, the Fathers of the Church see an indirect reference to the Trinity in the following places:

Numbers 6:24-26 The priestly blessing indicated by God through Moses, in trinity form:

"May the Lord bless you ... may the Lord look upon you with His bright face ... may the Lord turn His face upon you...".

Isaiah 6:3 Doxology of the seraphim standing around the Throne of God, in threefold form:

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts".

"By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host".

Finally, it is possible to indicate in the Old Testament Revelation the places where it is said separately about

Son of God and Holy Spirit. For example, about the Son:

Psalm. 2:7 "You are my Son; today I have begotten you."

Psalm. 109:3 "... out of the womb before the morning star, your birth is like dew."

Psalm. 142:10 "Let thy good spirit lead me into the land of righteousness."

Isaiah 48:16 "... the Lord sent me and His Spirit" and other similar places.

2. New Testament Scripture Evidence:

The Trinity of Persons in God is revealed in the New Testament in the coming of the Son of God and in the sending down of the Holy Spirit. The message to earth from the Father God the Word and the Holy Spirit is the content of all New Testament writings. Of course, the appearance of the Triune God to the world is given here not in a dogmatic formula, but in the narrative of the appearances and deeds of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

The manifestation of God in the Trinity took place at the baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is why the baptism itself is called Theophany. The Son of God, having become man, received water baptism; The Father testified of Him; The Holy Spirit, by His appearance in the form of a dove, confirmed the truth of the voice of God, as expressed in the troparion of the feast of the Baptism of the Lord:

"In the Jordan, to you who are baptized, O Lord, worship of the Trinity appeared, the voice of your parents testifying to you, calling your beloved Son, and the Spirit, in the form of a dove, knowing your word affirmation"

There are sayings in the New Testament Scriptures about the Triune God in the most concise, but, moreover, exact form, expressing the truth of the trinity.

These sayings are as follows:

Matt. 28:19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit ". - St. Ambrose remarks: "said the Lord: in the name, and not in the names, because there is one God; not many names: because there are not two Gods and not three Gods.

2 Cor. 13:13 "The grace of the Lord (our) Jesus Christ, and the love of God (the Father), and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen."

1 John. 5:7 "For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one " (this verse is absent from the surviving ancient Greek manuscripts, and is available only in Latin, Western manuscripts).

In addition, in the meaning of the Trinity, St. Athanasius Vel. The following text of the epistle to Ephes. 4:6" One God and Father of all, who is above all(God the Father) and through all

(God the Son) and in all of us (God the Holy Spirit)."

Confession of the Dogma of the Holy Trinity in the Ancient Church

The truth about the Holy Trinity is confessed by the Church of Christ from the beginning in all its fullness and integrity. He speaks clearly, for example, about the universality of faith in the Holy Trinity of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, disciple of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, instructed by the Apostle John the Theologian himself: "Although the Church is scattered throughout the universe to the end of the earth, but from the apostles and their disciples she received faith in one God the Father Almighty" ... and in one Jesus

Christ, the Son of God, incarnated for our salvation... Having accepted such preaching and such faith, the Church, as we have said, although scattered throughout the world, carefully preserves it, as if dwelling in one house; He equally believes in this, as if having one soul and one heart, and according to this he preaches and teaches and transmits, as if having one mouth. Although there are numerous dialects in the world, but the power of Tradition is one and the same... And of the primates of the Churches, neither the one who is strong in words, nor the one who is inexperienced in words will not say the opposite and weaken the Tradition.

The Holy Fathers, defending the catholic truth of the Holy Trinity from heretics, not only cited the evidence of Holy Scripture as proof of it, but also rational, philosophical grounds for refuting heretical sophistication, but they themselves relied on the evidence of the early Christians. They pointed out:

on the examples of martyrs and confessors who were not afraid to declare faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit before the tormentors; cited:

on the Scriptures of the Men of the Apostles and in general of ancient Christian writers and:

on liturgical formulas. So St. Vasily Vel. gives a small doxology: "Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit" and another: "To Him (Christ) with the Father and the Holy Spirit, honor and glory forever and ever," and says that this doxology has been used in churches since that very time, how the gospel is proclaimed. Indicates St. Basil also gives thanksgiving by the lamp, or the evening song, calling it an "ancient" song, passed down "from the fathers", and quotes from it the words: "We praise the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit of God", to show the faith of ancient Christians in the equal honor of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son.

There are many testimonies of the ancient Fathers and teachers of the Church also that the Church from the first days of her existence performed baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as three Divine Persons, and denounced heretics who attempted to perform baptism either in the name of the Father and the Son, and even one Son, humiliating the Holy Spirit before them (the testimonies of Justin Much., Tertullian, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Athanasius, Ilarius, Basil Vel. and others).

However, the Church has endured great turmoil and endured a huge struggle in defending this dogma. The fight was directed mainly on two points; first, to affirm the truth of the consubstantiality and equality of the Son of God with God the Father; then - to affirm the unity of the Holy Spirit with God the Father and the Son of God.

The dogmatic task of the Church in its ancient period was to find such exact words for the dogma, by which the dogma of the Holy Trinity is best protected from reinterpretation by heretics.

Wishing to bring the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity closer, if only somewhat, to our earthly concepts, the incomprehensible to the comprehensible, the Fathers of the Church resorted to similarities from nature, which are: a) the sun, its ray and light; b) root, trunk and fruit of a tree; c) a spring gushing out of it a key and a stream; d) three candles burning one at the other, giving one indivisible light; e) fire, shine from it and warmth from it; f) mind, will and memory; g) consciousness, subconsciousness and desire, etc. under. But here is what he says about these attempts to imitate St. Gregory the Theologian: “Whatever I considered with myself in my inquisitive mind, with which I enriched my mind, wherever I looked for similarities for this sacrament, I did not find what the distant (earthly) nature of God could be likened to. some small resemblance, then a much greater one slips away, leaving me below, along with what is chosen for comparison.Following the example of others, I imagined a spring, a key and a stream and reasoned: do not the Father have similarities with one, the Son with another, with the third Holy Spirit? For the spring, the spring and the stream are inseparable by time, and their cohabitation is uninterrupted, although it seems that they are separated by three properties. But I was afraid, firstly,

The concepts of the perfections of God, who is one in His essence, do not exhaust all the depth of the knowledge of God, which is granted to us in revelation. It introduces us to the deepest mystery of the life of the Deity when it depicts God as one in essence and three in person. Knowledge of this deepest secret gives a person only revelation. If a person comes to some knowledge about the properties of the divine essence and to the calling of the unity of God through his own reflections, then to such a truth that God is one in essence and trinity in persons, that there is God the Father, there is God and the Son, there is God and the Holy Spirit, that “in this Holy Trinity, the first and the last are nothing, more or less nothing, but the three hypostases are intact, coexistent with each other and equal” (the symbol of St. Athanasius), - no human mind can rise to this truth by natural forces. The dogma of the trinity of persons in God is a God-revealed dogma in a special and fullest sense of this word, a proper Christian dogma. The confession of this dogma distinguishes a Christian from the Jews, and from the Mohammedans, and in general from all those who know only the unity of God (which the best of the pagans professed), but do not know the secret of the Trinitarian Divinity.
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In the Christian doctrine itself, this dogma is a fundamental or basic dogma. Without the recognition of three persons in God, there is no place for either the doctrine of God the Redeemer, or the doctrine of God the Sanctifier, so that one can say that Christianity, both in its entire composition and in each particular truth of its doctrine, is based on the dogma of the Holy Trinity .
Being the cornerstone dogma of Christianity, the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is at the same time the most incomprehensible, and not only for people, but also for angels. The most vivid imagination and the most penetrating human mind cannot comprehend: how can there be three persons in God, each of which is God, not three Gods, but one God? How do all the persons of the Holy Trinity remain completely equal to each other and at the same time so different that one of them - God the Father is the beginning of others, and others are dependent on Him for being, the Son - through birth, the Holy Spirit - through the procession ? According to ordinary human ideas, such a relationship between persons is a sign of subordination of some to others. What, finally, is birth and procession in God, and what is the difference between them? All this is known only to the Spirit of God. The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
§ 23. History of the dogma of the Holy Trinity
Such separateness and distinctness with which the church teaches its members the doctrine of the revelation about the Holy Trinity, it received in the church gradually, in connection with the false teachings about it that arose. In the history of her gradual disclosure of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, three periods can be distinguished: 1) the exposition of the dogma before the appearance of Arianism, when the doctrine of the hypostasis of divine persons with the unity of the Godhead was revealed; 2) the definition of the doctrine of consubstantiality with the hypostasis of divine persons in the fight against Arianism and Dukhoborism; 3) the state of the church doctrine of the Trinity in later times, after its final determination at the Second Ecumenical Council.
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Period one. - The leading Christians confessed the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the formula of baptism, in the symbols of faith, in the doxologies of the Holy Trinity, liturgical chants and martyr confessions of faith, but they did not enter into the most particular definitions of the properties and mutual relations of the persons of the Holy Trinity. The representatives of this part of the Christians were the men of the apostles. In their writings, when they spoke of the Trinity, they repeated almost with literal accuracy the sayings of the apostles.
Others who accepted Christianity were not able to abandon the views of Judaism or pagan philosophy, and at the same time to assimilate the new concept of God given by Christianity. Attempts by such Christians to reconcile their former views with new ones were resolved by the appearance of heresies of the so-called. Jews and Gnostics. Heretics
Judaizers, brought up on the letter of the law of Moses, which says: Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, did not distinguish any persons in God; they affirmed the truth of the unity of God by a complete denial of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Christ the Savior, in their opinion, is not the true Son of God, and their teaching about the Holy Spirit is unknown. The Gnostics, holding on to the views of extreme dualism on the relationship between God and the world, spirit and matter, argued that God, without losing His divinity, cannot incarnate, since matter is an evil inclination; hence the incarnated Son of God cannot be God. He is nothing but an aeon, a person of an undeniably divine nature, but separated from the supreme God only through an outflow. At the same time, He not only came out of the “Depth” (Vabo^), but before Him, together with Him and through Him, a whole series of the same eons emerged from the same “Depth”, so that the whole in itself from 30 to 365 different entities. Gnostics and the Holy Spirit were among the same eons as the Son. In these fabrications of the Gnostic fantasy, there is obviously nothing even similar to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. - The false teaching of the Judaizers and Gnostics was denounced by Christian apologists: St. Justin Martyr, Tastr. 117thian, Athenagoras, St. Theophilus of Antioch, especially the anti-Gnostics - Irenaeus of Lyon (in the book "Ant. Heresies") and Clement of Alexandria (in "Stromati").
In the III century. a new false doctrine of the Holy Trinity appeared - monarchianism, which was revealed in two forms: in the form of dynamistic or Evioneian and modalistic monarchianism, in other words - patripassianism.
Dynamic monarchianism (the first representatives of it were Theodotus the tanner, Theodotus the Younger or the money changer and Artemon) reached its highest development with Paul of Samosata (c. 272). There is, he taught, a single divine personality. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not independent divine personalities, but only divine powers, that is, the powers of one and the same God. If Scripture says apparently, about three persons in the Godhead, then these are only three different names applied to the same person. In particular, the Son, also called in Scripture the Logos and the Wisdom of God, is the same in God as the mind is in man. Man would cease to be man if his mind were taken away from him; so God would cease to be a person if the Logos were taken away and isolated from Him. The Logos is the eternal self-consciousness in God and in this sense is consubstantial (otsooioio^) with God. This Logos also dwelt in Christ, but more fully than he dwelt in other people, and acted through Him in teaching and miracles. Under the influence of the divine power dwelling in Him, “as another in another”, Christ, a simple man, born of the Spirit of the Holy and Virgin Mary, reached the highest holiness possible for a person, and became the Son of God, but in the same improper sense in which other people are called sons of God. - As soon as the teaching of Paul of Samosata became known, all the famous pastors of the church at that time - Dionysius Alex., Firmillian of Cappadocia, Gregory the Wonderworker, etc. - opposed him with denunciation, verbally and in writing. six Orthodox bishops to Paul of Samosata”, and then at the former local councils against him in Antioch, while he himself was deprived of his episcopal rank and excommunicated from church communion.
Simultaneously with Evioneian, patripassian monarchianism also developed. Its main representatives were: Praksey, Noet and Sabellius of Ptolemais (in the middle of the 3rd century). The teaching of Praxeas and Noetus in its main features is as follows: the divine person is one in the strictest sense, this is God the Father. But the Savior of the world is God, and not a simple man, only not separate from the one Lord the Father, but is the Father Himself. Before His incarnation, He revealed Himself in the image (mode) of the unborn Father, and when He was pleased to endure the birth of the Virgin, He took the image (modus) of the Son not according to humanity, but according to divinity, “became Himself the Son of His own, and not the Son of another.” During His earthly life He proclaimed Himself the Son to all who saw Him, but from those who were able to accommodate He did not hide the fact that He is the Father. Hence the sufferings of the Son for these heretics were the sufferings of the Father. "Post tempus Pater
natus, Pater passus est,” Tertullian spoke of them. They did not expound the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The teachings of Praxeas and Noet found many followers, especially in Rome. It is natural, therefore, that at the very first stages of its appearance it met with a refutation: Tertullian in his work Against Praxeas, St. Hippolytus - "Against the heresy of Noet" presented their teaching as impious and unfounded, and together they opposed the Orthodox teaching to it; with the appearance of these writings, patripassianism also gradually began to weaken, but did not disappear. In a new and modified form (philosophical) it was revived already in the east.
The culprit was Sabellius, a former Roman presbyter and originally a pure patripassian. He also introduced the doctrine of the Holy Spirit into his system. This is the essence of his teaching. God is an unconditional unity, a boundless, inseparable and self-contained "Monad" that does not have and cannot, due to its infinity, have any contact with everything that exists outside of It. From eternity She was in a state of inactivity or "silence", but then God spoke His Word p. 119 or Logos and began to act; the creation of the world was the first manifestation of His activity, the work of the Logos proper. With the appearance of the world, a series of new actions and manifestations of the Divine began - in the mode of the Word or Logos. “The Unit expanded into the Trinity” - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (modes of the mode of the Word, person). In the Old Testament God (in the mode of the Word) appeared as the Legislator - God the Father, in the new one as the Savior - God the Son and as the Sanctifier - the Holy Spirit. There is, therefore, only a Trinity of revelations of a single divine person, but not a Trinity of hypostases. The teachings of Sabellius were last word monarchist movements of the 3rd century. It found a lot of followers, especially in Africa, in Libya. The first and decisive debunker of this false doctrine was St. Dionysius Alex. , Bishop preeminent in Africa Church. He condemned Cabellius at the Council of Alexandria (261) and wrote several epistles against him. Dionysius, ep. Rimsky, who was informed of the heresy of Sabellius, also condemned him at the Council of Rome (262). The most famous of the church writers of the 3rd c. - Origen.
The main error of monarchism was the denial of the personality and eternal existence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the defenders of frank ecclesiastical truth against the monarchists revealed with particular detail the truth about the actual existence and the difference between divine persons according to their personal properties. But the desire to more clearly imagine the trinity of God led some of them to the fact that, with the distinction of divine persons according to Their personal properties, they (from Western teachers - Tertullian and Hippolytus, from Eastern - Origen and Dionysius Alex.) allowed the difference between the essence of the Father and the essence of the Son and the Holy Spirit, having developed the doctrine of the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, not only according to their personal existence and personal relationships (the so-called subordinationism according to hypostasis), but also according to Their very essence, or the so-called. subordinationism essentially between the persons of the Trinity. Their subordinationism consisted in the fact that, recognizing the essence of the Son and the Spirit as being of the same nature as the being of the Father, they at the same time represented it as a derivative of the Father, dependent on Him and, as it were, lesser than the essence of the Father, although not outside the essence of the Father, but in himself. It turned out according to their view that the deity, power, might and other perfections the Son and the Spirit have from the Father, and do not have in their own way, from Himself, moreover, the Son is lower than the Father, and the Spirit is lower than the Son.
With some deviation from the truth in the disclosure of the dogma of the Holy Trinity by individual teachers of the church of the 3rd century, the church itself of that time believed in this dogma quite Orthodoxally. Evidence of this is the "Statement of Faith (symbol) of St. Gregory the Wonderworker. It is like this:
“There is one God the Father of the living Word, the Wisdom and Power of self-existence, and the image of the Eternal; Perfect Parent of the Perfect, Father of the only begotten Son.

One Lord; one from one, God from God, the image and expression of the Deity, the effective Word, the Wisdom that contains the composition of everything, and the Power that builds all creation; true Son of the true Father, Invisible of the Invisible, Incorruptible of the Incorruptible, Immortal of the Immortal, Eternal of the Eternal.
And there is one Holy Spirit, proceeding from God, manifested through the Son, that is, to people; A life in which the cause of living; Holy Source, Shrine, giving consecration. They are God the Father, who is above everything and in everything, and God the Son, who is through everything.
The Trinity is perfect, in glory and eternity and the kingdom, indivisible and inseparable. Why is there in the Trinity neither created, nor service, nor incoming, what would not have been before and what would have entered after. Neither the Father was ever without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit, but the Trinity is immutable, unchanging, and always the same."
Second period. - In the 4th century, with the advent of Arianism and Macedonianism, a new period opened in the disclosure of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. An essential feature of these false teachings was the idea of ​​the otherness of the Son and the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father: Arianism applied it to the Son, and Macedonianism applied it to the Holy Spirit as well. 121 to that. Accordingly, during this period, the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the persons of the Holy Trinity was mainly revealed.
Arianism, having set itself the task of reconciling the doctrine of revelation about the trinity of persons in God with the dogma of the unity of God, thought to achieve this by denying equality (and consubstantiality) between the persons of the Trinity according to divinity through the bringing down of the Son and the Spirit into the number of creatures. The culprit of this heresy. Presbyter Arius of Alexandria, however, only the doctrine of the Son of God and His relation to the Father was disclosed in this sense. The main points of his teaching are as follows. 1) God is one. That which distinguishes Him from all other beings and is exclusively characteristic of Him is His beginninglessness or non-begottenness (o kouo^, auєuupto^). The Son is not unbegotten; therefore, He is not equal to His unbegotten Father, because, as begotten, He must have a beginning of His being, while the true God is without beginning. As having a beginning, He is therefore not contemporaneous with the Father. 2) The divine nature is spiritual and simple, which is why there is no division in it. Hence, if the Son has the beginning of His being, then He was born not from the essence of God the Father, but only from divine desire, - born by the action of the almighty divine will from those who do not exist, otherwise - created. 3) As a creation, the Son is not the Father's own, natural Son, but the Son only in name, by adoption; He is not the true God, but God only in name, there is only a deified creation. When asked about the purpose of bringing such a Son into being, Arius answered with a dualistic opposition of God and the world. Between God and the world, according to his teaching, there is an impassable abyss, which is why He can neither create nor provide for it directly. Desiring to create the world, He first produced one being, in order to create everything else through His medium. From this followed the teaching of Arius about the Holy Spirit. If the Father alone is God, and the Son is the creature through whom all the rest came into being, then it is clear that the Spirit must be attributed to the number of beings created by the Son, and, therefore, according to essence and glory He is even lower than the Son. But having concentrated his attention on the doctrine of the Son of God, Arius hardly touched upon the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Arianism contained an internal contradiction. According to this teaching, the Son is thought to be the creator and the creature, which is incompatible. At the same time, the frank doctrine of the Trinity was completely destroyed by him. Heresy nevertheless began to spread rapidly. Emergency measures were required to stop it. The Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (325) was convened on this occasion. In the creed compiled under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the fathers of the council gave an exact definition of the doctrine of the second person of the Holy Trinity, which received a dogmatic and obligatory meaning for the whole church. It is this: “we believe ... in one

The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the Father, i.e. from the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, consubstantial with the Father (otsoooiou tyu Patr ^), Imzhe all bysha, even in heaven and on earth. At the same time, all the main provisions of the teachings of Arius were anathematized (see the book of the Rights of the Holy Apostle, instilled and helped. Sob. and the Holy Father). He himself and his associates were excommunicated from the church.
But the heretics did not want to submit to the Nicene creed. The heresy condemned by the council continued to spread, but had already broken up into parties. The Arians especially opposed the introduction into the symbol of the doctrine of the consubstantiality (otsooioia) of the Son of God with the Father. Very many of the Arians, not agreeing to recognize the Son of God as consubstantial with the Father, at the same time rejected the teaching of Arius about the createdness of the Son. They recognized Him only as "similar in essence" (bzoioioio^) to the highest Deity. It was the party of the so-called. "omiusian" or "semi-Arian" (headed by Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea). Their "similar" however, is very close to "consubstantial." Others of the Arians, who strictly adhered to the principles of Arius, began to express his teaching about the Son of God even more sharply, asserting that the nature of the Son, as a creature, is different from that of the Father, that He is in no way similar (auocio^) to the Father; they are known under the names Anomei (also Heterusians), strict Arians, and on behalf of the main exponents and defenders of their doctrine - Aetius (Antioch. deacon) and especially Eunomius (Bishop of Cyzicus) were also called Aetians and Eunomians.
During the Arian disputes and in connection with Arianism, a false doctrine arose about the Holy Spirit of Macedon (Bp. Constantinople), who became the head of a heretical party, which received from him its name "Macedonian" or "Doukhobortsy" (luєutsatotsamp;hoi). Macedonian, belonging to the semi-Arians, taught about the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit is the creation (ktyutou) of the Son, that He is incomparably lower than the Father and the Son, that in relation to Them He is only a servant creature (bіakouo^ kai sh^rєt^), that He does not have the same glory and honor of worship with Them, and that in general - He is not God and should not be called God; He is only to a certain extent superior to the angels and different from them. As a continuation and logical conclusion of Arianism, Macedonianism was equally opposed to the Christian dogma of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, it met with the same strong opposition from the church as Arianism. The second Ecumenical Council (381) was convened. In the short term of the Nicene symbol about the Holy Spirit: “we believe ... and in the Holy Spirit”, the fathers of the second Ecumenical Council (among 150) introduced the following additional explanatory provisions: “The Lord, the Life-Giving (i.e., that the Holy Spirit. - not a creature), Who comes from the Father (i.e., that He did not come through the Son), Even with the Father and the Son we worship and glorify (i.e., that He is not a servant being), who spoke the prophets ".
The Niceno-Tsaregrad definition of faith provides a clear and precise teaching on the consubstantiality of the persons of the Holy Trinity in the sense of Their unconditional identity and equality in essence, and at the same time the teaching on Their hypostatic differences, Under the banner of this definition, in the struggle against heretics, fathers and teachers The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was also revealed to the Church in the most private way. Among them, the names of the great ecumenical teachers and saints are especially glorious: Athanasius and Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Theologian. In the West, the most powerful and famous defender of Orthodoxy against Arianism was St. Hilarius Poattessky.
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Period three. - Statement of faith, drawn up at the first and second Ecumenical Councils, according to the definitions of the III (rights 7) and subsequent Ecumenical Councils(VI Vs. Sob. 1 pr.), should not have been subject to additions or reductions, and, therefore, should remain forever unchanged and inviolable, unchanged even in letter. In accordance with this, the Ecumenical Church in all subsequent time did not make any additions to the Nicene-Tsaregrad definition of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, nor diminish it. Her main concern became the concern for the intact preservation of the dogma in the form that it received in the Nikeo-Tsaregrad creed. It remained the same in the East
the attitude of the Orthodox Church to the dogma of the Holy Trinity and to the Nicene-Tsaregrad creed, even after the separation of the churches, remains so to this day.
Of the false teachings about the Holy Trinity that arose in the east after the second Ecumenical Council, only the so-called tritheism, or tritheism (VI century), and tetratheism, or tetratheism (VI-VII century). The tritheists represented the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as three special, separate persons, possessing three special and separate divine essences, just as there are three human faces, having the same, but not a single being. Tetratheists, besides the three persons in the Trinity, represented the divine essence, as it were, standing behind them and separate from them, in which they all participate, drawing their deity from it. In the fight against these false teachings, it was enough to clarify their disagreement with the doctrine of the Trinity, expressed in the Nicene-Tsaregrad creed.
Such was the attitude towards the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the Nicene-Tsaregrad definition and the Western Church for the first time after the second Ecumenical Council. But this unanimity did not last very long. Since blessed times. Augustine, the opinion began to spread in the Western Church that the Holy Spirit does not come from the Father alone, but “from the Son” (Filioque), which gradually acquired the meaning of a dogma in it, was included in the Nicene Constantinople symbol itself, and the confession of a new dogma was protected by an anathema. In such a perverted form, the dogma of the Holy Trinity is confessed by the Western Church to this day. It is contained in the same form by Protestantism, separated from Rome, in all its forms, i.e., Lutheranism, Reformation and Anglicanism.
Raising to the level of dogma the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit and from the Son, not given in revelation, but arbitrarily deduced by reason from revelation, the Roman Church embarked on the path of rationalism. The same rationalistic spirit was reflected in her raising to the level of dogmas and other private opinions. This spirit was also assimilated from it by Protestantism, which deviated even further from the ancient church confession in its doctrine. But with particular force he expressed himself in Protestant sectarianism, which was the last transitional step already towards strict and pure rationalism. Hence, in the Christian societies that separated from Protestantism, a new series of heretical teachings about the Holy Trinity arose; all of them, however, to a greater or lesser extent only repeat what was expressed by the ancient heretics.
So, at the same time as the Reformation, the so-called. antitrinitarianism (its other name is unitarism). In contrast to the ancient monarchists, who not so much rebelled against the dogma of the Holy Trinity, which had not yet received a definition, but defended the truth of the unity of God, the anti-trinitarians of the 16th century. set themselves the task of destroying the belief in the Holy Trinity. In the antitrinitarian movement of the XVI century. two streams can be distinguished. One branch of it bears the stamp of mysticism, while the other branch rests exclusively on the principles of rational thinking.
A systematist of antitrinitarian principles with a mystical tinge appeared in the 16th century. scientist Spanish doctor Michael Servet. The Church, he reasoned, has perverted the true Teaching of the Holy Trinity, just like Christianity in general. The teaching of Scripture about the Trinity, in his opinion, is not that there are three independent divine hypostases in God, but that God is one by nature and hypostasis, namely the Father, p. 126 The Son and the Spirit are not separate from the Father person, but only His various manifestations or modes. For his false teaching, Servetus Calvin was raised to the stake (October 27, 1553).
The views of antitrinitarianism with a more strictly rational character were presented in the system by Faust Sotsin (| 1604), which is why the followers of this trend are known as Socinians. The Socinian doctrine is often a rationalistic doctrine. A person is not obliged to believe in something that is not reconciled with his mind. The Socinians find the dogma of the Holy Trinity especially contrary to reason. Instead of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, rejected solely on the basis of rational considerations, they themselves proposed such a doctrine. God is one, one divine being and one divine person. This one God
is precisely the Father of our Lord I. Christ. The Son of God is only the personification of the historical I. Christ, but Christ is a simple man, only who happened in a special way, a sinless man. He can be called God in the same improper sense in which all believers are called sons of God in Holy Scripture and even Christ Himself (Jn 10:34). Compared to other sons of God, He is only par excellence the beloved Son of God. The Holy Spirit is a certain divine breath, or power, acting in believers from God the Father through Jesus Christ.
The doctrine of the Trinity of the Arminians, so called by the name of prof. theology at the University of Leiden, James Arminius (1560-1609), who laid the foundation for this sect. The church doctrine of the Trinity seemed contradictory to these sectarians in the sense that, when all the persons of the Trinity were assimilated equality in divinity, at the same time it ascribes guilt to the Father, birth to the Son, and procession to the Holy Spirit. They resolved this perplexity by repeating the ancient subordinationism in essence between the persons of the Trinity, i.e., that the Son and the Spirit are inferior to the Father in divinity and borrow their divine dignity from Him.
In the 18th century, with the strengthening of rationalism in general, a new, extremely peculiar sect was formed in Protestantism, in connection with the distortion of all Christianity, which also perverted the doctrine of the trinity of God—the sect of the followers of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg considered himself an extraordinary messenger of God, called to proclaim such a doctrine, which is higher than all previous revelations, but under the form of revelation from above, in the essence of the matter, he expounded his own views in his writings. As for all antitrinitarians, the doctrine of the Trinity seemed to Swedenborg an extreme perversion by the church of the genuine teaching of Holy Scripture about God and contrary to reason. His own understanding of this dogma is as follows. There is only one God (i.e., a single divine hypostasis). This one God took on a human form and a bodily shell in the image of I. Christ, subjected Himself to all temptations, entered into a struggle with the spirits of the underworld and defeated them; He also suffered death on the cross(obviously, a repetition of ancient patripassianism) and through all this he freed the human race from the power of hellish forces. Under the Holy Spirit, in his opinion, in the Bible is meant that action on people that has produced and is producing a frank word and a former revelation of God Himself, that is, the appearance of God in the flesh in the image of J. Christ.
With the advent of the so-called. idealistic philosophy appeared in the West in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, new false teachings. Attempts to substantiate and clarify the essence of this dogma on the principles of one mind led to the fact that in these explanations from the Christian dogma only terms remained, in which pantheistic concepts alien to the dogma were invested, and even the faces of the Holy Trinity were impersonal. Such are the views on the Christian Trinity of the idealist philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others. For Hegel, for example, the Christian Trinity is an absolute idea (eternal knowledge) in three states: the idea in itself, in its abstraction, is the Father, the idea incarnated in the external world it is the Son and His incarnation, and the idea, conscious of itself in the human spirit, is the Holy Spirit.
Thus reason alone is insufficient in the deepest mysteries of faith. All misconceptions about the dogma of the Holy Trinity, and ancient. The newest and most recent have flowed from the same source, namely, from the violation by reason of the boundaries that it must keep in relation to revelation in general. The dogma of the Trinity is the sacrament of sacraments (supra rationem), which reason must never forget.

Deepening our understanding of God, Christianity tells us about the Triune God. The root of this teaching is found in the Old Testament. Christianity, the only monotheistic religion, teaches about God as the Holy Trinity. Neither Judaism nor Mohammedanism, although descended from the same root as Christianity, profess the Most Holy Trinity. Acceptance of the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is inextricably linked with faith in Jesus Christ as the Only Begotten Son of God. Whoever does not believe in the Son of God does not believe in the Trinity either. In view of the special importance of the Dogma of the Holy Trinity, it is revealed with particular clarity in the Gospel. First of all, it is actually and really revealed in the event of the Baptism of the Lord or Theophany, when the Son of God received baptism from John, the Holy Spirit descended on the Baptized in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father testified about the Son: “This is. My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"(Matthew 3:16-17).

John the Baptist testifies of Him: “I didn't know Him; but for this he came to baptize with water, that he might be revealed to Israel. I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove and dwell on Him. I didn't know Him; but He who sent me baptizes with water said to me, On whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining on Him, He is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.”(John 1:31-34).

“In many places in the Gospel, God the Father and the Holy Spirit are mentioned. All farewell conversation. The Lord and his disciples are concluded in the ce6e revelation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Sending His disciples to preach the Gospel to the whole world, before His ascension, and blessing them, the Lord says to them: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”(Matthew 28:19-20). Book of Acts of St. apostles begins with a story about the descent of the Holy Spirit on them. All the Persons of the Holy Trinity are constantly mentioned as in the Acts of St. apostles, as well as in the apostolic epistles. From the first days of St. Church faith in the Holy Trinity is the main dogma of her religion. This dogma is the main content Orthodox Symbol faith, which is nothing else than the consistent disclosure of the fate of each Person of the Most Holy Trinity for our salvation. All this clearly suggests the fundamental meaning of this dogma in the Orthodox Church's worldview. And this basic dogma of our faith is a constant stumbling block and temptation for all non-believers, for all rationalists who cannot in any way reconcile the doctrine of the unity of God with the doctrine of the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead. They see this as an irreconcilable internal contradiction, a direct violation of human logic. This conclusion of theirs is the result of their misunderstanding of the difference that exists between reason or mind and spirit. The question of Unity in the Trinity is not decided from a superficial logical or mathematical point of view. It requires penetration into the depths of the laws - we do not say the Divine, but also our human spirit, reflecting in itself the laws of the Divine Spirit. But before talking about this, we ask you to pay attention to the fact that the dogma of the Holy Trinity reveals that fullness of the Divine Essence and Divine life, which other monotheistic religions, not to mention paganism, do not know. Both in Judaism (with its Jewish understanding) and in Mohammedanism, the Divine, in His inner life, in His deepest Being, appears to be deeply lonely and solitary. It is only in Christianity that the inner life of the Divine is revealed as the fullness and richness of life realized in indivisible unity. love of three The face of a deity. In Christianity, there is no place for the solitude of the Deity in His intra-divine life. Recognizing this advantage of the Christian understanding of the Divine life, they nevertheless say and object: “How is it so: God is one, but trinity in Persons? If it is trinitarian in Persons, it means not one; if one, how is it threefold? This is not only incomprehensible, but also contradictory.

Since ancient times there have been various attempts to bring the mystery of the Trinity closer to human understanding. For the most part, these attempts come down to similitudes from the created world, and do not reveal the secrets of the Trinity in essence. The most common and well-known of these comparisons are two: 1) a comparison with the sun, from which light is born and warmth emanates, and 2) a comparison with the spiritual nature of a person who combines three spiritual forces in his single “I”: reason, feeling and will. Both comparisons, for all their clarity and apparent correctness, have the drawback that they do not explain the trinity of persons in the Godhead. Both light and warmth in the sun are only manifestations or manifestations of the very same energy that is contained in the sun, and, of course, they do not represent self-active personalities uniting in a single being of the sun. The same must be said about the three forces or abilities of the human soul - mind, feeling and will, which, being separate forces of the human spirit, separate abilities, also do not have their own personal existence, do not have their own "I". All of them are only different gifts or powers of our deepest single "I", the nature of which remains completely unknown and incomprehensible to us. Thus, both comparisons leave without explanation the main secret in the dogma of the Holy Trinity, which consists in the fact that the three Persons of the Godhead, constituting the One and Indivisible Divine Trinity, at the same time retain each of His personal character, His own “I ". The most profound and correct approach to understanding the dogma of the Holy Trinity is the explanation of Metropolitan Anthony (formerly of Kiev and Galicia), on the basis of which he considers the property of the human spirit, correctly noted by him, namely the property of love. This explanation is very simple, very deeply consistent with the laws of the psychological and moral life of a person, and is based on the undoubted facts of human experience. Life experience testifies that persons bound by mutual love, while fully preserving and even strengthening their own personality, over time merge into a single being living a single common life. This phenomenon is observed in the lives of spouses, and in the lives of parents and children, and in the lives of friends; as well as in social life, in the life of entire peoples, at certain historical moments feeling like a single whole being, with a single mood, common thoughts, a single common aspiration of the will, and at the same time without each individual losing his personal life, his personal properties, and his personal will. This fact is undeniable and known to all. He shows us the direction in which we should seek clarification and understanding of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. This dogma becomes clear to us not as a result of one or another of our reasoning and logical conclusions. It becomes clear to us only in the experience of love. We must never forget the difference between these two paths to the knowledge of the truth. One way, external experience and logical conclusions, reveals to us truths of another kind. The truths of the religious life are known; in a different way than the truths of the external world: they are known precisely in this last way. In the Acts of St. apostles we read: “The multitude of believers had one heart and one soul”(Acts 4:32). We cannot understand this fact with the mind unless we experience it with the heart. Surely, many sinful people could have “one heart and one soul”, if their individual isolation could, so to speak, melt in warmth. mutual love, then why can't there be inseparable unity in the three most holy Persons of the Godhead?! Such is the mystery of the Christian doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity: it is incomprehensible to the human mind, which strives to comprehend this mystery with its own external forces and means, but it is revealed to the same mind through the experience of a loving heart.

Prot. Series Chetverikov († 1947). (From the manuscript "The Truth of Christianity")

The Holy Trinity is a theological term that reflects the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of God. This is one of the most important concepts of Orthodoxy.

The Holy Trinity

From lectures on dogmatic theology at the Orthodox St. Tikhon Theological Institute

The dogma of the Holy Trinity is the foundation of the Christian religion

God is one in essence, but trinity in persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity consubstantial and indivisible.

The very word “Trinity” of non-biblical origin was introduced into the Christian lexicon in the second half of the 2nd century by Saint Theophilus of Antioch. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is given in the Christian Revelation.

The dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is incomprehensible, it is a mysterious dogma, incomprehensible at the level of reason. For the human mind, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is contradictory, because it is a mystery that cannot be expressed rationally.

It is no coincidence that o. Pavel Florensky called the dogma of the Holy Trinity "a cross for human thought." In order to accept the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, the sinful human mind must reject its claims to the ability to know everything and rationally explain everything, i.e., in order to comprehend the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, it is necessary to reject one’s own understanding.

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is comprehended, and only in part, in the experience of spiritual life. This comprehension is always associated with an ascetic feat. VN Lossky says: “The apophatic ascent is the ascent to Calvary, therefore no speculative philosophy could ever rise to the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.”

Belief in the Trinity distinguishes Christianity from all other monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam. The doctrine of the Trinity is the basis of all Christian faith and moral teaching, for example, the doctrine of God the Savior, God the Sanctifier, etc. V.N. Lossky said that the doctrine of the Trinity is “not only the basis, but also the highest goal of theology, … to know the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity in its fullness means to enter into the Divine life, into the very life of the Most Holy Trinity.”

The doctrine of the Triune God comes down to three propositions:
1) God is trinity and trinity consists in the fact that there are three Persons (hypostases) in God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

2) Each Person of the Most Holy Trinity is God, but They are not three Gods, but the essence of a single Divine Being.

3) All three Persons differ in personal or hypostatic properties.

Analogies of the Holy Trinity in the world

The Holy Fathers, in order to somehow bring the doctrine of the Holy Trinity closer to the perception of man, used various kinds of analogies borrowed from the created world.
For example, the sun and the light and heat emanating from it. A source of water, a spring from it, and, in fact, a stream or a river. Some see an analogy in the structure of the human mind (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. Ascetic experiments): “Our mind, word and spirit, by the simultaneity of their beginning and by their mutual relations, serve as an image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
However, all these analogies are very imperfect. If we take the first analogy - the sun, outgoing rays and heat - then this analogy implies a certain temporal process. If we take the second analogy - a source of water, a key and a stream, then they differ only in our understanding, but in reality it is a single water element. As for the analogy connected with the abilities of the human mind, it can only be an analogy of the image of the Revelation of the Most Holy Trinity in the world, but not of an intra-trinitarian being. Moreover, all these analogies place unity above trinity.
St. Basil the Great considered the rainbow to be the most perfect of analogies borrowed from the created world, because “one and the same light is both continuous in itself and multicolored.” “And a single face opens up in multicolor – there is no middle and no transition between colors. It is not visible where the rays are delimited. We clearly see the difference, but we cannot measure the distances. And together, the multi-color rays form a single white. A single essence is revealed in a multicolored radiance.”
The disadvantage of this analogy is that the colors of the spectrum are not separate personalities. In general, patristic theology is characterized by a very wary attitude towards analogies.
An example of such an attitude is the 31st Word of St. Gregory the Theologian: “Finally, I concluded that it is best to depart from all images and shadows, as deceptive and far from reaching the truth, but to stick to a more pious way of thinking, dwelling on a few sayings” .
In other words, there are no images to represent in our mind this dogma; all images borrowed from the created world are very imperfect.

A Brief History of the Dogma of the Holy Trinity

Christians have always believed that God is one in essence, but trinity in persons, but the dogmatic doctrine of the Holy Trinity itself was created gradually, usually in connection with the emergence of various kinds of heretical delusions. The doctrine of the Trinity in Christianity has always been associated with the doctrine of Christ, with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Trinitarian heresies, trinitarian disputes had a Christological basis.

Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity was made possible by the Incarnation. As they say in the troparion of Theophany, in Christ "Trinity worship appeared." The teaching about Christ is “a stumbling block for the Jews, but foolishness for the Greeks” (1 Cor. 1:23). Likewise, the doctrine of the Trinity is a stumbling block for both "strict" Jewish monotheism and Hellenic polytheism. Therefore, all attempts to rationally comprehend the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity led to delusions of either a Jewish or Hellenic nature. The first dissolved the Persons of the Trinity in a single nature, for example, the Sabellians, while others reduced the Trinity to three unequal beings (Arians).
Arianism was condemned in 325 at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. The main act of this Council was the compilation of the Nicene Creed, in which non-biblical terms were introduced, among which the term "omousios" - "consubstantial" played a special role in the trinitarian disputes of the 4th century.
To reveal the true meaning of the term "homousios" it took great efforts of the great Cappadocians: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa.
The great Cappadocians, first of all, Basil the Great, strictly distinguished between the concepts of “essence” and “hypostasis”. Basil the Great defined the difference between "essence" and "hypostasis" as between the general and the particular.
According to the teaching of the Cappadocians, the essence of the Deity and its distinctive properties, i.e., the unbeginning of being and the divine dignity belong equally to all three hypostases. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are its manifestations in the Persons, each of which has the fullness of the divine essence and is in inseparable unity with it. The hypostases differ from each other only in personal (hypostatic) properties.
In addition, the Cappadocians actually identified (primarily two Gregory: Nazianzus and Nyssa) the concept of “hypostasis” and “person”. “Face” in theology and philosophy of that time was a term that belonged not to the ontological, but to the descriptive plan, that is, the mask of an actor or the legal role that a person performed could be called a face.
By identifying “person” and “hypostasis” in trinitarian theology, the Cappadocians thereby transferred this term from the descriptive plane to the ontological plane. The consequence of this identification was, in essence, the emergence of a new concept that the ancient world did not know: this term is “personality”. The Cappadocians succeeded in reconciling the abstractness of Greek philosophical thought with the biblical idea of ​​a personal Deity.
The main thing in this teaching is that a person is not a part of nature and cannot be thought in terms of nature. The Cappadocians and their immediate disciple St. Amphilochius of Iconium called the Divine hypostases “ways of being” of the Divine nature. According to their teaching, a person is a hypostasis of being, which freely hypostasizes its nature. Thus, a personal being in its concrete manifestations is not predetermined by an essence that is given to it from the outside, therefore God is not an essence that would precede Persons. When we call God the absolute Personality, we thereby want to express the idea that God is not determined by any external or internal necessity, that He is absolutely free in relation to His own being, is always what He wants to be and always acts in such a way. as he wants, i.e. freely hypostasizes His triune nature.

Indications of the Trinity (plurality) of Persons in God in the Old and New Testaments

In the Old Testament there are a sufficient number of indications of the trinity of Persons, as well as covert indications of the plurality of persons in God without indicating a specific number.
This plurality is already mentioned in the first verse of the Bible (Genesis 1:1): “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The verb “bara” (created) is in the singular, and the noun “elohim” is in the plural, which literally means “gods”.
Gen. 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The word “make” is plural. The same Gen. 3:22: “And God said, Behold, Adam has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil.” "Of Us" is also plural.
Gen. 11:6-7, where we are talking about the Babylonian pandemonium: “And the Lord said: ... let us go down and confuse their language there”, the word “we will go down” is in the plural. St. Basil the Great in Shestodnev (Conversation 9) comments on these words as follows: “Truely strange idle talk is to assert that someone sits to himself, orders, oversees himself, compels himself powerfully and urgently. The second is an indication of actually three Persons, but without naming the persons and without distinguishing them.
XVIII chapter of the book of "Genesis", the appearance of three angels to Abraham. At the beginning of the chapter it says that God appeared to Abraham, in the Hebrew text is "Jehovah". Abraham, going out to meet the three strangers, bows to them and addresses them with the word "Adonai", literally "Lord", in the singular.
There are two interpretations of this passage in patristic exegesis. First: the Son of God, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, appeared, accompanied by two angels. We find such an interpretation in Mch. Justin the Philosopher, from St. Hilary of Pictavia, from St. John Chrysostom, from Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus.
However, most of the fathers - Saints Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Ambrose of Milan, Blessed Augustine - believe that this is the appearance of the Holy Trinity, the first revelation to man about the Trinity of the Godhead.
It was the second opinion that was accepted by Orthodox Tradition and found its embodiment, firstly, in hymnography, which speaks of this event precisely as a manifestation of the Triune God, and in iconography (the famous icon “Old Testament Trinity”).
Blessed Augustine (“On the City of God”, book 26) writes: “Abraham meets three, worships one. Seeing the three, he comprehended the mystery of the Trinity, and bowing as if to one, he confessed the One God in Three Persons.
An indication of the trinity of God in the New Testament is, first of all, the Baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Jordan from John, which received the name of Theophany in Church Tradition. This event was the first clear Revelation to mankind about the Trinity of the Godhead.
Further, the commandment about baptism, which the Lord gives to His disciples after the Resurrection (Matt. 28, 19): “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Here the word "name" is in the singular, although it refers not only to the Father, but also to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit together. St. Ambrose of Milan comments on this verse as follows: “The Lord said “in the name”, and not “in the names”, because there is one God, not many names, because there are not two Gods and not three Gods.”
2 Cor. 13:13: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." With this expression, the apostle Paul emphasizes the personality of the Son and the Spirit, which give gifts along with the Father.
1, In. 5, 7: “Three bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.” This passage from the epistle of the apostle and evangelist John is controversial, since this verse is not found in ancient Greek manuscripts.
Prologue of the Gospel of John (John 1, 1): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Here God is understood to mean the Father, and the Son is called the Word, i.e., the Son was eternally with the Father and was eternally God.
The Transfiguration of the Lord is also the Revelation of the Holy Trinity. Here is how V.N. Lossky comments on this event of the gospel history: “Therefore, the Epiphany and the Transfiguration are celebrated so solemnly. We celebrate the Revelation of the Most Holy Trinity, for the voice of the Father was heard and the Holy Spirit was present. In the first case under the guise of a dove, in the second - like a radiant cloud that overshadowed the apostles.

Difference of Divine Persons according to hypostatic properties

According to church teaching, Hypostases are Personalities, and not impersonal forces. At the same time, hypostases have a single nature. Naturally, the question arises, how to distinguish between them?
All divine properties belong to common nature, they are characteristic of all three Hypostases and, therefore, in themselves they cannot express the differences of the Divine Persons. Impossible to give absolute definition each Hypostasis, using one of the Divine names.
One of the features of personal existence is that a person is unique and unrepeatable, and therefore, it cannot be defined, it cannot be subsumed under a certain concept, since the concept always generalizes; cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Therefore, a personality can be perceived only through its relation to other personalities.
This is exactly what we see in the Holy Scriptures, where the idea of ​​Divine Persons is based on the relationships that exist between them.
Starting approximately from the end of the 4th century, we can talk about the generally accepted terminology, according to which hypostatic properties are expressed in the following terms: the Father has unbegottenness, the Son has begottenness (from the Father), and the procession (from the Father) of the Holy Spirit. Personal properties are properties that are incommunicable, eternally remaining unchanged, exclusively belonging to one or another of the Divine Persons. Thanks to these properties, the Persons are distinguished from each other, and we recognize them as special Hypostases.
At the same time, distinguishing three Hypostases in God, we confess the Trinity consubstantial and indivisible. Consubstantial means that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three independent Divine Persons possessing all divine perfections, but these are not three special separate beings, not three Gods, but the One God. They have a single and indivisible Divine nature. Each of the Persons of the Trinity possesses the divine nature in perfection and wholly.

The dogma of the "holy trinity" is the result of violence over the Word of God

and deviations into the philosophy of Neoplatonism .

On the one hand, for Christians who share the dogma of the "holy trinity", the highest and final argument justifying the truth of this dogma is the Bible, but this is only in words. Holy Bible- The Word of the Living God clearly and clearly nowhere speaks of the essence of the “holy trinity”. Moreover, the Bible does not give grounds for believing in the "holy trinity", it is simply not written.

Christianity historically began to take shape within the framework of Judaism, in which only one God is revered - YHWH. In the first writings of Christians who entered and did not enter the canon of the New Testament, neither "God the Son", nor even the "Holy Trinity" is mentioned. Until the middle of the 2nd century, Christians had not yet heard and had no idea about the "holy trinity". And if at that time some modern Christian preacher had started talking about the “holy trinity”, they - the first, New Testament, apostolic Christians - would have considered him an incredible heretic.

The premises of the coming dogma of the "holy trinity" first began to appear only from the 2nd half of the 2nd century. After Christianity severed its spiritual connection with a strict biblical monotheistic creed, pagan - not biblical and not Jewish - beliefs in savior gods began to pour into its environment: Adonis, Mithra, Osiris other. And along with pagan gods saviors came beliefs in the existence of three leading gods of the heavenly pantheon:

- Trimurti, trinity, in Vedism (Hinduism): Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva;

Babylonian trinity: Anu, Enlil and Ea;

Ancient Egyptian trinity: Osiris(God the Father) Isis(Goddess Mother) and Gore(God the Son).

A significant influence on the formation of the Christian doctrine of the "Holy Trinity" was exerted by the philosophical and theological teaching of Gnosticism, which dominated public opinion at the beginning of our era. Gnosticism bizarrely combined the philosophy of Pythagoreanism and Platonism with Old Testament and original Christian beliefs. One of the most prominent figures in the mainstream of Gnosticism was Philo of Alexandria (25 BC - 50 AD).

He tried to combine the philosophy of Plato with biblical beliefs, more precisely with the text of the Jewish Bible itself. Communicating with the work of Philo, Christianity at the same time revered, according to Jewish custom, the sanctity of the Bible, on the one hand, and on the other hand, joined pagan culture and philosophy. It is no coincidence that a number of researchers ( Bruno Bauer, David Strauss) consider Philo of Alexandria "Father of Christianity".

Gnosticism of the 1st-2nd century AD together with Christianity broke away from Judaism and began to "develop" already on its own basis. At this stage big influence was rendered by the Gnostics Valentine and Basilides, who introduced into their teaching the idea of ​​the emanation of a deity, of the hierarchy of essences flowing from the nature of God.

The Latin-speaking Christian apologist of the 3rd century Tertullian testifies that it was the Gnostics who first came up with the heretical doctrine of the trinity of the deity. “Philosophy,” he writes, “has given rise to all heresies. From her came "eons" and other strange fictions. From it the Gnostic Valentinus produced his humanoid trinity, for he was a Platonist. From it, from philosophy, came the kind and careless God of Marcion, since Marcion himself was a Stoic ”(Tertullian.“ On the Writings of Heretics, 7-8).

Ridiculing the humanoid trinity of Gnostics,developing his religious and philosophical system, Tertullian himself eventually created his own doctrine of the trinity. The resulting "holy trinity" of Tertullian is in a certain hierarchical subordination. Their root is in the original God, in God the Father:"God is the root, The Son is a plant, the Spirit is a fruit", he wrote ("Against Praxei", ​​4-6). Although Tertullian was subsequently condemned as a heretic Montanist, his doctrine of the trinity became the starting pointformation of the church doctrine about God. Thus, Archpriest John Meyendorff, the most prominent expert in Christian patristics in the 20th century, writes: "Tertullian's great merit lies in the fact that he first used the expression, which subsequently became firmly established in Orthodox trinitarian theology" (See his "Introduction to Patristic Theology", New York, 1985, pp. 57-58).

In the 4th century, having become the dominant state religion, Christianity did not yet believe in the "Holy Trinity", did not have and did not recognize the dogma of the "Holy Trinity". At the 1st Ecumenical Council of 325, Christianity developed and approved a summary of its doctrine and called it the Creed. It was written that Christians believe"Into one God - the Almighty Father, the Creator of heaven and earth, of everything visible and invisible" .

It is important to note that Christians who worship the trinity greatly revere the creeds. Those Christian churches, denominations, etc. that do not recognize the Nicene-Tsaregrad Creed (since it was adopted at the first two councils in the cities of Nicea and Tsargorod, i.e. Constantinople) are not recognized as Christian.

Having become the state religion, coming out of the underground, the Christian church began to fit into the culture of the Greco-Roman world. In the 4th-5th century, the philosophy of Neoplatonism reached its peak, and in the work of its great representatives, as Iamblichus, Proclus, Plotinus, Porphyry, reflected the whole world, from the One Absolute God to matter and the underworld, in the form of a chain of interconnected and generating each other Triads, the so-called. Trinity consubstantial and indivisible:

1. Genesis (in the Christian trinity - God the Father);

2. Life (in the Christian trinity - the Holy Spirit, as the giver of life);

3. Logos, thinking (in the Christian trinity - the Son of God).

It should be noted an important and key aspect that all the leading creators of the Christian doctrine of the "holy trinity" ( Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa etc.) studied philosophy in the Athenian school of Neoplatonists, which was active until 529 (!) In this school, and on the basis of this Neoplatonic Hellenic wisdom, they composed the Christian doctrine of the "holy trinity."

As a result, at the II Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 381), under the chairmanshipGregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa several sentences about the Holy Spirit were added to the Nicene Creed: I believe and"into the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from God the Father..." . Thus, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ was added to believing in the Holy Spirit.

In the Niceno-Tsaregradsky Creed "God the Son" and "God the Holy Spirit" are not proclaimed Gods, but only Lords almost equal to God the Father. But (!) The Niceno-Tsaregradsky creed did not approve the dogma of the "holy trinity" in its modern sense. Then, in the 4th century, the official church, which called itself the one, holy, universal and apostolic church, proclaimed faith in the One God the Father and faith in the Lord the Son of God Jesus Christ and the Lord the Holy Spirit.

It is also necessary to emphasize that the dogma of the “holy trinity” in its modern ecclesiastical understanding and theological interpretation was not approved at any (!) of the church councils, since it is clearly - both in form and content - in direct contradiction with the canonical decisions of the 1st and 2nd Ecumenical Councils. The Decisions of the First and Second Ecumenical Councils do not know “God the Son” equal to God the Father and do not know equal to God the Father and “God the Holy Spirit”, who"come from God the Father" .

The dogma of the "holy trinity" was created

outside the text of the Bible and outside the canons of the Ecumenical Councils.

For the first time, the dogma of the "holy trinity" was anonymously formulated in Christianity only in the 6th century and was first set forth in a document that was included in church history entitled « QUICUMQUE »(Kuikumkwe). The document's title is taken from the first word of its first sentence: « QUICUMQUE vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem"(Whoever wishes to be saved must first of all adhere to the Catholic faith.)

Further, it is said that one must believe that God is one in essence and trinity in persons; that there is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, but not three Gods, but One God; that a Christian is obliged to equally honor and pray separately to God the Father, "God the Son" and "God the Holy Spirit", but not as three Gods, but God alone.

This Creed was first (!) published in an appendix to the writings of the famous theologian and preacher Caesar of Arles (Caesarius ex Arles), who died in 542. Most researchers date the appearance of the document to 500-510 years. To give credibility to the document, Catholic theologians attributed its creation to the saint Athanasius of Alexandria(St. Athanasius the Great, 293-373) and named him "Symbol of Athanasius the Great". Of course, this Symbol does not apply to Saint Athanasius, who died a century and a half before the writing of the Kuikumkva.

So, in the textbook for modern Russian Orthodox theological seminaries, Archpriest John Meyendorff "Introduction to Patristic Theology" treatise "Kuikumkwe" is not at all remembered among the works of St. Athanasius the Great not specified. It is important to add that St. Athanasius wrote his compositions only (!) in Greek, and "Kuikumkve" has come down to us in Latin. In the Greek-speaking Orthodox Church, this symbol was not known until the 11th century, until the division of the Christian Church into Catholicism and Orthodoxy in 1054. Over time, and in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the content of the Kuikumkwe was translated into Greek and taken as a model for expounding the general Christian doctrine of the "holy trinity."

Now the vast majority of Christian churches and the dogma of the "holy trinity" in the exposition "Symbol of Athanasius the Great". But the tragedy of this Christian church teaching lies in the fact that the dogma of the "Holy Trinity" is comprehensively substantiated from the point of view of Neoplatonism, but not a single word is confirmed by the text of Holy Scripture.

To eliminate this shortcoming, the phrase was inscribed in the Bible: “For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one". This phrase was first inserted into the epistles of the apostle Paul, then into the epistle of the apostle Peter, and finally, a more suitable place was found for it in the 1st epistle of the apostle John, where it is now. It now says: “This is Jesus Christ, who came by water and blood (and Spirit); not only with water, but with water and blood. And the spirit testifies (of Him), because the Spirit is truth. (For I bear witness to three in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.) For I testify three things in heaven: spirit, water, and blood; and these three are one" (1 John 5:6-8). Underlined and bracketed words are absent in all ancient - before the 7th century - New Testament texts.

After the invention of printing, the first scientific edition of the books of the New Testament in two languages ​​- Greek and Latin - was carried out by Erasmus of Rotterdam(1469-1536). In the first two editions of the text Erasmus he did not print the words about the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, since he did not find these words in the numerous lists of the New Testament that he had in the 4th-6th centuries. And only in the third edition, under pressure from the Catholic Church, he was forced to insert the words so necessary to the dogma of the "Holy Trinity". This is the third edition of the Bible Erasmus of Rotterdam was again carefully edited by the Catholic Church and approved as canonical under the title textus reptus (Accepted text), which became the basis for the translation of the New Testament into all languages ​​of the world. This is how things stand with the origin and assertion in the Christian church of the dogma of the "holy trinity."

Of course, modern Christianity, which has accepted the dogma of the "holy trinity", is forced to substantiate it not by referring to the Neoplatonists, but by the Holy Scriptures. But Holy Scripture, unlike the work of the Neoplatonists, does not provide any basis for recognizing this dogma.That is why there are still significant disagreements in the interpretation and understanding of this dogma among Christian churches where the trinity is worshiped. So, detailing the relationship of the persons of the "holy trinity", Orthodox Church believes that the Holy Spirit "comes from God the Father", and Catholic - that the Holy Spirit "comes from God the Father and from God the Son".

As for the "God the Holy Spirit", theologians prefer to talk about him least of all. There is no clear indication in the Bible that the Holy Spirit is a person.

Most Protestant Trinitarian preachers say that the image of the Holy Spirit has not yet been revealed to us, while others say that the Holy Spirit is a supernatural power that comes from God.

A number of Christian churches now do not recognize the dogma of the "holy trinity", in turn, the dominant trinitarian Christian churches and denominations do not consider them Christians.