Abstract
This article sets out the Eastern Orthodox understanding of God as Trinity and the relationship between the three Persons of the Trinity. It goes on to show how the life of the church reflects the relationships of the divine Persons. The church is rooted in the life of the Trinity, and shares in the divine life through its liturgical worship, in particular the celebration of the divine liturgy, the Eucharist. The church is a living icon of the Trinity. Only through membership of the church can believers enter into a living relationship with the trinitarian God and find salvation, not as individuals but as members of the believing and worshipping community: baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist are essential to the Christian life. While these doctrines are matters of academic study and ecumenical theological discussion, they are essentially truths to be lived, as they are by believers who are not professional theologians but who participate fully in the life of the church. The church needs to emphasize these traditional truths over against contemporary individualism and the privatization of religious faith.
Introduction
The church’s historical-theological shape was formed as a concrete, exterior, social manifestation of the overflow of intra-trinitarian love into a humanity fallen into sin. In its essence, it is the common life of the people with the Holy Trinity, with divine trinitarian relationships being the model for the interwoven unity between the life of the people and the life of the church. Differently put, within the light of the Holy Trinity the mysterious depths of the being of the church are discovered as well as the true meaning of every communion and unity in Christ. Specifically, in loving one another, the persons of the Holy Trinity produce among the believers an atmosphere of love. The one uplifting the believers to the unity of the trinity or the one through whom this unity descends to the believers is the Son, in the sense that the Son is as closely bound in grace with humankind as he is bound in his being with the Father, thus expressing towards them the same love. 1
Through the incarnation, the Son of God enjoys (as a human being) the love of the Father and becomes capable of sharing this love with all those who seek to unite with Him. In other words, the intra-divine love of the Father towards the Son is extended also over the people through the intermediation of the Holy Spirit. For nothing is done separately within the Holy Trinity, but is done within a trinitarian soteriological “economical” framework. 2 Saint Basil the Great is very clear on this matter when he affirms that the Holy Spirit is un-separated from the Father and the Son, between them there is no interval, and in every operation the Spirit is closely conjoined with, and inseparable from the Father and the Son. God works the differences of operations, and the Lord the diversities of administrations, but all the while the Holy Spirit is present too of His own will, dispensing distribution of the gifts according to each recipient’s worth. 3
The Relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit in Orthodox ecclesiology
In the Eastern tradition Christians can only live an authentic life by embracing Christ in the Holy Spirit, or, to put it another way, only by the Holy Spirit may one experience a relationship with Christ. There exists a “mathematics” of divine inter-conditioning, in the sense that “The more vividly one knows Christ and the more one comes to live in him, the more one knows and lives in the Holy Spirit. The more spiritual a life one leads the more lovingly is one bound to Christ.” 4 In other words, there is no working of the Son in which the Spirit is not present, and, through unity of being, in which the Father is not also present. 5
The workings of Christ and those of the Spirit are ever-present in the church. Basil the Great attributes to the Spirit even the organization of the church, as a continuity of its inexhaustible workings from its preexistence to economy and resurrection. 6 The indissoluble unity between Christ and the Holy Spirit, on which rests the life of the church and that of its Christian community, is an outward reflection (within the created world) of the unity of essence and love of the inter-trinitarian plan. 7
Yet this unity does not mean the uniformization of the mode of subsistence of the divinity by each person in part, in the sense that: the Father has His divine being as a spring, therefore as a distinct Person (showing that the person is not ulterior to the being or coming from being) and the Son and the Spirit have their being as receivers (showing that it is never situated outside of receiving personhood). Said otherwise, in God, the divine paternal relation and affection are revealed in a unique light, but with no confusion between them. This affectionate and loving unity cannot position itself outside the persons. 8
The unification of the Son and of the Spirit in an eternal and temporal plan
In the view of Stăniloae, the Spirit—who “rests” and “remains” on the Son—is the one that shines, that stays like a light over Christ, and Christ is the one put into a light by the Spirit. That is why he says that the holy Scripture does not speak about the “sight of the Spirit” in either general or specific terms, but of the seeing of “Christ in the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is the spiritual light that renders Christ visible in that the Spirit is both the medium and the means through which Christ is made apparent to human beings. As a consequence, the Spirit is the one who makes Christ known to us, being the power that enters our “subjective perception apparatus” in order to uplift us and to make us capable of seeing and understanding Christ.
As a consequence, it is the only way through which people (as future saints) are able to get closer to God for he makes His Son shine. 9 As Christ may be known and lived only through the Spirit, then also the Spirit (and the experience of approaching him) cannot be lived out alone, without Christ. When there is an attempt to separate the Spirit from Christ, room is given to false exaltations and enthusiastic manifestations, which, despite their emotional appeal, lack true spiritual consistency. From the other extreme of logic, the Spirit cannot be lived out in isolation as an object of knowledge apprehended through laboratory research, nor through the positing of mathematical or philosophical formulas. In short, it does not constitute the property of any group of initiated persons because it may not be made static and bounded. Rather, the Spirit is in a continual motion of manifestation of the love of the Father through the Son, and through the Son towards humankind, and we are called to respond with the power of our love which is carried over by the Spirit to the Son and from Him to the Father. 10
The believers always receive Christ in the Spirit and the Spirit in Christ
The “resting” and “remaining” of the Spirit on the Son is our insurance for receiving Christ and for His permanent presence in our life. In the moment of christening the neophyte receives the gift of Christ through the invocation of the Holy Spirit in order to become one with Christ, to enter Christ. In fact the whole ritual of baptism is done in the name of the Holy Trinity. Finally, the newly baptized and anointed one is given the body and blood of the Lord, in the form of bread and wine, transubstantiated through the invocation of the same Holy Spirit, in the Eucharist. 11 Again three: baptism, anointing, Eucharist.
Which is to say we are witnessing a paradox of the human–God relationship in the fact that on the one hand, in the beginning, the baptized enters Christ (implicitly the church for it is the body of which Christ is the head) and on the other hand, in the end, Christ enters the baptized (through the sharing of wine and bread). In other words, he enters the church and the church enters him in the sense that he is living out a paradoxical communion with God and with the other believers, in the indescribable image of the relationships between the trinitarian persons. 12 To put it otherwise, through the “rest” of the Spirit on Christ (on the church) and on us, who are united with Christ (becoming members of the church) we share the benefits of such a state, of course not in its plenitude, but as far as the measure of our power of working together with the received holy Grace will let us. Christ communicates to us the life of His resurrected humanity, preparing us also for resurrection. In this way, the church becomes the spiritual place where Christ gradually communicates to our humanity, through His Holy Spirit, His resurrected humanity and thus its eternal life. 13 The church is the center of confluence of spiritual divine–human energies made unique by the unity of the Trinity and its manifestations through the diversity of the gifts emerging from a single Spirit, their origin. Its pneumatological character is given by the oneness of this life circuit of the Spirit that descends from the Father (through and with the Son), breathing life upon its members, deifying, in turn, the spiritualized souls by ascent through the Son to the Father. The church is a living organism of the Spirit in which deification is present and active inside our souls, the souls themselves becoming in a way churches through the charisma that infiltrates them and enlightens them. These “subjective churches,” united in the same proclamation of faith and sanctified through the same charisma that is given to us through the sacraments, lend us their knowledge and holiness of life. 14
The reflection of inter-trinitarian relationships in the practice of Orthodox Church soteriology
In the Orthodox Church equilibrium between christology and pneumatology is to be found: never will the work of Christ be accentuated to the deficit of that of the Spirit, or the other way around. The balanced relationship extant between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is perfectly reflected within Orthodoxy in the interior ecclesiological world, and, through church practice, to the world outside. Concretely, on the one hand, the Holy Trinity is the foundation of the church and of the whole Christian life from which the Church of Christ is constantly growing; and, on the other hand, the church defends with vigor the dogma of the Holy Trinity, a unique essence with three modes of manifestation. For the church is the communion of the adoptive children of God through the incarnation of His Son, heirs of the goods promised and given through the blood of Christ and also the brotherly community and communion, in the same Spirit, of the ones who were invited to participate in the eternal legacy. The church is the presence of the Holy Trinity among the believers through godly charisma; it is the theandric sacramental reality through which the fullness of trinitarian love and life is offered to the believers.
The church is a communion of human and divine persons in a soteriological perspective. The relationship between them is so tightly knit that it can truly be said that one who truly sees the church is also seeing the Holy Trinity, in the sense that one is seeing it as a community of all who believe, as the Trinity is alive and present in the church. The peoples’ salvation is realized through their extension and incorporation in Christ, through their gradual assimilation in His resurrected humanity, their rising to the state of His humanity being realized through grace. In communion, He is transmitting from himself, not in isolation. True salvation is thus obtained only within the church, in the body of those gathered in Christ, because it forms the “field of action” of the Holy Spirit’s charisma, which fully resides in the resurrected humanity of Christ, from where it is communicated to us. 15
Therefore, salvation is not a mechanical, external act, but a personal conscious participation in the godly life, with our entire, integrated psychological being so performing that the “image” of God we are carrying may grow and evolve (through faith and charisma) to become the “likeness” of God as well. In order to reach this state, believers must know the divine, Triune truth, and their being must make it its own and further develop it (with the help of grace bestowed by the Holy Spirit) to a state of holiness. Objective salvation is realized by Christ (through the Incarnation, the cross, death, and resurrection), being subjectively appropriated by us through the working of the Spirit in the church. Not only is the Spirit the ascending way of knowing divinity, but also the descending way by which charisma comes towards and into us. The workings of the Holy Spirit (in the diversity of its energies and gifts) are inseparable from those of the Holy Trinity. They belong to it.
The church, through its pneumatocentric structure which is owed to the divine nature given to it by the body of Christ illuminated and transfigured by the Spirit, is the center of spiritual rebirth and the focal point of the deification of all its believers.
Yet all of these things are the matter of clerics, theologians, and professors of theology. 16 They truly become important in the context of officially formulated dialogue between the representatives of the different churches. This is not a small matter, because the educated classes have always been the ones to articulate and elaborate the formulae of faith that we all embraced, yet the individuals who have lived out their truth are usually drawn from the “simple” classes, less acquainted with exegetic exercises or with linguistic analysis. Even so, we all crave for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The educated ones say that all the synodal decisions stand under direct assistance from the Holy Spirit; the simple ones claim the historical continuity of faith of their forerunners. While both approaches are correct in their way, the problem must nonetheless be looked at in a more nuanced fashion.
The clerics and the need for fulfilling the mission
As far as the clerical world is concerned, things are pretty simple. Generally, priests perform their mission being convinced of the truths of faith they are promoting and that they have gained during their theological studies and from pastoral experience. For them, the church is the body of Christ extended in humanity, through the Holy Spirit, in time and in space. 17
This is the environment in which the Holy Trinity is fully reflected, 18 acting directly and continuously, and where the mystery of love and of life in communion above nature within its bosom represent the model and the aim of communion between all of its members. More to the point, nothing exists inside the church that is not to be sustained by the foundation of trinitarian dogma: learning, spiritual life, and pastoral experience.
We may say that the church is trinitarian because it is liturgical and celebrates the divine liturgy, because it is serving the triune God and is united with Him through the holy sacraments. Yet, only because it is trinitarian may the church also be liturgical, offering its members the possibility of giving themselves through the Son in the Spirit to the Father, and to each other, without losing their individuality and liberty. In a word, the church is the living icon of the Holy Trinity. The One trinitarian God is in the church as he is in His Kingdom that is advancing towards its perfect form in the afterlife. 19 The church is the whole cosmos restored in its beauty, or humanity restored in its three-in-one unity.
Believers and their need for confession
For the laity, faith does not always nor directly depend on the necessity of a detailed knowledge of doctrine and of cultic rites, rather it depends on being used to and accepting the tradition they were born into, seconded, for some, by a lived experience of evangelical commandments. One that believes does not ask himself about the relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit yet his or her entire life stands under the mark of the Trinity.
All prayers, communitarian as well as personal, are done in the name of the Trinity. In the church, the whole ritual begins by invoking the Holy Trinity and ends with the Gloria of the trinitarian Persons. 20 In other words, no prayer can be made nor be effective without a faith in the Holy Trinity, without the proclamation of its power, as a base for the trust that what has been solicited will also be fulfilled.
In the church (as well as upon initiating any daily ritual activity) the believers make the gesture of the cross, accompanied by the invocation of the Holy Trinity, this way showing that it is part of their lives. 21 They are thereby living out a reality of relating to God that they explain to themselves in a very simple way: they are bowing because through the cross the Son of God incarnated, Jesus Christ, has freed them from the slavery of sin and death, and through the simultaneous invocation of the Trinity, they show that this cross of Christ cannot be separated from the love and the caretaking of the Trinity for them. Likewise, the meeting of Christ and the sensing of His love are experienced by attending the holy liturgy, the prayer of the church par excellence, because it is a progressive spiritual introduction into the Kingdom as represented by the Communion of the Holy Trinity. That is why, for the people of God, there is no salvation and no experiencing of God outside of the church.
The false wish for a comfortable salvation
Persons who declare themselves to be believers, but do not come to the church, stand no chance of discovering the tripartite personal God. For only through Christ (acting through the Holy Spirit within His communal body, the church) do we get to meet and to know the Father. 22 Those who seek only the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit individually, outside the church, delude themselves with a mere illusion of a personal discovery, for God has a trinitarian life and being as well. Because of this, one may not find the Father outside the church, because He is in a communion of being with its Head (i.e., the church), who is Christ, and one may only discover the Spirit, which is the medium in which Christ “shines,” in the church. The holy fathers tried, in their own time, to answer questions following from this realization that are of relevance today. These questions are often put by people who are seeking salvation through a special, personal relationship with the Trinity, gained outside the church. This is because they believe they can, in this way, save themselves “on their own terms.” On the contrary, the whole body of patristic literature says that all things are done by the Father through the Son (through the church as His body) in the Holy Spirit, in a manner in which the Father appears as a source of the working, the Son as life, and the Holy Spirit as a power that concretizes and finalizes the action. Put simply, none of the three divine Persons has a distinct “personality,” but a singular, identical substance and life-action that passes through all Three.
Within the intellectual world especially there is a trend according to which the knowledge of God does not necessarily require a faith and living out the evangelical commandments promoted by the church, but only requires a personal exercise of moral and ethical self-education. This individualistic tendency overlooks that true communion between people is a “projection” of inter-trinitarian love in the bosom and the life of an ecclesial community.
Conclusions
The Trinity and its role in ecclesiology remains an important subject on the agenda of confessional and inter-confessional theological meetings. It is noticeable that it tends to become a strictly theological matter, belonging to the library and seminar room; yet its understanding is primarily one of living it out, one of communion. That is why, in the end, I believe that God prefers the sincere and love-filled prayer of a simple person (who is found communing and communicating with others in church) than with the theoretical efforts of the instructed theologian, whose ecclesiastical exercises are more “at home” in the library or the university aula than in the church, the one place where the Holy Trinity is surely present.
The social communitarian experience, along with the indifference of today’s society towards anything tied to tradition and traditions, is a pale, unknowing reflection of the religious sentiment and the joy of belonging and attending a church. By assuming the “secularization thesis” of modernity, people have turned faith into a purely private sphere, opposed to social knowledge, thus facilitating the apparition and development of an almost completely secular society. I would argue that being modern does not mean being radically secularized. For a modernity lacking Christianity is weaker than one organically reconciled with it. To credibly face this overwhelming challenge, the church must rediscover in its intimate springs of trinitarian faith the best means of communication and communion with an inhuman “brave new world” in which God Himself, its Creator, seems to no longer possess His place.
Footnotes
1
D. Stăniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: The Experience of God, trans. Ioniţă I. and R. Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 1998), 245–46.
2
I. Bria, “The Presence and the Work of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” Ortodoxia 3 (1978): 489–90. The common action of the Holy Trinity is expressed very clearly by Ambrose of Milan, “On The Holy Spirit,” III.16.
3
Basil, “The Treatise De Spiritu Sanctu,” XVI.
4
D. Stăniloae, “Trinitarian Relations and the Life of the Church,” in Theology and The Church, trans. R. Barringer (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary), 14.
5
In a less rigorous theological language, yet just as profound, Christ is the spring of flowing power in the church, continuously nourishing the godly life within it. Through this, those who receive His power become more and more intimately bound not only with Him, but also among themselves, in community and communion. The life flowing from Christ, being a life of love, enters the believers as another divine person, as the Holy Spirit. It makes the people discover the love for Christ and makes them feel His love as a central brother for them and inspires in them His filial love towards the Father. As a result, feeling as being all brothers of the same Christ and sons of the same Father of His, they feel among themselves as brothers. D. Stăniloae, “The Mystic Reality of the Church,” Ortodoxia 3 (1984): 416–17.
6
“And the organization of the Church? Is it not clear and undoubtable that it is the work of the Holy Spirit? For as Paul the Apostle says, the Spirit gave the Church at first the Apostles, at second the prophets and at third the teachers, and afterwards the gift of healing and of miracles (I Cor XII:28)” N. Buzescu, “The Pneumatological Aspect of the Ecclesiology and the Importance of Tradition at Saint Basil the Great,” Ortodoxia 1 (1979): 103.
7
God is only one, and never could one of the three divine persons be conceived (either in itself or in its working) as being separated from the others. The Holy Trinity is working in a complete harmony, guided by the same principle that is perichoretic love (Stăniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic, 245–60).
8
D. Stăniloae, “Holy Trinity—the Creator, the Saviour and the Eternal Goal of All Christians,” Ortodoxia 2 (1986): 16.
9
To say it otherwise, the Holy Spirit is the author of our spiritual rebirth for through it we become the sons of God. It is the life-giver, resurrecting the dead, for it has resurrected Christ. Salvation is gained through the Holy Spirit for it is the depository of godly charisma which overflows on everyone abundantly. It is the one that sets a beginning to confession and collaborates with humanity's liberty, working within the church and sharing with its members the “spiritual gifts” of which the great contemplative fathers speak. M. Ni1;coveanu, “The Teaching of St. Ambrose upon The Holy Spirit,” Studii Teologice 7–8 (1964): 465–66.
10
Trinitarian theology constitutes the nucleus of the Orthodox cult and the practice of the sacraments a unique mode of salvation for its believers. Buzescu, “Pneumatological,” 99.
11
The Eucharist is the plenary presence of Christ within His church, in the humanity regained and incorporated in it through the body and the blood of Christ which are filled with the Holy Spirit. Through the Eucharist the church finds its culminating development as the body of Christ or as the communitarian Christ who incorporates in himself the whole of humanity. In other words, the Eucharist expresses and realizes the consecration in Christ of the whole of humanity which He has redeemed and created. I. Zăgrean, “The Significance and the Place of the Eucharistic Ecclesiology of the Romanian Orthodox Church,” Ortodoxia 3 (1982): 398.
12
The interior illumination of our being brings with itself a total transfiguration so that the objective image of Christ and of the Holy Trinity are subjectively imprinted onto ourselves through the intense labor of the Holy Spirit. The integral work of the church appears as one of constant imprint and consecration of the image of the trinitarian God upon our soul, through the Holy Spirit. Buzescu, “Pneumatological,” 100.
13
Stăniloae, “Mystic,” 417.
14
Buzescu, “Pneumatological,” 91.
15
D. Stăniloae, “Ecclesiological Synthesis,” Studii Teologice 5–6 (1955): 267.
16
This is happening especially because theology has become in many universities a purely theoretical discipline based more on philological-historical and biblical-philosophical research rather than on living out the truths of faith and the appropriation of their spirit. Theology is referenced to the holy fathers and their patristic literature in general, not as a source of wisdom in itself, but only as an instrument of comparison with philosophical teachings. The church thus does not provide any interest for many students (there are exceptions), and does not make itself relevant to the spiritual preoccupations of the contemporary world. Any genuine return to tradition would require a rediscovery of authentic values of faith. For Basil the Great, ecclesiology was not a matter of theory (like a theorem that has to be demonstrated or a concept that must be developed and justified rationally), but as a phenomenon of Christian life in which the life of the divinity is interwoven with that of the believers. Consequently, the church appears as a specifically organic mode and medium in which divine life through the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life, is genuinely affirmed. Buzescu, “Pneumatological,” 93.
17
Stăniloae has stated that the church is the social extension of the resurrected Christ, yet it does not entirely find itself in the state of resurrection in which the personal humanity of Christ finds itself but in a mysterious way, through anticipation. Christ extends in it in order to gradually bring it to His own state. In other words, Christ is found in a state of resurrection but His social extension is only on the way to it. The church repeats the path of Christ in the sense that each one of its members is assisted by Christ himself on his path towards fulfillment. The church is the social communitarian Christ that makes the journey of the personal Christ with the personal Christ. Stăniloae, “Ecclesiological,” 267–68. In the Orthodox view, salvation is the result of the synergy of grace–faith–good deeds.
18
Epiphanius of Salamis says that the church is the temple of the Holy Trinity. It keeps and spills the treasure of faith. Coman 1984: 589. Tertullian underlines the role of the church as a mother in the economy of salvation and names it the body of the three persons of divinity, a mother and educator of the believers being the Holy Spirit itself where the Trinity of a single godliness can be found: the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. I. G. Coman, Patrologia, vol. I (Bucharest: Institutul Biblic 1;i de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1988), 499–500.
19
D. Stăniloae, Spirituality and Communion in the Orthodox Liturgy (Bucharest: Institutul Biblic 1;i de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române), 645; D. Ciobotea, Confessing the Truth in Love: Orthodox Perceptions of Love, Mission and Unity (Ia1;i: Trinitas, 2001), 67–75; Stăniloae, “Holy Trinity,” 34.
20
The holy liturgy reminds one of the trinitarian dimension of God. Through its every moment (starting with the great blessing) it illuminates and projects the unique and supreme being. Stăniloae, Spirituality, 642–43.
21
Buzescu, “Pneumatological,” 100.
22
The initiative of any action and of every gift, even after Christ became human and is working in us through the Holy Spirit after his uprising to the right of the Father as a human being, comes from the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit. More concretely, in any gift we receive in the church the love of the whole Trinity can be found. It begins from the Father, makes itself accessible to us in the embodied Son, and is fulfilled in our response and in our spiritual growth, as the Holy Spirit remains and resides in us. Stăniloae, “Holy Trinity,” 33.