IIIThe Athanasian Creed

"10. The essence of everything which it has pleased God to reveal to us about himself, outside his relation to other creatures, the Orthodox Church expresses in brief in the following words of Athanasius's Symbol : ' This is the Catholic creed : let us worship the one God in the Trinity, and the Trinity in the One, neither blending the hypostases, nor separating the substance.' "(p. 74.)

The fundamental truth which it has pleased God to reveal about himself to the church through the prophets and the apostles, and which the church reveals to us, is that God is one and three, three and one. The expression of this truth is such that I not merely cannot understand it, but indubitably understand that it cannot be understood. Man understands through reason. In the human mind there are no laws more definite than those which refer to numbers. And so the first thing which it has pleased God to reveal about himself to men is expressed in numbers : I myself = 3, and 3 = 1, and 1 = 3.

It is impossible that God should so answer the people whom he has himself created and to whom he has given reason in order to understand him; it is impossible for him to answer thus. A decent man, speaking to another, is not going to use to him strange, incomprehensible words. Where is there a man, however feeble in intellect, who to a child's question would not be able to reply in such a way that the child might understand him ? How then will God, revealing himself to me, speak in such a way that I cannot understand him ? Have not I, without

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having any faith, given myself an explanation of life, just as every unbeliever has such an explanation ? No matter how poor such an explanation may be, every explanation is at least an explanation. But this is not an explanation : it is merely a connection of words without any meaning and giving no idea of anything. I tried to find the meaning of life through rational knowledge, and found that life had no meaning. Then it seemed to me that faith gave that meaning and so I turned to the keeper of faith, to the church. And here, with its very first statement, the church affirms that there is no sense in the very concept of God. But, maybe, it only seems to me that it is senseless, because I do not understand the whole significance of it. Certainly that is not the invention of one person; it is that which billions have believed in. One and trine : what does that mean ? I read farther :

"Chapter I. Of God, one in substance." (p. 74.) It is necessary, in the first place, to show that God is one in substance, and, in the second place, to disclose the idea of the very substance of God. Then there follows the doctrine about the unity of God in fourteen pages, divided into articles. (" The Doctrine of the Church, and a Short History of the Dogma about the Unity of God.")

There are proofs of the unity of God from Holy Scripture and from reason. The moral application of the dogma. An exposition of the proofs and explanations of the unity of God.

God is for me and for every believer, above all, the beginning of all beginnings, the cause of all causes, a being out of time and space, the extreme Hmit of reason. No matter how I may express this idea, I cannot say that God is one, for to that concept I cannot apply the conception of number, which results from time and space, and so I can say just as little that there are seventeen Gods, as that there is one. God is the beginning of everything, God is God. That is the way I formerly comprehended God (and I am sure not I alone). But now I am taught that God is one. My perplexity before the expression that God is one and three is not only not cleared away, but my conception of God is almost lost when I read the fourteen pages which prove the unity of God. From the very first words, instead of elucidating that terrible statement about the unity and trinity of God, which has crushed out my idea of God, I am carried into the sphere of discussion about those Christian and pagan doctrines which have denied the unity of God.

It says there : "As opponents of the Christian doctrine about the unity of God have appeared (a) first of all, naturally, the pagans and polytheists who were to be converted to Christianity; (b) then, beginning with the second century, the Christian heretics, known under the general name of Gnostics, of whom some, under the influence of Eastern philosophy and theosophy, recognized the one supreme God, but at the same time admitted a multitude of lower gods, or seons, who emanated from him and created the existing world; and others, also carried away by the philosophy which, among other things, endeavoured to solve the origin of evil in the world, assumed the existence of two hostile, coeval principles, the principle of good and the principle of evil, as the prime causes of all good and evil in the world; (c) a little later, with the end of the third, and still more beginning with the middle of the fourth, century, the new Christian heretics, the Manicheans, who, with the same idea, assumed two gods, a good and an evil god, to the first of whom they subordinated the eternal kingdom of light, and to the second the eternal kingdom of darkness; (d) from the end of the sixth century, a small sect of tritheists, who, not understanding the Christian doctrine of the three persons in the one Divinity, assumed three distinct gods, who were as distinct as, for example, three persons or entities of the human race, although they all had the same substance, and as distinct as are the entities of any kind or class of beings; {e) finally, beginning with the seventh and up to the twelfth century, the Diacletians, whom many regarded as a branch of the Manichean sect, and who, indeed, like the Manicheans, worshipped two gods, the god of good and the god of evil." (pp. 76 and 77.)

I am told that God is one and trine, and I am told this is a divine, revealed truth. I cannot understand it, and I look for an explanation. What use is there in telhng me how incorrectly the pagans believed in assuming two or three gods ? It is clear to me that they did not have the same conception about God which I have, — so what is the use of talking to me about them ? I want to have the dogma explained to me, so why talk to me about these pagans and Christians who beheved in two and in three gods ? I am not a bitheist nor a tritheist. The refutal of these bitheists and tritheists does not clear up my question; and yet it is on this conception of the heretics that the whole exposition of the dogma about the unity of God is based, and not by accident. As before, when, in the question about the comprehensibility and incomprehensibility of God, the exposition of the church doctrine about it was connected with and even based on the refutal of the false doctrines, so even here, the doctrine is not expounded directly on the basis of traditions, reason, or mutual connection, but only on the basis of the contradictions of the other teachings, called heresies. In the doctrine about the Trinity, the divinity of the Son, the substance of the Son, there is everywhere one and the same method : it does not say there that the church teaches so and so for this or that reason, but it always says that some have taught that God is entirely comprehensible, others, that God is entirely incomprehensible, but that neither is correct, for the truth is so and so.

In the doctrine about the Son it does not say that the Son is this or that, but some have taught that he is en- tirely God, and others, that he is entirely man, and so we teach that he is so and so.

In the doctrine about the church and grace, about the creation, about the redemption, there is everywhere one and the same method. Never does the doctrine result from itself, but always from a dispute, where it is proved that neither one opinion nor the other is correct, but both taken together.

Here, in the exposition of the dogma about the unity of God, this method is particularly striking, because the impossibility of polytheism, or rather arithmotheism, is so indubitable to us and to all men who believe in God that the disclosure of the dogma about this, where it says that God is trine, acts directly contrary to the aim which the author has in view. That low sphere of disputing with the polytheists, to which the author descends, and those false methods, which he uses in doing so, almost destroy the concept of God, which every believer in him has.

The author says that God is one, not in the sense in which any pagan god, taken separately from all the other gods, might be.

"But he is one in the sense of there being no other God, neither equal to him, nor higher, nor lower; but he alone is the only God." (p. 77.)

Farther on the words of some father of the church are adduced : "When we say that the Eastern churches believe in one God the Father, the Almighty, the one Lord, we must understand here that he is called one not in number, but in totality (icnum non numero did, sed universitate). Thus, if somebody speaks of one man, or one horse, one is in this case taken as a number; for there may be another man, and a third, and equally a horse. But where we speak of one in such a way that a second and third can no longer be added, there one is taken not as a number, but in its totality. If, for exam- pie, we speak of the one sun, the word * one ' is used in such a sense that no second or third can be added to it. So much the more God, when he is called one, is to be understood not as one in number, but in his totality, one in the sense that there is no other God." (p. 77.)

However touching these words of the father of the church are by their dim striving to raise his conception to a higher level, it is evident that both that father of the church and the author are struggling only with polytheism and want the only God, but fail to understand that the words "one, only "are words expressiag number and so cannot be applied to God, in whom we believe. His saying that God is "one or only not in number "is tantamount to saying : "The leaf is green or greenish not in colour." It is evident that here the idea of God as one sun by no means excludes the possibility of another sun. Thus this whole passage brings us only to the conclusion that for him who wants to follow the consequent discussions it is necessary to renounce the idea of God as the beginning of everything, and to lower this idea to the semi-pagan concept of a one and only God as he is conceived in the books of the Old Testament. In the chapter of the proofs from the Old Testament, texts are quoted which reduce the conception of God to the one, exclusive God of the Jews, and there is an exposition of a dispute this time no longer with the heretics, but with modern science. The opinion of modern science that the God of the Jews was conceived by them differently from what God is conceived now by believers and that they did not even know the one God, is called a bold, manifest calumny.

"After that it is a bold, manifest calumny to assert that in the Old Testament there are traces of the teaching of polytheism and that the God of the Jews, according to their Sacred Books, was only one of the gods, a national god, like the gods of the other contemporary nations. In confirmation of the first thought they point to the passages in Holy Scripture where God is given the name of Elohim (gods, from 'Eloah,' god) in the plural number, and where he is made to speak : Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. i. 1 and 26); we will make him an help meet for him (Gen. ii. 18), and elsewhere. But when that same Moses, in whose books these passages are to be found, so often and so much in detail preaches monotheism as the chief part of the Sinaitic legislation; when he calls all the pagan gods vanities and idols, and in every way tries to guard the Jews from following them (Lev. xvii. 7; Deut. xxxii. 21, and elsewhere), there can be no doubt but that he did not, contrary to his opinion, openly express any belief in polytheism, and so we cannot but agree with the holy fathers of the church that here God is indeed represented in the plural, but that not the idea of the plurality of gods is expressed here, but of the divine persons in one and the same God, that is, that there is here an indication of the mystery of the Holy Trinity." (pp. 79 and 80.)

To any one reading the Old Testament it is clear that the conception of the God of the Old Testament is not at all the idea of a one God, but of a particular God, one only for the Jews. Why prove the contrary, when that is so unnecessary ? What startles us here is not so much the intentional shutting of the eyes against what is manifest, but the unscrupulousness and incomprehensible boldness with which that is denied which is so evident to everybody who reads the Scripture, that which for hundreds of years has been worked out and made clear by all thinking men who busy themselves with these subjects.

It would be useless to quote passages from the Bible, from which it is clear that the Jews recognized their God as one only in comparison with other gods. The whole Pentateuch is filled with such passages : Joshua xxiv. 2; Gen. xxxi. 19, 30; Psalm Ixxxvi. 8; the first of Moses' commandments. We wonder for whom these discussions are written; but what is most remarkable is that all that is said to those who are seeking for an explanation of the God-revealed truths about God. In order to reveal to me the truth about God, which is in the keeping of the church, I am told unintelligible words, God is one and three, and, instead of explaining it, they begin to prove to me what I and every believer know and cannot help knowing, namely, that God has no number; and, in order to prove that to me, I am taken down to the sphere of low, savage conceptions about God, and, to fill the cup, they quote in proof of God's unity from the Old Testament what obviously proves the opposite to me; and, in order to confirm these blasphemous speeches about God, they tell me that the plurality of the expression is a hint at the Holy Trinity, that is, that the gods, as on Olympus, sat there, and said : "Let us make ! "I feel like throwing it all away and freeing myself from this tormenting, blasphemous reading, but the matter is one of too much importance. It is that doctrine of the church which the masses believe in and which gives the meaning of life to them. I must proceed.

There follow confirmations of the unity of God from the New Testament. Again there is proved what cannot and ought not to be proved, and again with these proofs there is a debasing of the idea of God and again unscrupulous manipulations. In proof of the unity of God the following is quoted :

"The Saviour himself, in reply to the question of a certain scribe. Which is the first commandment of all ? answered. The first of all the commandments is Hear, 0 Israel; The Lord your God is one Lord (Mark xii, 28-29)." (p. 81.)

The author does not see that this is only a repetition of an Old Testament sentence, and that it says, "Your God is one." But more remarkable still is the following :

"In other cases he expressed this truth not less clearly or even more clearly, when, for example, to a man, who called him blessed teacher, he remarked, ' No one is blessed except the one God.' "(p. 81.)

The author does not see that here the word "one "has not even a numerical meaning. Here "one "does not mean "the only God," but "only God." And all tliis in order to prove what is included in the conception of God, which no one who pronounces the word "God "can doubt. Why this blasphemy ? One is involuntarily led to believe that all that is only in order intentionally to debase the conception of God. It is impossible to imagine any other purpose.

But that is not enough for the author. He considers it necessary to adduce more proofs of the unity (that is, of what cannot be connected with the idea of God) from reason. Here are the proofs of reason :

"The proofs of the unity of God, such as the holy fathers and the teachers of the church have used on the basis of common sense, are almost the same as those which are generally used at the present time for the same purpose. Some of them are borrowed from the testimony of history and the human soul (anthropological), others, from the examination of the universe (cosmological), others again, from the very conception of God (ontological)." (p. 83.)

In the first place, this is not correct, because such proofs have never been used to prove the' unity of God. They have been adduced to prove the existence of God, and there they have their place and are analyzed in Kant. In the second place, it is proved that none of them are conclusive to reason. Here are the proofs as offered by the theologian :

"(1) All nations have preserved an idea of the one God." That is not true. The author himself has just overthrown the polytheists.

"(2) On the agreement of the pagan authors." This again is not true. It cannot be a proof, because it does not refer to all pagan writers.

"(3) On the innateness of the idea about one God." This is again not true, because Tertulhan's words, which are quoted in confirmation of this position, are said about the innateness of the idea about God, but not about the innateness of the idea about the unity of God.

"Listen," Tertullian says to the pagans, "to the testimony of your soul, which, in spite of the prison of the body, of prejudices, and bad bringing up, of the fury of the passions, of the enslavement to false gods, when it is roused as though from intoxication or from a deep profound sleep, when it feels, so to speak, a spark of health, involuntarily invokes the name of the one true God and cries : * Great God ! Good God ! Whatever God may give 1 ' Thus his name is to be found on the lips of all men. The soul also recognizes him as the Judge in the following words : ' God sees, I hope to God, God will recompense me.' And pronouncing these words, it turns its glances, not to the Capitol, but to heaven, knowing that there is the palace of the living God, that from there and from him it has its origin. On the testimony of the soul according to the Christian nature (nattoraliter Christiance)." (p. 84.)

This exhausts the anthropological proofs. Here are the cosmological proofs :

"(1) The universe is one, consequently God is one." But why there is one universe is not apparent. "(2) In the life of the world there is order. If there existed several rulers of the universe, many gods, naturally divers among themselves, there could not be such an orderly flow and agreement in Nature; on the contrary, everything would turn into disorder and become chaos; then each god would govern his own part, or the whole universe, according to his will, and there would be eternal conflicts and strife."

"(3) For the creation and government of the world one almighty, omniscient God is sufficient; what, then, are other gods for ? It is obvious that they are superfluous."

Those are the cosmological proofs. What is this ? A bad joke ? Eidicule ? No, it is a Theology, the disclosure of God-revealed truths. But that is not all. Here are the ontological proofs :

"(1) By the common consent of all men, God is a being than whom there can be nothing higher or more perfect. But the highest and most perfect of all beings can be only one, for, if there existed others, too, equal to it, then it would cease being the highest and most perfect of all, that is, it would cease being a god."

Here the sophism proves nothing, and only makes us doubt the strictness and exactness of the thoughts of the holy fathers, especially of St. John Damascene.

The first proof that there can be but one most perfect and highest being is the only correct reasoning on the attribute of him whom we call God, but is by no means a proof of the unity of God; it is only an expression of the fundamental concept of God, which by its very essence excludes the possibility of uniting this idea with the conception of number. For, if God is what is highest and most perfect, then all the previous proofs from the Old Testament and others about God being one only impair that idea. But, ag^-n, as in the discussion of comprehensibility and incomprehensibility, the author obviously needs here, not clearness and agreement of thought, but the mechanical connection with the tradition of the church; this connection is preserved to the detriment of the idea, and at all cost.

After these proofs follow special proofs of the unity of God in opposition to the bitheistic heretics, and these proofs have no connection with the subject. And after all that it is assumed that the first dogma about the unity of God has been disclosed, and the author proceeds with the teaching about the moral application of this first dogma.

The author has the idea that every dogma is necessary for the saving faith. One dogma about the "one God "has been revealed, and so it is necessary to show how this dogma is helpful in the salvation of men. It is like this :

"Three important lessons can we draw for ourselves from the dogma about the unity of God. Lesson the first : in respect to our relation to God. * I believe in one God,' utters every Christian, beginning the words of the Symbol, — in one, and not in many, or two, or three, as the pagans and certain heretics used to believe : and so him alone shall we serve as God (Deut. vi. 13; Matt. iv. 10); and love him alone with all our heart, and with all our soul (Deut. vi. 4, 5); and put all our confidence in him alone (Psalm cxvii. 8, 9; 1 Peter i. 21); at the same time we must keep away from all kinds of polytheism and idolatry (Exod. xx. 3-5). The pagans, while believing in one supreme God, at the same time recognized many lower gods, and among this number included incorporeal spirits, good and bad (genii and demons), and deceased persons who had in some way been famous in life. We, too, worship good angels, and we worship holy men who in their lifetime have excelled in faith and piety; but we must not forget that we have to worship them, according to the teachmg of the Orthodox Church, not as inferior gods, but as servants and ministers of God, as intercessors for us before God, and as promoters of our salvation, — we must worship them in such a way that the whole glory should refer mainly to him alone as won- derful among his saints (Matt. x. 40). The pagans used to make sculptured figures of their gods and builded idols, and in their extreme blindness recognized these idols as gods, offering them divine worship : let not any of the Christians fall into similar idolatry ! We, too, use and worship the representations of the true God and of his saints, and bend our knees before them; but we use and worship them only as holy and worshipful representations, and do not deify them, and, in making our obeisances to the holy images, we worship not the wood and paint, but God himself and his saints, such as are represented in the images : such ought to be the true worship of the holy images, and then it will not in the least resemble idolatry." (pp. 89 and 90.)

That is, according to this preceding discussion, we are given a lesson to do precisely as the idolaters are doing, but to remember certain dialectic distinctions, as here expounded.

"It is well known that the pagans personified all human passions and in this shape deified them; we do not personify the passions in order to deify them; we know how to value them, but, unfortunately. Christians frequently serve their passions as though they were gods, though they themselves do not notice that. One is so given to belly service and in general to the sensual pleasures that for him, according to the expression of the apostle, God is his belly (Phil. iii. 19); another is so zealously concerned about acquiring treasure and with such love guards it that his covetousness can, indeed, not be called otherwise than idolatry (Col. iii. 5); a third is so much occupied with his deserts and privileges, l-eal and imaginary, and places them so high that he apparently makes an idol of them and worships them and makes others worship them (Dan. iii.). In short, every passion and attachment for anything, even though it be important and noble, if we abandon ourselves to it with zeal, so as to forget God and act contrary to his will, becomes for us a new god, or idol, whom we serve; and a Christian must remember firmly that such an idolatry can never be coextensive with the service of the one God; according to the words of the Saviour : No man can serve two masters; ye cannot serve God and mammon (Matt. vi. 24)." (pp. 90 and 91.)

What is this ? Where is this taken from ? What a lot of things have been said and connected with the unity of God ! How do they all result from it ? There is absolutely no answer to that.

"Second lesson, in respect to our relation to our neighbours. Believing in the one God, from whom we all have our being, through whom we Hve and move and are (Acts xvii. 28), and who alone forms the aim of all of us, we are naturally incited toward union among ourselves."

And still more texts and still less connection with the preceding. If there is any connection, it is only a verbal one, like a play of words : "God is one, — we must strive after oneness."

"Finally, the third lesson, in respect to our relation to ourselves. Believing in God, one in substance, let us see to it that in our own being we may reestablish the primitive union which has been impaired in us through sin. To-day we feel the cleaving of our being, the disunion of our forces, abilities, strivings; we delight in the law of God after the inward man : but we see another law in our members, warring against the law of our mind, and bringing us into captivity to the law of sin which is in our members (Piom. vii. 22-23), so that in each of us there are, not one, but two men, an inward and an outward, a spiritual and a carnal, man. Let us see to it that we put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and that we put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness (Ephes. iv. 22-24), and that we thus may again appear just as one in our substance as when we came out of the hands of the Creator."

And so forth. Without the least connection with the dogmas about the unity of God, but with a play on the word "unity," there proceeds a discussion on the moral apphcation of the dogma, but not a word is there for the solution of the question about the unity and trinity. I proceed to the next division of Chapter I.