The Trinity

Each person of the Godhead has a particular role and a particular mode of activity, but all three persons are present whenever a particular hypostasis is active, as for example, in the creation of the world. While the Father is the supreme creator, both the Son and the Holy Spirit were with the Father from eternity, and assisted in creation according to their roles. The Son, or Christ, is the Logos or Word of God, the divine ideas and ordering principles on which the cosmos was made ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." John 1:1). The activity of the Holy Spirit is to manifest the Word in concrete form and give all created things the breath of life. The Persons of the Trinity are united not only by will, essence, and power, but by a bond of love; according to some theologians, such as Saint Augustine, the Holy Spirit is precisely this love that exists between the Father and the Son.

The Trinity is unique among religious traditions, and is arguably the most theologically difficult of all Christian symbols. The Trinity refers to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the first, second, and third persons, or hypostases, of the Godhead, respectively. Christianity’s response to the charge that this doctrine is polytheistic, that it posits multiple gods while it claims to be monotheistic, is that each person of the Godhead shares in the same divine essence, or ousia, and so is one God, and not three gods, as, for example, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are usually conceived in Hindu traditions. The Trinity is "One in three and three in one;" the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, one will, one power, in multiple manifestations. The development of this difficult doctrine, the meaning of its symbolism, depends heavily on Greek philosophical concepts, as, for example, the association of Christ with the Logos, or Word of God, which signifies "reason" or "order" as the basis of the created world.

God the Father, the first person of the Trinity, is, according to Christian tradition, the creator of heaven and earth, the divine reality that underlies all existence. He is without a body, pure spirit, unseen, unknowable, wholly transcendent to the world. Because he has no earthly form, it is somewhat rare to find pictorial representation of God the Father, but a particularly famous example is Michelangelo’s "Creation of Adam" painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The Father is usually represented as an old man with a flowing white beard. Iconic representations of the Father are also to be found in depictions of Jesus’ baptism. Here the entire Trinity is present: the Father is peering out from heaven, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers above Jesus’ head, and the Son is below, in earthly, human form, receiving his Father’s benediction through the Holy Spirit, with the words, "This is my son, in whom I am well pleased."

The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son or Christ or Word, represents the self-emptying, or kenosis, of the Trinity into creation, into human form. While the divinity of Christ remains, he also has a human nature, and so is subject to temptation, suffering and death. This descent of the Word into the world was necessitated, according to tradition, by sin. Sin had damned humanity; it had perverted or, according to Protestantism, entirely effaced humanity’s original divine image. Only an intercession by God himself could effect the salvation of humanity by overcoming sin and death in human form. The drama of Christ’s sojourn on earth culminates in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, where the dual nature of Christ dies according to its humanity and is resurrected in its divinity. Thus, through the work of the Second Person of the Trinity, salvation and eternal life was opened for humanity. The Ascension of Christ to the "right hand of the Father," following his appearance to the disciples in his resurrected body, is the return to his fully divine status in the Trinity.

The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is also known as the "Comforter." Following Christ’s Ascension, the Holy Spirit descends on the apostles and fills them with the wisdom of God, consecrating them to their ministry. This event is known as Pentecost, and, as always in iconic representation, the Spirit appears in the form of a dove. It is also the Holy Spirit who, sent by the Father, implants Jesus in Mary’s womb. The Spirit, while the least clearly defined of all the hypostases, is co-eternal with the Father and Son, though the question of his status with regard to the Son has been a major divisive issue between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In Catholic liturgy, the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and from the Son—this phrase, "and from the Son," is known as the filioque, and, according to Orthodox theologians, makes the Holy Spirit unduly subordinate to the Son and upsets the balance of the Trinity. For the Orthodox, both Christ and the Spirit proceed from the Father. This difference in interpretation of the inner dynamics of the Trinity contributed significantly to the schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the 11^th century, and is indicative of a more general difference in Trinitarian conceptions. For the Catholics, the unity and singularity of the Trinity are of primary concern, while for the Orthodox, the emphasis is on the maintenance of distinct persons. In both traditions, the Holy Spirit is usually associated with the wisdom and beauty of God, with the Church (the community unified in their love of God), and with the consummation of God’s will that at the end of time, "God will be all in all." This ideal of the Heavenly Jerusalem following the Last Judgment, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, is viewed by some theologians as the age of the Holy Spirit.