The Holy Trinity mystery is the most core of Christian faith. All other things depend on it and everything else derives from it. Consequently, the Church’s persistent alarm to defend the naked truth that God is Three in Persons and One in nature. The history of the doctrine of the Catholic Church on the Trinity dates back to the initial years of Christianity. The current paper seeks to discuss the Catholic Doctrine on the Holy Trinity.
In 259 after death, Pope St. Dionysius penned down an open letter to Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria where he criticized the mistakes of the tritheist Marcion and Sabellius. The pontiffs steered the way in safeguarding the exposed mystery of the Holy Trinity as well as in clarifying its implication, long before ecumenical Committee got into the controversy 1 . A couple of lines from the pontiff's letter show the inflexibility of the Church and her certainty of mind regarding the Trinity. These sentences read: “The blasphemy of Sabellius is that the Father is the Son, and the Son the Father. The men in some way teach that there exist, 3 Gods, as they split the holy unity into 3 dissimilar hypostases totally separate from each other. The unwise Marcion’s teaching, who separates and divides the solitary God into 3 doctrines, is not the teaching of persons who truthfully obey Christ and who are contented with the Savior’s teachings, but it is a devil’s teaching” 2 .
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At the Committee of Nicea (325 after death), the 2nd Person was professed to be consubstantial with the Father, in which the word homo-ousios came to be the holy term for conveying the ideal arithmetical identity of nature between the Son and the Father who got incarnate. However, Nicea failed to resolve the controversy. Speculators, particularly within the Near East, pressed for exploring and streamlining the Trinity and thus, Pope St. Damasus, in the year 382 after death, called an assembly at Rome where he abridged the key faults up to his era. This collection of censures denotes a chain of descriptions on the Trinity which to the present-day are standards of clearness. A section from the set again echoes the perpetual faith of the Church. It reads, “In case any person refutes that the Holy Spirit is everlasting that, that the Son is eternal, and that the Father is everlasting, then the person is a heretic. In case a person claims that the Son was made of flesh and wasn’t in heaven with the Father when He was in the world, then that person is a heretic. In case a person refutes that the Holy Spirit is everywhere, knows everything, and possesses all power, like the Son and the Father, then the person is a heretic” 3 .
The most wide-ranging pronouncement of the teaching of Church on the Trinity was made in the year 675 after death at the 11th Synod of Toledo. It is a variety of manuscripts derived from every prior doctrine of the Church. It was purposed to accumulate a list of dogma declarations as complete as conceivable, taking into consideration the still widespread faults in ostensibly Christian circles, and (fortunately) taking into account the growth of Islam that hit with certain forcefulness against the Iberian Peninsula 4 . A section of the doctrine at Toledo reads, “We believe and we confess that the indescribable and Holy Trinity, Holy Spirit, Son, and Father is one solitary God in His nature, one substance, one nature, one power and majesty. We profess Trinity in the persons’ distinction; we acknowledge Unity due to the substance or nature. The 3 are one, not as a person but as nature. However, these 3 persons aren’t to be seen separable, because we trust that none of them is existent or at one time achieved a thing minus the other, after the other or before the other” 5 .
Two universal committees of the Church framed the belief in the Trinity in definite doctrines, that is, the Council of Florence and the Fourth Lateran. The emphasis of Fourth Lateran was to re-avow the belief facing the Albigensian heretical doctrine as well as to safeguard it against Abbot Joachim’s vagaries 6 . Lateran professed the unconditional oneness of God, who is simultaneously Triune: “We resolutely profess and believe without condition that there remains simply one real God, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, unchangeable, indescribable, and omnipotent, the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Father; 3 persons but one essence and a nature or substance that is entirely simple. The Holy Spirit comes from the Son and the Father alike; the Son comes from the Father alone; Father is from none. God does not have a beginning; He at all times exists, and all the time will remain. God the Father is the forebear, God the Son is the begotten, and God the Holy Spirit is proceeding. The three are all single nature, equally omnipotent, equally great, and equally everlasting. The three are the inimitable source of everything – Maker of all objects bodily and spiritual, invisible and visible, who from the actual start of time has made orders of living being equally from nothing, the angelic or spiritual universes and the visible or physical world” 7 .
The 4 th Lateran Council utilized the most practical terms to maintain that there remains no separation in God simply because there exists a difference of persons: The Father by everlastingly producing the Son offered Him His personal nature as the Son affirms, "What my Father has offered me is superior to all" 8 . Nonetheless, it can’t be claimed that He offered Him a portion of His nature, and kept a portion for Himself, since the nature of the Father is inseparable, as it is absolutely simple. A person can neither claim that the Father transmitted His personal nature in begetting the Son as if He offered it to the Son in a manner such that He failed to preserve it for Himself; else, He will stop being a substance.
On the other hand, in the lengthy Trinitarian Doctrine, the Council of Florence (1442 after death) detailed as follows: God The Father is wholly in the Holy Spirit and wholly in the Son; God the Son is wholly in the Holy Spirit and wholly in the Father; God the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Father. No one of the three persons come first of the others within eternity, and none has superior power. From perpetuity, without a start, the Son comes from the Father, and the Holy Spirit has proceeded from both the Son and the Father 9 .
Human language couldn’t be more unambiguous, and there the belief of the Catholic Church stands in the present day and will stand till the expiration of time. Ever since the Council of Florence, councils and popes have only applied the totally clear and elaborate teaching of Sacred Tradition to provide the realistic acceptance of what is simultaneously the magnificence of Catholic Christianity and its ultimate exposed mystery.
References
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Retrieved from: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p2.htm
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Catholic Doctrine on the Holy Trinity , 2003: Retrieved from: https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/catholic-doctrine-on-the-holy-trinity.html
Friesenhahn, Jacob H. The Trinity and theodicy: the Trinitarian theology of von Balthasar and the problem of evil . Routledge, 2016.
Joyce, George. "The Blessed Trinity." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. Retrieved from: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15047a.htm
Rev. William G. Most. The Holy Trinity, 1997. Retrieved from: https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/goda22.htm
