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40 Pages
Page 32
S. Gregory's own doctrine, indeed, has seemed to some critics to be open to the charge of tritheism. But even if his doctrine were entirely expressed in the single illustration of which we have spoken, it does not seem that the charge would hold good, when we consider the light in which the illustration would present itself to him. The conception of the unity of human nature is with him a thing intensely vivid: it underlies much of his system, and he brings it prominently forward more than once in his more philosophical writings [54] . We cannot, in fairness, leave his realism out of account when we are estimating the force of his illustration: and therefore, while admitting that the illustration was one not unlikely to produce misconceptions of his teaching, we may fairly acquit him of any personal bias towards tritheism such as might appear to be involved in the unqualified adoption of the same illustration by a writer of our own time, or such as might have been attributed to theologians of the period of S. Gregory who adopted the illustration without the qualification of a realism as determined as his own [55] . But the illustration does not stand alone: we must not consider that it is the only one of those to be found in the treatise, De Diff. Essen. et Hypost., which he would have felt justified in employing. Even if the illustration of the rainbow, set forth in that treatise, was not actually his own (as Dorner, ascribing the treatise to him, considers it to have been), it was at all events (on the other theory of the authorship), included in the teaching he had received from his "master:" it would be present to his mind, although in his undisputed writings, where he is dealing with objections brought against the particular illustration from human relations, he naturally confines himself to the particular illustration from which an erroneous inference was being drawn. In our estimate of his teaching the one illustration must be allowed to some extent to qualify the effect produced by the other. And, further, we must remember that his argument from human relations is professedly only an illustration. It points to an analogy, to a resemblance, not to an identity of relations; so much he is careful in his reply to state. Even if it were true, he implies, that we are warranted in speaking, in the given case, of the three human persons as "three men," it would not follow that we should be warranted thereby in speaking of the three Divine Persons as "three Gods." For the human personalities stand contrasted with the Divine, at once as regards their being and as regards their operation. The various human prosopa draw their being from many other prosopa, one from one, another from another, not, as the Divine, from One, unchangeably the same: they operate, each in his own way, severally and independently, not, as the Divine, inseparably: they are contemplated each by himself, in his own limited sphere, kat' idian perigraphen, not, as the Divine, in mutual essential connexion, differentiated one from the other only by a certain mutual relation. And from this it follows that the human prosopa are capable of enumeration in a sense in which number cannot be considered applicable to the Divine Persons. Here we find S. Gregory's teaching brought once more into harmony with his "master's:" if he has been willing to carry the use of numerical terms rather further than S. Basil was prepared to do, he yet is content in the last resort to say that number is not in strictness applicable to the Divine hupostaseis, in that they cannot be contemplated kat' idian perigraphen, and therefore cannot be enumerated by way of addition. Still the distraction of the hupostaseis remains; and if there is no other way (as he seems to have considered there was none), of making full acknowledgment of their distinct though inseparable existence than to speak of them as "three," he holds that that use of numerical language is justifiable, so long as we do not transfer the idea of number from the hupostaseis to the ousia, to that Nature of God which is Itself beyond our conception, and which we can only express by terms suggested to us by what we know of Its operation.
[54] Especially in the treatise, De Animâ et Resurrectione, and in that De Conditione Hominis. A notable instance is to be found in the former (p. 242 A.).
[55] See Dorner, ut sup., p. 315, and p. 319, note 2.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/life-works.asp?pg=32
