2) The distinctions in eternal Trinity are empty. The Trinity was created in order to understand the historical Jesus. As long as this was kept alive, there was a difference between God and him very evident. But now we are in the realm of a transcendent Trinity. How can differences be made there? They are made by words: like non- generated, generated, and proceeding. But what do these words really mean? They are words without content, because there is no perception of any kind which can confirm their meaning. And to anticipate something of Augustine: Augustine said these differences are not expressed because something is said with them, but in order not to remain silent about the differences. This means: If the motives of Trinity are left and lost, then the formulas become empty.
3) The Holy Spirit remains even now an abstraction. He is brought in concretely only if He is defined as the Spirit of Christ, namely of Jesus as the Christ, but if He is put into the transcendent Trinity, then He is more an abstraction than a person.
Therefore He never had very great importance for Christian piety. At the same time in which He was deified, in the same sense in which Christ was deified, He was replaced in actual piety by the Holy Virgin, who as the one who gives birth to God, received Divinity very much herself, at least for popular piety.
4) The three hypostases, the three different personae, could lead to tri-theism. This danger became much more fully real when the philosophy of Aristotle replaced that of Plato. Plato’s philosophy is always the background of what the medieval called mystical realism, namely that the universals are more real than their individual exemplars. But in Aristotle the thing is different: Aristotle calls the individual thing the telos, the inner aim, of all natural development. Now if this is the case, then the three powers of being in God become three independent realities – or more exactly, the three manifestations of God become independent powers of being, become independent persons This is something which I believe is one of the great difficulties in your understanding of the Trinitarian dogma. You are nominalists by education: everything which is must be a definite thing, limited and separated from all other things. For mystical, realistic thinking — as we have it in Plato, in Origen, in the Middle Ages – this is not so. There the power of being in a universal can be something quite superior and different from the power of being in the individuals.
Therefore the danger of tri-theism was very small, as long as Platonic philosophy interpreted the Trinitarian dogma. It became rather dangerous in the moment in which Aristotelian categories came in, and with it, some nominalistic trends, some emphasis on the individual realities. Then the Son and the Spirit could become, so to speak, special Individual beings – and then we are in the realm of tri-theism. The last great theologian, John of Damascus, of whom I hope Father Florovsky will tell you a little more, protested against this consequence. He emphasized the unity of action and being within each other of the three manifestations of God. But something else happened. For practical piety, the Trinitarian dogma became just the opposite of what it originally was supposed to be – it was supposed to be an interpretation of Jesus as the Christ; it was supposed to mediate this understanding to the Greeks, with the help of the Logos doctrine. But the consequences of the Logos doctrine became so dangerous in Arius especially, that traditional theology reacted against it. It was still used, but it was somehow broken in its philosophical meaning. And that’s something which has often happened with Christian theology.
