In this way – and here Athanasius is mostly responsible – the Trinitarian dogma became a sacred mystery. This sacred mystery was put on the altar and adored; it was put into the ikons, the pictures (which are important for the cult in the Eastern church); it was put into liturgical formulas and hymns, and there it lives ever since. But it has lost its power to interpret the meaning of the living God.
Now this is the end of the Trinitarian struggle. I come back to it once more when I shall speak about Augustine’s interpretation of it, which is typically Western, but for the time being I will now introduce the next great struggle, the Christological one: The Christological problem is historically a consequence of the Trinitarian problem.
But in principle it is the other way around. The Trinity is the answer to the Christological problem. But it is an answer which seems in its final formulas to deny the basis on which it has arisen. The question was: If the Son is of one substance with the Father, how can the historical Jesus be understood? This was the purpose of the whole Trinitarian dogma, but now if the Trinitarian dogma was formulated as it was in Nicaea, is it still able to make Jesus understandable? How can He who is of Divine nature, without restriction, be a real man at the same time? The answer to this question was given – or at least one attempted to give it – in the Christological struggle which, according to its importance, lasted for almost three centuries and again brought the Christian Church to the edge of self-destruction.
There were always two main types of Christological thought: Either ,God as Father (or as Logos or as Spirit) has used the man Jesus of Nazareth, begetting and inspiring and adopting him as Son – this is the one possibility; or a Divine being, the Logos, the eternal Son, has become man in an act of transformation. The Nicaenum, with its homoousios and with the Monarchianistic trend, favors the former solution. And so does the Roman theology. The emphasis on the Divinity of the eternal Son makes the emphasis on the humanity of the historical Son much easier. A half-God can be transformed; God Himself can only adopt man.
