Kallistos Ware - page 233   -TYPING-

 

The crypto-tritheist perils of the 'mutual love' paradigm may be spelt out more fully in two ways:

(1) In likening the Trinity to a human community of three persons, are we perhaps reading into the Patristic terms *hypostasis and prosopon our modern notion of personhood--a notion which the Greek fathers did not share. . . . . .among contemporary...no agreed definition of what constitues a 'person.' it can be argued in general terms that, when we to day speak about the 'person,' we have in mind primaryily our awareness of being each a distinct center of self-consciousness, of feeling and of willing. In the modern usage of the term, the emphasis is upon inner subjectivity. But in Patreistic words *prosopon* (literally 'face' and hypostasis (literally 'substratum,' and hence that which exists firmly, which has stability and durability) do not convey, in such a clear and direct way, the notion of innner subjectivity. The emphasis is objective rather than subjective, indicating the way in which a person appears to an outside ovserver. This the Greek fathers, in speaking of God as three proopa or three phypostaseis did not necessarily mean that there are in God three distinct cnters of self-consciousness. Perhaps their meaning was that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each a distinct and enduring 'mode of eistence' (tropos hyparxeous)

(2) In likening the Trinity to a human community of three persons, have we sufficently allowed for the fact that the union of Gagher, Son and Spirit is incomparably closer and stronger than any human association cn  ever be? .....
...And when the Fourth Gospel interprets the relationship between Father and Son in terms of mutual love, let us keep in view the truth that only persons are capable of such love; 'movements' or 'ways of being' do nt and cannot love one another.

. . .

(2) In likening the divine *koinonia* to a community of three human persons, the Cappadocian Fathers--always faithful to an apophatic understanding of God--were in fact careful to insist that there is a vital distinctionof levels. God is not a perons, or rather threr persons, in the same sense that we are persons. This does not mean, however, that god is less personal than we are, but on the contrary that he is unimaginabely more personal. Yet at the same time we dertainly should not--in a crude and unqualified way--project upon uncreated Godhead our created sense of being personal. An analogy odes not signify identity.

The Cappadocians had in fact a number of ways whereby they safeguarded the unique character of the divine unity: in particular, through their understanding of the Father as the sole source and fountainhead of the hypostatid subsistence ithin the Trinity )the 'nomarchy' of the Father); through their empasis upon the *perihcoresis* of the three persons, upon their coinherence and mutual indwelling; and aboe all through their insistence that the threemembers of the trinity share a single energy and a single will, which is certainly not the case with three huan persons.