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The testimony of tradition on the Holy Trinity is
extensively treated in the history of dogma. Here we
shall discuss only the more important questions relating to
the difference between tradition in the ante-Nicene and
post-Nicene periods. These questions have at all times
been discussed in the Church, and St. Thomas himself
wrote of them at length in his "Commentary on the
Prologue of the Fourth Gospel", where he speaks of
Origen's error about the Word, the Son of God, and
in the "Summa", where he says, "The
Arians, for whom Origen was the source, taught that the
Son was different from the Father by a diversity of
substance," and that the Word is said to be divine only
metaphorically and not properly.[100]
At the outset it should be noted, as is evident from the
New Testament, that from the beginning the Church
believed explicitly in the mystery of the Trinity,
professing in concrete terms that God the Father sent
His only-begotten Son into the world and then the Holy
Ghost came to sanctify men. This is the substance of the
Apostles' Creed itself. In defining this mystery the
Church did not yet make use of such abstract terms as
nature, person, and Trinity, but it was already clear
that the words "Father" and "Son" were personal
nouns. This should be kept in mind lest the earlier
sublime simplicity of contemplation, which transcends the
later technical terminology, be confused with a later
attempt to debase this doctrine by a superficial and
spurious simplicity. Some say that at first the faith of
the Church was proposed in a popular manner and later more
scientifically; it would be better to say that in the
beginning the faith was expressed in a concrete manner,
which in its sublimity surpassed the abstract technicality
of a later age. In the transition from this concrete
expression of the faith, particularly in the earliest
Creeds, to the abstract expression as formulated against
Arianism in the Council of Nicaea in 325, certain
difficulties arose which were solved by the Nicene
Council itself. Thus in this matter we distinguish two
periods: the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene periods.
We see here how slowly man learns to abstract, how he
slowly attains to the third stage of abstraction divorced
from all matter, how at first his metaphysical notions are
confused, and only later become clarified and distinct.
Then the danger of the abuse of abstraction arises as in
the decline of Scholasticism, when the mind receded too
far from the concrete, from the documents of revelation,
and from the vital contemplation of divine things.
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