5. THE BLESSED TRINITY IN TRADITION

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.