In Christian doctrine itself, this dogma is a fundamental or fundamental dogma. Without the recognition of the three persons in God, there is no place either for the teaching of God the Redeemer, or for the teaching of God the Sanctifier, so that it can be said that Christianity, both in its entirety and in each particular truth of its teaching, relies on the dogma of the Holy Scriptures. Trinity.

Being the cornerstone dogma of Christianity, the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is at the same time the most incomprehensible, and not only for people, but also for angels. The most vivid imagination and the most penetrating human mind cannot comprehend: how is it that there are three persons in God, each of whom is God, not three Gods, but one God? How did all the persons of the Holy Spirit? The Trinities remain completely equal to each other and at the same time so different that one of them, God the Father, is the beginning of the others, and the others are dependent on Him in being, the Son through birth, the Holy Spirit. "Through the procession?" According to ordinary human ideas, such a relationship between persons is a sign of subordination of one to another. What, finally, is birth and procession in God, and what is the difference between them? All this is known only to the Spirit of God. For the Spirit searcheth all things, and the depths of God.

§ 23. The history of the dogma of St. Trinity

Such separateness and distinctness with which the Church teaches its members the teaching of the revelation of the Holy Scriptures. It received the Holy Trinity in the Church gradually, in connection with the false teachings that arose in it. In the history of its gradual revelation of the dogma of the Holy Scriptures. Three periods can be distinguished from the Trinity: 1) the exposition of dogma before the appearance of Arianism, when the doctrine of the hypostasis of divine persons in the unity of the Godhead was revealed predominantly; 2) the definition of the doctrine of consubstantiality with the hypostasis of divine persons in the struggle against Arianism and Doukhoborism; 3) the state of the Church's teaching on the Trinity in the future, after its final determination at the Second Ecumenical Council.

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Period one. The first Christians confessed the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the formula of baptism, in the creeds, in the doxologies of the Holy Spirit. Trinity, liturgical hymns and martyric confessions of faith, but in the most particular definitions of the properties and mutual relations of the persons of the Holy Trinity. The Trinity was not included. Representatives of this part of Christians were the Apostolic Fathers. In their writings, when they spoke of the Trinity, they repeated the sayings of the Apostles almost with literal exactness.

Others who accepted Christianity were not able to renounce the views of Judaism or pagan philosophy, and at the same time to assimilate the new concept of God given by Christianity. The attempts of such Christians to reconcile their old views with the new ones were resolved by the appearance of the heresies of the so-called Judaizers and Gnostics. The Judaizer heretics, brought up on the letter of the law of Moses, in which it is said: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, did not distinguish any persons in God; they affirmed the truth of the unity of God by means of a complete rejection of the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Trinity. Christ the Saviour, in their opinion, is not the true Son of God, but their teaching is the Holy Spirit. The spirit does not know. The Gnostics, adhering to the views of extreme dualism on the relationship between God and the world, spirit and matter, asserted that God, without the loss of His divinity, cannot be incarnated, since matter is an evil principle; hence the incarnate Son of God cannot be God. He is nothing but an aeon, a person of undoubtedly divine nature, but only through an outflow separated from the supreme God. Moreover, He did not only come out of the "Depth" (Βάθος), but before Him, together with Him and through Him, a whole series of similar aeons came out of the same "Depth", so that the entire fullness (πλήρωμα) of the Godhead contains from 30 to 365 different essences. Among the same aeons as the Son were the Gnostics and the Holy Spirit. In these fabrications of the Gnostic fantasy, obviously, there is nothing even similar to the Christian teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Trinity. The false teaching of the Judaizers and Gnostics was denounced by Christian apologists: St. Justin the Martyr, Thetian, Athenagoras, St. Theophilus of Antioch, especially the anti-Gnostics, Irenaeus of Lyons (in Book II. "Archpriest. heresies") and Clement of Alexandria (in "Stromata").

In the third century there appeared a new false teaching of the Holy Scriptures. The Trinity is monarchianism, which is manifested in two forms: in the form of dynamistic or Ebionian monarchianism and modalistic, otherwise patripassianism.

Dynamic monarchianism (its first representatives were Theodotus the tanner, Theodotus the Younger or money-changer, and Artemon) reached its highest development with Paul of Samosata († about 272). There is, he taught, a single divine person. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. they are not independent divine persons, but only divine powers, i.e., the powers of one and the same God. If, however, the Scriptures seem to speak of three persons in the Godhead, then these are only three different names applied to one and the same person. In particular, the Son, who is also called in Scripture the Logos and the Wisdom of God, is the same in God as the mind is in man. A man would cease to be a man if his mind were taken away from him; so God would cease to be a person if the Logos were taken away and separated from Him. Logos is eternal self-consciousness in God and in this sense is consubstantial (ομοούσιος) with God. This Logos also dwelt in Christ, but more fully than He dwelt in other people, and worked through Him in teaching and miracles. Under the influence of the divine power that dwelt in Him, "as another in another," Christ is a simple man, born of the Holy Spirit. and Mary the Virgin, attained the highest holiness possible for man, and became the Son of God, but in the same improper sense in which other people are called sons of God. As soon as the teaching of Paul of Samosata became known, all the famous pastors of the Church of that time came out against him, both orally and in writing, Dionysius Alexis, Firmillian of Cappadocia, Gregory the Wonderworker, and others. and he himself was deprived of the episcopal dignity and excommunicated from ecclesiastical communion.

Simultaneously with the Ebionean monarchism, patripassian monarchianism also developed. Its main representatives were: Praxeus, Noetus and Sabellius of Ptolemais (in Pol. III century). The doctrine of Praxeus and Noetes is basically as follows: the divine person is one in the strictest sense, it is God the Father. But the Saviour of the world is God, and not an ordinary man, only not separate from the one Lord the Father, but is the Father Himself. Before His incarnation, He revealed Himself in the image (mode) of the unborn Father, and when He deigned to be born of a Virgin, He took the form (mode) of the Son not according to humanity, but according to divinity, "He Himself became His own Son, and not the Son of another." During His earthly life, He declared Himself to be the Son to all who saw Him, but He did not hide from those who were able to bear that He was the Father. Hence, the sufferings of the Son for these heretics were the sufferings of the Father. "Post tempus Pater natus, Pater passus est," said Tertullian. On the Holy Spirit. they did not expound the teachings. The teachings of Praxeus and Noetes found many followers, especially in Rome. It is natural, therefore, that in the very first stages of its appearance it met with refutation: Tertullian in his work "Against Praxeus", St. Hippolytus in "Against the Heresy of Noetus" presented their teaching as impious and unfounded, and at the same time opposed it with the Orthodox teaching; With the appearance of these works, patripassianism gradually began to weaken, but it did not disappear. In a new and modified form (philosophical) it was revived already in the East.

The culprit was Sabellius, a former Roman presbyter and originally a pure Patripassian. He also introduced into his system the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Spirit. "The essence of his teaching is as follows. God is an unconditional unity, a boundless, indivisible, and self-contained "Monad," which does not and cannot have, in its infinity, any contact with everything that exists outside of it. From eternity She was in a state of inactivity or "silence," but then God spoke His Word or Logos and began to act; the creation of the world was the first manifestation of His activity, the work of the Logos proper. With the appearance of the world, a series of new actions and manifestations of the Godhead began, in the mode of the Word or the Logos. "The unity expanded into the Trinity" – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (modes of the mode of the Word, person). In the Old Testament God (in the mode of the Word) appeared as the Lawgiver – God the Father, in the new Testament as the Saviour – God the Son, and as the Sanctifier – the Holy Spirit. Spirit. There is, therefore, only the Trinity of revelations of the one divine person, but not the Trinity of hypostases. The teachings of Sabellius were the last word of the monarchian movements of the third century. It has found many followers, especially in Africa and Libya. The first and decisive denunciator of this false teaching was St. Dionysius Alexis, the first bishop of the Church in Africa. He condemned Cabellius at the Council of Alexandria (261) and wrote several epistles against him. Dionysius, bishop. The Roman bishop, who was informed of the heresy of Sabellius, also condemned him at the Council of Rome (262). The fall of this heresy and monarchianism in general was also greatly contributed by his writings to the most famous of the church writers of the third century, Origen.

The main error of monarchianism was the denial of the person and eternal existence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Spirit. Accordingly, the defenders of the frank ecclesiastical truth against the monarchians revealed in particular detail the truth about the real existence and the difference of divine persons according to their personal properties. But the desire to present more clearly the trihypostasis of God led some of them to the fact that, with the distinction of divine persons according to Their personal properties, they (from the Western teachers – Tertullian and Hippolytus, from the Eastern – Origen and Dionysius Alexis) admitted the difference between the essence of the Father and the essence of the Son and the Holy Spirit, developing the doctrine of the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father not only according to their personal being and personal relations (the so-called subordination according to hypostasis). but also in Their very essence, or the so-called subordinationism in essence between the persons of the Trinity. Their subordinationism consisted in the fact that, while recognizing the essence of the Son and the Spirit as one natural with the essence of the Father, they at the same time represented it as a derivative of the Father, dependent on Him, and, as it were, less than the essence of the Father, although not outside the essence of the Father, but in himself. According to their view, the Son and the Spirit have divinity, power, might, and other perfections from the Father, and do not have originally, from Himself, in such a way that the Son is lower than the Father, and the Spirit is lower than the Son.