During the Arian controversies and in connection with Arianism, the false teaching of the Holy Scriptures also arose. The Spirit of Macedonius (Bishop Constantine), who became the head of a heretical party, which received from him its name "Macedonians" or "Doukhobors" (πνενματομάχοι). Macedonius, belonging to the semi-Arians, taught in the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit is the creation (κτιστον) of the Son, that He is incomparably inferior to the Father and the Son, that in relation to Them He is only a servant creature (διάκονος και υπηρέτης), that He does not have the same glory and honor of worship with Them, and that in general He is not God and should not be called God; He is only to a certain extent superior to the angels and differs from them. As a continuation and logical conclusion of Arianism, Macedonianism was equally contrary to the Christian dogma of the Holy Scriptures. Trinity. Therefore, it met with the same strong opposition from the Church as Arianism. The Second Ecumenical Council was convened (381). In a short article of the Nicene Creed, "We believe... and in the Holy Spirit", the Fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council (150 in number) introduced the following additional explanatory provisions: "The Lord, the Life-Giving (i.e., that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Holy Spirit). — not a creature), Who proceeded from the Father (i.e., that He did not come through the Son), Who with the Father and the Son worshipped and glorified (i.e., that He was not a servant being), the prophets said."

In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed there is given a clear and precise teaching of the consubstantiality of the persons of the Holy Spirit. Under the banner of this definition of faith, in the struggle against heretics, the fathers and teachers of the Church, the teaching of the Holy Trinity was revealed in the most particular way. Trinity. Among them, the names of the great universal teachers and hierarchs are especially glorious: Athanasius and Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Theologian. In the West, the most powerful and famous defender of Orthodoxy against Arianism was St. Hilary of Poaties.

{p. 121}

Period three. The exposition of the faith compiled at the First and Second Ecumenical Councils, according to the definitions of the Third (Canon 7) and subsequent Ecumenical Councils (Sixth Ecclesiastical Council 1), was not to be subject to either additions or reductions, and, consequently, it was to remain forever unchanged and inviolable, unchanged even in letter. In accordance with this, the Universal Church in all subsequent times did not make any additions to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan definition of the dogma of the Holy Scriptures. The Trinity, nor its diminutions. Its main concern was the preservation of the dogma in the form that it received in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan exposition of the faith. Such remained in the Eastern Orthodox Church the attitude to the dogma of the Holy Spirit. Trinity and to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, even after the division of the churches, it remains so to this day.

Of the false teachings that arose in the East after the Second Ecumenical Council, St. The Trinity requires mention only of the so-called tritheism, or tritheism (VI century), and tetratheism, or tetratheism (VI-VΙΙ centuries). The Tritheists represented the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Spirits as three particular, separate persons possessing three special and separate divine essences, just as there are three human persons having the same but not one being. The tetratheists, in addition to the three persons in the Trinity, also represented a divine essence standing behind them and apart from them, in which they all participate, drawing their divinity from it. In the struggle against these false teachings, it was enough to clarify their disagreement with the teaching of the Trinity, expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Such was the first period after the Second Ecumenical Council of the attitude towards the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Trinity and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Definition, and the Western Church. But this unanimity did not last very long. From the time of Bl. Augustine, the opinion began to spread in the Western Church that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father alone, but "also from the Son" (Filioque), which gradually acquired in it the meaning of a dogma, was included in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed itself, and the confession of the new dogma was protected by anathema. In this perverted form the dogma of the Holy Spirit is professed. The Trinity of the Western Church to this day. In the same form it is contained by Protestantism in all its forms, which separated from Rome, i.e., Lutheranism, Reformation, and Anglicanism.

Having raised to the level of dogma the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit. Not given in revelation, but arbitrarily deduced by reason from revelation, the Roman Church entered the path of rationalism. The same rationalistic spirit manifested itself in its elevation to the level of dogmas and other private opinions. Protestantism also assimilated this spirit from it, which deviated from the ancient church confession in its doctrine even further. But it expressed itself with particular force in Protestant sectarianism, which was the last transitional stage to strict and pure rationalism. Hence, in the Christian societies that separated from Protestantism, there arose a new series of heretical teachings of the Holy Scriptures. Trinity; all of them, however, to a greater or lesser degree only repeat what was expressed by the ancient heretics.

Thus, simultaneously with the Reformation, the so-called anti-Trinitarianism (its other name is Unitarianism) appeared in the Western Christian world. In contrast to the ancient monarchians, who did not so much rebel against the dogma of the Holy Scriptures. The anti-Trinitarians of the 19th century set the anti-Trinitarians of the 19th century the task of destroying the belief in the Holy Trinity, which had not yet been defined. Trinity. In the anti-Trinitarian movement of the sixteenth century, two streams can be distinguished. One branch of it bears the stamp of mysticism, while the other branch of it rests exclusively on the principles of rational thinking.

A taxonomist of anti-Trinitarian principles with a mystical tinge was the scientist and Spanish physician Michael Servetus in the sixteenth century. The Church, he reasoned, has perverted the true Teaching of the Holy Spirit. Trinity, as well as Christianity in general. The teaching of the Scriptures to the Trinity, in his opinion, does not consist in the fact that there are three independent divine hypostases in God, but in the fact that God is one in nature and hypostasis, namely the Father, {p. 126} The Son and the Spirit are not persons separate from the Father, but only His various manifestations or modes. For his false teaching, Servetus Calvin was burned at the stake (October 27, 1553).

The views of anti-Trinitarianism with a more strictly rational character in the system were presented by Faust Socins († 1604), which is why the followers of this trend are also known as the Socinians. The Socinian doctrine is often a rationalistic doctrine. A person does not have to believe that he does not put up with his reason. The dogma of the Holy Scriptures. The Socinians find the Trinity especially contrary to reason. Instead of the dogma of the Holy Scriptures, which was rejected solely on the basis of rational considerations. They themselves offered such a teaching to the Trinity. God is one, one divine being and one divine person. This one God is precisely the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Son of God is only the personification of the historical Jesus Christ, while Christ is a simple man, only born in a special way, a sinless man. He can be called God in the same improper sense as the sons of God in the Holy Scriptures. In the Scriptures, and even as Jesus Christ Himself, all believers are called (Jn 10:34). In comparison with the other sons of God, He is only the beloved Son of God par excellence. The Holy Spirit. there is a certain divine breath, or force, acting in believers from God the Father through Jesus Christ.

The teaching of the anti-Trinitarians is also joined by the teaching of the Trinity of the Arminians, so called after the professor of theology at the University of Leiden, Jacob Arminius (1560-1609), who laid the foundation for this sect. The Church's teaching on the Trinity seemed contradictory to these sectarians in the sense that, while assimilating to all the persons of the Trinity equality in divinity, it at the same time ascribes guilt to the Father, birth to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. — procession. They resolved this perplexity by repeating the ancient subordinationism in essence between the persons of the Trinity, i.e., that the Son and the Spirit are inferior to the Father in divinity and borrow their divine dignity from Him.

In the 17th century, with the strengthening of rationalism in general, a new, extremely peculiar sect was formed in Protestantism, which, in connection with the distortion of the whole of Christianity, also distorted the doctrine of the trinity of God, the sect of the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg considered himself an extraordinary messenger of God, called upon to proclaim a doctrine which was superior to all previous revelations, but under the guise of revelation from above in the essence of the matter he expounded in his writings his own views. As for all anti-Trinitarians, the doctrine of the Trinity appeared to Swedenborg as an extreme perversion by the Church of the authentic teaching of the Holy Trinity. The Scriptures are to God and to those who are contrary to reason. His own understanding of this dogma is as follows. There is only one God (i.e., one divine hypostasis). This one God took on a human form and a bodily form in the form of Jesus Christ, subjected Himself to all temptations, entered into a struggle with the spirits of hell and conquered them; He also suffered death on the cross (evidently a repetition of ancient patripassianism) and through all this freed the human race from the power of the forces of hell. Under the Spirit of the Holy Spirit. in his opinion, of course, in the Bible is that effect on people which has produced and is producing the revealed word and the former revelation of God Himself, i.e. the appearance of God in the flesh in the form of Jesus Christ.

With the emergence of the so-called idealist philosophy, they appeared in the West in the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. New false teachings to the Trinity. Attempts to substantiate and clarify the essence of this dogma according to the principles of reason alone led to the fact that in these explanations only terms remained of the Christian dogma, in which pantheistic concepts alien to the dogma and even the persons of the Holy Spirit were embedded. The Trinity was impersonal. For Hegel, for example, the Christian Trinity is the absolute idea (eternal knowledge) in three states: the idea in itself, in its abstraction, is the Father, the idea incarnated in the external world is the Son and His incarnation, and the idea which is conscious of itself in the human spirit, the Holy Spirit.

Thus, reason alone is insufficient in the deepest mysteries of faith. All errors regarding the dogma of the Holy Scriptures. The Trinity, and the most recent and the most recent of them, proceeded from the same source, namely, from the violation by reason of the boundaries which it must maintain in relation to revelation in general. The dogma of the Trinity is the sacrament of the sacraments (supra rationem), which reason must never forget.