In the way of thinking of the Eastern Fathers, the theological concept of hypostasis, cleansed of Aristotelianism, means not an individual, but a person in the modern sense of the word. In fact, it was Christian theology that gave us our idea of the human person as something "personal," making of each human individual a "unique" being, completely incomparable to anyone else, and irreducible to other individuals. The philosophy of the ancient world knew only human individuals. The human personality cannot be expressed in concepts. It eludes all rational definition and is even indescribable, since all the properties with which we would try to characterize it can be found in other individuals. The "personal" can be perceived in life only by direct intuition, or it can be conveyed by a work of art. When we say: "This is Mozart" or "This is Rembrandt", we always find ourselves in that "sphere of the personal", which cannot be found anywhere else. However, "human persons or hypostases are separated and, according to the teaching of St. John of Damascus, do not exist one in another"; whereas "in the Holy Trinity, on the contrary, ... The hypostases are one in the other" [68]. The work of human persons is different, but the work of the Divine Persons is not different, for the "Three," having one nature, have also one will, one power, one action. St. John of Damascus says that the Persons "are united, not merging, but jointly coexisting with each other and penetrating each other (??????????????????????????????????) without any confusion and fusion, and in such a way that one does not exist outside the other or is not divided in essence according to the Arian division. For, to put it briefly, the Godhead is inseparable in the divided, just as in the three suns, closely adjacent to each other and not separated by any distance, there is one mixture of light and one merging" [69]. "For each (hypostasis) is one with the other, no less than with itself" [70]. In fact, each of the three Persons contains a unity, a single nature, in its own way, which, although it distinguishes Her from the other two Persons, at the same time creates an inseparable bond that unites the Three. "Non-childishness, birth and procession... it is only by these hypostatic properties that the three holy hypostases are distinguished from each other, inseparably distinguished not by essence, but by the distinctive property of each hypostasis" [71]. "For the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one in all things, except begottenness, begottenness, and procession" [72].

The only characteristic hypostatic feature which we could regard as peculiar to each of them, and which would not be found in the others on account of their consubstantiality, would be correlation by descent. However, this correlation must be understood apophatically: it is primarily a negation, indicating that the Father is not the Son and not the Holy Spirit, that the Son is neither the Father nor the Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. To consider this correlation differently would be to subordinate the Trinity to one of the categories of Aristotelian logic, the category of relation (or connection). Perceived apophatically, this connection marks the difference, but nevertheless does not indicate "in what way" the Persons of the Holy Trinity originate. "The image of birth and the image of procession are incomprehensible to us," says St. John of Damascus. "That there is, of course, a difference between birth and procession, we have learned, but what is the form of the difference, we do not comprehend in any way" [73]. Even St. Gregory the Theologian should have rejected attempts to determine the mode of origin of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. "You ask," he says, "what is the procession of the Holy Spirit? Tell me first what the non-begettness of the Father is, and then I, in turn, as a naturalist, will discuss the begettness of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. And we will both be struck with madness because we have spied the mysteries of God" [74]. "Thou hast heard of the birth; do not try to know what the manner of birth is. You hear that the Spirit proceeds from the Father; do not be curious to know how it comes out" [75]. Indeed, if the correlations of origin – non-begetting, birth and procession, by which we distinguish the three Hypostases, lead our thought to the one Source of the Son and the Holy Spirit – to ????????????? , to the Source of the Godhead [76] – the Father, they do not thereby establish a special relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit. These two Persons differ in the mode of their origin: the Son is born from the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. This is enough to distinguish them.

The objections of St. Gregory the Theologian show that Trinitarian reasoning, not satisfied with the formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit, ???????? - "through the Son" or "in relation to the Son" (an expression used by the Holy Fathers and most often meaning the mission of the Holy Spirit in the world through the mediation of the Son), they tried to establish a connection between the Son and the Holy Spirit according to their hypostatic origin. This relationship between the two Persons proceeding from the Father was established by the Western teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit ab utroque, that is, simultaneously from two Persons - from the Father and the Son. It was the Filioque that was the only dogmatic cause, was the "first cause" of the separation of East and West; the rest of the doctrinal disagreements are only its consequences. In order to understand what the Eastern Fathers wanted to defend by objecting to the Western formula and not accepting it, it is sufficient to compare the two Trinitarian conceptions as they were opposed by the middle of the ninth century.

As we have already said, Western thought, in its exposition of the Trinitarian dogma, most often proceeded from one nature in order to arrive at the Persons, while the Greek Fathers followed the opposite path, from the three Persons to the one nature. St. Basil the Great preferred this last path, which departed from the concrete, in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and the baptismal formula that names the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Thus thought could not wander when it first contemplated the Persons, and then proceeded to the contemplation of their general nature. However, both of these paths were quite legitimate, since they did not presuppose in the first case the primacy of the one essence over the three Persons, in the second - the primacy of the three Persons over the common nature. And indeed, we see how the Holy Fathers, in order to establish the distinction between nature and Persons and not to single out either one or the other, use two synonyms - "ousia" and "hypostasis".

When Persons (or Persons) are affirmed, nature is simultaneously affirmed, and vice versa, for nature is not thought outside of Persons or "before" Persons, even if in a logical order. If we upset in one direction or the other the equilibrium of this antinomy between nature and Persons, who are absolutely identical and at the same time absolutely different, we deviate either into Sabellian Unitarianism (God is the essence of the philosophers) or into Tritheism. In the formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, the Greeks saw a tendency to emphasize the unity of nature to the detriment of the real distinction of Persons: the relations of origin, which do not lead the Son and the Spirit directly to the One Source, the Father, the One as Begotten, the Other as Proceeding, become a kind of "system of relations" in a single essence, something logically consequential to the essence. Indeed, in the speculation of the Western Church, the Father and the Son bring forth the Holy Spirit, since they represent one nature; in turn, the Holy Spirit, who for Western theologians is "the bond between the Father and the Son," signifies the natural unity of the first two Persons. The hypostatic properties (fatherhood, birth, procession) turn out to be more or less dissolved in nature or essence, which, as the beginning of the unity of the Holy Trinity, becomes a differentiated relationship: relating to the Son as the Father, to the Holy Spirit as the Father and the Son. Relations, instead of distinguishing Hypostases, are identified with Them. Later, St. Thomas Aquinas would say this: "The name 'Person' means a relation,"[77] that is, an intra-essential relationship that diversifies it, the essence. We will not deny the difference between such a concept of trinity and the concept of, say, St. Gregory the Theologian, who sees in Her (the Trinity) "three holy things that converge into one Lordship and Divinity" [78]. Regnon quite rightly remarks: "Latin philosophy first considers nature in itself, and then reaches its Bearers; Greek philosophy first considers the Bearers and then penetrates into Them in order to find nature. The Latin considers the Person as a mode of nature, the Greek considers nature as the content of the Person" [79].

The Greek Fathers always maintained that the beginning of unity in the Holy Trinity is the Person of the Father. Being the beginning of the other two Persons, the Father is thereby the limit of the correlations from which the Hypostases derive their distinction: giving the Persons their origin. The Father also establishes their relationship with the one principle of the Godhead as birth and procession. That is why the Eastern Church opposed the formula of the "Filioque", which seemed to damage the unity of the Father: either it was necessary to break the unity and recognize the two principles of the Godhead, or to substantiate unity, first of all, by the community of nature, which would thereby come to the fore, transforming the Persons into interconnections within a single essence. For Western relations, they "diversify" the primary unity; for the Eastern, they signify both difference and unity, for they refer to the Father, who is the Beginning and the "reunion" of ????? (????????? ) Trinity. It is in this sense that St. Athanasius the Great understands the saying of St. Dionysius of Alexandria: "We spread the Indivisible Unity into the Trinity, and we again reduce the indivisible Trinity into the Unity" [80]. And in another place he declares: "One principle of the Godhead and unity of command in the proper sense" [81]. In the words of the Greek Fathers, "there is one God, because there is one Father." Persons and nature are posited, so to speak, simultaneously, without the one logically preceding the other. Father-????????????? , the Source of all Godhead in the Trinity, brings forth the Son and the Holy Spirit, imparting to them His nature, which remains one and indivisible, identical with itself in the Three Persons. To confess one nature means for the Greek Fathers to see in the Father the One Source of Persons who receive the same nature from Him. "In my judgment," says St. Gregory the Theologian, "faith in one God is preserved when we relate the Son and the Spirit to one Principle, without composing or mixing them, and affirming the identity of essence, as well as what can be called the one and same movement and will of the Godhead" [82]. "We have one God, because the Godhead is one. And to the One are raised Those Who proceed from Him, being Three in faith... Therefore, when we have in our thoughts the Divinity, the First Cause and unity of command, then what we imagine is one. And when we have in our thoughts Those in Whom the Divinity is and Who proceed from the First Principle before time and with equal honor, then we worship the Three" [83]. St. Gregory the Theologian here brings the Divinity and the Person of the Father so close that one might think that he confuses them. But in another place he clarifies his thought: "... the one nature in the Three is God, and the Unity (??????) is the Father, from Whom the Others and to Whom They are raised, not merging, but co-existing with Him and not separated from each other by time, nor will, nor power" [84]. St. John of Damascus expresses the same thought with his characteristic precision: the Father... "Of Himself He has being, and of that which He has, He has nothing of another; on the contrary, He Himself is for all things the beginning and cause of the image as it exists by nature. ... Thus, everything that the Son has and the Spirit has from the Father, even existence itself. And if anything is not the Father, it is neither the Son nor the Spirit; and if the Father did not have what the Father did not have, the Son and the Spirit do not have; but through the Father, that is, because there is a Father, there is a Son and a Spirit; and through the Father the Son has, and also the Spirit has all that He has, because the Father has all these things... When we consider in God the First Cause, unity of command... we see the One. But when we consider Those in Whom there is Divinity, or rather Those Who are Themselves Divinity, Persons Who proceed from the First Cause, ... that is, the hypostases of the Son and the Spirit, then we worship the Three" [85].

But according to the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, it is the Father who gives distinction to the Hypostases "in the eternal movement of love" (??????????????????????) [86]. He communicates His one nature equally to the Son and the Holy Spirit, in whom it is one and indivisible, although it is communicated in different ways, for the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father is not identical with the birth of the Son from the same Father. Manifested through the Son and together with the Son, the Holy Spirit exists as a Divine Person proceeding from the Father, as St. Basil the Great clearly says: "From the Father proceeds the Son, by Whom all things came into being, and with Whom the Holy Spirit is always inseparable from our minds, for it is impossible to think of the Son without being enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Thus, on the one hand, the Holy Spirit, the Source of all good things given to creation, is connected with the Son, with Whom He appears inseparably; on the other hand, His being depends on the Father, from Whom He proceeds. Consequently, the distinguishing feature of His hypostatic attribute is that He manifests Himself after the Son and with the Son, and has His being from the Father. As for the Son, Who by Himself and with Himself makes the Spirit proceeding from the Father known, He alone shines from the unborn Light, as the only Son; it is His own attribute, which distinguishes Him from the Father and from the Holy Spirit, and designates Him as a person. And God alone above all has this pre-eminent attribute of His Hypostasis, that He alone is the Father and does not proceed from any beginning; it is by this sign that He is known as a Person" [87]. St. John of Damascus expresses his opinion no less precisely, distinguishing the Persons of the Holy Trinity and not subordinating them to the category of relations: "It should be known that we do not say that the Father proceeds from anyone, but call the Son Himself the Father. We do not say that the Son is the cause, nor do we say that He is the Father, but we say that He is both of the Father and the Son of the Father. And of the Holy Spirit we say that He is of the Father, and we call Him the Spirit of the Father, but we do not say that the Spirit is also of the Son, but we call Him the Spirit of the Son (??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????)" [88].

The Word and the Spirit are two rays of the same Sun, or, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, "or rather, two new Suns" in Their manifestation of the Father, inseparable, and yet, as two Persons proceeding from the same Father, inexpressibly different. If, according to the Latin formula, a new relation of origin were introduced between them, allowing the Holy Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son, then the oneness of the Father's authority, that personal relation which at the same time creates unity and trinity, would give way to another concept, that of one substance, in which the relations would substantiate the difference between the Persons, and where the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit would be only a mutual relation between the Father and the Son. If we grasp the difference in the aspects of these two teachings on the Holy Trinity, we will understand why the Eastern Fathers always defended the ineffable, apophatic procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father as the one Producer of Persons, against a more rational teaching which, by transforming the Father and the Son into the common principle of the Holy Spirit, placed the general over the personal; in this teaching there was a tendency to "depersonalize" the Hypostasis, as it were, by confusing the Divine Persons of the Father and the Son in the natural act of the Spirit's effition, and thus transforming the Third Person into a connection between the first two.

Insisting on the unity of the Father, the one Source of the Godhead and the Beginning of the Trinity, the Eastern Fathers defended the concept of the Trinity, which seemed to them more concrete and more personal. However, one may ask oneself whether such a triadology does not fall into an extreme opposite to that of which the Greeks reproached the Latins, whether it does not place Persons above nature. This would be the case, for example, if nature were understood as the general revelation of the Three Persons, as we see in the sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov, a contemporary Russian theologian, whose teaching, like that of Origen, reveals the possibility of dangerous deviations of Eastern thought, or rather the temptations inherent in Russian religious thought. But the Orthodox tradition is as far from this "Eastern" extreme as it is from its "Western" antithesis. Indeed, as we have seen, if the Persons exist, it is precisely because they possess nature: their very origin is that they receive nature from the Father. Another objection may seem more justified: is not this "one-man rule" of the Father some kind of expression of subordinationism? Does not the One Source, the Father, in this understanding receive the character of the Divine Person predominantly? St. Gregory the Theologian foresaw this difficulty: "I would be ready to call the Father greater, from Whom the Equals have equality, as well as being..., but I am afraid that the Principles may be made the beginning of the lesser and offended by preference. For there is no glory to the Beginning in the humiliation of Those Who are from Him" [90]. "The one Godhead does not increase, or diminish through additions and decreases, everywhere is equal, everywhere the same, as the one beauty and one majesty of heaven. It is the Three Infinites, the infinite co-naturalness," where Each, contemplated by Himself, is God, as the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, with the preservation of a personal attribute in each, and the Three, conceived together, are also God: the former by reason of consubstantiality, the latter by reason of unity of authority" [91].

In this way, the apophatic contemplation of God of the Fathers, in formulating the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, was able to preserve their mysterious equivalence in the distinction between nature and hypostases. In the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, "God is equally One and Trinity" [92]. This is the end of the path that has no end, the limit of the boundless ascent: the Unknowable One is revealed precisely by the fact that He is unknowable, for His unknowability lies in the fact that God is not only nature, but three Persons; the unknowable essence is such in so far as it is the essence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is unknowable as the Trinity, but also revealing Himself as the Trinity. This is the limit of apophaticism: the Revelation of the Trinity as a primordial fact, an absolute reality, a first cause, which can neither be deduced, nor explained, nor found from any other truth, for there is nothing that precedes it. Apophatic thinking, rejecting all support, finds its support in God, Whose unknowability is revealed as the Trinity. Here thought acquires unshakable stability, theology finds its foundation, ignorance becomes knowledge. For the Eastern Church, when they speak of God, it is always a concrete God. "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ." It is always the Trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and vice versa, when in the concept of trinity the common nature comes to the fore, the religious reality of God - the Trinity is inevitably somehow erased, giving way to the well-known philosophy of the Divine essence [93]. The very concept of eternal bliss acquires a certain intellectual aspect in the West, as a vision of the divine essence. Man's personal relationship to the Living God will no longer be his conversion to the Holy Trinity, but rather will have as his object the person of Christ, who reveals to us the Divine essence. Both Christian thought and Christian life will become Christ-centered [94] and will be connected primarily with the humanity of the incarnate Word, which can be said to be the anchor of salvation for the West. For under the dogmatic attitudes characteristic of the West, any purely theocentric speculation, relating first of all to nature and then to Persons, could be transformed into a kind of mysticism of the "abyss of the Godhead" (compare, for example, Meister Eckhart's Gottheit), into an "impersonal apophaticism" of the Divine non-being, which would precede the Holy Trinity. Thus, by a certain paradoxical detour through Christianity, it is possible to return to the mysticism of the Neoplatonists.

In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology of the Divine essence, much less for its mysticism. The ultimate goal of spiritual life and eternal bliss in the Kingdom of Heaven is not the contemplation of the essence, but first of all participation in the Divine life of the Most Holy Trinity, the deified state of "co-heirs of the Divine nature," as gods created after the uncreated God, and possessing by grace all that the Most Holy Trinity possesses by nature.

For the Orthodox Church, the Most Holy Trinity is the unshakable foundation of all religious thought, all piety, all spiritual life, all spiritual experience. It is Her that we seek when we seek God, when we seek the fullness of being, the meaning and purpose of our existence. For our religious consciousness, the Holy Trinity is the primordial revelation, the source of all revelation and all being. It must be accepted as a fact, the reliability and necessity of which can only be substantiated by himself. According to the modern Russian theologian Father Pavel Florensky [95], in order for human thought to acquire absolute stability, there is no other way out for it than to accept the Trinitarian antinomy. By deviating from the Trinity, as the only foundation of all reality, of all thought, we doom ourselves to a hopeless path, we come to aporia, madness, to the rupture of our being, to spiritual death. There is no other choice between the Trinity and hell. This is truly a question of the cross in the literal sense of the word: the Trinitarian dogma is the cross for human thought. The apophatic ascent is the ascent to Golgotha. Therefore, no speculative philosophy could ever rise to the mystery of the Holy Trinity. For this reason, too, human minds could receive the revelation of the Divinity in its entirety only after the cross of Christ, which triumphed over death and hell. For this reason, finally, the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity shines forth in the Church as a purely religious given, as a predominantly catholic truth.

Chapter IV: Uncreated Energies