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Alexander Schmemann
2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)
From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox ChurchPage 6
Even in the second century the Apologists, defenders of the Christian faith to the empire and the public, had tried to explain faith in the Trinity by basing it on the concept of the Logos familiar to Greek philosophers. The Son of God, Christ, is the Word of the Father, by which He creates and saves the world, and by which He is linked to the world. In the “Word” we in turn recognize God and join ourselves to Him.
But the danger of such an explanation is that the concept of the Logos in Greek philosophy has what might be called an instrumental nature. The Logos was always the bond, the intermediary link, the unifying principle; it was not an independent source existing by itself. Although in the Fourth Gospel the Word is understood in the spirit and light of the Old Testament as the living and acting God, it might in the Greek conception easily be taken to be some divine quality or force given to the man Jesus, which distinguished Him from the rest of mankind. In other words, the concept of the Logos, which was common to Christianity and Hellenism, still had to be purified of its exclusively cosmological significance in Greek philosophy. The Apologists of the second century, however, lacked the words and the philosophical gift to do this. Their writings are ambiguous and inconsistent. While, they were wholly orthodox for the Church, which read them in terms of its own faith, they could be understood by outsiders as identifying the Father with the Word in the way that a man might be identified with his reason or his thought.At the beginning of the third century a movement called Monarchianism had arisen, again in the West. This was a doctrine of the Trinity, which defended the “monarchy” of the Father. It reflected the fear of retreating from the position of radical monotheism and a confused conception of the faith of the Church as being faith in three gods. The Monarchians taught that only the Father was God; in their teachings about Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit they split into two groups — one which taught that Christ was a man on whom the divine force had descended, making Him the Son of God and uniting Him with the Father in a unique way; while the second taught that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were three different modes of the appearance of the One God in the world. First He revealed Himself as the Father, then as the Son, and finally as the Holy Spirit. The latter doctrine was called Modalism, and its chief representative, the scholarly Roman presbyter Sabellius, was expelled from the Church under Pope Callistus (217-22).
Out of the struggle against these heresies come the first attempts to give an orthodox description of the mystery of the Trinity and to express it in human terms. In the West there was the theology of Tertullian before he retreated into Montanism, and in the East that of Origen.
Despite the great difference between them, both had a common inadequacy: they identified God only with the Father, the view that had led to Monarchianism.
The Trinity “arises,” “becomes,” if not in time, in any case hierarchically; it is a “disclosure” of God the Father — although according to the experience of the Church it is precisely the triune quality of God that is His complete form — the mystery of the Three who have one life in perfect love.
Cf. Books for getting closer to Orthodox Christianity ||| Orthodox Images of the Christ ||| Byzantium : The Alternative History of Europe ||| Greek Orthodoxy - From Apostolic Times to the Present Day ||| A History of the Byzantine Empire ||| Videos about Byzantium and Orthodoxy ||| Aspects of Byzantium in Modern Popular Music ||| 3 Posts on the Fall of Byzantium ||| Greek Literature / The New Testament
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-2-triumph.asp?pg=6
