§ 130. THE NICENE DOCTKmE OF THE TKINITT. 673
with ns [and yet individually distinct from us] as touching the manhood." The Niceue Creed does not expressly assert the singleness or numerical unity of the divine essence (unless it be in the first article: " We believe in on«? God ") ; and the main point with tbe Nicene fathers was to urge against Arianisni the strict divinity and essential equality of the Soiz and Holy Ghost with the Father. If we press the difference of homoousion from ononoousion^ and overlook the many passages in which they assert with equal emphasis the monarchia or numerical unity of the Godhead, we must charge them with tritbeism.'
But in the divine Trinity consubstantiality denotes not only sameness of kind, but at the same time nutnerical unity ; not merely the unum in specie, but also the unum in nurnero. The three persons are related to the divine substance not as three individuals to their species, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or Peter, John, and Paul, to human nature ; they are only one God. The divine substance is absolutely indivisible by reason of its simplicity, and absolutely inextensible and untransferable by reason of its infinity ; whereas a corporeal substance can be divided, and tbe human natui-e can be nmltipiied by generation. Three divine substances would limit and exclude each other, and therefore could not be infinite or absolute. The whole fulness of the one undivided essence of God, with all its attributes, is in all the persons of the Trinity, though in each in his own way : in the Father as original principle, in the Son by eternal generation, in the Spirit by eternal procession. The church teaches not one divine essence and three persons,, hut one essence in three persons. Father, Son, and Spirit cannot be conceived as three separate individuals, but ai'e in, one another, and form a solidaric unity.*
' Cudworth (in his great work on the Intellectual System of the Universe, vol. iL p. 43*7 ff.) elaborately endeavors to show that Athanasius and the Nicene fathont actually taught three divine substances in the order of subordination. But he makes no account of the fact that the terminology and the distinction of ohcsia. and for<f- (TTOffis were at that time not yet clearly settled,
" Comp. the passages from Athanasius and other fathers cited at § 126. "The Persons of the Trinity," says R. Hooker (Ecclc?. Polity, B. v. ch. 5ft, voL iL D R^fi
674 THIRB PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
Many passages of the JSIiccne fathers have ui\questionablj rt tritheistic sound, bnt arc neutralized by otliers which by themselves may bear a Sabeiliau construction ; so that their position must be regarded as midway between these two extremes. Subsequently John Philopouus, an Aristotelian and Monophysite in Alexandria about the middle of the sixth century, was charged with tritlieism, because he made no distinction between ^v<jl<; and v7r6aTaat<i, and reckoned in the Trinity thi-ee natures, substances, and deities, according to the number of persons.'
in Keble's edition), quite in the spirit of the Nicenc orthodoxy, " are not three parfcular substances to whom one general nature is common, but three that subsist by one substance which itself is particular : yet they all three have it, and their several ways of having it are that which makes their personal distinction. The Father therefore is in the Son, and the Son in Him, they both in the Spirit and the Spirit in both them. So that the Father's offspring, which is the Son, remaineth eternally rn the Father; the Father eternally also in the Son, no way severed or divided by reason of the sole and single unity of their substance. The Son in the Father as light in that light out of which it fioweth without separation ; the Father in the Son as Ught in that light which it causeth and leaveth not. And because in this respect his eternal being is of the Father, which eternal being is his life, therefore he by the Father liveth." In a similar strain, Cunningliam says in his exposition of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity (Hist. Theology, i. p. 285) : " The unity of the divine nature as distinguished from the nature of a creature, might be only a specific and not a numerical unity, and this nature might be possessed by more than one divine being; but the Scriptures plainly ascribe a numerical unity to the Supreme Being, and, of course, preclude the idea that there are several different beings who are possessed of the one divine nature. This is virtually the same thing as teaching us that the one divine nature is possessed only by one essence or substance, from which the conclusion is clear, that if the Father be possessed of the divine nature, and if the Son, with a distinct personality, be also possessed of the divine nature, the P'ather and the Son must be of one and the same substance ; or rather — for it can scarcely with propriety be called a conclusion or consequence — the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father is just an expression or embodiment of the one great truth, the different component parts of which are each established by scriptural authority, viz. : that the Father and the Son, having distinct personality in the unity of the Godhead, are both equally possessed of the divine, as distinguished from thf created, nature. Before any creature existed, or had been produced by God out of nothing, the Son existed in the possession of the divine nature. If this be true, an i If it be also true that God is in any sense one, then it is likewise true — for this is just according to the established meaning of words, the current mode of expressing it — that the Father and the Son are the same in substance as well as equal in powor and glory."
' On tritheism, and the doctrine of Jolm Philopouus and John Ascusnaeea