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Holy Catechism
Nikolaos Voulgaris, tr. Daniel, 1893
Of the Holy Trinity
56. Ex. And how from the Patriarchs and from the Prophets do you infer a Son of God and a Trinity of Persons, when we notice in so many places of Holy Scripture that “The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt not serve or worship other gods; because I am a jealous God; and the Lord thy God, He is God in heaven above, and on earth beneath, and there is none other beside Him,” and many other places?
C. Because of idolatry, into which the Hebrews easily fell, being perverted by their intercourse with the Egyptians, God herein so severely warned them, telling them to worship and reverence one only God, and concealing, so far as was possible, the Inconceivable Mystery of the Superessential Trinity. And certainly God is one, and there is none other but He, and so too we Christians believe and confess. We teach not God and God and God: far from it; for this would be polytheism, so Cyril of Alexandria teaches in his book on the Trinity; but we glorify the three in their properties as one God, and one Nature, and one Substance; for what we honour is a single principle.” Nevertheless, that the God Who is of one nature and substance, is in the persons (ὑπόστασις) threefold, divided in respect of persons (πρόσωπον) only as concerns atoms and as concerns characters, there are countless passages of Holy Scripture where this is made evident: just as they teach both the timeless generation and the generation in time of the Son of God. And as Cyril of Jerusalem, in his 4th Catechesis, explains: “This salvation belonging to our Faith depends not on curious research, but on demonstration of the sacred Scriptures.”
57. Ex. Will you do me the favour to bring us first a few testimonies from the Old Testament Scriptures about this reason-transcending Mystery of the Superessential Trinity?
C. The mystery of the holy and consubstantial Trinity is plainly revealed in the 33rd Psalm by the Prophet-king David: there where he begins, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens established, and by the spirit of His mouth all their host.” Here we perceive the Word of the Lord, the Spirit of the Lord, and the Lord Himself; clearly the Three Persons of the very superessential Trinity. And Solomon, in his Wisdom, ch. xviii. 15, says: “The Almighty Word from heaven leaped down fiercely off the royal throne;” and ch. vii. 22: “The only-begotten Spirit, intelligent, holy, all-powerful.” Here we have an all-powerful Word, and an all-powerful Spirit. The person is indubitably the Father’s. And Isaiah xlviii. 16: “The Lord, the Lord sent Me, and His Spirit.” Here is the Son, Who is sent, one person; the Lord the Father Who sends, two persons; and the Spirit of the Father, Which also itself, with the Father, sends the Son, three persons.
For this reason, in Genesis, ch. i. 26, God spoke in the plural number: “Let Us make man in our image;” in ch. iii. 22: “Behold Adam has become as one of Us;” in ch. xi. 7: “Come, let Us go down and confound the tongues.” And in countless passages of Holy Scripture, God is named three times, by way of pointing out the Divine Trinity itself. So in Josh. xxii. 22, it is said thrice, “God, God is the Lord; and God, God, the Lord Himself knoweth.” In Deut. vi. “The Lord, the Lord, God;” and in Isaiah vi. 3, “Holy, holy, holy.” So in Gen. xviii., the three men who appeared to Abraham, at one time converse as three in the plural, and at another as one in the singular. Particularly there, where we read in Gen. i. i, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” In Hebrew it is not Eloah, which means God, but Elohim, Gods, in signification of the unconfounded Trinity itself, the One God and Three Persons, as is pointed out in the Instructions made for Jews now in our time by the most wise Prelate and Light of Corcyra, Philip Cartanus.
As also the Heathen have received and acknowledged in the Divinity a sort of shadow of the Trinity. In Plato we see “the Word of God, first-begotten, image of God, and most divine Word.” The school of Pythagoras would have the Trinity as the measure of the Universe, saying, “The Universe and all things are bounded by Three.” And the Stagirite de Cœlo, i., “All are Three, and triplicity is everywhere;” and therefore he would have it that naturally men dealt with three exactly as they did in the sacrifices to the false gods. “And for the sacred rites of the gods we use this number, having gotten it from nature, like laws of her own.” Three things the Egyptians used to offer to God, trees, flowers, and animals; three things were offered by the Chaldeans, gold and frankincense and myrrh. “Thrice I make libation, and thrice I call on these venerable ones,” writes Theocritus in Idyl 2. And the poet Ovid, Met. vii. 261. “And thrice Medea purifies her sire with fire, thrice with water, and thrice with sulphur.” And in his Metaphysics, Aristotle acknowledges in God, Mind, Reason, and Will. I refer to what the School Divines have written at such length. The far-famed oracles of the Sibyls I leave unmentioned, which Divine Providence disclosed to the Gentiles in abundance.