“When divine truth is expressed in human language, the words themselves are transformed. And the fact that the truths of the faith are veiled in logical images and concepts testifies to the transformation of word and thought— words become sanctified through this usage. The words of dogmatic definitions are not “simple words,” they are not “accidental” words which one can replace by other words. They are eternal words, incapable of being replaced. This means that certain words— certain concepts— are eternalized by the very fact that they express divine truth. This means that there is a so-called philosophia perennis that there is something eternal and absolute in thought. But this does not at all mean there is an “eternalization” of one specific philosophical “system.” To state it more correctly— Christian dogmatics itself is the only true philosophical “system.””

In other words, the presupposition of the Church’s attitude toward philosophy is that her philosophy and her interpretation of words like “hypostasis” or “Logos” cannot be replaced or revised on the basis of historical studies, academia or novel heresies. In this sense the Church is the true perennial philosophy, in that all things are Hers (1 Cor. 3:21).  Attempts to interpret the theology of the Bible through the sense of Neoplatonism or German Idealism thus share the same faulty presuppositions: the true account is the reverse approach: Divine Revelation is the guide for the interpretation and transformation of the Hellenic concepts, ideas, and terms.

In fact, the biblical notion of person, as opposed to unclear terms in Greek philosophy like “individual” (in Aristotle, see Lucian Turescu, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons, 26-32), or the doctrine of God creating ex nihilo, or the anti-Platonic Christian doctrine of the enypostatiation of the logoi which function as the patterns for all created forms and realities, including created noetic realities and ideas, in contrast to the eternality of the ideas and their corresponding actualized world in Greek thought (The Synodikon of Orthodoxy also condemns these heretical Platonic, Aristotelian and Origenistic errors and myths):

For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself…”  (John 5:26).  Knowing that the Father is the Personal Source of all life and divinity, Jesus comments that His own divine life, power, judgement, authority – even His very existence is of the Father.  For Orthodox, we understand terms like “life,” “power,” “love,” etc., to be common predicates of God that signify (not define) the divine nature.  So Christ saying He possesses life from the Father as Source means the ousia he possesses is also from the Father.  This is why for us, there is One God because of One Father, as the Creed states: “I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”  This is not to deny the predication of “deity” to the Triad, but to locate the proper order of theology in the Hypostasis of the Father.

“Yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live.'” (1 Cor. 8:6).  “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” (James 1:17).  “Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).  Greater, as St. Basil says, as Cause, not in the sense of subordination, since the Son has the same ousia as the Father. “For just as the brightness is emitted by the flame, and the brightness is not after the flame, but at one and the same moment the flame shines and the light beams brightly, so does the Apostle mean the Son to be thought of as deriving existence from the Father.” (Letter 38 of “St. Basil” / St. Gregory Nyssa).

Indeed, John 1 itself teaches us the Causal role of the Father as the eternal begetter of of the Son, when St. John writes:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God….And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth (14)…No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”  St. John is noting the Son remains in the bosom of the Father as His begotten, even as He was incarnate on earth.  This begetting was from all eternity and thus not constrained or limited by the temporal analogy of “cause.”  

In fact, the only knowledge of the Father as First Hypostasis and Personal Cause is through the Son (and in the Spirit), showing that no one can know or approach the Father apart from His eternal Logos (Matt. 11:27).   From this vantage point of the fuller revelation of the New Testament, we know this is the meaning of the prophetic Psalm 2, an eternal begetting: “I will declare the decree: The LORD has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.”  Hebrews expands on this exegesis of the Old Testament: “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”  The Son being the express brightness of the Father is not a temporal event: it’s an eternal reality.  

This Personal conception of a God one can have a covenantal relationship with is a novel notion in the ancient world, unique to the biblical revelation.  The God of Exodus 3:14 is not an impersonal force or ‘thought thinking itself.’  The God of Exodus is the Personal God of Genesis Who creates by an act of will, placing Him in stark contrast to the pagan and later Hellenic notions of self-subsisting forms or a Platonic Monad.  Even Aristotle’s god is a higher form of thought that bears no real relation to the eternally actualized natural world (Metaphysics 13:4-7). In fact, St. Basil mocks this foolishness in Aristotle as ultimately resulting in a dyad, since the actualized world takes on the attribute of eternality, leading to a dyad of Actus Purus / Eternal Mover over against its actualized / moved world, and its dialectically necessary need for eternal prima materia (See St. Basil, Hex. 2.1-2).

The movement from the Aristotelian notion of a concrete individual substance to the Cappadocian doctrine of the distinction between ousia and hypostasis is detailed well in Met. Zizioulas’ Being and Communion, Chapter 1.  For the Gree mind, monism tended toward a restatement of reincarnation, where the transmigration of souls and even the Monad’s relationship to the world is determined by the necessity of the world existing as its image.  Zizioulas correctly notes the eternality of the world is fundamental to Plato’s Timaeus, as well as Aristotle’s First Mover. The world thus possesses the same ontological necessity as the First Principle, with the deterministic generation of the world standing in stark contrast to the Personal, ex nihilo creation of the world by the God of Genesis.   As Dr. Tollefson notes in chapter 2 of Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximos the Confessor, there are 3 main areas that distinguish the logoi doctrine from the Neoplatonic version: 1. Creating is a real potentia, a dynamis or power God possess that He does not have to actualize, apart from his good will and pleasure to do so. 2. Due to the essence-energy distinction, God genuinely possesses free will (See Fr. Florovsky, St. Athanasius & the Doctrine of Creation).  Zizioulas writes:

“Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological “principle” or “cause” of the being and life of God does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father.  The one God is not the substance, but the Father who is the cause both of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit.”  Zizioulas goes on to note that this is directly connected to the doctrine of God’s free will, allowing for a distinction between the natural “act” of generating the Son, and a different type of act relating to the creating of the world.  The first is necessary, though not against the Father’s will, while the second is purely a free choice:

“Thus God as person, as the hypostasis of the Father, makes the one divine substance to be what it is: the One God.  This point is absolutely crucial, for it is precisely with this point that the new philosophical position of the Cappadocian Fathers, and of St. Basil in particular, is directly connected.  That is to say, the substance [or essence of God] never exists in a naked state, without hypostasis, without a mode of existence. And the one divine substance of God is consequently the being of God only because it has these three modes of existence which it owes, not to the substance, but to One Person, the Father. Outside the Trinity there is no God, that is no divine substance, because the ontological principle of God is the Father. The Personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His substance, makes it hypostasis.” (Being as Communion, 40-1).  Note that “being” here is used in the sense of common existence among the three, and so related here to essence.  Strictly speaking, “being” is an energy of God, just like “simplicity,” as Professor Mantzaridis explains:

“God is simple by His own nature. But simplicity is not God’s nature.  Simplicity, Palamas observes, is one of the divine energies.  That means it becomes participable, without offending the imparticipability of the divine essence (ousia).  Therefore with their participation in the simplicity of God, angels and souls become simple.”  St. Gregory Palamas, citing St. Gregory Nazianzus in Oration 42,  explains: “God has the simplicity which belongs to Him by nature as an activity [energy].” (Dialogue with a Barlaamite, XXXVI. See also Mantzaridis’ Deification of Man: St. Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition, 104-9 on the uncreated natural energies and western simplicity). The full passage from St. Gregory Nazianzus is also enlightening, as it shows the continuity of Palamas with the Cappadocians, particularly in attempting to predicate positively of the divine essence, identifying it with any predicates or hypostatic properties such as ungenerate, unbegottenness or begotteness (in the exact same fashion as Eunomius):

“That which is without beginning, and is the beginning, and is with the beginning, is one God. For the nature of that which is without beginning does not consist in being without beginning or being unbegotten, for the nature of anything lies, not in what it is not but in what it is. It is the assertion of what is, not the denial of what is not. And the Beginning is not, because it is a beginning, separated from that which has no beginning. For its beginning is not its nature, any more than the being without beginning is the nature of the other. For these are the accompaniments of the nature, not the nature itself. That again which is with that which has no beginning, and with the beginning, is not anything else than what they are. Now, the name of that which has no beginning is the Father, and of the Beginning the Son, and of that which is with the Beginning, the Holy Ghost, and the three have one Nature — God. And the union is the Father from Whom and to Whom the order of Persons runs its course, not so as to be confounded, but so as to be possessed, without distinction of time, of will, or of power. For these things in our case produce a plurality of individuals, since each of them is separate both from every other quality, and from every other individual possession of the same quality. But to Those who have a simple nature, and whose essence is the same, the term One belongs in its highest sense.”

This Personal starting point for a correct ordo theologiae is utilized from Exodus 3:14 by St. Basil in his Against Eunomius, where he notes that God’s special Name given there still does not explain or define his inner essence.  He even mocks the notion one could come upon a predicate for the divine essence through empirical sense data, which is ironically the very movement Thomistic and Roman Catholic epistemology almost wholesale makes, following the peripatetic axiom (which Aquinas accepts in De veritate, q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19, following Aristotle.  Thus Exodus 3:14 for St. Basil is actually an apophatic statement, the very opposite of a definitional affirmation of God’s essence being identical to “being” or “essence” or “simplicity” (See his Against Eunomius, 1.12-14)

St. Photios continues in this tradition of starting our theology with the Person of Father when confronting and refuting the Latin Filioque as it was becoming clearer in his day what the full implications of a double hypostatic procession would mean.  St. Photios explains in the Mystagogy, the confusion of properties of nature with hypostatic properties violates the integrity of the Triad itself:

“16. It is also necessary to accompany this conclusion with the following one: this impious doctrine also separates the hypostasis of the Father into two hypostases, since the ungodly doctrine frames laws for itself, mixing the hypostasis of the Son with that of the Father, as parts of the same thing. But the essence is not the cause of the Word; the Father is the hypostatic cause of the hypostasis of the Word. But if, as this impoius doctrine asserts, the Son is also a cause of the Spirit, then it must be conceded that either the Son takes over the Father’s role and title (receiving the hypostatic property of being the cause), or the Father’s hypostasis is imperfect, lacking completion, and that the Son supplements the hypostasis of the Father. Since the Son is made a part of the Father, this truncates the awesome mystery of the Trinity to a mere dyad.

If the Father’s unique role and property as Cause is shared or transferred to the Son, the particular characteristics that identify the individual hypostases is relativized and confused.  As as result of this, multiple reductio ad absurdam arguments follow, which occupy many of the subsequent paragraphs.   If something is common to Father and Son (such as being Cause), then it stands to reason this commonality is predicable of the entire Godhead and thus common to all Three.  Properties are thus either common to all 3 or the unique hypostatic characteristics that pick out each Person in relation to their role.  Even the relations of Persons, which Orthodox affirm, are not themselves subjects and thus not the sole basis for distinguishing Persons (as Lossky notes, relations are predicates, not subjects).  St. Photios continues, noting it is not common essence that is Source, but Hypostasis:

“19. In general, aside from the properties characteristic of a specific hypostasis, whenever some property is truly possessed by any hypostasis other than the one first possessing it, the property shared by those hypostases belongs to the essence in order to not join that property to a specific hypostasis. In a word, however, it is really we men who determine the processions of the essence, and therefore it is we men who determine which hypostases will not submit themselves to share in the properties of the other hypostases. But if one knows by the eyes and ears of the mind that the procession is not from the Father as a hypostatic source, then one must deny a hypostatic procession of the Spirit from the Son as well. — The hatred of God is turned to the same sort of goal! — It is opportune to say at this point that it follows simultaneously that the specific features of the hypostases cannot be imitated either. Otherwise, we actually abandon the divine, hypostatic source and cause, and consequently lose the perfections of the hypostases in the essence. Let presumption see, despite itself, to what conclusion that doctrine hated by God arrives, for the lovers of falsehood have raged against the characteristic properties.”

Furthermore, if the generation of the Son is whole and perfect, and no other Hypostasis contributes or shares in his generation, then the production of the existence of the Holy Spirit must also be whole and perfect from the Father alone.  St. Photios also invokes the Creed, showing its intention behind “God from God” cannot involve partition or diminution.  The Father communicates everything He possesseses – full divinity and power – to the Son, aside from His own peculiar property of being the Sole Cause, Arche, Fount of Deity, etc .:

“31. Accordingly, for my part I pay no attention to the rest of your reflections. If you have committed the unforgivable sin, then I must refute, convict, and overturn every one of your earthly doctrines. But if you simply need your sight healed, then I must go before you and cure you from the same chalice of truth, which allays pains and purges disease. For if — O what if you have accosted the Spirit? — the procession from the Father is perfect — because Perfect God proceeds from Perfect God — then what specific and concrete thing does the procession from the Son contribute? For if He supplies something specific and concrete, it must also be declared what it is He has contributed and then the procession from the Father would not be perfect and complete. But if it is not possible to think or speak of something that has been added to the divine hypostasis of the Spirit, then why are you determined to insult the Son and the Spirit with your falsehoods, and by implication, our Father as well?”

And noting the priority of Person, in relation to the Personal Cause:

“63. Do you see the manifold absurdity of this ungodly thing? Observe it here. In accordance with sacred theology and the laws of the incorporeal and supernatural essence, the Son is begotten from the Father simultaneously with the Spirit’s procession from the Father. However, if the Spirit were to proceed from both the Father and the Son simultaneously (for a before and an after are alien to the eternal Trinity), then the former procession and the latter procession each belong to a completely different hypostasis. But if this is the case, then how are the distinctions of the causes and the divine operations maintained? And why is division induced against the indivisible, simple, and unitary hypostasis of the Spirit? For the hypostasis comes before the distinctions in energies and operations, especially because it is supported by the evidence of the superior and supernatural Word. It is easy to see and accept these many testimonies which refer to a distinct hypostasis producing various operations and virtues simultaneously, especially in supernatural things which surpass our intellect, but it is absolutely impossible to find a hypostasis which is due to multiple causes without the hypostasis having within itself the difference of the causes and being divided by them.”

Commenting on these properties, Turescu writes summarizing the Cappadocian appellations, with no reference to the double hypostatic procession Filioque.  Indeed, the debate has always been, since St. Photios up to the Latin Council of Lyons the question of confusing eternal and energetic manifestation with hypostatic origin:

“The Father can be described as, and is, a unique collection of the following: proceeding from no other cause, that is, being ungenerated, and being Father.  The Son is a collection of the following” “through himself and with himself he makes known the Spirit who proceeds from the Father,” and he shines forth as the unique only begotten of the Father: all things, (including the Holy Spirit) come into existence from the Father through the Son.  The Spirit in turn can be described as a unique collection of the following properties: has his being from the Father, that is, proceeds from the Father and is known after the Son and with the Son.  Gregory seems to imply here that the unique collection of properties is both that by which the person is known or identified and that by which the person is constituted as distinct.  Moreover, the relation of these persons to the common nature is similar to the relation between the individual and the universal. (Concept of Divine Persons, 57)

In fact, Father and Son both have the whole and entire existence derivatively of the Father, thus excluding the Lyons/Florence doctrine through the relations of origin:

“‘The mediation of the Son preserves His being the only-begotten and does not sever the Spirit’s relation by way of nature to the Father.’  The causal relations by which one Person [Father] is the source of the other two persons are relations of origin.  They help Gregory distinguish persons from one another.  This conception, however, must not be confused with Filioque, as the Father and Son do not form one principle like that of the western doctrine.  the proper cause of the Spirit is the Father…Gregory then proceeds with his causal argument and says that in using such language we do not actually state what the persons are, but how they are.  Casual language indicates only difference in the “manner of existence” among the persons; the divine persons are distinct from each other by the way in which they obtain their existence.  It is worth noting that, like the names Father, Son and Holy Spirit, causal language is relational language expressing relations of origin.”

In fact, as St. Alexander and St. Athanasius argued, denying God is an eternal Father amounts to denying eternal generation.  This is precisely why the Creed identities the one God as the Father Almighty who, from all eternity, begat His only Son.  If He at some point in time begat His divine Son, then His nature underwent a fundamental, substantial change.  This at once refutes both the Arian and Eunomian arguments relating to simplicity, as well as guarding the distinction between begetting and creating.  In fact, this is precisely the argument St. Athanasius uses to demonstrate the essence-energy distinction, that unless there are distinct “acts” God does, there is no way to distinguish the generation of the Son from the creation of the world, as both would be “acts of essence” (given this doctrine of what simplicity must be).

This is why Person and its relational character are fundamental to knowing and experiencing God, as opposed to abstractions and the impersonalism of Hellenism.  St. Gregory Palmas replies to Barlaam: “When God was conversing with Moses, He did not say “I am the essence,” but “I am the One Who Is.”  Thus it is not the One Who is who derives from essence, but the essence which derives from Him, for it is He who contains all being in Himself.”  (Triads, 3.2.12).  Following the Cappadocians, essentialism and granting and ontological or epistemological priority is ruled out, as God is revealed to us as divine Person, who enhypostatizes the divine nature.  St. Gregory emphasizes the priority of Person, not essence.  The God we meet in covenantal relationship is a Who, not an It.  Lossy makes a similar argument in Image and Likeness, on page 130. What God is, no man can know.   Enhypostatization thus signifies the mode in which nature exists, the hypostasis.  Hypostasis is thus not reducible to trait or quality or instantiation.

In St. Basil’s argumentation, this is the only means to preserve the unity and distinctions in God:

“It results that in Himself He shows the glory of the Only begotten, and on true worshippers He in Himself bestows the knowledge of God. Thus the way of the knowledge of God lies from One Spirit through the One Son to the One Father, and conversely the natural Goodness and the inherent Holiness and the royal Dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit. Thus there is both acknowledgment of the hypostases and the true dogma of the Monarchy is not lost. They on the other hand who support their sub-numeration by talking of first and second and third ought to be informed that into the undefiled theology of Christians they are importing the polytheism of heathen error.” (On the Holy Spirit, 47).

The Causal relation of the Father to the Son is according to the Son being begotten as light from light, divinity from divinity from the Father’s nature.  The generation is hypostatic in Origin (the Father) and that Father communicates eternally to the Son His whole existence, being and hypostasis, the the Son derives His natural existence from the Father:

“2. Because even at that time there were men who asserted the Son to have been brought into being out of the non-existent, the term homoousion was adopted, to extirpate this impiety. For the conjunction of the Son with the Father is without time and without interval. The preceding words show this to have been the intended meaning. For after saying that the Son was light of light, and begotten of the substance of the Father, but was not made, they went on to add the homoousion, thereby showing that whatever proportion of light any one would attribute in the case of the Father will obtain also in that of the Son. For very light in relation to very light, according to the actual sense of light, will have no variation. Since then the Father is light without beginning, and the Son begotten light, but each of Them light and light; they rightly said of one substance, in order to set forth the equal dignity of the nature. Things, that have a relation of brotherhood, are not, as some persons have supposed, of one substance; but when both the cause and that which derives its natural existence from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called of one substance. (Letter 52)