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The Trinity and the Fathers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
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In a celebrated passage Gibbon justly remarks that ‘the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousions and the Homoiousions'. But this unfavourable impression of the preoccupations of the early Church has been shared by more than ‘the profane'. In somewhat less amiable terms than Gibbon the equally Olympian figure of Mgr Duchesne speaks with an oddly similar distaste of the dogmatic developments of the first five Christian centuries when he writes: Since the curiosity of men would investigate the mystery of Christ, since the indiscretion of theologians laid on the dissecting-table the Blessed Saviour, who came to be the object of our love and of our imitation rather than of our philosophical investigation, at least the investigation should have been made more peaceably by men of approved competence and prudence, far from the quarrelsome crowd'.
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- Copyright © 1960 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Histoire ancienne de l'Eglise, t. iii, pp. 323-4.
1 Briefly the difficulty was this: as a matter of language the one Latin word substantia has two Greek equivalents, ousia and hypostasis. As a mere matter of language, indeed, hypostasis is a more exact equivalent than ousia of the Latin substantia. And so a terminology which talks about three hypostases in the Godhead could be very disconcerting to Latins translating unwarily as three substances. The difficulty was overcome by the Latins using the word persona as equivalent to the Greek hypostasis in this context. It was not till the scholastic period that the Latins evolved the word subsistentia as a more exact linguistic equivalent of hypostasis, and began talking about three subsistences. But by this time the word person had achieved pride of place. With the Greeks on the contrary, prosopon, the linguistic equivalent of person, though occasionally used, never displaced the traditional hypostasis in theological language.
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