By Henry Aloysius Barry
CHAPTER XIX. THE ORDER OF PERSONS.
The baptismal formula, the motto carved on the portals of the kingdom of Christ by our Lord Himself, reads in this way:—"In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." The Ecclesiastic Doxology re-echoes this dictamen—"Be glory given to the Father and the Son and to the Holy Ghost, this day and for aye." St. John's declaration preserves this arrangement: —"There are Three Who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these Three are One." (i, John v, 7.) These facts set forth such an order of persons as brooks no divergence from what is so clearly built on the deepest harmonies of Godhead as it is in its eternal rhythm. One would, by inverting this order of divine relations, be guilty of serious error. Were one, for example, to put the Holy Ghost first in order it would imply that the Holy Ghost is the One that begets. The Holy Ghost belongs in third place, in view of the relationship of procession. There is a difference in the matter of relationship but no difference in point of substance in the Trinity. There is a difference of persons but not of nature. Fatherhood is the First Person; Sonship is the Second Person and Spiration is the Third Person. There is, however, no superiority among the Three, no dependency, no inequality of years, of dignity or perfection. In the olden days, Catholics were marked out from the Arians, as Nicephorus informs us. Some Arians piped, "Glory to the Father in the Son," with the view to relegating the Son to an obscure and secondary place. Others skirled "Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Ghost." But such as made the true profession of consubstantiality carolled "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost." The Council of Nice made an addition to these words of the following versicle, "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, one God world without end." (March. Hort, past. to. iv lect.)
There is equality in the Trinity. The sense in which One of the Three is greater than Another is in that of 'cause', of principle or origin, that is to say, inasmuch as one proceeds from Another. St. Basil remarks upon the order of the Trinity, "Those who shift this order about, seeing that it has been handed down to us by our Lord, must discontinue the practice because they are in open war with the truth. Stable and incorrupt must we preserve this order of persons which we have received from our Lord's own lips." Theodoret also makes the observation: —"The order of names does not teach us that there is any difference in the matter of dignity and nature." St. Athanasius sympathetically agrees: —"therefore the Son Himself did not allege, 'the Father is better than I,' lest someone should fancy that His nature is not the same, but, 'greater than I,' said he, not by any greatness or age, but simply that He was begotten by the Father." St. Gregory Nazianzen queries in this style:—"What lacketh the Spirit of being the Son? We admit that He lacketh naught, for, God could not be lacking in aught. The difference, however, of what I might call Their manifestation and of Their mutual relationship, has created different names for Them." (Orat. xxxvii.)
