Together with the Pauline benediction,
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit, be with you all,” which was written down earlier but
presumably spoken later, the baptismal formula from the Gospel of Matthew, “in
the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” constituted the most
explicit biblical identification of all three hypostases of the Trinity;
and the two passages were therefore seen to be closely related. (Bas. Spir.
25.59 [SC 17:458-60]) As such an identification, the baptismal formula
was a keystone of trinitarian orthodoxy, so that Basil, for example, gave it
priority in his list of proofs for the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. It had
the additional advantage of containing an explicit reference to the concept of “the
name.” (Bas. Spir. 29.75 [SC 17:516]) Closer inspection of the
formula, however, showed it to be a particularly striking piece of evidence of
the “unnameabilty of the name” of God; for after seeming to promise a
disclosure of the name, Christ in fact “did not add the actual term of signification
that ‘the name’ indicates.” Because the uncreated nature of God transcended “all
signification of names,” this baptismal formula because instead of an authorization
for Christian believers to apply equally to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “whatever
name our intelligence by pious effort” had managed to find “to indicate the
transcendent nature,” (Gr. Nyss. Ref. 14-15 [Jaeger 2:318]) such names
as the good or the incorruptible. These three names of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit were, then, not names of ousia, which, because they pointed to “the
transcendent power,” (Gr. Nyss. Ref. 124 [Jaeger 2:365]) would have had
to be apophatic in form or at any rate in content. They were, rather,
names of “relationship,” (Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.568-71 [Jaeger 1:190-91]) of
the relationship of God to humanity and of the relationship of the divine hypostases
to one another. Christ had deliberately passed over “all those names employed
to indicate the surpassing transcendence [hyperkeimenē] of the divine nature,”
since in fact there were no cataphatic names that could do this, in
favor of “the title of ‘Father’ as better suited to indicate the truth.” (Gr.
Nyss. Ref. 10 [Jaeger 2:316] Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.554 [Jaeger 1:186])
Such names of relationship could connote a variety of meanings, but they did
not and could not denote the ousia of the one being named. The baptismal
formula in Matthew 28:19-20, far from conveying an essential divine name, had
rather laid down the rule that the divine ousia remained “ineffable and
incomprehensible.” For if it had been either possible or necessary for salvation
not know about the divine ousia, then God would have made it known. But
by his silence about the name of the divine ousia, an ousia “beyond
our power to know.” Christ delivered in his great commission to the disciples
and to the church the knowledge of what was sufficient for salvation, a knowledge
and a set of names that were within human grasp. (Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity
and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian
Encounter with Hellenism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 211-12)
. . . The Cappadocian lexicon of
transcendence this equation of God with being, like every other divine name,
could be rescued from grave misunderstanding only by involving apophatic theology.
(Gr. Nyss. Eun. 3.6.8 [Jaeger 2:188]) For if the word from the burning bush
meant, “We know nothing else of God but this one thing, that God is,” the “we
know” in that declaration had to be qualified by the warning: “We do not by
this negative predication understand the subject, but are guided as to what we
must not think concerning this subject.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun. 3.5.59-60
[Jaeger 2:181-82]) Thus the self-revelation of God did not in fact answer the
request of Moses for a name, nor did it provide a disclosure of the transcendent
ousia of God. (Bas. Eun. 1.13 [SC 299:218]) That kind of
exegetical argumentation by the Cappadocians inevitably raised the question of
whether this left any room for faith in a reliable divine revelation, together with
the question of how a divine being defined in such negative terms could at the
same time serve as the foundation for the Cappadocian doctrine of the relation between
the one divine ousia and the three divine hypostases in the
Trinity. (Ibid., 214)
