Sometimes, Trinitarian apologists will appeal to there being 7
billion human persons (plurality of ‘persons’) but one “humanity” (one 'being') as
support for three “persons” in one “being." However, this is not a good analogy at all, and would actually lead to belief in, not the Trinity, but a Quaternity (!) As Matthew Barrett noted
in his 2021 Simply Trinity:
Paul, Andrew, and James? Away with
Quaternity
Unlike the movies, not every
priceless artifact has been stolen in a heist and sold on the black market.
Sometimes the most precious artifacts are just destroyed. For centuries a
medieval limestone sculpture stood tall on the Romanesque cathedral in Vic, a
town just north of Barcelona, Spain. Eventually, the sculpture was destroyed,
as was the cathedral that housed its beauty. Nevertheless, a fragment of the
sculpture was saved and today is housed in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas
City. This rock fragment exhibits three apostles: Paul, Andrew, and James.
Since I live in Kansas City, I have seen this twelfth-century work of art with
my own two eyes. The paint colors are long since worn away; yet every curve,
every crease is still sharp. The apostles stand one right next to the other
with their Gospels in hand and circular halos adorning their brows. In my
opinion, it was one of the museum’s greatest treasures.
As such I cherish this sculpture,
it too is a bad analogy for the Trinity. Paul, Andrew, and James are three
person, and they all have the same human nature (Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not
Three Gods” [NPNF2 5:331-32). We might say that all
possess the nature we call humanity. But we can say they are one human? We
cannot (Muller, PRRD, 4:211). Paul, Andrew, and James all
participate in what we call humanity, but they are not a single human being.
They are, rather, three separate individuals, three separate beings. They are
not only distinct but independent. They may have much in common, but three they
remain, not one. The illustration buckles; what we call a human nature can be
divided. Never can it be a single human essence and at the same time three
humans. “The common humanity of the three human persons does not indicate,
as it must in God, a numerical unity of essence, only a generic unity” (Muller,
PRRD, 4:211). And a generic unity will not do when we are speaking of
the triune God.
Paul, Andrew, and James can exist
without one another; they do not need one another, nor is their identity
dependent on one another. There is no genuine unity between the three. They are,
in short, separable and divisible. Not so with the Father, Son, and Spirit. The
father does not exist without his Son, the Son does not exist without his
Father, and the Spirit does not exist without the Father and the Son, not if
all three have the same divine essence (Leigh, Treatise 2.16 [p. 128];
quoted in Miller, PRRD, 4:212). Yes, they are distinguishable, but
only in terms of their eternal relations of origin (personal properties), not
in terms of their essence (nature). The divine essence they hold in common.
For the essence is communicable while the personal properties are not (they are
incommunicable) (Ursinus, Commentary, 130; Muller, PRRD, 4:326). “The
Father and the Son are one in all things except what concerns their personal
properties: the Son is all that the Father is, except that he is not Father and
not without principle,” says Emery. “In the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy
Spirit, the divine nature therefore is identical and the same” (Emery, The
Trinity, 126).
In sum, the divine essence isn’t
one thing and the three persons another thing, as if we now have four things,
creating a quaternity instead of a Trinity—this is the real danger of
[the analogy] (apostles). As much as we distinguish between the essence and the
persons, we cannot forget that each person is a divine subsistence of the one, undivided,
indivisible essence. If not, simplicity dissolves and the Trinity with it. As
John of Damascus says, “Each of the three has a perfect subsistence, . . not one compound perfect nature made up of
three imperfect elements, but one simple essence, surpassing and preceding
perfection, existing in three perfect subsistences” (John of Damascus, Exposition
of the Orthodox Faith 8 [NPNF2 9:10]) (Matthew Barrett, Simply
Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker Books, 2021], 143-45, emphasis in bold added)
