Blu,
Many thanks for your response! I likewise hope that everything is well on your end vis-à-vis the pandemic situation and in general.
You make a good point, I will try and explain how it is understood in the creedal formulations.
We believe in something called the '
inseparable operation of God'.
It holds that whilst the Trinity does function in a Triune way i.e. the Father (by means of his relation of paternity in the divine essence)
sends, the Son (by means of his relation of filiation)
acts and the Holy Spirit (by means of his relation of procession)
perfects, each person works according to the one undivided will, intellect and spirit, that constitutes God as a single being.
We have to carefully scrutinize what the council Fathers (and indeed Tertullian, Athanasius etc.) actually meant by
persons here, because it does not carry our modern connotations of independent agency and being. It means three subsisting and concrete relations of
one divine being, not three 'individual' minds with independent agencies, wills, thoughts and intentions etc. The persons are nothing other than the active relations subsisting in the eternal divine
ousia.
The personality of God, his consciousness, is found in the common
essence (the
ousia) because as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us in the Summa: “
the act of God’s intellect is His substance (essence)” and thus His self-consciousness as an object in Himself is common to the Persons as one 'being', rather than individuated. So there cannot be three divine 'wills'.
Consider the Second Council of Constantinople (553 CE), which says, in Anathema 1:
If anyone will not confess that the Father, Son and holy Spirit have one nature or substance, that they have one power and authority, that there is a consubstantial Trinity, one Deity to be adored in three subsistences or persons: let him be anathema. (Tanner 1990, 114)
The Tome of Damascus from the Council of Rome in 382 likewise says:
Anyone who denies that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have one Godhead, one might, one majesty, one power, one glory, one Lordship, one kingdom, one will and truth, is a heretic. (Dupuis 2001, para. 306/20)
Their differentiation is not in will, mind or spirit (they are each the same Being whole and undivided) but only that the Father is neither begotten nor spirated; the Son is begotten but not spirated; the Spirit is not begotten but is spirated - these distinct relations of origin within the divine essence.
These constitute their sole distinguishing attributes as 'persons' (concrete instantiations, or subsisting relations, of one being to Itself). The relations existing within the one divine being do not change what God is – and considered according to their existence, they simply
are what God
is because God is simple – but they do place the being of God in a series of self-differentiating relational oppositions, which subsist in the divine essence and are traditionally named ‘persons’.
If I can quote one patristic scholar, Stephen Holmes:
"There are three divine hypostases that are instantiations of the divine nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three divine hypostases are distinguished by eternal relations of origin – begetting and proceeding – and not otherwise.
All that is spoken of God, with the single and very limited exception of that language which refers to the relations of origin of the three hypostases, is spoken of the one life the three share, and so is indivisibly spoken of all three. The relationships of origin express/establish relational distinctions between the three existent hypostases; no other distinctions are permissible".