Today’s article is going to take a bit of a deeper dive into Church history and theology. Particularly, we are going to look a the Cappadocians and their influence on our theology of Trinity.
When people refer to the Cappadocians, they often mean the early Church fathers from the 4th century located in Central Asia Minor, in and about the region of Galatia. Among these are great saints such as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. And these men wrote extensively about the Trinity and helped shaped this central doctrine of the faith.
To understand this, we have to understand the Cappadocian settlement. In the early Church there was a great deal of confusion about the Trinity. It was clear that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit were divinely connected, but there was difficulty squaring it away with the uncompromising monotheism that Christians inherited from Judaism. If God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does that mean that there are 3 Gods? This was obviously contrary to Scripture. But if you said that the Son or the Spirit were not God, then you would fall into heresies like Arianism, Subordinationism, and Modalism. This led to the Cappadocians, who lived in the Eastern Church in and around modern day Turkey, to come up with a way to talk about God’s oneness and threeness as seen in the symbol.
Part of the issue deals with the language used to describe the Trinity. It was settled by the Church that God is one ousia. This word was synonymous with the word hypostasis, which means substance. It is very clear that God is one substance. The first Capodocian settlement made the distinction between ousia and hypostasis. In this view, ousia would still mean substance. So no matter what, God is still one substance. But the Cappadocians now took hypostasis to mean idiomata, which means the qualities of being a Person. On this view, God is one ousia and three hypostasis.
But the Father is not the Son, nor the Spirit. The Son is not the Spirit nor the Father. And the Spirit is not the Father nor the Son. That is because they are distinct hypostasis. Each has distinct qualities of personhood. For example, the Cappadocians saw that the Father’s idiomata was unbegottenness, the Son’s idiomata was begottenness, and the Spirit’s idiomata was procession. The Father cannot be the Son, because the Son is begotten and the Father is unbegotten. He also cannot be the Spirit, because the Father does not proceed from the Son and Spirit. The Son cannot be the Father, because the Son is begotten and the Father is not. The Son cannot be the Spirit, because He is begotten by the Father, but he is not in procession between the Father and the Spirit. And the Spirit cannot be the Father nor the Son because of the reasons already mentioned.
The second Cappadocian settlement had to deal with Aristotle’s 10 Categories. Aristotle categorized qualities of substances into ten categories. There was one essential property: being. The other properties like posture, relation, etc, were accidental properties. Because being is an essential property, it properly belongs to God. That is why Father, Son, and Spirit are God, who is Being Itself. But the Cappadocians took one of the remaining 9 categories and pointed out that it was also an essential quality of God: relatio or relation. For the Cappadocians, God’s very nature necessitated that each person of the Trinity was in relationship to the other. This, Cappadocians argued, was not an accidental property of God, but an essential one. God is not only essentially one Being, but He is also in relationship to each Person in the Trinity. That is why the Father cannot be the Son and neither of them are the Spirit. That is because relatio requires distinct persons for each Person of the Godhead to be in relationship to.
St. Augustine approached the Trinity from a different perspective than the Cappadocians in the East. Instead of starting with God as three hypostasis, he began by looking at God’s unity. That is why it is proper to predicate of each person that each “is God.” Augustine sees this unity as essential to understanding God so that wherever one Person of the Trinity is at work, so too are the others. But Augustine acknowledges what the Cappadocians saw as well. He saw the necessity of each person being distinct. Although Augustine used the word “person” reluctantly because he thought it would be too easy for people to mistake “God as 3 Persons” with “God is made up of three separate beings.” However, he does not reject what the Cappadocians have brought. In fact, he embraces it by pointing out that there are vestiges of the Trinity throughout creation. That is because God’s “Godness” is reflected in His creation.
St. Thomas Aquinas, like St. Augustine, begins by focusing on God’s unity, but he also would accept that God is three hypostasis. St. Bonaventure would focus the dynamic love at play between each person of the Trinity.
Joseph Ratzinger brought together both of these elements of ousia and hypostasis in his Introduction to Christianity when he made the point that the highest point of unity is the unity of love. God is ultimate unity because He is ultimate love. In order to have love you need more than one person and God, in His Godness, finds complete unity in Himself by being joined in love.
And while all of this may seem a bit technical, it is important to see the importance of how the Cappodocians gave us the vocabulary to speak about God as Three and One.
Copyright 2026, WL Grayson
W.L. Grayson
I am a devoutly Catholic theology teacher who loves a popular culture that often, quite frankly, hates me. I grew up absorbing every movie, TV show, comic book, science fiction novel, etc. I could find. As of today I’ve watched over 2100 movies and tv shows. They take up a huge part of my life. I don’t know that this is a good thing, but it has given me a common vocabulary to draw from in order to illustrate whatever theological point I make in class. I’ve used American Pie the song to explain the Book of Revelation (I’ll post on this some time later) and American Pie the movie to help explain Eucharist (don’t ask). The point is that the popular culture is popular for a reason. It is woven into the fabric of our lives and imaginations, for good or ill. In this blog I will attempt to bring together the things of heaven with the things of earth. Of course this goal may be too lofty for someone like me.
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