“By the word Consubstantial, they meant not of the same numerical, or individual substance, but of the same generical substance or subsistence. As, amongst men, a son is consubstantial with his father; so, in their opinion, the Son of God is consubstantial with the Father, that is, of the same divine nature.
“By this word therefore they intended to express the same kind of nature, and so far, a natural equality. But according to them, this natural equality excluded not a relative inequality; a majority and minority, founded upon the everlasting difference between giving and receiving, causing, and being caused.
“They had no notion of distinguishing between person and being, between an intelligent agent, and an intelligent active substance, subsistence, or entity.
“When they said that the Father was God, they meant that he was God of himself, originally, and underived.
“When they said that the Son was God, they meant that he was God by generation or derivation.
“The Unity of God they maintained, and they defended it, first, by considering the Father as the First Cause, the only underived and self-existing; secondly, by supposing an intimate, inseparable, and incomprehensible union, connection, indwelling, and co-existence, by which the Father was in the Son, and the Son in the Father; and thirdly, by saying that in the Father and the Son there was an unity of will, design, and consent, and one divine power and dominion, originally in the Father, and derivatively in the Son.
“In process of time, Christians went into a notion that the Son was ‘of the same individual substance with the Father, and with the Holy Spirit,’ and they seem to have done this with a view to secure the doctrine of the Unity.
“The schoolmen took up the subject, and treated it in their way, which they call explaining, and which men of sense call impenetrable jargon.”—(Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 202.)
You will observe, that so far no mention had been made of the separate deity of the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene Creed is silent upon the subject. It was a question that grew out of the deity of Christ. The philosophy of the times, no less than the reluctance to be deemed the followers of a crucified man, led to the deification of Jesus, and afterwards, from the personifications of the Holy Spirit, in such expressions as “I will send unto you the Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth,” and from its frequent connection with the name and mission of Christ, arose the idea of a separate divinity, a third person in the Trinity. The Platonic Trinity would indeed have naturally led the early Fathers to the conception of a third principle, and in some of the Anti-Nicene Writers this conception appears; but the Controversy was carried on with almost exclusive reference to the deity of Christ, which independent of the general burden of their writings, clearly appears from the fact, that when defending themselves against the charge of violating the Unity of God, they always state the objection, so as to show that the accusation against them was that they were “introducing a second God.”
Accordingly it was after the Council at Nice, when the deity of the Son was established, that orthodoxy took a second and consequent step, and proceeded to establish the deity of the third person in the Trinity.[[495]]