During the long-lasting and momentous process of the hellenizing of Christianity, the conceptuality of Greek metaphysics substantially conditioned the dogmatic formalization of Christian truth, whether consciously or unconsciously. Thus, we find many theological tenets which only through philosophical reflection and theoretical form came to be what they are, or at least through philosophy gained a convincing character for faith as a whole. This is particularly true for the question of creation as the unfolding of the divine Will and Goodness, for the ideas as the structures of divine Thought, for the concept of God as identical with absolute Being in the sense of a reflexively moved immutability, for the concept of a hypostatic unity of God and man in Christ, for will and freedom, arché and logos, eternity, time and history, and the issue of the approach towards knowledge of God through affirmative, symbolic, and negative theology. None of these theological tenets is more intensively determined by, and so deeply interwoven with, philosophical concepts and theories than the Trinity. Its intelligibility depends upon more or less developed concepts of unity, singleness, simplicity, and also on the three-ness that indicates a characteristic difference in the unity, but which nonetheless should not be understood as numerical in the mathematical sense. It also involves conceptions of difference and characteristic individuality as elements in the unity and, at the same time, the inseparability, nondistinctness, or even “equality” through which the characteristic three form the Trinity in itself: “...in his igitur tribus quam sit... inseparabilis distinctio, et tamen distinctio, videat qui potest.”? No less decisive for the reflexive form of the Trinity is the ontological meaning of the concept of relation which founds and carries the reciprocal interpenetration of tri--and un-ity: Trinity as a correlative unity which is itself only through self-relatedness. Such a unity, …
It's not often you come across a single page in a book of philosophy that has as much going on as this one has.
From 'Unity and Trinity in East and West, by Werner Beierwaltes #Eriugena
