Chapter XX. On the Three Primary Hypostases

WHEREAS next to the doctrine of Father and Son the Hebrew oracles class the Holy Spirit in the third place, and conceive the Holy and Blessed Trinity in such a manner as that the third Power surpasses every created nature, and that it is the first of the intellectual essences constituted through the Son, and third from the First Cause, observe how Plato also intimated some such thoughts, speaking thus in his Epistle to Dionysus:

[PLATO] [1] ‘I must explain it to you then in riddles, that if the tablet suffer any harm in the remote parts of sea or land, the reader may learn nothing. For the matter is thus: Around the King of the Universe are all things, and all are for His sake, and that is the cause of all things beautiful: and around the Second are the secondary things, and around the Third the tertiary. The soul of man therefore strains after them to learn what sort of things they are, looking upon the things akin to its own nature.’

These statements are referred, by those who attempt to explain Plato, to the First God, and to the Second Cause, and thirdly to the Soul of the Universe, defining it also as a third God. But the sacred Scriptures regard the Holy and Blessed Trinity o’f Father and Son and Holy Ghost as the beginning, according to the passages already set forth.

The next point to this is to examine the nature of the Good.