The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Post 2 of 7)

The Father, Source Without Origin

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

There is a moment in prayer that most people who pray regularly will recognise, though we may not have words for it. We begin to speak to God, and somewhere in the middle of the words, the words run out. Not because we have lost concentration or grown distracted, but because we have arrived at something so vast that language cannot quite reach it. The sentence begins and does not know where to go. The thought starts and finds itself standing at the edge of something it cannot cross.

The Christian tradition has a name for what we are standing at the edge of in that moment. It is the Father.

Last week we began this series by looking at Pentecost as a Trinitarian event, the moment when the full movement of God toward us was made visible: the Father who planned and sent, the Son who died and was raised and exalted, the Spirit who was poured out and given. This week we move more slowly into the first of the three persons. We are going to sit with the Father, asking what it means to call God Father in the Syriac and Alexandrian tradition, and why this first person of the Trinity is described in the patristic sources as the Source Without Origin.

The phrase may sound abstract. By the end of this post, I hope it will feel like the most personal thing in the world.

The Problem of Speaking About the Father

Every time we use the word Father for God, we are doing something that requires careful thought. We are taking a word drawn from human experience, a word loaded with the particular memories, associations, and feelings that our own earthly fathers have given it, and applying it to the first person of the eternal Trinity. For some people, the word Father carries warmth, safety, and love. For others, it carries pain, absence, or disappointment. The Christian tradition does not pretend that this is a simple matter.

But here is what the tradition does say. The name Father, as applied to God, is not a human projection upward. It is a revelation downward. We do not call God Father because we looked at human fatherhood and thought it seemed like a good description. We call God Father because Jesus called God Father, because He taught His disciples to call God Father, and because the Holy Spirit, given to us at Pentecost, cries out “Abba, Father” from within our hearts as Paul describes in his letter to the Romans. The name comes from inside the Trinity itself. We received it as a gift, not invented it as a metaphor.

And what the name points to, when we follow it carefully through the patristic sources, is something that goes beyond any human experience of fatherhood. It points to a person Who is the source of everything that exists, and Who is Himself without source. The Father is the One from whom all things come, and there is nothing and no one from whom the Father comes. In the technical language of theology, the Father is unbegotten, unoriginate, the ground without ground. The Syriac tradition has a word for this, and that word opens a door that is worth stepping through.

Raza: The Father as Hidden Mystery

The Syriac word “raza” (ܪܐܙܐ) means mystery, secret, or hidden depth. It is used in the Syriac liturgical tradition for the sacraments, which are called raze, mysteries, hidden realities made present under visible signs. But it is also used by the Syriac fathers, and particularly by Ephrem the Syrian, to describe the Father Himself.

For Ephrem, the Father is the raza, the hidden one, the depth from which the Word comes forth and into which the Word eternally returns. The Father is not hidden in the sense of being absent or distant. The Father is hidden in the sense that the divine source is always beyond what any created mind can grasp or any created word can fully express. We can receive from the source. We can be nourished by the source. We can trace everything back to the source. But we cannot stand outside the source and look at it from a distance, because there is no outside. The Father is the ground of everything, including the ground of our own existence.

This is not a frightening idea in Ephrem’s hands. It is a deeply comforting one. The Father’s hiddenness is not the hiddenness of a God Who is indifferent or unreachable. It is the hiddenness of a love so complete that it surrounds us on every side, so that wherever we look, we are already inside it. Ephrem uses the image of someone swimming in a deep river, surrounded by water on every side, able to drink from it and be carried by it, but unable to see the river as a whole from where they are standing. The Father, for Ephrem, is something like that river. Not something you observe from outside. Something you are already inside.

Ephrem the Syrian: The Father as Root and Source

Ephrem the Syrian, whose Hymns on the Holy Spirit we drew on in the first post, also left us a body of work on the nature of the Father that is less well known in popular reading but theologically rich. In his Hymns on Faith, which are among his most theologically concentrated writings, Ephrem works through the question of how we speak about God at all, and what it means to call the first person of the Trinity the Father.

Ephrem uses the image of a root, a tree, and its fruit. The Father is the hidden root, buried in the ground, invisible, the source from which the entire life of the tree flows. The Son is the tree itself, the visible expression of what the root contains, the one in whom the life of the root becomes manifest and accessible. The Spirit is the fruit, the gift that the tree produces and offers to those who come to it, carrying within it the seed of the same life that flows from the root. It is a simple image, but Ephrem uses it with great theological precision.

The point Ephrem is making is this: the root does not appear. We do not see the root of a tree when we stand under its shade or eat its fruit. And yet the root is the reason the tree exists, the reason the fruit is possible, the reason there is shade at all. Everything that the tree is and does flows from the root. In the same way, Ephrem says, everything that the Son reveals and everything that the Spirit gives flows from the Father. The Father is the unoriginate source, the One whose giving is so complete and so prior to everything else that it is the condition of everything that follows.

Ephrem is also careful to say that this hiddenness of the Father does not mean distance from us. The fruit of the tree is precisely where the life of the hidden root becomes available and real to the one who comes hungry to the tree. When we receive the Son, when we receive the Spirit, we are receiving what comes from the Father, and in receiving it, we are in contact with the Father himself, even though we cannot see the Father directly as he is in himself. This is why Jesus can say in John’s Gospel: whoever has seen me has seen the Father. Not because the Father and the Son are the same person, but because the Son is the perfect and complete expression of the life that flows from the Father.

There is another dimension of Ephrem’s understanding of the Father that deserves mention here, because it is distinctive in the Syriac tradition. When Ephrem speaks of the Spirit, he frequently uses feminine imagery, drawing on the fact that the Syriac word for Spirit, “ruha,” is grammatically feminine. This has sometimes led readers to wonder whether Ephrem is making a theological statement about gender and the divine. What Ephrem is doing is more subtle than that. He is working within the full range of biblical and Syriac imagery to say that the divine life is not captured by any single human category. The Father is not male in the way that human fathers are male. The fatherhood of God is an original, from which human fatherhood is at best a distant reflection. And the richness of Syriac theological language, which can speak of the Spirit in feminine terms alongside the Father and the Son, is a reminder that God exceeds and encompasses all our categories rather than fitting neatly inside any of them.

Cyril of Alexandria: the Father as the Unbegotten Source of the Son

Cyril of Alexandria, whose Commentary on the Gospel of John we drew on in the first post, gives us a second and complementary angle on the Father as Source Without Origin. Cyril’s primary concern in his Trinitarian theology is to safeguard the full equality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father, against any suggestion that the Son or Spirit are lesser or derivative divine beings. But in doing this, he also develops a careful and precise account of what it means to call the Father the source of the Godhead.

For Cyril, the Father is the Unbegotten One, the One Who has no origin, no cause, no prior reality from which He proceeds. The Son is eternally begotten from the Father: not made, not created, not brought into being at a point in time, but begotten, which is a different kind of relationship altogether. The Son’s origin is in the Father’s Own nature and being, not in the Father’s will or choice. The Father did not decide to have a Son at some point. The Father has always and eternally been the Father of the Son, and the Son has always and eternally been the Son of the Father. The relationship is not sequential. It is eternal.

Why does this matter? Cyril says it matters because salvation depends on it. If the Son is not eternally begotten from the very being of the Father, then the Son is a creature, however exalted. And if the Son is a creature, then when the Son became human and died for us and was raised, what was accomplished was the work of a creature, not the work of God. And the work of a creature, however magnificent, cannot save us. Only God can bridge the infinite distance between God and a fallen creation. Only God can give us participation in the divine life, because only God has the divine life to give.

Cyril develops this with particular care in the early sections of his Commentary on John, where he reflects on the opening of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Cyril reads “with God” as pointing to the eternal distinction between the Father and the Son: the Son is not the Father. They are genuinely distinct persons. And he reads “the Word was God” as pointing to the eternal unity of their nature: the Son is not a different or lesser God. The Son shares the one divine nature with the Father completely and without diminishment.

For Cyril, then, calling the Father “Source Without Origin” does not place the Father above the Son in terms of divinity or honour. It simply describes the particular manner in which the Father exists within the one Godhead. The Father is the source because the Father is unbegotten. The Son is from the Father because the Son is eternally begotten. The Spirit proceeds from the Father. These are three different modes of existing within the one divine nature, not three ranks or grades of divinity. The Father is source, but the Son and Spirit are not less divine for flowing from that source, any more than the light that fills a room is less real than the sun from which it comes.

Cyril also makes a point that has direct relevance to how we pray. He observes that Jesus consistently prayed to the Father, consistently referred His own authority and mission back to the Father, and taught His disciples to address the Father in prayer. This is not, Cyril says, evidence that Jesus was subordinate to the Father in any ultimate sense. It is evidence that the Son lives out, even in His earthly life, the eternal relationship of the Son to the Father: a relationship of complete love, complete trust, and complete self-giving. When we pray to the Father in the name of the Son, we are being invited to participate in that same relationship, to approach the Source of all things through the One Who is Himself eternally from that Source.

Severus of Antioch: the Monarchy of the Father and the Unity of the Trinity

The third father who guides this post is Severus of Antioch, the sixth-century Patriarch of Antioch who is one of the most important theologians in the Oriental Orthodox tradition, and a foundational voice for the Malankara Church. Severus was a precise and careful theological thinker, trained in the Greek philosophical tradition but deeply committed to the Syriac and Alexandrian patristic inheritance. His collected letters and homilies, known as the Cathedral Homilies, contain some of the most carefully argued Trinitarian theology in the Oriental Orthodox corpus.

Severus writes extensively about what theologians call the “monarchy” of the Father. This is a technical term, but its meaning is not complicated. Monarchy comes from the Greek word for single source or single principle. When the Fathers speak of the monarchy of the Father, they mean that the Father is the single source or principle of the Godhead. The Son and the Spirit have their existence from the Father: the Son by eternal generation, the Spirit by eternal procession. The Father alone is unbegotten, unoriginate, the one from whom the other two persons derive their existence within the one divine nature.

Severus is at pains to point out that this does not make the Father greater than the Son or the Spirit. The monarchy of the Father is not a statement about divine rank. It is a statement about the structure of relationships within the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Spirit are one in nature, one in will, one in operation. There is no division between them, no gap, no hierarchy of holiness or power. The Son does everything the Father does, and the Spirit does everything the Father and Son do, because they share one divine nature and one divine will. The monarchy of the Father simply means that this one divine life has a personal source, a starting point, a “whence,” and that starting point is the Father.

Why does Severus insist on this so carefully? Because he is guarding against two opposite errors that the Church had to navigate in its early centuries. On one side was the error of suggesting that the three persons of the Trinity are so distinct that they are really three separate gods, which is the error of tritheism. On the other side was the error of suggesting that Father, Son, and Spirit are simply three names for the same single divine person appearing in different modes, which is the error of Sabellianism or modalism. The monarchy of the Father is Severus’s way of holding the middle path: truly three persons, genuinely distinct, and yet one God, because all three share the one divine nature that has its personal source in the Father.

Severus also connects this Trinitarian theology directly to the life of worship. In his Cathedral Homilies, he reflects repeatedly on the structure of the Eucharistic prayer, the Anaphora, and how it moves from the Son through whom we offer, to the Spirit who makes the offering holy, to the Father to whom the offering is made. For Severus, the shape of the Eucharist is itself a theological statement about the Trinity. Every time the Church gathers to celebrate the Qurbana, it is enacting, in its worship, the truth that the Father is the source and goal of all things, that the Son is the way through which we approach the Father, and that the Spirit is the one who makes our approach possible and holy. Worship is Trinitarian because God is Trinitarian, and the Father as Source Without Origin is the one toward whom all worship ultimately moves.

The Father and the Malankara prayer tradition

This is a point worth dwelling on for those of us who worship in the Malankara Orthodox tradition, because it is closer to home than any patristic text.

The prayers of the Malankara Qurbana are deeply Trinitarian in their structure. The great doxologies that punctuate the liturgy, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages,” are not decorative additions to the service. They are the spine of it. Every major section of the Qurbana begins or ends by returning to the Trinity, and very often the particular movement is from the Son and Spirit back to the Father. The liturgy teaches us, if we are paying attention, that the Father is the source from Whom the Son comes and to Whom the Spirit leads us back.

The opening prayer of the priest in the Qurbana, prayed silently before the service begins, is addressed to the Father. The closing blessing is Trinitarian. The Anaphora, the great prayer of thanksgiving at the heart of the liturgy, is addressed to the Father and moves through the work of the Son to ask for the descent of the Spirit. The shape of the entire Qurbana is, in a very real sense, the shape of what the three fathers in this post are trying to describe: the Father as the source and goal, the Son as the way, the Spirit as the one who makes the journey possible.

If we have been attending the Qurbana for years and have found it beautiful without perhaps being able to say why, part of the answer may be this: we have been worshipping our way into the truth of the Trinity, Sunday after Sunday, shaped by a liturgy that was written by people who understood what Ephrem, Cyril, and Severus were teaching.

Why the Father Matters for How We Pray

There is a practical question that all of this raises, and it is worth addressing directly. How should knowing the Father as Source Without Origin change the way we actually pray?

The first thing it changes is our understanding of what we are doing when we come to God in prayer at all. If the Father is the unoriginate source of all things, the one from whom all existence flows and in whom all existence is sustained, then coming to the Father in prayer is not like approaching a powerful being who may or may not choose to hear you. It is like a river finding its way back to its source. It is, to use Ephrem’s image, like the fruit recognising the root from which it comes. Prayer to the Father is the most natural thing in the world, not because it is easy, but because it is what we were made for. We come from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, and prayer is simply that movement made conscious and deliberate.

The second thing it changes is our understanding of the silence that sometimes meets us in prayer. When the words run out, when we arrive at the edge of something we cannot cross, the tradition does not tell us we have failed. It tells us we have arrived. The Father is the raza, the hidden mystery at the source of all things, and the silence of prayer is sometimes simply the silence of a creature standing at the edge of something that exceeds it, in the best possible way. The silence is not empty. It is full. It is the fullness of the Source Without Origin, closer to us than our own breath, and yet always and forever beyond what any word can reach.

The third thing it changes is the way we receive love. If the Father is the Source Without Origin, the one from whom the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit eternally proceeds, then the love that reaches us in the Son and the Spirit is not a secondary love, a copy of something that exists more truly somewhere else. It is the love of the Source itself, reaching us through the persons who flow from it. When we feel loved by God, when the Spirit moves in our hearts, when the presence of Christ is real to us in the Qurbana, we are not at a distance from the Father. We are in contact with the Source of all things, through the very persons who carry that source into our lives.

A prayer to close

Ephrem, in his Hymns on Faith, closes one of his meditations on the hiddenness of the Father with a prayer that is worth making our own here.

Father, hidden source of all things, you are the depth from which the Word comes forth and to which all things return. We cannot contain you in our words or our thoughts, but you have opened yourself to us in your Son and your Spirit. Let the love that flows from you, through your Son and by your Holy Spirit, find its way into the deepest part of what we are. And when our words run out, let the silence be full of you. Amen.

Next Wednesday: The Eternal Son, Begotten Not Made. We will look at the Nicene confession through Oriental Orthodox eyes, drawing on Cyril of Alexandria and the Alexandrian tradition to explore what it means that the Son is eternally begotten from the Father, and why this is the foundation of everything the Gospel promises.

This series, The Undivided Light, is an observational study, the reflections of someone sitting with these texts and trying to share what he is finding along the way. It is offered in humility, not as finished scholarship. If you are reading this, your prayers for the completion of the series are genuinely asked and gratefully received.

The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Post 2 of 7)