The writers of the creed added the point that there is one God and
Lord, not three gods and lords, so that they would not be exposed to
ridicule before the whole world. Who would not laugh at three gods? On
the other hand, though, anyone can see the contradiction in the phrase
they added.
[ 3 ] If instead they had said that the Father has a divine essence, the Son
has a divine essence, and the Holy Spirit has a divine essence, but never-
theless there are not three divine essences, there is one indivisible essence,
then that mystery would be explainable. That is, “the Father” means the
divine nature as an origin, “the Son” means the divine-human nature that
came from that origin, and “the Holy Spirit” means the divine influence
that radiates out. These are three aspects of one God. Another way of put-
ting it is that the Father’s divinity means something like the soul in us, the
divine-human manifestation means something like our body, which
comes from our soul, and the Holy Spirit means something like our
actions, which come from both our body and our soul. Then we see three
essences that belong to one and the same person. Together they form one
indivisible essence.173 The idea of three gods is impossible to wipe out just by orally con-
fessing one God, because it has been planted in our memory since child-
hood. We all think on the basis of what is in our memory.
The human memory is like the rumen that some birds and animals
have. As these creatures go through the process of getting nourishment
from their food, they first put their food in the rumen. They take it back
out several times, and then put it in the main area of their stomach,
where the food is digested and dispensed to serve all their body’s func-
tions. The human intellect is like the main area of the stomach; the
human memory is like the rumen.
Anyone can see that the idea of three divine persons who existed
from eternity, which is the same as the idea of three gods, cannot be
wiped out just by orally confessing one God. Just look at the following
piece of evidence: it has not been wiped out yet. There are famous peo-
ple who do not want it to be wiped out, who insist that the three divine
persons are one God but stubbornly deny that because God is one, he is
also one person. Surely all wise people, though, think to themselves that
“person” here does not mean person at all. It means the attribution of
some quality. Which quality exactly, we do not know. Because we do
not know, the concept of three gods stays sown in our memory from