St Gregory of Nyssa

The Great Catechism

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205.xi.ii.i.html

The above is right up on this topic of the Holy Trinity.

and from this page: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205.xi.ii.v.html

Chapter III. And so one who severely studies the depths of the mystery, receives secretly in his spirit, indeed, a moderate amount of apprehension of the doctrine of God’s nature, yet he is unable to explain clearly in words the ineffable depth of this mystery. As, for instance, how the same thing is capable of being numbered and yet rejects numeration, how it is observed with distinctions yet is apprehended as a monad, how it is separate as to personality yet is not divided as to subject matter1950. For, in personality, the Spirit is one thing and the Word another, and yet again that from which the Word and Spirit is, another. But when you have gained the conception of what the distinction is in these, the oneness, again, of the nature admits not division, so that the supremacy of the one First Cause is not split and cut up into differing Godships, neither does the statement harmonize with the Jewish dogma, but the truth passes in the mean between these two conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is useful to it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the acceptance of the Word, and by the belief in the Spirit; while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the Nature abrogating this imagination of plurality. While yet again, of the Jewish conception, let the unity of the Nature stand; and of the Hellenistic, only the distinction as to persons; the remedy against a profane view being thus applied, as required, on either side. For it is as if the number of the triad were a remedy in the case of those who are in error as to the One, and the assertion of the unity for those whose beliefs are dispersed among a number of divinities.

On the Incarnation

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.toc.html

The above whole work is dedicated to the issue you are struggling with.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.xxiv.ii.html

11. Godhead of the Spirit also involved in the Nicene Creed. For this Synod of Nic ¦a is in truth a proscription of every heresy. It also upsets those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and call Him a Creature. For the Fathers, after speaking of the faith in the Son, straightway added, ‘And we believe in the Holy Ghost,’ in order that by confessing perfectly and fully the faith in the Holy Trinity they might make known the exact form of the Faith of Christ, and the teaching of the Catholic Church. For it is made clear both among you and among all, and no Christian can have a doubtful mind on the point, that our faith is not in the Creature, but in one God, Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible: and in one Lord Jesus Christ His Only-begotten Son, and in one Holy Ghost; one God, known in the holy and perfect Trinity, baptized into which, and in it united to the Deity, we believe that we have also inherited the kingdom of the heavens, in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom to the Father be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.x.ii.html

Statement of Faith. 1. We believe in one Unbegotten428 God, Father Almighty, maker of all things both visible and invisible, that hath His being from Himself. And in one Only-begotten Word, Wisdom, Son, begotten of the Father without beginning and eternally; word not pronounced429 nor mental, nor an effluence430 of the Perfect, nor a dividing of the impassible Essence, nor an issue431; but absolutely perfect Son, living and powerful (Heb. iv. 12), the true Image of the Father, equal in honour and glory. For this, he says, ‘is the will of the Father, that as they honour the Father, so they may honour the Son also’ (Joh. v. 23): very God of very God, as John says in his general Epistles, ‘And we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ: this is the true God and everlasting life’ (1 Joh. v. 20): Almighty of Almighty. For all things which the Father rules and sways, the Son rules and sways likewise: wholly from the Whole, being like432 the Father as the Lord says, ‘he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’ (Joh. xiv. 9). But He was begotten ineffably and incomprehensibly, for ‘who shall declare his generation?’ (Isa. liii. 8), in other words, no one can. Who, when at the consummation of the ages (Heb. ix. 26), He had descended from the bosom of the Father, took from the undefiled Virgin Mary our humanity (????????), Christ Jesus, whom He delivered of His own will to suffer for us, as the Lord saith: ‘No man taketh My life from Me. I have power to lay it down, and have power to take it again’ (Joh. x. 18). In which humanity He was crucified and died for us, and rose from the dead, and was taken up into the heavens, having been created as the beginning of ways for us (Prov. viii. 22), when on earth He shewed us light from out of darkness, salvation from error, life from the dead, an entrance to paradise, from which Adam was cast out, and into which he again entered by means of the thief, as the Lord said, ‘This day shalt thou be with Me in paradise’ (Luke xxiii. 43), into which Paul also once entered. [He shewed us] also a way up to the heavens, whither the humanity of the Lord433, in which He will judge the quick and the dead, entered as precursor for us. We believe, likewise, also in the Holy Spirit that searcheth all things, even the deep things of God (1 Cor. ii. 10), and we anathematise doctrines contrary to this. 2. For neither do we hold a Son-Father, as do the Sabellians, calling Him of one but not of the same434 essence, and thus destroying the existence of the Son. Neither do we ascribe the passible body which He bore for the salvation of the whole world to the Father. Neither can we imagine three Subsistences separated from each other, as results from their bodily nature in the case of men, lest we hold a plurality of gods like the heathen. But just as a river, produced from a well, is not separate, and yet there are in fact two visible objects and two names. For neither is the Father the Son, nor the Son the Father. For the Father is Father of the Son, and the Son, Son of the Father. For like as the well is not a river, nor the river a well, but both are one and the same water which is conveyed in a channel from the well to the river, so the Father’s deity passes into the Son without flow and without division. For the Lord says, ‘I came out from the Father and am come’ (Joh. xvi. 28). But He is ever 85with the Father, for He is in the bosom of the Father, nor was ever the bosom of the Father void of the deity of the Son. For He says, ‘I was by Him as one setting in order’ (Prov. viii. 30). But we do not regard God the Creator of all, the Son of God, as a creature, or thing made, or as made out of nothing, for He is truly existent from Him who exists, alone existing from Him who alone exists, in as much as the like glory and power was eternally and conjointly begotten of the Father. For ‘He that hath seen’ the Son ‘hath seen the Father (Joh. xiv. 9). All things to wit were made through the Son; but He Himself is not a creature, as Paul says of the Lord: ‘In Him were all things created, and He is before all’ (Col. i. 16). Now He says not, ‘was created’ before all things, but ‘is’ before all things. To be created, namely, is applicable to all things, but ‘is before all’ applies to the Son only. 3. He is then by nature an Offspring, perfect from the Perfect, begotten before all the hills (Prov. viii. 25), that is before every rational and intelligent essence, as Paul also in another place calls Him ‘first-born of all creation’ (Col. i. 15). But by calling Him First-born, He shews that He is not a Creature, but Offspring of the Father. For it would be inconsistent with His deity for Him to be called a creature. For all things were created by the Father through the Son, but the Son alone was eternally begotten from the Father, whence God the Word is ‘first-born of all creation,’ unchangeable from unchangeable. However, the body which He wore for our sakes is a creature: concerning which Jeremiah says, according to the edition of the seventy translators435 (Jer. xxxi. 22): ‘The Lord created for us for a planting a new salvation, in which salvation men shall go about:’ but according to Aquila the same text runs: ‘The Lord created a new thing in woman.’ Now the salvation created for us for a planting, which is new, not old, and for us, not before us, is Jesus, Who in respect of the Saviour436 was made man, and whose name is translated in one place Salvation, in another Saviour. But salvation proceeds from the Saviour, just as illumination does from the light. The salvation, then, which was from the Saviour, being created new, did, as Jeremiah says, ‘create for us a new salvation,’ and as Aquila renders: ‘The Lord created a new thing in woman,’ that is in Mary. For nothing new was created in woman, save the Lord’s body, born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse, as also it says in the Proverbs in the person of Jesus: ‘The Lord created me, a beginning of His ways for His works’ (Prov. viii. 22). Now He does not say, ‘created me before His works,’ lest any should take the text of the deity of the Word. 4. Each text then which refers to the creature is written with reference to Jesus in a bodily sense. For the Lord’s Humanity437 was created as ‘a beginning of ways,’ and He manifested it to us for our salvation. For by it we have our access to the Father. For He is the way (Joh. xiv. 6) which leads us back to the Father. And a way is a corporeal visible thing, such as is the Lord’s humanity. Well, then, the Word of God created all things, not being a creature, but an offspring. For He created none of the created things equal or like unto Himself. But it is the part of a Father to beget, while it is a workman’s part to create. Accordingly, that body is a thing made and created, which the Lord bore for us, which was begotten for us438, as Paul says, ‘wisdom from God, and sanctification and righteousness, and redemption;’ while yet the Word was before us and before all Creation, and is, the Wisdom of the Father. But the Holy Spirit, being that which proceeds from the Father, is ever in the hands439 of the Father Who sends and of the Son Who conveys Him, by Whose means He filled all things. The Father, possessing His existence from Himself, begat the Son, as we said, and did not create Him, as a river from a well and as a branch from a root, and as brightness from a light, things which nature knows to be indivisible; through whom to the Father be glory and power and greatness before all ages, and unto all the ages of the ages. Amen.

428 See de Syn.  § §3, 46, 47, and the Excursus in Lightfoot’s Ignatius, vol. ii. pp. 90 and foll (first ed.). 429 Cf. note by Newman on de Synodis,  §26 (5). 430 Cf. Newman’s note (8) on de Decr.  §11. 431 Or ‘development’ (Gr. ???????) a word with Gnostic and Sabellian antecedents, cf. Newman’s note 8 on de Synodis,  §16. 432 This word, which became the watchword of the Acacian party, the successors of the Eusebians, marks the relatively early date of this treatise. At a later period Athanasius would not use it without qualification (see Orat. ii.  §22, note 4), and later still, rejected the Word entirely as misleading (de Synodis,  §53. note 9). Yet see ad Afros. 7, and Orat. ii. 34. 433 ? ???????? ???????? (see above, introductory remarks). The expression is quoted as used by Ath., apparently from this passage, by Rufinus (Hieron. Opp. ix. p. 131, ed. 1643), Theodoret, Dial. 3, and others. The expression ‘Dominicus Homo’ used by St. Augustine is rendered ‘Divine Man’ in Nicene and P. N. Fathers, Series i. vol. vi. p. 40 b. 434 ?????????? ??? ??? ????????? (see Prolegg. ch. ii.  §3 (2) b sub fin.). The distinction cannot (to those accustomed to use the ‘Nicene’ Creed in English) be rendered so as to imply a real difference. The real distinction lies, not in the prefixes ????- and ???-, but in the sense to be attached to the ambiguous term ?????. 435 Heb. For the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall encompass a man.’ Cf.Orat. ii. 46, note 5. 436 The same phrase also in Serm. M. de Fid. 18. 437 ???????? ????????, see above. 438 ???????? (1 Cor. i. 30, ???????). The two words are constantly confused in mss., and I suspect that ???????, which (pace Swainson p. 78, note) the context really requires, was what Ath. wrote. 439 See also de Sent. Dionys. 17.

http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/npnf207/htm/TOC.htm

On the unity of God.

http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/npnf207/htm/ii.ix.htm#ii.ix

St Gregory Nazianzen.

2nd Oration on Easter. XXVII. He was sent, but sent according to His Manhood (for He was of two Natures), since He was hungry and thirsty and weary, and was distressed and wept, according to the Laws of human nature. But even if He were sent also as God, what of that? Consider the Mission to be the good pleasure of the Father, to which He refers all that concerns Himself, both that He may honour the Eternal Principle, and that He may avoid the appearance of being a rival God. For He is said on the one hand to have been betrayed, and on the other it is written that He gave Himself up; and so too that He was raised and taken up by the Father, and also that of His own power He rose and ascended. The former belongs to the Good Pleasure, the latter to His own Authority; but you dwell upon all that diminishes Him, while you ignore all that exalts Him. For instance, you score that He suffered, but you do not add “of His own Will.” Ah, what things has the Word even now to suffer! By some He is honoured as God but confused with the Father; by others He is dishonoured as Flesh, and is severed from God. With whom shall He be most angry-or rather which shall He forgive-those who falsely contract Him, or those who divide Him? For the former ought to have made a distinction, and the latter to have made a Union, the one in number, the other in Godhead. Do you stumble at His Flesh? So did the Jews. Do you call Him a Samaritan, and the rest which I will not utter? This did not even the demons, O man more unbelieving than demons, and more stupid than Jews. The Jews recognized the title Son as expressing equal rank; and the demons knew that He who drove them out was God, for they were persuaded by their own experience. But you will not either admit the equality or confess the Godhead. It would have been better for you to have been circumcised and a demoniac-to reduce the matter to an absurdity-than in uncircumcision and robust health to be thus ill and ungodly disposed. But for our war with such men, let it be brought to an end by their returning, however late, to a sound mind, if they will; or else if they will not, let it be postponed to another occasion, if they continue as they are. Anyhow, we will have no fear when contending for the Trinity with the help of the Trinity.

Prolegomena, The Life of Gregory Nazianzen. P.193 “Would to God that none of us may perish, but that we may all abide in one spirit, with one soul labouring together for the faith of the Gospel, of one mind, minding the same thing, armed with the shield of faith, girt about the loins with truth, knowing only the one war against the Evil One, and those who fight under his orders, not fearing them that kill the body but cannot lay hold of the soul; but fearing Him Who is the Lord both of soul and body; guarding the good deposit which we have received from our fathers, adoring Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, knowing the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Holy Ghost-into which Names we were baptized, in Which we have believed, under Whose banner we have been enlisted ; dividing Them before we combine Them, and combining before we divide; not receiving the Three as one Person (for They are not impersonal, or names of one Person, as though our wealth lay in Names alone and not in facts), but the Three as one Thing. For They are One, not in Person, but in Godhead, Unity adored in Trinity, and Trinity summed up in Unity; all adorable, all royal, of one throne and one glory; above the world, above time, uncreated, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscript; in Its relation to Itself known only to Itself; but to us equally venerable and adorable; Alone dwelling in the Holiest, and leaving all creatures outside and shut off, partly by the First Veil, and partly also by the Second;-by the first, the heavenly and angelic host, parted from Godhead; and by the second, we men, severed from the Angels. This let us do; let this be our mind, Brethren; and those that are otherwise minded let us look upon as diseased in regard to the truth, and as far as may be, let us take and cure them; but if they be incurable let us withdraw from them, lest we share their disease before we impart to them our own health. And the God of Peace that passeth all understanding shall be with you in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.”

Gregory Nazianzen,

On the death of his Father.

pp. 259/260.

He acknowledged One God worshipped in Trinity, and Three, Who are united in One Godhead; neither Sabellianising as to the One, nor Arianising as to the Three; either by contracting and so atheistically annihilating the Godhead, or by tearing It asunder by distinctions of unequal greatness or nature. For, seeing that Its every quality is incomprehensible and beyond the power of our intellect, how can we either perceive or express by definition on such a subject, that which is beyond our ken? How can the immeasurable be measured, and the Godhead be reduced to the condition of finite things, and measured by degrees of greater or less? St Augustine

On the Trinity. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103.toc.html