Are the three Hypostases or Persons of the Most Holy Trinity all of equal majesty? Why then does Jesus say, “the Father is greater than I?”
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share equal majesty as the eternal, uncreated Lord and Savior: the Father is true God, the Son equally true God, and the Holy Spirit true God. This ontological equality the Church expressed in the Creed with the word homoousios (“of one essence”), condemning Arianism and affirming that the Son is co-eternal and co-uncreated with the Father. This equality of nature does not negate the distinct order and roles within the divine economy: “the head of every man is Christ… and the head of Christ is God” (1Co 11:3); “when all things have been subjected to him, then the Son will also subject himself to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all” (1Co 15:27–28).
When the Son says, “the Father is greater than I” (Joh 14:28), he refers to the fact that the Father is his cause and origin, as the Holy Fathers explain:
The Son does not say, “My Father is better than I,” lest we should conceive him to be foreign to his nature, but “greater”, not indeed in greatness nor in time, but because of his generation from the Father himself. (St Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, 1.58)
Since the Son’s origin (archē) is from the Father, in this respect the Father is greater, as cause and origin… Indeed, what else does the word “Father” signify, unless being the cause and origin of him who is begotten of Him? (St Basil the Great, Against Eunomius, 1.25)
Superior greatness belongs to the cause, equality to the nature… To say that the Father is greater than the Son in his humanity is certainly true, but it is no great thing; for what wonder is it that God is greater than man? (St Gregory the Theologian, Orations 30.7)
If anyone should say that the Father is greater insofar as He is the cause of the Son, we will not dispute this. But this does not make the Son to be of a different essence. (St John Chrysostom, Homilies on John (on Joh 14:28))
This teaching is sometimes misunderstood, chiefly by Christians shaped by later Western presentations of the Trinity, as “subordinationism.” However, this term cannot rightly be applied to the Orthodox doctrine, for the causal order implies no inequality of essence. It can even be said that God the Father is never without the Son, and is called Father because of the Son, as Lactantius rightly taught:
When we speak of God the Father and of the Son as God, we do not speak of them as diverse, nor do we separate them: for the Father cannot be without the Son, nor can the Son be separated from the Father, since without the Son He cannot be named ‘Father,’ nor without the Father can the Son be begotten. (Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 4.29)
