Blessed Feast of the Holy Trinity to you all! In celebration of this occasion, I’ll point you to one of my favorite posts of the past, Revelations of Divine Algebra.
I’ll note that despite the great suggestions in the comments by Annie, *Christopher, Marshall+ and others, I haven’t had the chance to alter the content, so take their thoughts into consideration as well.
I think you may have missed one variation in your
admirable Trinitarian algebra (or geography?) (2006).
I’m afraid I have forgotten the commentator’s name, but the proposal was that the Holy Spirit be understood as JESUS’S own “personal spirit” — i.e., that after Jesus’s body ascended, his “spirit” (soul? substance? divinity? spiritual dimension?) returned at Pentecost to in-spirit and in-vent the Church. And the commentator held that this was a common understanding in the early Church.
Wow…I haven’t heard that one. It’s modern, I take it?
Honestly, it sounds at the root like a form of modalism. Depending on what they do with God the Father it might be a semi-modalist variant expressed as 1(GtF) + 1(GtS) then 1(GtHS) = 2 so that there are essentially only two “active” memebrs of the Trinity at any given time.
This was not a common understanding according to all the Fathers I’ve read. It was to head off this kind of thing that we identify the Spirit as the same who spake by the prophets and was thus active chronologically before the Incarnation at Bethlehem.