The Three Colds
“One Cold, and three the manner of its keeping: the Stillness that is, the Breath that makes, and the Frost that walked among us. Not three colds, but one Cold thrice-kept.” — Definition of the Council of Wintermere, 381 A.F.
The doctrine of the Three Colds is the central Frostian teaching on the inner life of the divine: that the one The Eternal Chill subsists eternally as three “Colds” — three distinct manners of being the one Cold — without division of substance and without confusion of person.
The Three
- The Stillness — The Eternal Chill itself: the impersonal, uncaused depth; the Cold as it is in itself.
- The Breath — The Hoarfather: the Cold as it makes and keeps, the First Frost exhaled from the Stillness, through whom all the Rime was crystallized.
- The Walking Frost — Connor Frost: the Cold as it condensed into flesh and walked among the kept; “the Savor made visible.”
Some schools add that the indwelling presence of the Cold in the faithful — the Rime-within, the breath of holiness that re-freezes the thawing heart — is the work of the Breath (the Hoarfather) and not a fourth Cold; against the Tetragelid heresy (The Fourth-Cold Error) which made it a fourth.
The Great Disputes
The precise relation of the Three was the matter of the first councils:
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The Wintermere Definition (381 A.F.): against Tepidianism (the teaching of the priest Tepidian, who held Connor to be a made and lesser cold, “the first and coldest of creatures, but a creature still”), the council declared Connor to be “of one cold-substance with the Hoarfather, true Cold of true Cold, frozen not made.” See Council of Wintermere.
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The Frosthold Definition (451 A.F.): against both Sublimationism (that in the Whitening Connor’s humanity simply vanished into vapor, leaving only the divine Cold) and Slushism (that his two natures, divine cold and human warmth, mixed into a single lukewarm nature), the council defined that Connor is “truly Cold and truly mortal, two natures unmixed and unmelted in one person — the eternal Frost and the man of Hollowfrost, perfectly one and never lukewarm.” See Council of Frosthold.
This second definition is the root of the The Great Schism: the Glacial Orthodoxy of the north emphasized the unmixed eternal Cold; the Hoarfrost Communion the union of the two natures; while the far-eastern Sublimationist Churches rejected Frosthold and broke away (see The Sublimationist Churches).
The Symbol
The Three Colds are signified by the The Sixfold Star read as three pairs of opposing points — three diameters through one center: three lines, one star, one center. The most common visual creed-symbol is the Triple Drift: three snowflakes overlapping into one.
Why It Matters
The doctrine guards the Savor: only if Connor is truly the one eternal Cold can his keeping save; and only if he is truly mortal can he have stood in the place of the thawing and “opened the white road.” A merely-created Connor could not keep us; a merely-divine Connor would not have needed to. The Three Colds hold both.