HOLY SPIRIT

HOLY SPIRIT. The third person of the Trinity (q.v.) given by the risen Christ to his disciples (Jn 20, Acts 2), and as the sign of the messianic age and new creation (Rom 8). It is the gift given to every believer at Baptism (q.v.) and Chrismation, the one who effects the consecration of the bread and wine at the eucharistic epiclesis, the goal and means of all Orthodox asceticism (q.v.). The Spirit is counselor, comforter, the mark of the presence of Christ, the heart and power of prayer (q.v.), the reality of the eschaton.

All the above is common to the patristic background of Christian East and West. Orthodoxy parts company with the Latin West in seeing the procession or eternal origin of the Spirit as coming from the Father (Jn 15:26) and sent, in the economy (q.v.) of Christ, through the Son. The Latin addition to the article on the Spirit in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (q.v.) of the phrase, “and from the Son” (filioque), was viewed in the East as inadmissible.

This reaction was argued on two grounds, canonical and properly theological. The filioque (q.v.) entered the Creed by a unilateral action of the West without Eastern consent or participation. It first appears in the Creed as cited by the Council of Toledo in 589, then was adopted by the Carolingians as part of their politico-theological program, and was finally, under German pressure, adopted by the papacy around 1014. Second, the Greek theologians felt that the addition disturbed the balance of the Trinity by confusing the persons of the Father and the Son, and by refusing to distinguish between the temporal economy of the Son and Spirit and the eternal relations of the Three within the Godhead. Patriarch Photius (q.v.) of Constantinople summed up these arguments in his Mystagogy, ca. 880, and subsequent Byzantine writers added little. The question of the Spirit constitutes, together with the papacy itself, the most serious point of division between present-day Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (q.v.).