Holy Spirit

SERGEY TROSTYANSKIY

The subject of the Holy Spirit is one of the deepest mysteries in the church. He is the Sanctifier who never becomes incarnate and whose personal being always stays mysteriously hidden, though universally extensive. From the beginning to the present day the Holy Spirit has never been a subject to comprehend, or an easy subject to speak about. Sergius Bulgakov suggested that this will not change until that time beyond time when the glorified church in Heaven, at the last day, will be able to look upon the true icon of the Holy Spirit, in the form of the glorious communion of elect saints, the completion of the sanctifying operations of the Divine Spirit in the cosmos; as then it will have a more graphic under­standing of his hypostatic reality. In the meantime, the church knows him through his fundamental energy of sanctifying believers, molding them into conformity with the redeeming Christ.

This mysterious character is equally pre­sent in the history of the expression of the church’s theological tradition. Orthodox pneumatology passed through a number of stages in its development. The basic insights of the New Testament authors presented the Spirit as a personal being. They concurred with the Old Testament view that the Spirit raised up judges, proph­ets, and seers, friends of God who led the people correctly in worship and belief, speaking as of God himself (Judg. 3.10, 6.34; Neh. 9.30; Is. 11.2). The Old Testament also associates the gift of the Spirit with cre­ativity (Gen. 1.2), with the finding and mak­ing of beauty (especially human craft and skill: Ex. 35.31). However, the proper termi­nology capable of expressing the Spirit as a personal subsistence (hypostasis) of the trinitarian God was yet to be developed. The profound teachings on the Spirit as presented by Jesus in the final discourses in the Gospel of John have always been the church’s goal and inspiration for all pneumatological thought. The early patris­tic authors, in their turn, attempted to com­prehend the Spirit in terms of his operations and relations to the Father and the Son. These attempts were not without certain historical and semantic confusions, witnessed among the early 2nd-century writers such as Theophilus of Antioch, and other early fathers concerned with under­standing God’s work of creation and revelation.

The Monarchian crisis of the 3rd century highlighted a new stage in the development of Christian pneumatology. In response to the Monarchians (most notably, Sabellius and Paul of Samosata) who argued for an idea of the unity of God in which the varied “names” of Father, Son, and Spirit were simply variant aspects of the selfsame single being (a monad with different non- hypostatized external aspects), the early Logos school of patristic theologians, espe­cially Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen, provided an explicit account of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as three distinct personal realizations of one divine sub­stance. At this time a distinct terminology was introduced. Origen expressed it clearly in his celebrated formula “one ousia [Sub­stance] and three hypostases [Persons].” Tertullian presented it as a relation of one Nature (natura) to three Persons (personae). For a while there was confusion between the western and eastern churches over the terminologies used in Latin and Greek (hypostasis among the Greeks being used for differentiation, while its semantic parallel, the Latin word substantia, con­noted the unity of divine being for west­erners). But by the 4th century clarity returned as they realized that the two approaches were saying the same thing by different semantic routes.

The Arian controversy of the 4th century marked a critical stage in the development of pneumatological language in the church. Arius and his later radical followers, Eunomius and Aetius, elevated as a chief theological axiom the philosophical assump­tions that cause is always greater than its effect, and that a name has an essential con­nection with what it designates. These pre­suppositions forced the Arians to insist that the Father was greater than the Son as the cause of the Son’s being, and that the Son was greater than the Spirit as the cause of the Spirit’s mission. The radical Arians (Heterousians) argued that such names as Unbegotten, the Only Begotten, and the Sanctifier were essential properties that designated different substances. Thus, the Spirit, for these Arians, had to be Heteroousion, of a different substance to God, and thus not God.

It was the great Nicene fathers, Athanasius of Alexandria and the Cappadocians (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Greg­ory of Nyssa), who took up the cause to refute such views of the Spirit’s role in the Divine Trinity, and in the course of their efforts to establish Nicene Orthodoxy, greatly elabo­rated the church’s theological vocabulary about the Holy Spirit. The Nicene fathers argued against the Heterousian Arians that the Father’s causality was the very bond of the Trinity, not its dissolution; his gift of his own being as the common ousia of the Divine Triad establishing a perfect equality of nature among the three hypostases, and thereby demonstrating the full divinity of the Son and Spirit alongside the Father. They demonstrated that the divine attri­butes as described in human terms could refer legitimately to the operations of God in the world, but could never clearly express the inner life of God which is always a sublimely ineffable and transcen­dent mystery. St. Athanasius argued in his Letters to Serapion that the Spirit’s sanctify­ing functions in the church were consum­mated in the manner in which he deified believers through baptism. This making of the elect into sons and daughters of God, he argued, could not have been effected by one who was not himself divine. St. Basil argued strongly in the treatise On the Holy Spirit that the church’s ancient doxology demonstrated the Spirit’s divine status, and that his primary role in the church and the world was the sanctification and deification of believers. He describes the soul’s acquisition of the Holy Spirit beauti­fully as comparable to a glass lit up by the sun so as to become all light itself. St. Gregory the Theologian argued in his Theological Orations (27–31, especially Oration 31) that the Holy Spirit must be confessed as Homoousion in strict logic, and although the wider church was content to accept his teaching in the course of his­tory, the fathers of the Council of Constan­tinople in 381 were content to follow

St. Basil, and add to the older Nicene Creed simply these extension terms to elab­orate the Orthodox core of belief in the Holy Spirit: “And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life who pro­ceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is together worshipped and glori­fied, who spoke through the prophets.” The operations of sanctification and inspi­ration are especially seen as charisms of the Spirit of God, who is also confessed as “Lord of Life,” especially that divine life (zoe more than bios) which he communi­cates to the faithful to conform them into the mystery of Christ.

Orthodox theology is far more than a semantic history, however, and it is espe­cially in the church’s doxological and ascet- ical traditions that we find extensive evidence of how the church has celebrated and experienced the Holy Spirit of God: as comforter, sanctifier, illuminator, and initiator. The roles of the Spirit in the pro­cess of the progressive cleansing and deifi­cation of the Christian are especially prevalent in the Orthodox baptismal liturgy and prayers. In the celebration of the Holy Eucharist (and equally in the ordination prayers and prayers of blessing), the most sacred moment of the consecration is attributed to the descent and operation of the Holy Spirit (Epiclesis). The lyrical prayer to the Holy Spirit in the words of the Byzantine mystic Niketas Stethatos (Kephalaia Gnostica 46) sums up well the church’s passionate desire for the Spirit:

The Spirit is light, life, and peace. If you are illumined by that Spirit your life will be established in peaceful serenity; a spring will gush out from within you, being the wisdom of the Logos, and the mystical knowledge of existent being. On that day you will come to have the mind of Christ, and know the mys­teries of the Kingdom of God, and you will enter the depths of the deity.

SEE ALSO: Baptism; Cappadocian Fathers; Council of Constantinople I (381); Epiclesis; Holy Trinity; Logos Theology

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Basil the Great (1980) On the Holy Spirit. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2001) St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.