02 — Person, Not Power

The question on which everything else in this collection depends: is the Holy Spirit someone, or is he God’s power under another name? This section gives the two Orthodox answers that matter — the argument from what Scripture predicates of the Spirit, and St. Basil’s far stronger argument from what the Church does in baptizing and giving glory — and it reports the impersonal reading accurately, because it is not a foolish position and was not held by foolish men.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

File	Description
the-spirit-as-hypostasis.md	What is at stake for a collection about the Spirit’s work; the Cappadocian vocabulary and the Damascene’s “substantive power in his own proper hypostasis”; St. Gregory the Theologian’s dilemma in Oration 31.6 — an activity is effected and ceases, but the Spirit chooses and is grieved; a structured note conceding that the familiar grammatical argument from ἐκεῖνος in John 16 proves less than it claims; the impersonal reading stated at its strongest, including the three things Scripture never does; and the Spirit’s characteristic self-effacement, with two cautions about how far that theme may be pressed
the-argument-from-worship-and-baptism.md	The collection’s patristic centrepiece, given at length: the quarrel over prepositions; the baptismal chain from Matthew 28:19 through On the Holy Spirit 10.24–27 and 12.28, where faith and baptism are “completed by the same names”; the three-link demand of 27.68 — not to baptize as we have received, not to believe as we were baptized, or not to give glory as we have believed; the appeal to unwritten tradition in 27.66, which names the epiclesis; the actual origin of lex orandi, lex credendi in Prosper of Aquitaine, sixty years later and in a different controversy; and three real limits of the argument, including that it presupposes an ecclesiology rather than replacing one

File

Description

the-spirit-as-hypostasis.md

What is at stake for a collection about the Spirit’s work; the Cappadocian vocabulary and the Damascene’s “substantive power in his own proper hypostasis”; St. Gregory the Theologian’s dilemma in Oration 31.6 — an activity is effected and ceases, but the Spirit chooses and is grieved; a structured note conceding that the familiar grammatical argument from ἐκεῖνος in John 16 proves less than it claims; the impersonal reading stated at its strongest, including the three things Scripture never does; and the Spirit’s characteristic self-effacement, with two cautions about how far that theme may be pressed

the-argument-from-worship-and-baptism.md

The collection’s patristic centrepiece, given at length: the quarrel over prepositions; the baptismal chain from Matthew 28:19 through On the Holy Spirit 10.24–27 and 12.28, where faith and baptism are “completed by the same names”; the three-link demand of 27.68 — not to baptize as we have received, not to believe as we were baptized, or not to give glory as we have believed; the appeal to unwritten tradition in 27.66, which names the epiclesis; the actual origin of lex orandi, lex credendi in Prosper of Aquitaine, sixty years later and in a different controversy; and three real limits of the argument, including that it presupposes an ecclesiology rather than replacing one

The Shape of the Argument

St. Basil’s argument is the strongest thing in the patristic dossier because it requires nothing the disputants did not already grant. Both sides agreed on how the Church baptizes and how she gives glory. Basil’s move is to show that these practices are not incidental to the faith but are the faith, so that his opponents must forbid a form of baptism, or of belief, or of praise.

That he never writes God of the Spirit, and never writes homoousios, is not concealed here. The two explanations of that reserve are set out with the scholarship in the Trinity collection, and this section links there rather than re-arguing it.

02 — Person, Not Power

Contents

The Shape of the Argument

See Also