The Argument from Worship and Baptism

St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit answers the question of the Spirit’s rank not from metaphysics but from what the Church does: she baptizes into three names and gives glory to three, and she cannot be doing either to a creature. This file gives that argument at length — the baptismal chain, the quarrel over prepositions, the doxology, and the appeal to unwritten tradition — and then states its limits, which are real, and its afterlife as the principle later summarized as lex orandi, lex credendi.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Shape of the Argument

Everything in this collection about the Spirit’s work presupposes that he is God, and the strongest single piece of the patristic dossier for that conclusion is not a proof-text or a syllogism. It is an argument from the practice of the Church.

Its form is this. Christ commanded a baptism into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Church has always so baptized. The Church has always given glory to the Spirit together with the Father and the Son. If the Spirit were a creature, then Christian initiation would place a creature in the position of God, and Christian worship would render to a creature the honour due to God — which is idolatry. The Church is not committing idolatry. Therefore the Spirit is not a creature.

The argument’s power is that it does not require the disputed vocabulary at all. It works entirely from what everyone on both sides of the fourth-century argument agreed was happening in every church every week. And its cost is that it puts the whole weight on the Church’s practice being a reliable datum — which is a claim about the Church, and one this collection defends rather than assumes.

The Occasion

St. Basil wrote On the Holy Spirit in 375, at the request of St. Amphilochius of Iconium, and its occasion was a quarrel about prepositions. Basil had used at a service the doxology “Glory to the Father with (μετά) the Son together with (σύν) the Holy Spirit,” alongside the older and more familiar “Glory to the Father through (διά) the Son in (ἐν) the Holy Spirit.” Opponents took the first form as an innovation and argued from the second that the prepositions encode a hierarchy of ranks: the Father is the one from whom, the Son the one through whom, the Spirit the one in whom — three grades, and only the first is God without qualification (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 2–8; trans. NPNF II/8, and David Anderson, Popular Patristics 42, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980).

Basil first dismantles the technical claim on its own ground, showing that Scripture uses “through whom” of the Father as freely as of the Son and of the Spirit — “God is faithful, by whom (δι’ οὗ) ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son” (1 Corinthians 1:9), “Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ by (διά) the will of God,” “to one is given by (διά) the Spirit the word of wisdom” (On the Holy Spirit 5.10, citing 1 Corinthians 1:9; 12:8; 2 Timothy 1:14). If the prepositions were a ranking system, the ranking would collapse.

Then he changes the ground of the argument, and this is where the treatise becomes permanently important.

The Baptismal Argument

The opponents’ position, as Basil states it, is that “it is not permissible for the Holy Spirit to be ranked with the Father and Son, on account of the difference of his nature and the inferiority of his dignity” (On the Holy Spirit 10.24). His reply begins from a command.

“For if our Lord, when enjoining the baptism of salvation, charged his disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, not disdaining fellowship with him, and these men allege that we must not rank him with the Father and the Son, is it not clear that they openly withstand the commandment of God?”
(Basil, On the Holy Spirit 10.24; trans. NPNF II/8, citing Matthew 28:19.)

The move is exact. Basil is not arguing that the baptismal formula contains a hidden doctrinal statement; he is arguing that the conjunction itself is the doctrinal statement. The three names stand in one command, in one act, and no one may separate what the Lord joined.

He then draws the consequence for the one being baptized. Salvation is bound to what was confessed at the font:

“Whence is it that we are Christians? Through our faith, would be the universal answer. And in what way are we saved? Plainly because we were regenerate through the grace given in our baptism… Whether a man have departed this life without baptism, or have received a baptism lacking in some of the requirements of the tradition, his loss is equal.”
(On the Holy Spirit 10.26.)

And the sequence of confession and baptism is stated as a single indivisible act:

“Faith and baptism are two kindred and inseparable ways of salvation: faith is perfected through baptism, baptism is established through faith, and both are completed by the same names. For as we believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, so are we also baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; first comes the confession, introducing us to salvation, and baptism follows, setting the seal upon our assent.”
(On the Holy Spirit 12.28.)

This is the hinge of the whole treatise. Faith and baptism are completed by the same names — so that a defect in the confession of any one of the three names is a defect in the baptism, and a man who denies the Spirit has broken the covenant he made at the font. Basil says so in the sharpest terms available to him: to reject the Spirit whom one confessed at baptism is to be a transgressor, to have “violated the covenant of their salvation,” and to have set at naught one’s own handwriting (On the Holy Spirit 10.26–27).

Note what he does not say. He does not say that the Spirit is homoousios with the Father, and he does not call the Spirit God. That reserve is real, was noticed at once, and has two explanations that are not mutually exclusive — pastoral economy under a hostile emperor, on St. Gregory the Theologian’s contemporary account (Oration 43.68–69; Epistle 58), and a settled methodological preference for arguing from worship rather than from the vocabulary of essence. The Trinity collection sets out both readings with the scholarship on each side, and this collection does not re-argue it (see Basil’s Reserve and Gregory’s Boldness).

The Argument from the Doxology

The second half of the argument turns from initiation to worship, and it is the part Basil was actually attacked for.

If the Spirit is confessed at baptism as one of three, then he must be glorified as one of three, and the doxology “with the Spirit” is not an innovation but a consequence. Basil states the chain in a single sentence, and this sentence is the most quoted thing in the treatise:

“They must now instruct us either not to baptize as we have received, or not to believe as we were baptized, or not to ascribe glory as we have believed.”
(On the Holy Spirit 27.68; trans. NPNF II/8.)

Three links: baptism → belief → glorification. Each follows from the one before, and the opponents must break the chain somewhere or accept its conclusion. He restates it a section earlier as a demand for consistency: if it is granted that “as we are baptized, so also under the obligation to believe, we make our confession in like terms as our baptism,” then “let our opponents grant us too the right to be as consistent in our ascription of glory as in our confession of faith” (On the Holy Spirit 27.67).

The rhetorical position is worth noticing. Basil is not the innovator asking for permission; he has forced his opponents into the position of having to forbid something — either a form of baptism, or a form of belief, or a form of praise — and each prohibition is more scandalous than the last.

He adds the practical version of the same argument, which St. Gregory the Theologian would put still more starkly: “For if he is not to be worshipped, how can he deify me by baptism? But if he is to be worshipped, surely he is an object of adoration, and if an object of adoration he must be God; the one is linked to the other, a truly golden and saving chain” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.28; trans. NPNF II/7).

The Appeal to Unwritten Tradition

The obvious counter-attack was that the doxology “with the Spirit” is nowhere in Scripture. Basil’s answer is chapter 27, and it is the locus classicus for the Orthodox doctrine of Tradition.

“Of the beliefs and practices whether generally accepted or publicly enjoined which are preserved in the Church, some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force.”
(On the Holy Spirit 27.66.)

He then lists the practices no one disputes and no one can find in Scripture: signing with the cross, turning east to pray, the words of the invocation at the showing forth of the eucharistic bread and the cup of blessing, the blessing of the baptismal water and of the oil of chrism, the triple immersion, the renunciation of Satan (On the Holy Spirit 27.66). The list is chosen with care. Every item is something the objectors themselves do. If unwritten practice has no authority, the objectors have no baptism and no Eucharist.

That the words of the epiclesis appear on this list is not incidental for this collection: the fourth century’s most authoritative witness to Tradition names the invocation of the Spirit over the gifts as apostolic and unwritten (see The Epiclesis). The wider doctrine of Tradition that grows out of the chapter is treated elsewhere (see Unwritten Tradition; Paradosis: The Living Memory).

The Rule Before It Had a Name

What Basil has done is to establish a rule: the Church’s law of prayer establishes her law of belief. The Latin tag ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi comes from Prosper of Aquitaine, in the eighth chapter of the Indiculus de gratia Dei (also transmitted as the Capitula Coelestini), written in the semi-Pelagian controversy some sixty years after Basil’s treatise and in a wholly different dispute — the appeal there is to the Church’s intercessory prayer for the conversion of unbelievers as evidence that grace precedes the will. The compression to lex orandi, lex credendi is later still.

Basil neither knew the phrase nor needed it. He had the thing itself, and he had it in a stronger form than the tag usually carries: not “the Church’s prayer illustrates her faith” but “the Church’s prayer is her faith, and to change the one is to change the other.”

The principle is one of the working premises of this repository, and it is treated in its own right elsewhere (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi; Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi).

The Limits of the Argument

Three limits should be stated, because an argument this good is more dangerous when it is overstated.

It can be run in the wrong direction. From the fact that the Church prays in a certain way, it does not follow that every feature of the way she prays is dogmatically load-bearing. Practices accumulate; some are local, some are late, and some are abuses. The rule requires a prior judgment about which practices are the Church’s received practice, and that judgment is not itself supplied by the rule.

Basil’s opponents contested exactly that prior judgment. They said the doxology with σύν was an innovation of his own. Basil’s reply is historical — he appeals to the usage of Firmilian, Gregory the Wonderworker, Meletius, Africanus, and to the lamplighting hymn Phos Hilaron, which he calls ancient and whose author he says he cannot name (On the Holy Spirit 29.72–74). This is an argument about the facts of liturgical history, and it can be right or wrong; it is not settled by the principle it is being used to defend.

And the argument presupposes the Church. It works only if the assembly that baptizes and glorifies is the Body of Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, and therefore incapable of instituting idolatry at the centre of her own initiation. Someone who does not grant that will not be moved. Basil grants it, and grants it because of what he thinks baptism is; the argument is circular only if one supposes the Church’s practice and the Church’s faith are two separable things, which is the very supposition it denies.

None of this weakens the argument in its own domain. What it shows is that the appeal to worship is not a shortcut around ecclesiology but an application of it — which is why this collection puts the Spirit’s work in the Church before his work in the mysteries, and both before the Christian’s own acquisition of him.

References

Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 2–8, 5.10, 10.24–27, 12.28, 27.66–68, 29.72–74. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; also trans. David Anderson, Popular Patristics 42. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 31 (Fifth Theological Oration), 28; Oration 43.68–69; Epistle 58. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion I.22–30. Trans. DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, Popular Patristics 43. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
Prosper of Aquitaine. Indiculus de gratia Dei (Capitula Coelestini), ch. 8. (Source of ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi.)
Hildebrand, Stephen M. The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Scripture: Matthew 28:19; 1 Corinthians 1:9; 12:8; 2 Timothy 1:14.