03 — The Spirit and the Son

How the two are related in the world’s salvation, and what is pneumatologically at stake in getting it wrong. This section takes St. Irenaeus’ image of the two hands of the Father as its organizing principle, follows it through the Gospel and into the Church’s prayer, and then asks the narrower question the Filioque controversy leaves behind: whether a Spirit defined as the bond of love between Father and Son has any work of his own to do.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
the-two-hands-and-the-order-of-the-economy.md Irenaeus’ Word and Wisdom, and the three rules the image yields; St. Gregory the Theologian’s five clauses on the Spirit in the Lord’s life — forerunner, witness, guide, companion, successor; St. Basil’s two directions, from the Father through the Son in the Spirit and back again, and why the anaphora has that grammar; Vladimir Lossky’s “two economies” with a structured note distinguishing the patristic material from his systematization; and why the Spirit’s coming is not a consolation for the Ascension
the-spirit-of-christ-and-what-the-filioque-costs.md St. Augustine reported from De Trinitate VI–XV in his own words and at his strongest, including the tentativeness of the love-analogy, his insistence that Scripture does not identify the Spirit as Love, his principaliter, and the confession of failure that ends Book XV; then the pneumatological cost, in three steps, stated as a claim about what the conciliar definitions entail; four disclaimers, including the refusal of the de Régnon paradigm and of the causal history of Western divergence; and the Orthodox side’s own mirror-image risk, a Spirit loosed from Christ

The Discipline of This Section

The Filioque itself is settled elsewhere and is not re-argued. The chronology, the Latin case in its own words with the 1995 Roman concessions quoted verbatim, the canonical objection, and the theological objection all belong to the Trinity collection, which this collection agrees with in every particular.

Augustine is reported accurately. He does not teach two causes, he qualifies the procession with principaliter, he offers his analogies as traces and dismantles each, and his Spirit is a person who gives himself. An argument that needs him to be a rationalist is not made here.

And the argument is pneumatological, not civilizational. It rests on what follows for the Spirit’s own economy if his hypostasis is defined by the relation of the other two, not on a grand narrative about East and West.

See Also