The Two Hands and the Order of the Economy

St. Irenaeus called the Son and the Spirit the two hands of the Father, by which he made and remakes all things. This file follows that image through the economy — the Spirit preparing, the Son accomplishing, the Spirit applying — and takes up the reciprocity that makes the pattern more than a sequence: the Spirit descends on the Son at the Jordan, and the Son sends the Spirit from the Father at Pentecost.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Image

Writing against Gnostics who filled the space between God and the world with intermediaries, St. Irenaeus insisted that God needed none:

“For with him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, he made all things.”
(Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.1; trans. ANF I.)

He puts it more famously in the image of the hands: “man, and not a part of man, was made in the likeness of God. Now the soul and the spirit are certainly a part of the man, but certainly not the man; for the perfect man consists in the commingling and union of the soul receiving the Spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God”; and it is by “the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit,” that man is made (Against Heresies V.6.1; cf. IV.praef.4; V.1.3; V.28.4; trans. ANF I).

Three things follow from the image, and all three govern this collection.

Neither hand is an instrument of the other. Both belong immediately to the Father. The Spirit is not the Son’s agent, dispatched to carry out a work already complete, any more than the Son is the Spirit’s. Each is sent by the Father, and each does what only he does.

Both hands are at work in every divine act. The Fathers hold, as a rule with conciliar force, that the external works of the Trinity are undivided: creation, incarnation, sanctification, and glorification are the work of the whole Trinity, with each person acting according to his own hypostatic mode. This is the reason no economy of the Spirit can be set against an economy of the Son (see Perichoresis and the Common Energy).

And the work is one work, from creation to deification. Irenaeus’ hands are the same hands throughout: they mould Adam from the earth and they raise the flesh at the last day. The Spirit’s work of sanctifying is continuous with his work of giving life at the beginning (see The Old Testament Witness).

The image, and Irenaeus’ use of it against the Gnostic pleroma, is treated in the collection devoted to him and in the Trinity collection’s pre-Nicene section (see The Apologists and the Two Hands; Anakephalaiosis).

The Order of the Gospel

St. Gregory the Theologian describes the Spirit’s place in the Lord’s life in five clauses, and no summary improves on them:

“Christ is born; the Spirit is his forerunner. He is baptized; the Spirit bears witness. He is tempted; the Spirit leads him up. He works miracles; the Spirit accompanies them. He ascends; the Spirit takes his place.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.29; trans. NPNF II/7.)

Each clause has its text. The Spirit overshadows the Virgin so that the Holy Thing born is called the Son of God (Luke 1:35). At the Jordan the Spirit descends in the form of a dove and remains (John 1:32) — the one detail the Baptist was told to watch for. The Spirit drives him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12). Christ casts out demons “by the Spirit of God” (Matthew 12:28), and reads Isaiah’s “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me” as fulfilled that day (Luke 4:18–21). He offers himself “through the eternal Spirit” (Hebrews 9:14). He is “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). And after the Ascension, the Spirit comes to occupy the place the visible Christ has vacated (Acts 2).

The pattern this yields is not a relay in which one hand finishes and the other begins. It is closer to a chiasm. The Spirit prepares and anoints the Son; the Son accomplishes the work in the flesh; the Son, ascended, sends the Spirit; the Spirit makes the accomplished work present to every person and every place. The Church says the same thing when she notes that “Christ” means anointed, and that “Christian” means one who shares the anointing — the Son’s anointing and the Christian’s are by the same Spirit (see Chrismation and the Seal).

Ascent and Descent

St. Basil formulates the resulting order of divine action as a movement in two directions:

“The way of the knowledge of God lies from one Spirit through the one Son to the one Father, and conversely the natural goodness and inherent holiness and royal dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit.”
(Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.47; trans. NPNF II/8.)

Downward, from the Father through the Son in the Spirit: this is the order of gift. Upward, in the Spirit through the Son to the Father: this is the order of prayer, and it is why the Church’s liturgical prayer is addressed to the Father, offered through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The anaphora has exactly this grammar (see The Epiclesis).

The two directions are not two economies. They are one movement, described from the receiving end and from the giving end.

The Two Economies, and the Care That Claim Needs

Vladimir Lossky pressed the distinction between the Son’s work and the Spirit’s harder than anyone in the modern period, and his formulation is the one most readers meet first. On his account the Son unites human nature to God by assuming it — the work of recapitulation, done once, for all — while the Spirit communicates grace to human persons, each singly, so that what Christ did for the whole becomes each person’s own. Christ makes us one nature; the Spirit makes each of us a person in whom that nature is deified, unrepeatably (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 7–8; In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974, “Redemption and Deification”).

Three cautions belong with this, and Lossky himself supplies the first two.

He insists that the two economies are inseparable and that neither may be treated as complete without the other; the distinction is between modes of one work, not between two works. And he grounds it in the reciprocity already noted: the Spirit rests on the Son and the Son sends the Spirit, so that each is, in the economy, “the other’s condition.”

The third caution is this collection’s. Lossky’s account of the two economies is joined, in his own writing, to a large historical thesis about the Filioque as the root of Western theological divergence, and to the reading of the divided tongues of Acts 2 as a doctrine of the person. The historical thesis is contested among Orthodox scholars and is reported without adjudication elsewhere in this repository (see The Filioque Thesis; The De Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis; The Modern Questions). The distinction between the personal and the natural aspects of salvation stands on its own patristic feet — it is a way of saying what St. Cyril and St. Maximus say — and this collection uses it in that limited sense, attributing the wider construction to its author.

[Disputed: the standing of the "two economies" formulation. (a) Lossky presents the distinct economies of Son and Spirit as the structure of Orthodox soteriology and as what the *Filioque* obscures (*Mystical Theology*, chs. 7–8). (b) Critics hold that the sharpness of the distinction is Lossky's own systematization rather than a patristic commonplace, and that its polemical function within his *Filioque* thesis has given it a prominence the Fathers do not — see Rowan Williams, "The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique" (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975) — the fullest critical study, which this collection has not consulted directly — and the survey of the critique in Aristotle Papanikolaou, *Being with God*, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. What is not in dispute is the underlying patristic material: that the Son assumes and heals the nature, and that the Spirit sanctifies persons. This collection uses the material and attributes the systematization.]

The Spirit Is Not a Second-Best

One consequence of the order deserves stating on its own, because it is the pastoral point of the whole section.

“It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you” (John 16:7). The Church has never read this as a consolation offered to disappointed disciples. The Ascension is not a loss made bearable by a substitute; the coming of the Spirit is a greater intimacy than the disciples had when they walked beside the Lord in Galilee, because the Spirit is not beside but within. St. John Chrysostom puts the whole matter in a sentence when he says that the disciples were more courageous after the Ascension than before it, and that the Spirit is the reason (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4; trans. NPNF I/11).

The two hands are not one hand and its shadow. Whatever else the doctrine of the Spirit has to protect, it has to protect that.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies IV.praef.4; IV.20.1; V.1.3; V.6.1; V.28.4. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 31 (Fifth Theological Oration), 29. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.47. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 11.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957; In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine–Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
Scripture: Luke 1:35; 4:18–21; Mark 1:12; Matthew 12:28; John 1:32; 16:7; Acts 2; Romans 1:4; Hebrews 9:14.