The Liturgical Witness

Almost every Orthodox service begins with a prayer addressed to the Holy Spirit, and for fifty days each year that prayer is deliberately silenced. This file sets out where the Church’s pneumatology actually lives — “O Heavenly King,” the Trisagion, the kneeling prayers of Pentecost, the hymns of the feast, the epiclesis, the ordination prayer, the thanksgiving after communion — and reads the calendar’s own arrangement as an argument.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Prayer That Opens Everything

The ordinary beginning of Orthodox services, after the initial blessing, is this:

“O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.”
(Horologion, the usual beginning; the Trisagion prayers.)

The prayer repays attention because of what it is and what it asks.

It is addressed to the Holy Spirit directly. The Church prays to him, in the second person, several times a day. This is exactly what the New Testament does not do — Scripture records no apostolic prayer addressed to the Spirit — and the discrepancy is not hidden by anyone; the Pneumatomachoi pressed it, and the Church’s answer was St. Basil’s: the Spirit is confessed at baptism as one of three and therefore glorified as one of three, and what she does in her prayer is what she believes (see The Argument from Worship and Baptism).

It is the troparion of Pentecost. The prayer that opens the Church’s daily worship is the sticheron of the feast of the Spirit’s descent, lifted out of the Pentecostarion and set at the head of everything. Every service begins at Pentecost.

And what it asks for is cleansing and salvation. Not gifts, not powers, not experiences. The Church, given the opportunity to address the Holy Spirit directly at the start of every office, asks him to come, to dwell, to cleanse, and to save. This is her own ranking of what the Spirit is for, stated more often than any theological proposition about him (see The Gifts and the Fruits).

The Fifty Days of Silence

From Pascha until Pentecost “O Heavenly King” is omitted from the services. In its place, through Bright Week and the paschal season, the Church sings “Christ is risen from the dead.” It is restored at the Vespers of Pentecost — the kneeling Vespers served on the evening of the feast, at which the faithful kneel for the first time since Pascha.

The arrangement is a piece of theology done with the calendar. The Church does not invoke the Spirit’s coming during the season in which she is celebrating the events that precede his coming; she waits with the apostles, and receives the prayer back on the day the Spirit came. A worshipper who attends the services learns the sequence of the economy in his knees and his memory before he learns it from a book.

At those Vespers three long sets of prayers are read, traditionally ascribed to St. Basil, invoking the Holy Trinity and interceding for the living and — in the third set — for the departed, which is why Pentecost is also associated in popular usage with prayer for the dead. That the Church’s first act on receiving the Spirit is to kneel and pray for the departed is a datum about her eschatology as well as her pneumatology (see Praying for the Departed).

The Trisagion and the Doxologies

The Trisagion — “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us” — is sung at every Liturgy and follows immediately upon “O Heavenly King” in the daily prayers. Read Trinitarianly, as the Church reads it, the three holies are the three persons.

More pervasive still is the doxology. “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” concludes essentially every unit of Orthodox prayer, and the exclamations at the end of each litany name the Three. The form in which the Church gives glory is the form St. Basil defended in 375, and the argument he made about it is the reason the Church can be said to have settled the doctrine of the Spirit in her worship before she settled it in a creed (see The Argument from Worship and Baptism).

The Feast

The hymnography of Pentecost is the densest concentration of Orthodox pneumatology in any single set of texts.

The kontakion reads the day against Babel: “When the Most High came down and confounded the tongues, he divided the nations; but when he distributed the tongues of fire, he called all to unity, and with one voice we glorify the All-holy Spirit” (Kontakion of Pentecost, tone 8).

The troparion puts the whole apostolic mission in one sentence: “Blessed art thou, O Christ our God, who hast revealed the fishermen as most wise, having sent upon them the Holy Spirit; and through them thou didst draw the world into thy net. O Lover of mankind, glory to thee” (Troparion of Pentecost, tone 8).

The feast’s stichera repeatedly insist that the Spirit is God and one of the Trinity — the Church saying in her hymns what the Creed of 381 declined to say in its own words, which is a point the Trinity collection makes and this one repeats without arguing (see The Pneumatomachoi and the Creed).

In Russian usage the feast is Troitsa, Trinity; churches and homes are decorated with birch branches and cut grass, and the Rublev icon of the Hospitality of Abraham is the icon of the day. The following day is the Monday of the Holy Spirit, kept throughout the Byzantine rite. The feast of the Spirit is thus, in practice, two days and a season — the whole subsequent year being numbered as weeks after Pentecost (see Pentecost).

The Spirit in the Mysteries, Liturgically Stated

The Church’s sacramental texts are pneumatological at their decisive moments, and the pattern is uniform: the Father is petitioned, and the Spirit is asked for.

At the Liturgy: “Send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here set forth” (see The Epiclesis).

At baptism, over the water: the priest asks that the water be sanctified by the power and operation of the Holy Spirit, and breathes upon it in the sign of the cross.

At chrismation: “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

At ordination: “The divine grace, which always healeth that which is infirm and completeth that which is wanting, ordains…” — and the assembly answers, “Lord, have mercy,” and sings Axios.

At unction, at the blessing of waters at Theophany, at the consecration of a temple — the same structure each time.

And after communion the Church sings a hymn that states what she believes has just happened to her:

“We have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true Faith, worshipping the undivided Trinity, for he hath saved us.”
(Hymn after Communion, Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.)

Four clauses, in that order: light, Spirit, faith, Trinity. The Church’s summary of what the Eucharist is for is pneumatological before it is anything else.

The Icon

The icon of Pentecost shows the apostles seated in a semicircle in an upper room, tongues of fire above each, with an open place at the centre where Christ is not depicted, and — in the developed Byzantine form — an old crowned figure below, labelled Kosmos, holding a cloth with twelve scrolls: the world, in darkness, receiving the apostolic preaching.

Two features are theologically load-bearing. St. Peter and St. Paul are shown together at the head, though Paul was not present on the day, because the icon depicts the Church rather than the moment. And the assembly is seated in a horseshoe with no principal figure, so that the composition shows a body constituted by the Spirit rather than a scene organized around a leader. The iconographic detail and its history belong to the collections on icons and on the feasts (see The Icon of the Feast).

What the Liturgical Witness Establishes

That Orthodox pneumatology is not primarily a body of propositions. The Church addresses the Spirit daily, invokes him at every mystery, dates her year from his coming, silences and restores his invocation according to the paschal season, and thanks him after every communion. If someone wished to know what the Orthodox Church believes about the Holy Spirit and had access only to her service books, he would find it all — including the parts her theologians argue about.

This is not a devotional flourish at the end of a doctrinal collection. It is the same argument the collection began with, arriving where it was always going: the Church knows the Spirit because she prays to him, and what she says about him is an account of what she does.

References

Horologion: the Trisagion prayers and the usual beginning (“O Heavenly King”).
Pentecostarion: Troparion and Kontakion of Pentecost; the stichera of the feast; the kneeling prayers of Pentecost Vespers.
Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: the anaphora; the hymn after Communion. Eng. in Isabel F. Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. New York, 1906.
Euchologion / Trebnik: the great blessing of the waters; the chrismation formula; the ordination prayer; Holy Unction.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The Pentecost icon.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.