De Spiritu Sancto (On the Holy Spirit)

Ambrose’s three books On the Holy Spirit, written for the emperor Gratian around 381, are among the first sustained Latin treatments of the full divinity of the Third Person of the Trinity, composed against the Pneumatomachi who denied it. The work is also the clearest single case of Ambrose’s role as the conduit of Greek theology into Latin: it draws openly and extensively on Basil the Great, Athanasius, and Didymus the Blind — so openly that Jerome publicly accused Ambrose of plagiarism. This file sets out the treatise’s argument, its dependence on the Greek fathers, and the plagiarism controversy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Occasion and Date

De Fide had defended the divinity of the Son (see The Western Anti-Arian Struggle); the emperor Gratian, receiving it, asked Ambrose for a companion treatise on the Holy Spirit, and Ambrose answered with the three books De Spiritu Sancto, written around 381 and dedicated to the emperor (Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto, prologue [CSEL 79, ed. Faller]; trans. NPNF II/10; NPNF II/10 Prolegomena). The timing is significant: it was in the same year, 381, that the First Council of Constantinople in the East completed the Creed’s confession of the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the Giver of life,” against precisely the heresy Ambrose was writing against (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ecumenical Councils). Ambrose’s treatise is the Western voice in the same conciliar moment that gave the Church its pneumatology.

The Argument

The opponents were the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”) or Macedonians, who, even where they had come to confess the divinity of the Son, refused it to the Holy Spirit, ranking the Spirit among the creatures. Against them Ambrose argues, through three books, for the full and equal Godhead of the Spirit within the one undivided Trinity (Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto 1–3; trans. NPNF II/10).

His method is both scriptural and typological. He gathers the texts that ascribe to the Spirit what belongs to God alone — creation, the giving of life, sanctification, omnipresence, the forgiveness of sins — and argues that what does the works of God is God. He reads the Old Testament figuratively for the Spirit’s presence: Gideon’s fleece, wet while the ground is dry and then dry while the ground is wet, becomes a figure of the grace passing from the Jews to the Gentiles (Book I); the strength of Samson and the creative breath of God supply further types (Books I–II); and Book III presses the Spirit’s unity of operation and honor with the Father and the Son — that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with them, not as a third and lesser thing but as one God with them (Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto 1–3; Ramsey, Ambrose, 60–66). The whole is a Latin statement of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan faith that the Spirit is consubstantial Lord and Giver of life.

The argument of the three books can be followed more closely. Book I establishes the divinity of the Spirit from his works and his proper names. Ambrose opens with the type of Gideon’s fleece and then turns to the central principle of the whole pneumatological case: that the Spirit is named with the Father and the Son in the one baptismal command (Matthew 28:19), is the “finger of God” by which Christ casts out demons, and performs the works that Scripture reserves to God — he creates, gives life, indwells, and sanctifies. What is omnipresent, what searches the depths of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), what cannot be circumscribed, is not a creature but God. Book II develops the Spirit’s role in creation and sanctification: the Spirit “moving over the waters” at the beginning (Genesis 1:2), the breath of life breathed into man, the Spirit who renews the face of the earth (Psalm 103/104:30) and who is the author of the new creation in baptism and the gifts of grace; Ambrose insists that the Spirit is not a passive instrument but a free agent, distributing his gifts “as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11), which a creature cannot do. Book III presses home the unity of operation, will, and honor among the three Persons, and so reaches the worship of the Spirit: because the Spirit shares the one undivided activity of the Godhead, he is to be adored and glorified together with the Father and the Son, as the Church confesses in the doxology and at the baptismal font. Ambrose is careful to guard the distinction of Persons even as he asserts the unity of essence: the Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but proceeds from God and is sent by the Son, and is yet wholly God — one Godhead, one operation, one majesty in three Persons (Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto 1.prol.–1.9, 2.5–10, 3.11–21; Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 89–93). The treatise is thus not a string of proof-texts but a structured ascent from the Spirit’s works, through his role in creation and the economy of grace, to his consubstantial honor and worship within the Trinity.

Drawing on the Greek Fathers

What gives De Spiritu Sancto its peculiar historical importance is its dependence on the Greek tradition. Ambrose, who read Greek when most Latin churchmen could not (see The Man and the See), built his treatise substantially on the recent Greek pneumatology — above all on Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit (375), but also on Didymus the Blind’s treatise of the same name and on Athanasius (Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 89–93; Ramsey, Ambrose, 60–66). The layering can be discerned with some precision. The backbone of the argument — the demonstration of the Spirit’s divinity from his works, the insistence on his being named and worshipped with the Father and the Son, the appeal to the baptismal formula, and much of the scriptural arrangement — follows Basil’s On the Holy Spirit closely, often phrase for phrase. The detailed scriptural proof of the Spirit’s full equality and the rebuttal of the Pneumatomachian objections draw on Didymus the Blind’s On the Holy Spirit, the very work Jerome would later translate to expose the borrowing. And the underlying logic — that the Spirit must be God because he sanctifies and deifies, and a creature cannot make others divine — reaches back to Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion (c. 359–361), the foundational refutation of the Tropici who first denied the Spirit’s Godhead, mediated to Ambrose through the Cappadocians. In carrying these across the language barrier Ambrose performed for the West a service of the first rank: he made the mature Greek doctrine of the Spirit available to the Latin church and, through him, to Augustine (see The Shaping of the West). This is Ambrose at his most characteristic and most valuable — not an original speculative theologian but a great translator and transmitter, the channel by which the Cappadocian and Athanasian achievement reached the Latin mind.

The Pneumatomachian Controversy and Constantinople 381

The treatise belongs to the last and briefest phase of the fourth-century Trinitarian crisis. Once the divinity of the Son had been substantially secured among the moderate party in the 360s and 370s, attention turned to the Holy Spirit, whose full Godhead the Nicene Creed of 325 had only gestured at in the bare clause “and in the Holy Spirit.” A party arose — the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”), called Macedonians after Macedonius of Constantinople and earlier Tropici in Egypt — who, having conceded the Son’s divinity, balked at the Spirit’s, ranking him among the ministering creatures or as something intermediate between God and creation. It was against these that Athanasius wrote to Serapion, that Basil and the two Gregories labored in Cappadocia, and that Ambrose now wrote in the West. The controversy was resolved conciliarly in the very year of Ambrose’s treatise: the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Second Ecumenical Council, expanded the Creed’s third article into the confession the Church has recited ever since — that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets” (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ecumenical Councils). Every theme of that clause — Lordship, the giving of life, procession from the Father, co-worship and co-glorification, the inspiration of the prophets — is precisely what Ambrose’s three books had argued from Scripture. The Western treatise and the Eastern council are two expressions, in two languages and two modes, of a single confession reaching its definitive form in 381.

Significance for Later Latin Pneumatology

De Spiritu Sancto established for the Latin West a vocabulary and a method for speaking of the Third Person that would shape every later treatment. By naturalizing Basil’s and Didymus’s arguments in Latin, Ambrose gave Western theology a ready arsenal for the Spirit’s consubstantial divinity at the moment the doctrine was being defined; and his pupil Augustine would take up the question with far greater speculative depth in the De Trinitate, building on the foundation Ambrose had laid. What matters for the fourth-century doctrine — and this guide keeps strictly to it — is that Ambrose’s treatise belongs entirely to the common patristic confession of the Spirit’s full and equal Godhead, the faith of Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and the Council of Constantinople, shared East and West. Its achievement is to have planted that shared confession firmly in Latin soil: the Spirit is true God, consubstantial Lord and Giver of life, worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. On that the whole undivided Church of the fourth century, Greek and Latin, was one.

Jerome’s Charge of Plagiarism

The dependence was so close that it drew a famous attack. Jerome, who could be merciless toward rivals, undertook his own Latin translation of Didymus the Blind’s On the Holy Spirit precisely in order to expose Ambrose’s borrowings to Greekless Latin readers, and in the preface he savaged Ambrose without quite naming him — comparing him to “an ugly crow decked out in another bird’s bright plumage,” who had written “bad things in Latin taken from good things in Greek” (Jerome, preface to his translation of Didymus, De Spiritu Sancto; reported in NPNF II/10 Prolegomena). The charge was real and was felt; it has shadowed the treatise’s reputation ever since.

Two things must be said in its measure. First, Rufinus defended Ambrose against Jerome, retorting that Ambrose had written his book on the Holy Spirit “not in words only, but with his own blood” — a reference to the perils of his episcopate, the basilica crisis among them (Rufinus, Apologia contra Hieronymum; NPNF II/10 Prolegomena). Second, by the standards of the age the charge somewhat misfires: the patristic method was cumulative and traditional, not proprietary, and a Latin father’s transmission of a Greek father’s theology to a church that could not otherwise reach it was a service, not a theft. Modern scholarship treats De Spiritu Sancto less as a plagiarism than as the best evidence of the westward flow of Greek Trinitarian theology in the late fourth century, with Ambrose as its principal conduit (Campenhausen, The Fathers of the Latin Church, 89–93; Ramsey, Ambrose, 60–66). That Didymus’s Greek original now survives largely in Jerome’s hostile Latin translation is a final irony: the text marshaled to convict Ambrose of borrowing reaches us only because of the borrowing it sought to expose.

Significance

De Spiritu Sancto is not Ambrose’s most original work, but it is one of his most consequential. It gave the Latin West a full, scripturally grounded confession of the Spirit’s Godhead at the precise moment the universal Church was conciliarly defining it; it bound the bishop of the imperial capital, and through him the emperor, to that confession; and it stands as the clearest monument to Ambrose’s vocation as the bridge between the Greek and Latin worlds — the man through whom the theology of Basil and Athanasius entered the bloodstream of the West.

See Also

References

  • Ambrose of Milan. De Spiritu Sancto, 3 books, c. 381 [CSEL 79, ed. Faller]; trans. NPNF II/10 (de Romestin). On the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
  • Jerome. Preface to his Latin translation of Didymus the Blind, De Spiritu Sancto; trans. NPNF II/3 and discussed in NPNF II/10 Prolegomena. The plagiarism charge.
  • Rufinus of Aquileia. Apologia contra Hieronymum; trans. NPNF II/3. The defense of Ambrose.
  • Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit [PG 32]; trans. NPNF II/8 and SVS Popular Patristics. Ambrose’s principal Greek source.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit [PG 26]; trans. Shapland (1951) and SVS Popular Patristics. The foundational refutation of the Spirit’s deniers, behind the whole tradition Ambrose transmits.
  • Didymus the Blind. On the Holy Spirit (surviving chiefly in Jerome’s Latin); ed. and trans. in Works on the Spirit (SVS Popular Patristics, 2011). A principal source of Ambrose’s detailed argument.
  • Campenhausen, Hans von. The Fathers of the Latin Church. London: A. & C. Black, 1964, 87–116. On Ambrose’s use of the Greek fathers.
  • Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 55–66. On De Spiritu Sancto and its sources.
  • Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 2:565–600.