The Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit

Written c. 357–359 from exile to Bishop Serapion of Thmuis, these letters are the first sustained patristic defense of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. Against a group called the Tropici — who conceded the divinity of the Son but reduced the Spirit to a creature — Athanasius argues that the Spirit is proper to the Godhead, that his relation to the Son mirrors the Son’s relation to the Father, and that a creature could never deify. The letters set the agenda that the Cappadocians and the Council of Constantinople (381) would bring to its conclusion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Occasion and Date

Around 357–359, during his third exile (356–362) among the monks of the Egyptian desert, Athanasius received a letter from his friend and ally Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis, reporting a troubling development. A faction had arisen — orthodox in their confession of the Son as consubstantial with the Father, yet teaching that the Holy Spirit is a creature (ktisma), one of the ministering spirits differing only in degree from the angels. Athanasius answered with a treatise that the manuscripts transmit as the Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit. Scholarship dates the first and principal letter to roughly 357–359, in the same exile that produced the Letters to the Bishops of Egypt and Libya and much of the polemic against the Arians (Shapland, The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit, introduction; DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, PPS 43, introduction).

These letters matter because, at this date, no one had yet written a dedicated treatise on the Spirit. The Creed of Nicaea (325) had said only “and in the Holy Spirit,” without elaboration. Athanasius is therefore working out, almost from first principles, the grammar by which the third Person would later be confessed at Constantinople.

The Tropici and Their Exegesis

Athanasius coins, or adopts, the label Tropici (hoi tropikoi, “the figurists”) for his opponents — from tropos, a “turn” or figure of speech — because their whole case rested on reading the scriptural texts that exalt the Spirit as mere figures while taking literally the texts they thought demoted him (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.2; Shapland, introduction, on the name). They are an early form of the party later known as the Pneumatomachoi (“Spirit-fighters”); Athanasius’ Tropici may have had links to the followers of the deposed bishop Eustathius or to broader Homoian circles, though their precise identity is debated.

Their two principal proof-texts were:

Amos 4:13 (LXX): “For behold, I am he that strengthens the thunder and creates spirit (ktizon pneuma), and announces to men his Christ.” Reading pneuma here as the Holy Spirit, the Tropici concluded that Scripture itself calls the Spirit a created thing (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.3). Athanasius answers (around 1.7–1.9) that pneuma in this verse is anarthrous and means simply “wind” or the created breath of the natural order — the prophet is describing God’s works in creation, the wind and the thunder, not the divine Spirit. He lays down a general exegetical rule: where pneuma stands absolute in Scripture, without the article or a defining context, it does not denote the Holy Spirit unless the surrounding text already supplies that reference (Letters to Serapion 1.4–1.9).
1 Timothy 5:21: Paul charges Timothy “before God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels.” Since the verse names God, Christ, and angels — but not the Spirit — the Tropici inferred that the Spirit must belong among the angels, an elect angel of superior rank (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.10–1.14). Athanasius replies that the silence proves nothing — Scripture elsewhere joins the Spirit to the Father and the Son in the one baptismal name (Matthew 28:19) — and that the Spirit is never numbered among the leitourgika pneumata, the ministering spirits “sent forth to serve” (Hebrews 1:14). The angels are sent; the Spirit sanctifies and is the one in whom the faithful are sealed (Letters to Serapion 1.11–1.14).

Athanasius’ Argument from the Triad

The structural heart of the letters is Athanasius’ insistence that the Spirit’s relation to the Son is the analogue of the Son’s relation to the Father. The Spirit is proper to the Son (idion tou Huiou) just as the Son is proper to the Father, and therefore proper to the Godhead and not to the creatures (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.20–1.21, 1.25). The Spirit is the Son’s own Spirit, the anointing and the seal with which the Word anoints and seals all things; he proceeds from the Father and is given through the Son.

From this Athanasius presses his decisive objection: if the Spirit were a creature, then the Triad would be a Dyad — a duality of God and Son with a creature attached — and the Trinity would be neither eternal nor self-consistent, since “there was once when it was not” would reappear at the level of the Spirit (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.2, 1.17). The Triad is eternal, indivisible, and homogeneous in nature; one cannot introduce a created member without dissolving it. “The Triad is not constituted out of Creator and creature” (cf. Letters to Serapion 1.17, 1.21).

The Deification Argument

Athanasius’ most influential argument is soteriological, and it is the same logic he had used for the Son against the Arians, now turned to the Spirit: a creature cannot deify; therefore the Spirit who deifies is no creature. It is through the Spirit that we are “made partakers of God” (metochoi Theou); the Spirit unites us to the Word, and through the Word to the Father, making us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and sons by adoption (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.22–1.25; trans. DelCogliano–Radde-Gallwitz–Ayres, Works on the Spirit, PPS 43).

The reasoning is participatory: a being that is itself only a participant in holiness — as every creature is — cannot be the one in whom others participate and are sanctified. “If by participation in the Spirit we are made ‘partakers of the divine nature,’ it would be mad to say that the Spirit is of created nature and not of the nature of God; for it is on this account that those in whom he is are made divine. And if he makes men divine (theopoiei), there is no doubt that his nature is of God” (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1.24). Were the Spirit a creature, there would be no real participation of God in us, no adoption, no incorruption — and the whole economy of salvation would collapse. This is the same exchange-logic that grounds Athanasius’ Christology in On the Incarnation (cross-link Theosis in Athanasius).

The Edition and Numbering Question

The textual transmission of the Letters to Serapion poses a genuine scholarly problem that any user of the citations should know. As they come down in the medieval Greek manuscripts (Opitz’s “middle corpus,” traceable to the sixth and seventh centuries), the work is divided into four letters — conventionally Serapion I, II, III, and IV. But the internal evidence shows this division is partly artificial:

Letter II, which treats the divinity of the Son, is in substance more closely bound to Letter III than to Letter I; in II.1 Athanasius promises Serapion an abridgement of the first letter, and II and III together read as one continuous treatment.
Severus of Antioch cites material from II.8 as belonging to the first letter, and the Armenian corpus counts I and II as a single work, suggesting the later boundary between them is editorial.
The so-called fourth letter is itself composite: only its opening continues the pneumatological argument, while the remainder is a distinct piece on the sin against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31).

Modern editors and translators therefore frequently redivide the corpus — commonly into three letters (I; II+III as one continuous work; and the genuinely pneumatological portion of IV), separating off the excursus on the unforgivable sin (Shapland, introduction; DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, PPS 43, introduction, which adopts a revised numbering). When citing, then, it is safest to give the section number together with the edition consulted, since “Serapion 4” in one edition may not be “Serapion 4” in another.

The Road to Constantinople 381

The Letters to Serapion are the headwaters of the conciliar pneumatology of 381. Athanasius supplied the two arguments the Cappadocians would systematize: the Spirit’s homotimia (equal honor) with Father and Son, grounded in the indivisible Triad, and the deification argument that a sanctifier cannot be a creature. St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit (375) develops the worship and procession arguments at length; St. Gregory the Theologian’s Fifth Theological Oration (Oration 31) presses the divinity of the Spirit explicitly. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) crowned this trajectory by confessing the Spirit as “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified” — language that vindicates exactly what Athanasius had argued against the Tropici two decades earlier (cross-link Orthodoxy: Pneumatology).

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit. c. 357–359. Translated in NPNF II/4 (Schaff and Wace, eds.).
Athanasius of Alexandria. Works on the Spirit: Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit and Didymus’s On the Holy Spirit. Translated by Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, and Lewis Ayres. Popular Patristics Series 43. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
Shapland, C. R. B., trans. The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit. London: Epworth Press, 1951. (Introduction on the Tropici, the manuscript transmission, and the numbering question.)
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.