On the Holy Spirit

St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto, 375) is the most important patristic defense of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, written for his disciple Amphilochius of Iconium out of a controversy over a single word in the doxology — whether to glorify God “with the Spirit” or only “in the Spirit.” This file treats the occasion, Basil’s argument from worship, conumeration, baptism, and the Spirit’s works, and his famous reserve in never flatly writing “the Spirit is God” — a reticence that Gregory of Nazianzus defended as deliberate economy in Oration 43 and impatiently surpassed in Oration 31 — and the treatise’s decisive role in the pneumatological article of the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Occasion: A Quarrel Over a Preposition

By the early 370s the Nicene cause had substantially prevailed concerning the Son, but a new front had opened. A party that Basil and his contemporaries called the Pneumatomachoi (“Spirit-fighters”) — associated with the name of Macedonius and so also called Macedonians — conceded the divinity of the Son while denying it of the Holy Spirit, ranking Him among the creatures or the “ministering spirits” sent forth to serve (cf. Heb 1:14). Basil’s whole pastoral and dogmatic energy in these years was bent against them (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 5; Hildebrand, PPS 42, introduction).

The treatise’s immediate occasion was strikingly small. At a service — Basil tells us so at the opening of the work — he had used, in the doxology, two forms of glorifying God: “with (meta) the Son together with (syn) the Holy Spirit,” alongside the more familiar “through the Son in (en) the Holy Spirit.” His opponents seized on the unfamiliar form. Their objection, as Basil reports it, was that “in” is “exactly appropriate to the Spirit, and sufficient for every thought concerning Him,” whereas “with the Spirit” is “a new phrase… an expression which is quite unnecessary, and sanctioned by no usage in the churches” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.65; trans. NPNF II/8). The complaint was not really grammatical. To coordinate the Spirit with the Father and the Son in the act of glorification was to confess Him as their equal in honor; to subordinate Him under “in” was to keep Him in an instrumental, lower rank. The whole status of the Third Person hung on the preposition.

It was Basil’s younger friend and former protégé Amphilochius of Iconium — whom Basil had himself helped to the episcopate — who asked him to set the matter out fully, and the treatise is addressed to him throughout as “my right well-beloved and most deeply respected brother Amphilochius” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit, dedication; trans. NPNF II/8). The work was completed in 375, some four years before Basil’s death (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 5).

The treatise unfolds in roughly two movements. The first (chapters 2–8) takes up the prepositions themselves, refuting the opponents’ attempt to fix a rigid theology of rank onto the words “from,” “through,” and “in,” and showing that Scripture uses them flexibly of all three Persons. The second and larger movement (chapters 9 onward) argues positively for the Spirit’s dignity from His titles, His operations, His place in baptism, and the Church’s worship, culminating in the defense of unwritten tradition in chapters 27–29. Throughout, the polemical edge is restrained: Basil writes as a pastor managing a divided Church, not only as a controversialist (Hildebrand, PPS 42, introduction).

The Argument

Basil’s strategy is consistent with the epistemology he had developed against Eunomius (see Against Eunomius): rather than reasoning from the divine essence — which he holds to be incomprehensible — he reasons from the Spirit’s operations and from the Church’s worship.

Conumeration Against Subnumeration

The Pneumatomachoi had pressed a numerical argument drawn from Aristotelian logic: things counted together must be of the same rank, and to “co-number” (synarithmēsis) the Spirit with the Father and the Son would either multiply the Godhead or, conversely, the Spirit’s distinctness from them proved His inferiority. They preferred “subnumeration” (hyparithmēsis) — counting the Spirit under the Father and Son, in descending rank. Basil dismantles the premise. Number, he argues, does not measure the nature of what is numbered; to count three is not to assert three grades of being. The Father, Son, and Spirit are confessed together not because counting demands it but because the things counted are equal in nature, and the act of numbering says nothing for or against their dignity (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 17–18; Hildebrand, PPS 42, introduction).

The Baptismal Formula

Basil’s strongest argument is liturgical and dominical. The Lord Himself, in the baptismal command, ranked the Spirit with the Father and the Son: “Go… baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19). The Spirit is named in the same breath, on the same level, in the formula that makes a Christian. From this Basil draws a chain binding faith, baptism, and worship together: we must glorify the Spirit as we are baptized, and believe as we are baptized — “for it is incumbent on us to be baptized in the terms we have received and to profess belief in the terms in which we are baptized, and as we have professed belief in, so to give glory” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.68; trans. NPNF II/8). To rank the Spirit below the Father and Son in the doxology is therefore to contradict the rank the Lord Himself assigned in baptism.

The Spirit’s Works

Throughout, Basil argues from what the Spirit does. The Spirit sanctifies, perfects, illumines, and deifies; He is the place of worship and the giver of the gifts; He is present in the angels’ perfection and in the saints’ holiness; through Him comes the adoption of sons and the foretaste of the age to come (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 9, 16, 19, 22–23). These are not the operations of a creature. A being who deifies cannot Himself be ranked among the made; a being in whom the whole economy of salvation is brought to its completion cannot be a servant external to that economy. The Spirit’s divinity is read off His divine work — the same move by which the whole later tradition would argue from the uncreated energies to the divine nature (cf. Against Eunomius).

Basil reinforces this with the Spirit’s inseparable conjunction to the Father and the Son in every divine work. As the Father is never thought apart from the Son, so the Spirit is never severed from either in the bestowal of grace; the Three act in an undivided operation, and the Spirit is the perfecting cause in whom the gifts of the Father, given through the Son, reach their end (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16). To rank Him below, then, is not merely to demote a Person but to divide an operation Scripture presents as one.

The Famous Reserve

The most discussed feature of On the Holy Spirit is what it does not say. Across the whole treatise Basil never once writes the flat sentence “the Holy Spirit is God” (ho theos), and he does not call the Spirit homoousios (“consubstantial”) with the Father, though that word had become the touchstone of orthodoxy regarding the Son. He confesses the Spirit’s full equality of nature, honor, and operation by every other means — but he withholds the two bluntest terms (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 5; Behr, The Nicene Faith, ch. 8).

This was deliberate, and it was controversial in Basil’s own lifetime; some of the orthodox suspected him of unsoundness or timidity. The fullest contemporary defense comes from Gregory of Nazianzus, in the funeral oration he delivered for Basil (Oration 43, c. 382). Gregory explicitly treats the reserve as a planned economy (oikonomia) — a strategic management of the truth for the sake of the times. Basil, he says, “postponed for the time the use of the exact term, begging as a favour from the Spirit Himself and His earnest champions, that they would not be annoyed at his economy, nor, by clinging to a single expression, ruin the whole cause” — for had Basil been driven from his see, “the community would suffer a very serious injury, if the church were seized upon by the heretics” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.68–69; trans. NPNF II/7). The orthodox, on Gregory’s account, would have been the real losers had Basil spent his episcopate on a word and been expelled for it; better to safeguard the substance and concede the syllable for a season.

Gregory’s own patience, however, had limits. In his Fifth Theological Oration (Oration 31, 380), preached at Constantinople after Basil’s death, he says plainly what Basil had circled: “What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is He consubstantial? Yes, if He is God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.10; trans. NPNF II/7). Gregory there frames the whole question as one of gradual revelation: “The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and suggested the deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit Himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of Himself” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.26; trans. NPNF II/7). On this reading the explicit naming of the Spirit as God was simply the next, ripe stage — and Gregory, unlike his more cautious friend, judged the hour to have come.

Whether Basil’s reticence was prudent economy or excessive caution is debated to this day. Some scholars read it as genuine pastoral statesmanship in a Church not yet ready for the word; others see in it the limits of Basil’s own pneumatology, or a real difference of temperament between the two friends. [Disputed: Gregory of Nazianzus reads Basil’s silence as deliberate economy (Or. 43.68–69); modern scholars divide, some (e.g., Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 5) stressing pastoral strategy, others noting Basil’s own theological caution about applying theos and homoousios beyond their scriptural and conciliar warrant (Behr, The Nicene Faith, ch. 8).] What is not disputed is that the substance of Basil’s confession — the Spirit glorified equally with the Father and the Son — became the Church’s own.

Constantinople 381

The vindication came two years after Basil’s repose. The Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, convened under the emperor Theodosius, condemned the Pneumatomachoi and expanded the Creed with an article on the Holy Spirit. Strikingly, the Council adopted not the blunt terms Basil had avoided but very nearly his own doxological language. The Creed confesses the Spirit as “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets” (Council of Constantinople I, 381, Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). The decisive phrase — that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with (syndoxazomenon) the Father and the Son — is precisely the point Basil had defended with his contested preposition “with.” The Council, like Basil, declined to write “God” or “consubstantial” of the Spirit in the symbol itself, and confessed His full divinity through the language of common worship instead (Behr, The Nicene Faith, ch. 8). Basil’s reserve, in other words, was written into the Creed of the universal Church. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus presided over the Council for a time; his brother Gregory of Nyssa was among its leading voices. The argument Basil had pressed over a single word at a single service had become the pneumatology of Christendom.

References

Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto). 375. Translated by Blomfield Jackson, NPNF II/8.
Hildebrand, Stephen M. (trans.). St. Basil the Great: On the Holy Spirit. Popular Patristics Series 42. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated in NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 31: The Fifth Theological Oration, On the Holy Spirit. Translated in NPNF II/7.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.