The Disputed Expressions

The very features that make Gregory’s Creed remarkable also make it disputed. Its text reaches us only embedded in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory the Wonderworker, written about a century after the Wonderworker’s death, so the exact original wording cannot be established with certainty. And certain of its phrases — the Son and the Spirit each called “Image,” the Spirit’s subsistence “from God” and being “made manifest by the Son,” the very ordering of the articles — can sound “economic” or mildly subordinationist to ears trained by the post-Nicene settlement. This file presents both readings fully and without resolving by assertion: the case that, read in their pre-Nicene context, these expressions are at home and even anticipate Nicene orthodoxy; and the case that the surviving wording may be smoothed in transmission and that some phrasing reflects the looser third-century idiom. It names the positions and the scholars, in the manner the methodology requires for disputed topics (METHODOLOGY §4).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Ante-Nicene Father; Wonderworker)

This file presupposes The Trinitarian Creed, where the text is given, and An Early Trinitarian Witness, where the positive doctrinal case is made. Here the difficulties are faced directly. The aim is not to undermine the Creed — the scholarly consensus holds its Trinitarian substance to be authentically Gregorian and orthodox — but to be honest about what is genuinely contested in its text and its language, and to lay out both sides of each question.

The Transmission Problem

Before any individual phrase is weighed, one structural fact must be stated plainly, because it conditions everything else: we do not possess Gregory’s Creed as an independent third-century document. It survives quoted within Gregory of Nyssa’s De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi (PG 46:893–958), the encomiastic Life composed around 380, roughly a century after the Wonderworker’s death (see The Witness of Gregory of Nyssa). Nyssa reports that the autograph of the Creed, in Gregory’s own hand, was still preserved at Neocaesarea in his own day; but what Nyssa gives his readers is the text as he received and reproduced it, and the Life is our earliest witness to that text. There is no third-century manuscript, no quotation in Eusebius or any contemporary, against which Nyssa’s wording can be checked.

This means that the question of the Creed’s wording is inseparable from the question of its transmission. A confession used liturgically and catechetically in a single church for a hundred years and more — Nyssa says it remained “the rule of teaching” at Neocaesarea (Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi, PG 46; trans. Slusser 1998) — passes through living use before it is set down by a later hand, and living use can polish, clarify, or lightly adjust. The scholarship is candid that this is a real possibility for Gregory’s Creed.

[Disputed: whether the wording transmitted by Gregory of Nyssa is the exact wording Gregory the Wonderworker composed. A — most scholars hold that a genuine Gregorian core is faithfully preserved: Nyssa appeals to the surviving autograph, the confession's content fits the mid-third century, and the Neocaesarean church had every motive to guard its founder's words exactly (Slusser 1998, introduction; the older critical work of C. P. Caspari, *Alte und neue Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols und der Glaubensregel*, 1879). B — the precise wording cannot be certified, and a century of liturgical and catechetical use, followed by reproduction within an encomiastic *Life*, may have smoothed or sharpened the phrasing; the surviving text may reflect some adjustment toward the doctrinal clarity of Nyssa's own day (Van Dam 2003, on the Cappadocian reworking of Gregory's memory; Slusser 1998 himself allows the possibility while defending the core).]

The two sides here are not as far apart as they may look. Almost no scholar doubts that a real, Gregorian Trinitarian confession underlies Nyssa’s text; almost none claims the wording is certified to the syllable. The dispute is about degree of fidelity, and it is the necessary backdrop to every question of phrasing that follows: where a phrase reads awkwardly to post-Nicene ears, one cannot always be sure whether one is reading Gregory’s third-century idiom or Nyssa’s fourth-century reproduction of it.

The Phrases That Give Pause

Read against the standard of the developed Nicene-Constantinopolitan settlement, several features of the Creed can sound less than fully orthodox. It is worth naming them precisely, because the imprecise charge “subordinationist” obscures what is actually at issue.

The Son and the Spirit each called “Image.” The Creed calls the Son the “Eternal Image” and “Image and Likeness of Deity,” and then calls the Holy Spirit “Image of the Son, Perfect Image of the Perfect” (Gregory Thaumaturgus, A Declaration of Faith; trans. ANF 6). To a post-Nicene ear, “image” can suggest derivation and inferiority — an image is of something prior and less than its original — and the chain “Father → Image (Son) → Image of the Image (Spirit)” can look like a graded hierarchy of descending divinity. The worry is sharpened by the fact that calling the Spirit an “image of the Son” is unusual and did not become standard Trinitarian language; the developed tradition reserves “image” primarily for the Son’s relation to the Father (Colossians 1:15) and speaks of the Spirit differently.

The Spirit’s subsistence “from God” and manifestation “by the Son.” The third article says the Spirit has “His subsistence from God, and [is] made manifest by the Son” (Gregory Thaumaturgus, A Declaration of Faith; trans. ANF 6). Two things can trouble a later reader. First, “made manifest by the Son” is economic language — it describes how the Spirit is revealed to men in the dispensation of salvation — and a reader anxious about the eternal relations of the Persons may worry that the Creed says too little about the Spirit’s eternal procession and frames Him too much by His function toward us. Second, in the centuries after the Creed the phrase “from God… through the Son” became a flashpoint: it can be read in the East’s sense (the Spirit proceeds from the Father, manifested or sent through the Son in the economy) or pressed toward the later Western Filioque. The Creed itself, being pre-Nicene, stands innocent of that controversy, but its language can be drawn into it anachronistically.

The ordering and the language of “cause.” The Creed’s strict sequence — Father, then Son “of” the Father, then Spirit “from God” and “of the Son” — and its talk of the Father as “Begetter” and “Cause” can be read as a taxis of origin shading into a taxis of rank. In the third century the language of the Father as the sole aitia (cause or source) within the Godhead was a commonplace that the orthodox tradition would later affirm as the “monarchy of the Father.” But before Nicaea, the same language sat closer to genuinely subordinationist usage, and the line between an orthodox order-of-origin and a heretical order-of-dignity was not yet sharply drawn.

[Disputed: whether the Creed's "Image" language and economic phrasing carry a subordinationist sense. A — read in pre-Nicene context the expressions are orthodox and even anticipatory: "image" predicated of the Son draws on Colossians 1:15 and Hebrews 1:3 and is qualified by "Eternal Image" and "Perfect Image of the Perfect," which exclude inferiority, and the Creed flatly denies that anything in the Trinity is "created or in servitude" (Slusser 1998; the Cappadocians, who received it as fully orthodox: Basil, *On the Holy Spirit* 29). B — the expressions reflect the looser third-century idiom and the Origenist inheritance, in which image-of-image language and an emphasis on the order of origin sat naturally and had not yet been disciplined against subordinationism; some of the phrasing reads as "economic" rather than confessing the eternal relations with post-Nicene precision (Van Dam 2003; on the third-century horizon generally, Crouzel 1969 on Gregory's Origenist formation).]

The Case That the Expressions Are At Home (A)

The defenders’ case has several strands, and it is strong.

First, the qualifiers in the text itself exclude the subordinationist reading. The Creed does not call the Son simply “image” but “Eternal Image”; it does not call the Spirit simply “image of the Son” but “Perfect Image of the Perfect.” Eternity and perfection are precisely the predicates that block any sense of derivation-into-inferiority: an eternal image is co-eternal with its original, and a perfect image of a perfect original lacks nothing the original has. The image-language, on this reading, is being used in the strong biblical sense of Hebrews 1:3 — the Son as the exact imprint (charaktēr) of the Father’s very substance — in which perfect imaging means perfect equality, not inferiority (Gregory Thaumaturgus, A Declaration of Faith; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998).

Second, the Creed’s own explicit denials are decisive. Whatever the resonance of individual phrases, the confession ends by ruling out subordinationism in so many words: in this Trinity “there is nothing either created or in servitude, nor anything superinduced”; “neither was the Son ever wanting to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son”; the same Trinity abides “without variation and without change” (Gregory Thaumaturgus, A Declaration of Faith; trans. ANF 6). A document that denies that anything in the Godhead is created, servile, or temporally added has placed its own image-language under an anti-subordinationist rule. On this reading the Creed does not merely escape subordinationism; it anticipates the Nicene refutation of it.

Third — and for the Orthodox tradition this is weighty — the Cappadocians received the Creed as fully orthodox and used it as a weapon for orthodoxy. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the Theologian were the most exacting Trinitarian theologians of their age, the very men who fixed the technical vocabulary of ousia and hypostasis and routed both the Arians and the Spirit-fighters. They knew the Creed intimately — it was the rule of faith of their own ancestral church — and they treasured it as the witness of an apostolic founder who had taught the whole faith (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8; Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi, PG 46; trans. Slusser 1998; see An Early Trinitarian Witness). They found nothing in it to correct or apologize for. If the Creed’s expressions had carried a real subordinationist sense, these readers — primed to detect exactly that error — would have been the first to notice. Their unembarrassed reception is, for the defense, the strongest single argument that the phrases are at home (Slusser 1998; Van Dam 2003 on the Cappadocian reception).

The Case That the Wording Reflects a Looser Idiom (B)

The counter-case does not deny the Creed’s orthodoxy; it complicates the picture in two ways, one textual and one historical.

The textual point returns to the transmission problem. If a Gregorian core has been smoothed in a century of use and in Nyssa’s reproduction, then the very anti-subordinationist clarity that the defense relies on — the explicit denials that anything is “created or in servitude” — could in principle be part of what has been sharpened. On this view one cannot fully use the Creed’s polished orthodoxy to vindicate its phrasing, because the polish may be later than Gregory. The Cappadocians’ comfort with the text would then partly reflect a text already congenial to Cappadocian sensibilities. This does not make the Creed inauthentic — the substance is Gregory’s — but it cautions against treating every word as a third-century datum (Van Dam 2003; Slusser 1998, allowing the possibility of smoothing).

The historical point is about the third-century idiom itself. Gregory was formed in the school of Origen (see The Student of Origen), and Origenist theology spoke comfortably in just the registers that give the Creed its distinctive cast: image-of-image language, an emphasis on the Father as sole source and cause, and a readiness to describe the Persons by their roles in the economy of revelation. In that setting, before the Arian crisis forced the distinction between an orthodox order-of-origin and a heretical order-of-rank, such language was unmarked — neither pointedly orthodox nor pointedly heretical, simply the available idiom. A phrase like “made manifest by the Son” is most naturally read not as a considered statement about eternal procession (a question not yet posed) but as the unselfconscious economic language of a pre-Nicene confession. On this reading the Creed is orthodox in substance and intent, but some of its phrasing belongs to a stage of development before the questions had been sharpened, and it is anachronistic to demand of it the precision of Constantinople (Crouzel 1969 on the Origenist horizon; Van Dam 2003).

[Disputed: how much weight the Cappadocian reception can bear as evidence of the original wording's orthodoxy. A — the Cappadocians' intimate knowledge and unembarrassed use of the Creed is decisive evidence that its expressions are orthodox in their proper sense (Slusser 1998; Basil, *On the Holy Spirit* 29). B — the Cappadocians received the Creed within a living tradition they themselves were actively shaping, and their comfort with it may partly reflect a text already conformed, in transmission, to their own theology; their reception certifies the Creed's orthodoxy as they received it more securely than it certifies Gregory's exact third-century words (Van Dam 2003).]

Distinguishing the Core from the Polish

The responsible conclusion is not a verdict for one side but a distinction the two sides can largely share. There is wide agreement on a Gregorian core: a genuine, mid-third-century, fully Trinitarian confession, naming Father, Son, and Spirit each in full divinity and gathering them into one undivided Godhead, stands behind Nyssa’s text and is authentically Gregory’s (Slusser 1998; Van Dam 2003; and the older consensus of Caspari 1879). There is wide agreement, too, that the exact wording cannot be certified, because the text reaches us only through a century of use and through a Life written about 380 — so that individual phrases cannot always be assigned with confidence to Gregory’s pen rather than to the tradition that carried his confession.

Within that shared frame the live questions remain genuinely open. Is the “image of the Son” language for the Spirit Gregory’s own or a feature of the transmitted text? Does the Creed’s economic phrasing reflect Gregory’s deliberate reticence about the eternal relations, the natural idiom of his century, or a later hand? These cannot be settled by assertion, and this guide does not settle them. What can be said with confidence is the double truth that both sides affirm: that in substance the Creed is an orthodox Trinitarian confession of extraordinary maturity for its date, received as such by the most exacting theologians of the patristic age; and that in exact wording it is a transmitted text whose pre-Nicene phrasing must be read in its own context and cannot be pressed for fourth-century precision it was never composed to carry. To hold both truths at once — the orthodoxy of the substance and the honesty about the transmission — is to read the Creed as the sources actually permit (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4; on the doctrine the Creed confesses, see The Holy Trinity; on the conciliar creed it anticipates, The Nicene Creed).

References

Gregory Thaumaturgus. A Declaration of Faith (the Creed). Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The “Eternal Image” and “Image and Likeness of Deity” of the Son; the Spirit as “Image of the Son, Perfect Image of the Perfect,” “having His subsistence from God, and being made manifest by the Son”; the denial that anything is “created or in servitude” or “superinduced.”)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (Translation and introduction; the case for a faithfully preserved Gregorian core and the defense of the Creed’s orthodoxy, with acknowledgment of the transmission question.)
Gregory of Nyssa. De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi. PG 46:893–958. Trans. in Slusser, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (1998). (The sole early witness to the Creed’s text; the claim that Gregory’s autograph survived at Neocaesarea and remained the rule of teaching there.)
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 29. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8. 1895. (The Cappadocian reception of Gregory as a father who taught the whole orthodox faith.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. (The Cappadocian shaping of Gregory’s memory and the source-critical reading of the transmitted texts.)
Crouzel, Henri. Grégoire le Thaumaturge: Remerciement à Origène, suivi de la Lettre d’Origène à Grégoire. Sources chrétiennes 148. Paris: Cerf, 1969. (Gregory’s Origenist formation and the third-century theological idiom in which the Creed’s phrasing is at home.)
Caspari, C. P. Alte und neue Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols und der Glaubensregel. Christiania [Oslo], 1879. (The older critical study of early creeds and rules of faith, defending a preserved Gregorian core.)