Basil’s Reserve and Gregory’s Boldness

St. Basil wrote a book on the Holy Spirit without once calling him God or consubstantial. St. Gregory the Theologian said both, in public, within five years. This file examines the disagreement — Basil’s argument from worship and from unwritten tradition, the two readings of his reserve, Gregory’s boldness and the account of doctrinal disclosure he gave to justify it, and why that account is one of the most delicate passages in patristic theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Book and Its Occasion

St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit was written in 375 at the request of St. Amphilochius of Iconium, and its immediate occasion was a liturgical quarrel about prepositions.

Basil had used, at a service, the doxology “Glory to the Father with (μετά) the Son together with (σύν) the Holy Spirit,” alongside the more familiar “Glory to the Father through (διά) the Son in (ἐν) the Holy Spirit.” Opponents seized on the first form as an innovation, and argued from the second that the prepositions themselves encode a hierarchy: the Father is the one from whom, the Son the one through whom, the Spirit the one in whom — so that the three occupy different ranks, and only the first is God without qualification. The argument was drawn from a technical Hellenistic grammar of causes, and Basil answers it on that ground before moving to his own (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 2–8; trans. NPNF II/8, and David Anderson, Popular Patristics 42, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980).

His counter-argument runs on two lines.

From the practice of the Church. The Spirit is invoked in baptism as one of three; the baptized are sealed with him; the Church has always given him glory. If he were a creature, the baptismal formula would place a creature alongside the Father and the Son, and Christian initiation would be a mixture of worship and idolatry (On the Holy Spirit 10–15). The argument is Athanasius’ argument, and Basil presses it further than anyone had.

From unwritten tradition. This is the treatise’s most influential chapter. Basil observes that a great deal of what the Church does is nowhere in Scripture — signing with the cross, turning east to pray, the words of the epiclesis, the blessing of the water and the oil, the triple immersion, standing on Sundays — and that no one calls these arbitrary. Dogmas and kerygmata alike come to us “some from written teaching, others from the tradition of the apostles handed on to us in mystery,” and both have the same force (On the Holy Spirit 27.66). The doxology belongs to the same deposit. The chapter is the locus classicus for the Orthodox doctrine of Holy Tradition (see St. Basil: Unwritten Tradition; Paradosis: The Living Memory).

What Basil establishes is that the Spirit is to be glorified together with (syndoxazein) the Father and the Son, and that he is not a creature. What he never writes is the word God of the Spirit, or the word homoousios.

Two Readings of the Reserve

The reserve was noticed at once and it needs accounting for. Two explanations are on the table, and they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is economy, and it comes from Gregory the Theologian himself. Writing to Basil, and later preaching his funeral oration, Gregory defends his friend explicitly: Basil had a see to hold and churches to protect under a hostile emperor, and a public confession of the Spirit’s Godhead would have cost him both; he therefore taught the substance while withholding the term, and Gregory — who held no see securely and had nothing to lose — could say plainly what Basil could not. In the funeral oration Gregory presents this as a division of labour between them, and even represents Basil as having asked it of him (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 43.68–69; Epistle 58; trans. NPNF II/7). This is a contemporary explanation from the person best placed to give one, and it deserves the weight it has traditionally been given.

The second is that Basil’s method was genuinely his own. On this reading the reserve is not tactical concealment but a consistent theological policy: Basil argues throughout from what the Church does rather than from what her essence-language implies, holds that the divine essence is unknowable and that terms describing it are therefore to be used sparingly, and has a documented reluctance to press vocabulary Scripture does not supply. His conclusion — that the Spirit is to be worshipped with the Father and the Son — is dogmatically equivalent to calling him God, and Basil may simply have judged that this was the better way to say it.

[Disputed: the character of Basil's reserve. (a) Gregory the Theologian's contemporary account presents it as deliberate *oikonomia*, pastoral prudence under persecution, agreed between the two of them (*Oration* 43.68–69; *Ep.* 58). (b) A body of modern scholarship holds that the reserve was also, or instead, a settled methodological preference for arguing from worship rather than from ontological vocabulary — see the assessment in R. P. C. Hanson, *The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God*, Edinburgh, 1988, 776–790, and the account of Basil's method in Stephen M. Hildebrand, *The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea*, Washington, DC, 2007. The two readings are compatible, and this collection does not decide between them. What is not in dispute is the doctrinal content: Basil taught that the Spirit is not a creature and is to be adored with the Father and the Son.]

The point should not be inflated into a difference of faith. Basil’s Epistle 159 and other letters state that the Spirit is not to be numbered with creation, and his treatise’s whole argument depends on it. What differed was nerve, position, and judgment about timing.

Gregory’s Boldness

St. Gregory the Theologian, preaching the fifth of his Theological Orations at the Anastasia in Constantinople in 380, refused the reserve.

The relevant exchange is deliberately staged as a dialogue with an objector, and is quoted in full because its economy is the whole point:

“What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.10; trans. NPNF II/7.)

He goes further, naming the position that the Spirit is a creature as blasphemy, and setting out the dilemma the Pneumatomachoi cannot escape: the Spirit is either God or a creature, there is no third category, and if he is a creature we are not saved by him and should not worship him (Oration 31.3–6).

He also answers the objection that the Spirit’s mode of origin cannot be specified, and answers it by refusing the demand: “What then is procession? Do you tell me what is the unbegottenness of the Father, and I will explain to you the physiology of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit — and let us both be frenzy-stricken for prying into the mystery of God” (Oration 31.8). This refusal is not a dodge. It is the establishment of a permanent rule: the Church confesses that the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, and confesses that these are different, and does not claim to know in what the difference consists. Every later Orthodox treatment of the procession rests on it, and it is the reason the Orthodox objection to the Filioque is not answerable by producing a better theory of what procession is (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference).

The Argument from the Order of Disclosure

Gregory knew that his boldness raised an obvious objection: if the Spirit is God, why does Scripture not say so, and why has the Church not always said so? His answer is the most delicate passage in the Theological Orations and one of the most consequential in patristic literature.

“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. For it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son; nor when that of the Son was not yet received to burden us further with the Holy Ghost.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.26; trans. NPNF II/7.)

He develops the point with two images: God accommodates his self-disclosure to what his hearers can bear, as a teacher does; and the light comes “by gradual additions, and, as David says, goings up,” so that the Trinity is revealed by stages within the one revelation (Oration 31.26–27).

Two things must be said about this passage, because it is regularly used for purposes it will not serve.

It is not a doctrine of doctrinal development in the nineteenth-century sense. Gregory is describing the pedagogy of divine revelation within the biblical economy, culminating in Pentecost, not the growth of the Church’s understanding over subsequent centuries. What he says is added is not new content but clarity, and the agent is the Holy Spirit himself. That said, the passage was later drawn upon by Newman and others in constructing such theories, and the question of what if anything in the Orthodox tradition corresponds to a doctrine of development is a genuine and contested one, treated elsewhere in this repository (see Does Doctrine Develop?).

And it is not licence for the Church to define new dogmas. Gregory’s argument is precisely that the disclosure culminates in the Spirit’s coming, and that the Church’s task afterward is to confess what has been given. He was, on his own account, saying openly what had been believed all along and what the pressure of denial now made it necessary to state.

The Outcome

Basil died in January 379. Gregory presided briefly over the council of 381 and resigned from it in disgust at its politics and, on his own testimony, its compromises. The Creed the council issued took, in the end, Basil’s road rather than Gregory’s: it said that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, and did not say that he is God or consubstantial (see The Pneumatomachoi and the Creed).

The judgment of the Church, in the event, was that both men had confessed the same faith and that the Creed’s formula carried it. Gregory received the title “the Theologian.” Basil received the title “the Great.” Neither is remembered as the loser of this argument, and the Church’s practice — which is to worship the Holy Spirit, and to call him God freely in her hymns while confessing the Creed as written — has kept both.

References

Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; also trans. David Anderson, Popular Patristics 42. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980.
Basil the Great. Epistles 159, 223, 244. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 31 (Fifth Theological Oration); Oration 43 (On St. Basil); Epistle 58. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; Five Theological Orations also trans. Williams and Wickham, Popular Patristics 23, 2002.
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
Hildebrand, Stephen M. The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007.
McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.