The Pneumatomachoi and the Creed

The divinity of the Holy Spirit was the last thing settled and the least discussed beforehand: the Creed of 325 said only “and in the Holy Spirit.” This file sets out what the Spirit-fighters actually held and why their case was not weak, how the Church answered it, what the Second Ecumenical Council defined in 381, and two things usually passed over — that the Creed does not call the Spirit God or homoousios, and that the text of the Creed of 381 has a complicated documentary history.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Creed of 325 Had a Gap

The Nicene Creed of 325 devotes its central paragraph to the Son and ends: “And in the Holy Spirit.” Nothing further. This is not evasion; it reflects the fact that in 325 nobody was disputing the Spirit, and councils define what is disputed.

Within a generation the dispute arrived, and it arrived from an unexpected quarter. Its exponents were not Arians. Many of them had accepted, or come to accept, the full divinity of the Son — a number were homoiousians who had been reconciled to the Nicene faith on that point — and they then declined to take the further step. St. Athanasius first hears of them, from Serapion of Thmuis, around 359: people who “hold rightly concerning the Son” but say of the Spirit “that he is not only a creature, but one of the ministering spirits, and differs from the angels only in degree” (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion I.1; trans. NPNF II/4).

Who They Were

The Greek Fathers call them Pneumatomachoi, “Spirit-fighters.” They are also called Macedonians, after Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople until his deposition in 360.

[Disputed: the connection between the doctrine and Macedonius. The label "Macedonian" is used by the historians Socrates and Sozomen and became standard, and Canon 1 of Constantinople I anathematizes "the heresy of the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachi" among others; but the sources tying the doctrine specifically to Macedonius are later than the events, and Hanson concludes that the association is unreliable and that the party's actual leadership lay elsewhere (Hanson, *The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God*, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988, 760–762). The doctrinally accurate designation, and the one this collection uses, is Pneumatomachoi.]

The figure who mattered in practice was Eustathius of Sebaste (c. 300–after 377), a leading ascetic, one of the formative influences on St. Basil’s monastic vocation, and for years his friend. Eustathius would not say that the Spirit is God, and would not say that he is a creature either; he held that Scripture does not authorize the question. The rupture between him and Basil, played out in the letters of the mid-370s, is one of the more painful episodes of the period and gives the controversy its personal shape (Basil, Epistles 125, 128, 223, 244; trans. NPNF II/8).

Their Case, at Its Strongest

The Pneumatomachian position was not perverse, and it should be stated as they would have stated it.

Scripture never calls the Spirit God. This is simply true. The New Testament calls the Son God (John 1:1; 20:28; Hebrews 1:8); it nowhere applies the word to the Holy Spirit. Acts 5:3–4, where lying to the Holy Spirit is lying to God, is the closest thing to an exception and is an inference rather than a title.

Scripture never records the Spirit being worshipped. Prayer in the New Testament is to the Father, and there are prayers to the Son; there is no apostolic prayer addressed to the Holy Spirit.

Scripture never speaks of the Spirit’s generation or origination in the way it speaks of the Son’s. The Spirit is “of God,” “sent,” “poured out,” “given.” All of this is compatible with his being God’s gift rather than God.

Hebrews 1:14 calls angels “ministering spirits sent forth to minister.” If the Spirit is a spirit who is sent to minister, the category is ready to hand.

And the theological worry was serious. If the Spirit is God and is not begotten, what is he? To say that he proceeds while the Son is begotten is to assert a difference without content, unless one can say what the difference is — and no one could. The Pneumatomachians pressed exactly this, and St. Gregory the Theologian’s answer, when it came, was to concede that the difference cannot be stated and to insist on it anyway (Oration 31.8).

The Answer

Four bodies of work answered them, and the argument in all four is fundamentally the same as Athanasius’ argument about the Son.

St. Athanasius, Letters to Serapion (c. 359–361), the first sustained treatment. The argument is soteriological and sacramental: the Spirit is the one in whom we are made partakers of God and by whom we are deified; a creature cannot deify; and baptism is into the Trinity, so that if one of the three is a creature the whole initiation is void (Letters to Serapion I.22–27). Athanasius adds the rule that would govern all later argument: the Spirit belongs to the Son as the Son belongs to the Father, and whatever is said of the Son’s relation to the Father is to be said proportionally of the Spirit’s to the Son.

St. Basil, On the Holy Spirit (375), which argues from the Church’s practice of worship rather than from the vocabulary of essence — treated in the companion file (see Basil’s Reserve and Gregory’s Boldness).

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31, which says outright what the others circled: “Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God” (Oration 31.10; trans. NPNF II/7).

St. Gregory of Nyssa, Against the Macedonians, On the Holy Spirit, and Didymus the Blind, On the Holy Spirit — the latter surviving only in St. Jerome’s Latin translation, and one of the fullest treatments of the period.

A synod at Iconium in 376 under St. Amphilochius condemned the Pneumatomachoi, and the Roman synods under Pope Damasus in the 370s did likewise; the matter was already judged before the ecumenical council met.

The Council of 381

The Second Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople from May to July 381, convened by the Emperor Theodosius I, with about 150 bishops. It was an Eastern council; no Western bishops and no papal legates were present, and it acquired its ecumenical standing by later reception rather than by its original composition (see Ecumenicity and Reception).

Its Canon 1 anathematizes “every heresy, and particularly that of the Eunomians or Anomoeans, the Arians or Eudoxians, the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachi, the Sabellians, the Marcellians, the Photinians, and the Apollinarians” (Constantinople I, 381, Canon 1; trans. NPNF II/14). The council also produced the canon on the precedence of the see of Constantinople, whose separate and contested history belongs elsewhere.

Its dogmatic act was the Creed, in the form the Church has used ever since. The third article, added to the bare clause of 325, reads:

“And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father (τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον), who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified (τὸ σὺν Πατρὶ καὶ Υἱῷ συμπροσκυνούμενον καὶ συνδοξαζόμενον), who spoke through the prophets.”

Four claims are made, and each is aimed. “The Lord” (to Kyrion, neuter, agreeing with Pneuma) places the Spirit on the divine side of the line, since Kyrios is the Septuagint’s rendering of the divine Name. “The Giver of Life” makes him the agent of what only God does. “Who proceeds from the Father” states his relation of origin, in the language of John 15:26, and distinguishes it from the Son’s begetting. “Worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son” settles the practical question: he receives the adoration due to God, which of a creature would be idolatry.

What the Creed Does Not Say

It does not call the Holy Spirit God. It does not call him homoousios. Two explanations are given, and they are not exclusive.

The first is economy. Some thirty-six Pneumatomachian bishops attended the council and withdrew when the Nicene faith was pressed; the milder formulation was, on this reading, a bridge held out to those who might yet be reconciled — a policy consistent with Basil’s own, and Basil had died only two years before.

The second is the principle of scriptural language. Every phrase in the article is drawn from Scripture. The council said of the Spirit exactly what Scripture says and required that he be worshipped, which is the practical equivalent of the dogmatic term without the term.

That the formula was not universally welcome is well attested by the reaction of the man who had done most to press the point. St. Gregory the Theologian, briefly president of the council, resigned from it and from the see of Constantinople, and his later verse and his De vita sua speak with real bitterness of a body he found factious and politically managed, and of a compromise he regarded as an evasion (Gregory the Theologian, De vita sua 1680–1796; Oration 42; see Anastasia and the Council). Conceding this does no damage. The council’s formula proved sufficient, and the Church has read it, from the beginning, as confessing the Spirit’s full divinity — which is what “worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son” means and can only mean.

A Note on the Text

[Disputed: the documentary history of the Creed of 381. The creed we call the Niceno-Constantinopolitan is not preserved in any surviving act of the council of 381; its first attestation as the creed of that council is at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, where it was read out and received. This gap generated a nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly literature: F. J. A. Hort and A. von Harnack proposed that the text was an existing baptismal creed, perhaps of Jerusalem, adopted at or after 381 rather than composed there. J. N. D. Kelly's assessment (*Early Christian Creeds*, 3rd ed., London: Longman, 1972, ch. 10) and A. M. Ritter's monograph (*Das Konzil von Konstantinopel und sein Symbol*, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1965) accept a genuine connection with the council while agreeing that the council worked from existing material rather than composing *de novo*. What is not disputed is the reception: the Church received this text at Chalcedon as the faith of the 150 Fathers, and has confessed it as such ever since.]

The distinction to hold is the one this repository draws elsewhere between documentary history and ecclesial authority. The Creed’s authority rests on its conciliar reception, which is secure; the compositional history is a scholarly question and is reported as one.

What Was Achieved

With 381 the Trinitarian dogma is complete. The Son is homoousios with the Father; the Spirit is Lord and Giver of Life, proceeding from the Father, worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son; the three are one God. Nothing has been added since, and the Church has defined nothing further about the inner life of God. The controversies that follow — Chalcedon, the icons, the Filioque, Palamas — are all consequences, applications, or defences of what was settled by 381.

See Also

References

  • Council of Constantinople I (381). Creed and canons. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion I. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4; also in DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, trans., Works on the Spirit, Popular Patristics 43. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit; Epistles 125, 128, 223, 244. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
  • Gregory the Theologian. Oration 31; Oration 42; De vita sua. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Against the Macedonians, On the Holy Spirit. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5.
  • Didymus the Blind. On the Holy Spirit. Trans. in DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, PPS 43, 2011.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972.
  • Ritter, Adolf Martin. Das Konzil von Konstantinopel und sein Symbol. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1965.
  • Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.