The Holy Spirit and the Cappadocians

Between Nicaea and Constantinople the controversy shifted from the Son to the Holy Spirit, as the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”) accepted the Son’s divinity but denied the Spirit’s. The Cappadocian Fathers — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa — answered them, defended the Spirit’s full Godhead, and forged the distinction of ousia and hypostasis that made the whole Nicene confession coherent.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

From the Son to the Spirit

The half-century after Nicaea was not a straight road. The council’s homoousios met a long and shifting reaction — outright Arians (“the Son is a creature”), Anomoeans or “Eunomians” (“the Son is unlike the Father”), and a large middle party of Homoiousians (“the Son is like the Father in essence”) who feared homoousios smelled of Sabellianism (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 1977, on the parties; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004). Through the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, and Valens, imperial favor swung against Nicaea; Athanasius was exiled five times; and it seemed for a time, in Jerome’s famous phrase, that “the whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian” (Jerome, Dialogue against the Luciferians 19). The recovery was the work of the Cappadocians, who won over much of the Homoiousian middle by showing that homoousios, rightly understood, did not abolish the distinction of the persons.

As that battle neared resolution, a new front opened. A party — associated with Macedonius, a former bishop of Constantinople, and called Pneumatomachoi, “fighters against the Spirit” (also “Macedonians”) — was willing to confess the Son’s divinity but refused to extend it to the Holy Spirit, treating the Spirit as a creature, a “ministering spirit” (cf. Hebrews 1:14), higher than the angels but not God (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on the Pneumatomachi; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979). The logic of Nicaea now had to be carried through to its end: if the Spirit sanctifies and deifies, and if only God can deify, then the Spirit too must be confessed as God.

Basil: On the Holy Spirit

St. Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote the classic treatment around 375 in his treatise On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto), addressed to Amphilochius of Iconium (Basil, On the Holy Spirit; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; see St. Basil the Great). Basil’s argument moves on two levels. Doctrinally, he shows from Scripture and from the Church’s practice that the Spirit is ranked with the Father and the Son — in the baptismal formula (Matthew 28:19), in the work of sanctification, in the very naming of the Spirit as “holy” by nature and not by participation (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 9–19). Liturgically and by way of Tradition, he appeals to the Church’s worship: the doxology “Glory to the Father with the Son with the Holy Spirit” confesses the Spirit’s equal honor, and the whole unwritten tradition of the Church’s prayer — the sign of the cross, facing east, the baptismal rites — witnesses the Spirit’s Godhead (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66, the celebrated passage on unwritten tradition; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; cf. Orthodoxy: Holy Tradition).

Characteristically, Basil practiced a certain “economy” (oikonomia) of language: in On the Holy Spirit he refrains from bluntly calling the Spirit “God” or “consubstantial” in so many words, preferring to establish the Spirit’s equality of honor and nature by the whole weight of Scripture and worship, so as not to give needless offense and to win the hesitant — a reticence for which he was criticized by more forward Nicenes but which reflects a pastoral strategy of leading the Church to the truth (Basil, Letters 113, 114; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on Basil’s reserve; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979).

Gregory the Theologian: The Fifth Theological Oration

Where Basil was reserved, his friend St. Gregory of Nazianzus — “the Theologian,” a title the Orthodox Church gives to only three — spoke with full boldness. In the Five Theological Orations he delivered at Constantinople in 380, the fifth (Oration 31, On the Holy Spirit) is the classic confession of the Spirit’s divinity (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; see St. Gregory the Theologian). Gregory faces the objection head-on — that Scripture nowhere says in plain words “the Spirit is God” — and answers with a theology of doctrinal development within revelation: the Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly and the Son obscurely; the New proclaimed the Son and hinted at the Spirit; now the Spirit “dwells among us and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself,” so that the full confession of the Spirit’s Godhead is the Spirit’s own gift to the Church in its time (Gregory, Oration 31.26–27). His summary is the enduring formula of Trinitarian faith: “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish the Three than I am carried back into the One” (Gregory, Oration 40.41, On Holy Baptism; cf. Oration 31). And of the Spirit he declares flatly: “Is the Spirit God? Yes. Is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God” (Gregory, Oration 31.10).

The Cappadocian Settlement: One Ousia, Three Hypostaseis

The Cappadocians’ most consequential achievement was terminological, and it healed the deepest wound left by Nicaea. Nicaea had used ousia and hypostasis almost as synonyms (its anathema condemned those who said the Son was “of another hypostasis or ousia”), and this had made homoousios sound, to Eastern ears, dangerously Sabellian — as if Father, Son, and Spirit were one person under three names. The Cappadocians drew a firm distinction: one ousia (essence, what God is, common to the three) and three hypostaseis (persons, the concrete “whos,” the Father, Son, and Spirit) — with hypostasis now clearly distinguished from ousia and paired with the Latin persona/Greek prosōpon (Basil, Letter 214 and Letter 236, distinguishing ousia and hypostasis as common and particular; Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius: On “Not Three Gods”; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vols. 5 and 8; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977, on the Cappadocian settlement). The Godhead is one in being and three in person; the persons are distinguished not by any difference of essence or rank but only by their relations of origin — the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.9). This grammar let the Church hold Nicaea’s homoousios without any taint of modalism, and it is the settled language of Orthodox Trinitarian theology to this day.

The Council of 381

Theodosius I, a convinced Nicene, became emperor in the East in 379 and moved at once to end the Arian ascendancy. He summoned a council of Eastern bishops — about 150 — to Constantinople in 381 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Meletius of Antioch presided first; when he died during the council, Gregory the Theologian, newly installed as bishop of Constantinople, took the chair — only to resign amid disputes over the legitimacy of his see and retire to Cappadocia, so that the council concluded under Nectarius (Gregory’s own bitter account in De Vita Sua [On His Own Life]; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Despite its stormy politics and its purely Eastern composition, the council reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea, condemned the range of contemporary heresies — Eunomians, Arians, Pneumatomachi (Macedonians), Sabellians, Apollinarians — in its first canon, and confessed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, completing the Trinitarian dogma (Council of Constantinople I, 381, canon 1; NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Its creed and canons are treated in the next file. Though only Eastern in its sitting, the council was in time received by the whole Church, and Chalcedon in 451 formally accorded it ecumenical rank, ratifying “the faith of the 150 holy Fathers assembled at Constantinople” (Chalcedon, Definition; NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14) — a textbook case of ecumenicity conferred by later reception rather than by the council’s own composition (see Ecumenicity and Reception).

See Also

References

  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto), esp. 9–19 and 27.66; Letters 113, 114, 214, 236. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 31 (Fifth Theological Oration, On the Holy Spirit); Oration 40.41; De Vita Sua. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. To Ablabius: On “Not Three Gods.” Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5.
  • Council of Constantinople I (381). Canon 1. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Council of Chalcedon (451). Definition (ratifying the faith of the 150 Fathers). NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A&C Black, 1977.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 5.8. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2.