On the Holy Spirit
Basil's treatise and the Trinity completed
The Council of Nicaea settled the question of the Son. It said very little about the Spirit.
The original Nicene Creed of 325 AD ends almost perfunctorily: and in the Holy Spirit. Three words. No elaboration. The councils that followed were consumed with defending the Nicene position on the Son against Arian revision, and the Spirit got left behind.
But a new controversy is brewing. A group called the Pneumatomachi — fighters against the Spirit — is arguing that while the Son may be fully God, the Spirit is a created being, subordinate to the Father and the Son. It is Arianism applied to the third person of the Trinity.
Basil of Caesarea writes a treatise — On the Holy Spirit, addressed to his friend Amphilochius — that provides the theological foundation for what the Council of Constantinople will declare in 381 AD: that the Holy Spirit is Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.
Basil's argument is characteristically both theological and practical: the church worships the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son in its liturgy, in its baptismal formula, in its prayers. The practice of worship contains an implicit theology. The church has always worshipped the Spirit as God. Therefore the Spirit is God.
The liturgy knows things the councils have not yet said.
Basil dies in 379 AD, two years before the council that vindicates his theology. He does not live to see the completed creed that his work made possible.
“The Spirit is not a ministering servant but a Master; not a grace given but a Giver of grace; not sanctified but the Sanctifier.”
— Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 46, c. 375 AD
“However when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak from himself; but whatever things he hears, he will speak. He will declare to you the things that are to come.”
Basil's argument from liturgy is worth dwelling on: the church's worship contains theological knowledge that its formal statements sometimes lag behind.
The believers who prayed to the Spirit, who were baptized in the name of the Trinity, who confessed the Spirit's work in their lives — they knew something about the Spirit's divine status that took decades to articulate in credal form.
The practice often knows before the theology can say.
What does the way your community actually worships — not what it says it believes, but what it does in prayer and song and practice — reveal about what it actually believes?