With the eight Article the portion of the Christian Creed in which we directly confess our belief in the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity is concluded. Since the Creed is Trinitarian in its structure, the last four Articles fall under the section of the Holy Ghost but, although they cover matters that are related to the present ministry of the Holy Ghost, they do not expand upon the eighth Article in the same way the third through seventh Articles expand upon the second.
In the
Apostles’ Creed the eighth Article is as simple as possible – Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. Thomas Cranmer’s rendition of this in our Book of Common Prayer is similarly
simple and straightforward – “I believe in the Holy Ghost”. It is in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed
that matters get more complicated, not only because more is said about the Holy
Ghost, but because the Latin version of this Creed, from which our English
version is translated, adds a word that is not there in the Greek original, which
addition broke the fellowship between the Greek and Latin speaking Churches a
thousand years into Church history, which Schism has yet to be healed, but
persists to this day. The Greek version,
most of which was put in the Creed at the First Council of Constantinople for
the Nicene original was simply the equivalent of the Article in the Apostles’
except using the word for “and” rather than “I believe”, is Καὶ εἰς τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον, τὸ Κύριον,
τὸ ζῳοποιόν, τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον, τὸ σὺν Πατρὶ καὶ Υἱῷ
συμπροσκυνούμενον καὶ συνδοξαζόμενον, τὸ λαλῆσαν διὰ τῶν προφητῶν. Here is how the Book of Common Prayer rendition of this would go if it did not include
a translation of the extra word from the Latin version: “And I believe in the
Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father; who
with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified; who
spake by the Prophets.” The actual Book of Common Prayer rendition is “And
I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth
from the Father and the Son; who with
the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified; who spake
by the Prophets.” I have italicized the translation of the additional word in
the Latin, which is Filioque, for
which reason the theological dispute at the heart of the Great Schism is called
the Filioque Controversy.
Before looking more closely at what the Creed says about the
Holy Ghost I should say something about the way the Book of Common Prayer translates the Greek Πνεῦμα and the Latin Spiritus
(1). “Ghost” in English, which is
cognate with the German “Geist” – think “Zeitgeist” or “Spirit of the Age” -
was originally a synonym for spirit that was used for any sort of spirit. In recent centuries its usage has come to be
mostly limited to a certain type of spirit – the spirits of the dead, and
usually more specifically than that, the spirits of the dead manifesting
themselves in some way to the living on earth.
Obviously, when we speak of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity as the
Holy Ghost, it is with the older meaning of the word, not the more recent
narrower meaning. Many, wishing to
avoid potential confusion, prefer to just use “Spirit”, transliterating rather
than translating the Latin. I think that
this exaggerates the potential for confusion and that it is a lazy way of
handling it as it is not difficult at all to explain the older meaning of the
word. Neither rendition is wrong and
whichever you use in no way affects Pneumatology – the doctrine of the Holy Ghost
– of course. My aesthetical and
liturgical preference is for the older term.
It just sounds better, like the “quick” in “the quick and the dead”.
The original Nicene Creed had been composed by the First
Ecumenical Council of the Church which had been convened primarily to deal with
the Arian heresy which pertained to the deity of the Son. The Arian heresy did not just die out after
the Nicene Council and, indeed, there was a period between the First Ecumenical
Council and the Second where it came to predominate. The Arians in this period divided among themselves. Some who continued to hold to Arius’ original
position that Jesus was a created being, a small-g god, came to be known as Anomoeans
from their insistence that Jesus was ἀνομοιος – of a different nature – to God
the Father. Others accepted the Nicene
Creed but altered the word ὁμοούσιον – “being of one substance”, i.e., with the
Father, to ὁμοιούσιον – “being of a similar substance”. These were often called Semi-Arians. In 335 AD they were able to depose the
leading orthodox theologian of the day, St. Athanasius, from his See in
Alexandria. In 342 AD they were able to
have one of their own, Macedonius I, installed as Bishop of
Constantinople. Those who are unsound
on the Second Person of the Trinity are seldom sound on the Third and
Macedonius would lend his name to the heresy of Macedonianism which claimed
that the Holy Ghost was not a Person, nor co-equal and co-eternal with the
Father, but an impersonal force created by the Father, which served the Father and
the Son. The heresy of the Macedonians –
also called Pneumotachi from the Greek for “combatting the Spirit” – was soundly
rebutted by the Cappadocian Fathers, especially St. Basil the Great of Caesarea
and St. Gregory of Nyssa, and one of the main reasons for convening the Second
Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, was to formally condemn the Macedonian
heresy and revise the Nicene Creed to more fully express the orthodox view of
the Holy Ghost.
Everything added to the eighth Article by the First Council
of Constantinople was for the purpose of making plain that the Holy Ghost is a
Person co-equal, co-eternal, and co-substantial with the Father and the Son. The first thing said about Him is that He is
τὸ Κύριον – “The Lord”. As we saw when we looked at the second
Article, this is the word that the translators of the LXX wrote wherever the
Holy Name of God was found in the text, following the Jewish custom of saying the
Hebrew equivalent whenever the text was read aloud, which custom survives in
our Authorized Bible which in most Old Testament instances puts LORD in allcaps
rather than Jehovah where the Name is found.
Each Person of the Trinity is both Lord and God. In St. Paul’s epistles, the Apostle regularly
uses the Greek word for “God” for the Father, and the Greek word for “Lord” for
the Son, but not so consistently or in such a way as to suggest that the Father
is not “Lord” or that the Son is not “God”.
The Fathers who composed the Creed followed the Pauline usage in
declaring there to be “One God” – The Father, and “One Lord” – The Son, Who is “God
of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God”, i.e., equally God with The
Father. Here they have done the same
and declared The Holy Ghost to be equal with the Son and therefore equal with
the Father with Whom the Son is equal by saying of the Holy Ghost that He is
that of which the Son is the One.
The next phrase, τὸ ζῳοποιόν,
“the Giver of Life” is in this Article the functional equivalent of “Maker of
heaven and earth” in the first Article and “through whom all things were made”
in the second. It affirms the Holy
Ghost’s role in Creation. Just as St.
John’s Gospel, in declaring that it was through the Word (the Son) that all
things were made pointed back to the first chapter of Genesis where God creates
everything by speaking – i.e., “Let there be light” – so when St. John records
Jesus saying “It is the Spirit that quickeneth” (Jn. 6:63), “quickeneth”
meaning “gives life”, this points back to the second chapter of Genesis where
God “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living soul”. (v. 7). The words for “spirit” in the Biblical
languages are the same words that mean “breathe” and “wind”.
This brings us to the controversial, Schism-generating,
section of the Article. Before delving
into the rightness or wrongness of the filioque
let us consider what the conciliar Fathers were getting at by borrowing the
language of procession here from Jn. 15:26.
The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is that the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost are Three Persons, each distinct from the Others – The Father is not the
Son nor the Holy Ghost, the Son is not the Father or the Holy Ghost, the Holy
Ghost is neither the Father nor the Son – Who are co-equal, co-eternal, and
co-substantial, each of Whom is fully God rather than a part of God, but Who are
One God, not Three Gods. We being
finite beings, constrained by the limits of Creation, cannot fully grasp God,
Who is infinite and outside Creation, but the closest we have to an understanding
of how One God is Three distinct Persons, is that the essence of God – that which
makes God God – is something the Father has of Himself, which He eternally
shares with the Son and the Holy Ghost so that it is the Father’s divine
essence, not a duplicate copy, that the Son and the Holy Ghost each possess,
and that this sharing or communication of essence eternally occurs through the
process, for lack of a better word, by which the Son is distinguished in Person
from the Father, and the Holy Ghost is distinguished in Person from the other
Two Persons. Now, the process by which
the Son is distinguished from the Father, and through which the Father’s divine
essence is communicated to the Son so that the Father and Son are distinct
Persons, but the same God, is called Eternal Generation, a term that refers to
a father’s begetting a son, which is eternal in this case because there never
was a moment before which the Son existed when the Father did not have a
Son. Clearly, since the Son is the
Only-Begotten Son of the Father, the process by which the Holy Ghost is
distinguished in Person and the divine essence is communicated with Him is not
Generation but something else. The Creedal
term for this is procession.
Theologians also use the term “Spiration”. The purpose of this term is to express the
Scriptural idea of the Holy Ghost as the “Breathe of God”. Again, the ideas of spirit, breathe, and
wind – invisible forces that are seen in their visible effects in the world – are
expressed by the same words in the ancient languages. Jesus said “God is a Spirit: and they that
worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (Jn. 4:24). Now if God is a Spirit, and gives life to
the man He created out of the dust by breathing into him, what else could this
Breathe of the God Who is a Spirit be, but a Spirit Who is God?
In the original Greek of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed
it says that the Holy Ghost is He: τὸ ἐκ
τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον – “who proceedeth from the Father”. This is exactly what Jesus said of Him in
Jn. 15:26. Does that mean that the
Latin Church fell into heresy by adding Filioque – “and the Son”?
The Eastern Church certainly answers this question with a
strong affirmative. Certainly the Latin
Church erred in terms of protocol. The
original Nicene Creed had been composed by a General Council, the revised
Nicene-Constantinopolitan version that we usually just call the Nicene Creed
today was revised by the same type of Council with the same authority. To further amend the Creed the way the Latin
Church did should have been done through another General Council, but it was
not. That does not make the addition
heretical. Nor does the fact that there
is no “and the Son” in Jn. 15:26, because there is no “only” in Jn. 15:26
either.
What we in the West don’t always understand well about the
Eastern Church’s position regarding the Filioque is that the serious error they
accuse us of is more about the Father than the Holy Ghost. They place a strong emphasis upon the Father’s
being the sole source of the divine essence shared by the Trinity. None of the Three Persons had a beginning,
but the Son and the Holy Spirit both receive the divine nature of the Father
from the Father. Think of how the Quicumque Vult puts it:
Pater a nullo est
factus: nec creatus, nec genitus. Filius a Patre solo est: non factus, nec
creatus, sed genitus. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio: non factus, nec
creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens.
In the Book of Common
Prayer this reads:
The Father is made of
none: neither created, nor begotten.
The Son is of the
Father alone: not made, nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Ghost is of
the Father and of the Son: neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but
proceeding.
Although this is the Western framework the point that the
Eastern Church places so much emphasis on still comes across here – The Father
is God of Himself and no one else, the Son and the Holy Ghost are God and as
God, like the Father are neither made nor created, but they are both of the
Father, Who alone is of Himself alone.
The Eastern Church thinks that the Western Church has detracted from
this by saying that the Holy Ghost proceeds from both the Father and the Son.
I do not think the Eastern Church, as much respect for her
as I have, is right on this, for two reasons.
The first is that as just noted, the Father’s uniqueness in the Trinity
as the Sole Person Whose deity has no source in any Person other than Himself comes
across strongly in the text just cited from the Athanasian Creed, which is
clearly well within the Western tradition with its Filioque. The second is that Procession, when used of
the Holy Ghost in discussing intra-Trinity relationships, is clearly the same
thing as Spiration. Think of the Second
Person of the Trinity. He is the
Eternal Son of God. He is also the
Eternal Word of God. When we speak of
Him as God’s Eternal Son we use the word Generation to describe how He was
Eternally Begotten of the Father. We
could also, if we wished, describe Him as the Word as being Eternally Spoken of
the Father. For some reason we don’t
usually talk about Him that way but we would be well within Biblical orthodoxy
if we were to do so. We would not say,
however, that Jesus being Eternally Spoken as the Word is different from His
being Eternally Generated as the Son. If
someone were to try and claim that we would recognize immediately that he was
speaking an absurdity. The most we would
say is that His being Eternally Spoken and Eternally Begotten are two different
aspects of the same thing. The same
thing is true of Procession and Spiration with regards to the Holy Ghost. In the twentieth chapter of the Gospel
according to St. John, the Resurrected Jesus tells His disciples – except St.
Thomas who was not present on the occasion - that as the Father sent Him, so He
was sending them. Then St. John
records:
And when he had said
this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
(v. 22)
In this verse the Son clearly breathes out the Holy Ghost
upon His disciples. If the Holy Ghost
can be said to be breathed out by the Son as by the Father, then He proceeds
from the Father and the Son, for Procession and Spiration are the same.
In recent dialogue between the East and West it has come out
that the wording “Who proceeds from the Father through the Son” would be more acceptable to the East than the Filioquue
as it currently stands. Whether having
found a wording that is acceptable to both sides will eventually end the Controversy
and heal the thousand year Schism remains to be seen.
In the remainder of the Article, we confess the equality of
the Holy Ghost with the Father and Son – “with the Father and the Son together
He is worshipped and glorified” and His Old Testament ministry “Who spake by
the prophets”.
We shall discuss His New Testament ministry when we turn to
the next and ninth Article about the Church.
For now, let us close by saying that for sixteen centuries, all the
ancient orthodox Churches – Greek, Latin, Middle Eastern – have confessed their
faith in the Holy Ghost, co-equal, co-eternal, and co-substantial with the
Father and the Son, in the words of the Article we have just looked at, and for
the past five centuries the orthodox Churches of the Reformation have done the
same. In the last century we have seen
the rise of new enthusiasts who have accused all Christians prior to them of
not teaching the Holy Ghost because these Christians of long ago believed that
Christianity was about Jesus Christ and not about exciting experiences, signs,
miracles, wonders, personal revelation, falling on the floor, barking like a
dog, raising millions of dollars on television to waste on vanity projects and
the like. Clearly these accusations against
past generations of orthodox Christians are false.
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