I was invited to give The Pallium Lecture, in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, as part of a larger conference entitled “Synods, Councils and Creeds”. The Conference was designed to help celebrate the 1700 anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The text of the lecture is given below, entitled “Inviting Nicaea to Speak.” I am grateful for the gracious welcome I received from the people of the Archdiocese. (The references cited in the talk are listed at the end of the text.)
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Inviting Nicaea to Speak
+Daniel E Flores, STD
Bishop of Brownsville
For a Christian there is a kind of lectio divina that attends to history, just as their is one attending to the Sacred Text of Scripture. Like the Lectio of Scripture it is marked by an attending to the letter, the historical events, and never prescinding completely from them. History is populated by the realism of things done and said, the human acta that are in some way visible to us. This aspect keeps history from being easily malleable to our will. We cannot make it mean and say what we want. By attending to the littera Nicaea is open to being understood, to helping us rise to a consideration of the truth of things perceived as a larger whole.
For our limited purposes this evening I would like to look at Nicaea not simply as a Council of the Church that took place in 325, but as a time-frame event of roughly 56 years, beginning with the eruption of the Arian controversy around 318, and culminating in the work of the Council of Constantinople in 381. Between the articulation of the homoousion of the Son at Nicaea and the elaboration of the Holy Spirit’s With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified at Constantinople, a great deal was fought over, clarified, agreed to, canonized, and set in motion.
Fifty-six years is a brief time, brief like a human life. It is roughly the time span between us and the Second Vatican Council. The lectio of history causes us to ask questions. I think, though, we should try to let the lectio of Nicaea speak to us, like a peripheral parishioner who will never speak unless asked. We should even let this parishioner question us about our current presumptions and preoccupations. I will gesture gently to some of the questions Nicaea might ask us, but will mostly leave the questions for you to hear, think, and pray about. In the current context, this seems a synodal way to proceed.
1 The Only Begotten Son.
The presenting controversies that led to Nicaea originated in Alexandria around the year 318 when the Patriarch Alexander of Alexandria condemned the teaching of a priest in Alexandria by the name of Arius. The gist of what Arius taught is sketchily known, but it is safe to say he wrote disapprovingly of what the Patriarch Alexander taught concerning the Godhead.
Essentially, for Alexander the relation between Father and Son is an eternal one. As long as there was the Father there was his eternally begotten Son. (Ayres pos 361). God is called Father because he eternally begets the Son. It was this eternal Son who became flesh so as to lead us back to the glory he shares with the Father since before the world began.
Athanasius was a deacon in Alexandria, an advisor to the Patriarch. He wrote the treatise On the Incarnation around 318. He makes no mention of Arius, so he likely wrote it before the teaching of Arius became prominent. The treatise, therefore, is a good indicator of what the Church in Alexandria, under the Patriarch Alexander, taught as received tradition about the Son. In On the Incarnation we hear the young deacon-theologian say things like this: … to change the corruptible to incorruption was proper to none other than the Savior Himself, Who in the beginning made all things out of nothing; that only the Image of the Father could re-create the likeness of the Image in men,(On the Incarnation 20).
The text is a pre-Arian witness to a soteriological context for understanding the work of the Son, and for perceiving the identity of the Son. What Athanasius says as a matter of course reveals a tradition of teaching about the Son’s relation to the Father. The “in the beginning he made all things out of nothing” of the Son places him decidedly on the side of the eternal Godhead of the Father. Athanasius is not arguing the point, he is using what he considers a given of the faith to make a related but different point, namely that it was fitting the Son should come in the flesh to restore creation.
Arius, we know, declined to count the Son / Word of the Father as eternal and divine in the same way as God the Father who sent him. For Arius the first creative act of the Father is the Son, created spiritual reflection of the Father’s glory. It was this created reflection who became flesh in the womb of the Virgin. Thus, the famous catch-phrases of Arius and of his varied supporters afterwards were simply, “There was a time when he was not”, and “he is not the same” as the Father.
The phrase “He is not the same”, surely meant two things primarily: that the Son is not the Father, and (consequently) since the Father is the only eternal God, the Son must be something other and less than that. The argument proposes a straightforward claim of metaphysical verity. It can’t be otherwise. If the Son is not the Father, and the Father is the One True God, then the Son must be something else. If the Son is the Only-Begotten from the Father, as Scripture says, then the Begetter is the eternal unbegotten, and the begetting of the Son was a creative act on God’s part. Only of the True God, the Father, can it be said “there never was a time when he was not”. Despite the enchanting logic of this way of describing the Mystery, it presents a sad confesión of faith, because from eternity, God the Father Almighty was alone.
Arius was willing to say the WORD, prior to his enfleshment in the womb of the Virgin, was divine in a participated sense, as much like God as a created thing can be, but created nonetheless. To speak otherwise, Arius would say, is to introduce into the eternal and simple Godhead a principle of modality: sometimes the One God acts as Father, sometimes as Son or as Spirit. The catch-word for diverse modalities in the Godhead is Sabellianism, which had been condemned in the previous century as an erroneous account of what the Scriptures teach and what the Church believes. Sabellianism is related to the abhorrent claim of the Patripassionists, that the Godhead suffered the Cross, since for them the difference between the Father and the Son is in name only.
So much of doctrinal development is about clarifying first what the church cannot say: by all accounts scriptural and traditional, we can never say the Father suffered and rose from the dead. Or that the Father and the Son are the same such that what happens to the Son happens to the Father also. We do say the Father accepts the gift offered by the enfleshed Son. Arius thought his Patriarch Archbishop was a Sabellian without the name. Because if the Son is True God like the Father is, and there can be no difference within the Godhead of the One God, then by what logic can the Incarnational mysteries be said not to involve the passio of the Father?
The structure of human thought creaks when looking for ways to describe the identity and works of the God revealed in Christ and testified to in Scripture. Arius and his later defenders were not unintelligent; but they could not see a way, or find the words, to preserve the teaching about “One God creator of heaven and earth” while speaking of an eternal Son, not the Father, within the Godhead.
2 Of Synods and Councils
Probably in 320, Alexander of Alexandria called what could be described as a local synod of the Church of Alexandria. He prepared a profession of the Trinitarian faith of the Church, which Arius refused to sign (Ayres 285). By 324 Alexander had convoked various synods of local bishops within the territory of Egypt and Libya to meet and address the doctrinal discord caused by Arius’ teaching. During this same time period, Arius went to Palestine and the environs of Antioch to seek support, which he found. Supporters of Arius’ teaching included the bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea. Rival synodal gatherings were convened, supporting Arius and disavowing the decisions of the synods previously held within the ecclesial sphere of Alexandria.
These competing synods occasioned the taking of sides by many bishops who were previously unaware of the problem stirring in Alexandria. A dispute of this type in Alexandria had effects far and wide because Alexandria was a great Church, an Apostolic Church, recognized at that time as second in ecclesiastical precedence only to the Church of Rome.
The custom was that once a Synodal action involving bishops of a province or region took place, letters are sent to the bishops of the other major sees, Rome being the first, asking that their decisions be recorded and recognized in their Churches. After the local and regional Synods Alexander sent letters to the other churches, including Rome. Meanwhile, once the synods at Nicodemia and elsewhere took place, supporters of Arius sent letters of their own to the other churches. If recognition was given to the decisiones of local synods, then the Churches were in Communion with one another; if not, communion was ruptured, at least until the matter was straightened out in some way. By 324 a serious rupture of communion between the Churches was underway.
It is important to note that concomitant to the central Christological issue in dispute, there is also an inextricably connected ecclesiological practice being enacted. The communion of the Churches was an indispensable good presumed throughout the controversies leading to Nicaea and after. As the Church sweated to resolve the Christological issue, it did so because the communion of the Churches had to be maintained. The Church could not address what we believe about the Christ without also manifesting in actu how the Catholicity of the Church is lived, expressed and verified.
Further, it is singularly significant that the first great affirmation of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, (as the Church describes herself in the Creed at Constantinople), is about the faith of the Church in Christ. The Communion within the Catholic Church is inseparably a matter of communion of the faith professed in the local Churches in Christ: faith in who Christ is, in what he does for us, and how we relate through him to one another and to the Father.
The actions of local synods were a vital way of addressing these issues affecting the communion of the Church. The controversial local synods leading to Nicaea witness to the fact that the Christological faith of the Church is embedded and expressed in the life and communion of the local Churches. Taken as a whole, synodal gatherings prepared the ground for the vehicles of the Church’s more universal judgement about the content of our communion in Christ. Still, we could not have gotten to Nicaea without having heard from the synods. It is also true that on matters touching upon the communion of the Catholic Church, the decisions of the local synods eventually yielded to the decisions of two General Councils whose actions were recognized by the See of Rome.
After 325, while the Niceneprofession of faith was being disputed and defended, the question of the Spirit imposed itself on the Catholic communion almost immediately by a kind of theological necessity. This necessity is based on the lived experience of the Church. We relate to Christ in the Spiritto the Father. The dynamic of salvation in Christ and the communion of the Church in Christis at the same time a manifestation of the Spirit’s mission and identity. Elaborating upon the work of the Spirit while clarifying the identity of the Son is like noticing the air we breathe as we behold a sunrise: we wouldn’t be able to see the one without receiving the life sustained by the other.
3 A Work of Translation
In 325 Emperor Constantine issued invitations to the bishops of the Church to a Council to settle the festering dispute about what the Church believes concerning the Father and the Son. Constantine’s letters inviting the bishops to come to Nicaea, not far from the newly establish imperial seat in Constantinople. The pope in Rome, Sylvester, sent two priests as his delegates, pleading failing health as the reason he could not attend in person. We have every reason to believe that the Bishop of Rome was fully aware of the issues at stake and was engaged through his delegates. The Greek speaking bishops greatly outnumbered the Latin Westerners at Nicaea. There were also Syriac speaking bishops there from Persia and Mesopotamia. Thus, in addition to Greek, Latin and Syriac were also spoken at Nicaea. The emperor Constantine, it is reported, gave his opening address to the bishops at Nicaea in Latin (Davis 58).
There was a bishop by the name of Ossius who was present at a regional synod of Antioch held just a few months before Nicaea (Ayres, pos 300 ff). He had signed his recognition of its decisions condemning Arius’ teaching. Ossius is an interesting figure. He was a personal advisor to the Emperor Constantine, a bishop of Córdoba, from the Western part of the empire, in modern day Spain. Constantine, it is good to remember, knew a lot of people in the West. He had been emperor in the West since 312, and did not consolidate his rule in the East until 324. Ossius had connections to Rome and was likely Constantine’s primary line of contact with Pope Sylvester. Ossius was fluid in Greek and Latin, and indications are he had a good understanding of what the Alexandrian controversies implied. He is a one of those bridge figures that quietly play a role in making things move along. He actually presided at Nicaea, and he, together with the two Roman priest-delegates sent by the pope, were the first to sign the acta of the Council at Nicaea (Davis, 57).
We should be careful, therefore, not read back into this time period the linguistic, cultural and theological estrangement between East and West that developed later. In the fourth Century knowledge of Greek was not lost in the West. This was the century of Ambrose, who knew Greek quite well, and had connections in the East. It is also the time of Jerome and Hilary of Potiers, equally conversant in both Latin and Greek culture. Jerome was translating Didymus the Blind into into Latin while Didymus was still alive. Neither was knowledge of Latin or Syriac lost in the East.
We can be sure that while the decisive terms of the Nicene profession were being hammered out in Greek, the Latins and Persians and Mesopotamians were simultaneously translating the terms in their heads and in letters. Thus, for example, the Latin translation of homoousion as consubstantialem was contemporaneous to the Council itself.
The issue of translation is not a secondary one. One can describe the very mystery of the Inarnation of the WORD as God’s self-translation to us. Translation has to do with more than finding equivalent words. Words seek to transmit understandings. They express thought patterns flowing through literature and culture. Nicaea was possible as an achievement of communion in the midst of controversy in great part because polycultural polylingualism was not rare in the 4th Century.
But it is not just a matter of tracing translations across linguistic and cultural contexts, it is also a deeper matter of how people, and Christians in particular, in late antiquity traveled, listened, and learned from each other in simple human ways. People heard things, translated things in their head, remembered things, copied things, sang things, and moved about more than we know. We hardly have a clue as to the dimensions of this aspect of the Church’s transmission of the faith across language and culture before, during and after the Council of Nicaea.
4 The Baptismal Faith
Prior to Nicaea, handing on faith in the Most Holy Trinity was an essential aspect of the Church’s practice when initiating catechumens, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. No baptized person denied the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
What we know today as the Apostles’ Creed is based on earlier creedal forms in use in Rome and Jerusalem. These in turn formed the basis of baptismal catechesis in the Greek, Latin and Syriac speaking Churches.The Catechumens were given the Trinitarian baptismal profession of faith, and they were required to profess it back from memory, often to the bishop, prior to baptism. As de Lubacargues, there is no sound historical reason to think there was an intermediate, non-Trinitarian baptismal usage emerging from the age of the Apostles, prior to the Trinitarian form we know from ancient times. (See de Lubac, The Christian Faith, 71ff).
The Arian problem, however, brought to the fore the question about what we mean when making the baptismal profession of faith. The broader issue is what the Churches intentionally understand about the relation of the Three in light of the Church’s equally firm profession of faith in one God, summarized in the phrase common to the most ancient Baptismal creeds: “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty”.
Thus, the Nicene Creed is formulated for its moment atop the earlier baptismal creeds of the Churches. And these reflected the baptismal traditions of the Churches, and their inescapably Trinitarian Structure. Notably, Nicaea marks the first time a creedal statement takes center stage as a way of assuring the communion of faith, not of catechumens, but of the bishops themselves. The Creed of Nicaea affirms by each phrase what the bishops agreed was a recognizable expression of the faith handed down from the Apostles to the Churches, and what is taught in the Scriptures rightly understood.
This does not mean that the earlier creeds in use within local churches for the liturgical rites were no longer used (See Ayres pos 1404-1407). Nor is it the case that the form of the Nicene profession was initially perceived by even the participants in the Council of 325 as possessing the stature and authority it came to gather over time. This growing stature was built up through the confirming gestures of Constantinople I, the Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon and beyond (Ayres pos 1407 ff).
5 The Christological Confession
The text of the Nicene Creed is itself predominantly a positive statement of faith. The decisive articulations that address the problem of Arius and his supporters are found where the baptismal creed phraseology is expanded upon. It is mostly a series of affirmative assertions about what we can rightly say : And We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only begotten of the Father, that is of the being of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came into existence,.. (Ayres, pos 319).
Nicaea itself used the term ousia (substance / being) twice in its formula. The first time is when it says only-Begotten of the Father, that is, from the substance of the Father. This phrase is not retained at Constantinople I. At Nicaea it renders emphatic that the Only-begotten is of the same God-reality as God the Father. This is reinforced by saying he was not made, or created. The Son does not flow from the creative act alluded to in the profession about God the Father, maker of heaven and earth. The Son is not a created Son, but he is the begotten Son, generated within the eternity of the Father. The Creed makes no attempt to explain how this can be. This is a profession, not a treatise. The Son is not less God than God. The clear line enunciated between the created order and God places the Son as having an origin, a begetting, on the God side of things. And there is only One God.
The Faith professed in the Creed goes on to add that he is of the same substance, homoousios / consubstantialem to the Father. He is from the Father, with the Father in the eternity of the divine being. The Father is not Father because he created and adopted the WORD. He is Father of the Son from eternity.
Thus the Son is professed and announced in the dynamic of the divine internal relations. The Creed of Nicaea does not offer a metaphysical term of similar weight to ousia to name in what way the Son is not the Father. There is no word agreed upon at Nicaea for the particularity of the relations between Father and Son. In the canons of Nicaea there is a specific rejection of speaking about a distinct hypostasis, in the generation of the Son. The intention here is to rule out a use of hypostasis in a sense that suggests a different ousia / substance. So in 325 we have not yet reached a point of speaking about hypostasis/ prosopon/ persona as a settled way of naming the distinctions within the Trinity.
There were energetic theological efforts after Nicaea dedicated to finding an acceptable language, a counter-weight word of sorts to substance, to name the distinct identities of the Father and the Son. The specification of hypostasis in the later writings of Basil the Great, Gregory Nanzianzus and Gregory of Nyssa amounts to a purification and baptism of the word Nicaea had disavowed. They were able to do so by carving out a specific sense of the word, one aiming at naming the reciprocal dynamic relations that constitute distinct identities within the Godhead (see Maspero, Metaphysics, 141 ff).
Before the Cappodocian chiseling of the language of hypostasis, the Creed at Nicaea lets the prepositions carry the weight of the relationships internal to God. The Son is from the Father, as God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. The from presupposes that the Son is in the Father, with the Father. The intimacy of the Johannine prologue is implicit here: The Word was with God. The adoption of ousia/substantia language does not mean we know what the substance or being of God actually is. We don’t. Substance is the best stand-in word available for whatever the uncreated life of the One God is. We don’t really know how the hypostases are either; but we can truly name them as distinct within the One God. (See Maspero, Metaphysics, 82 ff and Ayres, pos 2421 ff, and 3078 ff.)
The Creed presumes that the ecclesial practice of initiation through baptism involves being swept into something bigger than we are. Conversion is not a moral code we adopt, nor an intellectual system we buy into. It is a going into a new, un-anticipated life, ungenerated by us. Once there, with the help of Scripture, we name what we live, but do not fully see. Along this line, there is a fittingness to the grammatical decision in the Creed to use the accusative case and not the ablative in the Greek and Latin texts, when saying Credo in unum Deum, … in unum Dominum Jesum Christum … in Spritum Sanctum. We are reborn into a mystery the dimensions of which we can only begin to glimpse once we have been brought into it. Christ is God from, who is sent as God towardus at the Incarnation.
Our being reborn from above is actually a being brought into the life of the Son born from the Father before all ages. Ourbaptismal identity rests on the faith professsed at Nicaea: we are invited and adopted participants in the eternal filiation of the Son. Being children of God by grace of Christ in the Spirit is of an entirely different order when compared to being God’s children at our creation.
6 The Triple reference to Creation
Taking into view the elaborations included at Constantinople in 381, we should condider the fact that all three Trinitarian sections of the Creed make references to the creative act of the Triune God. The Father is Maker of heaven and earth… The Son through whom all things were made,… The Spirit Lord and giver of life.
First of all, the Father is origin of the Eternal Trinitarian dynamic and origin of the creative act. The Father acts through the Son. The through whom all things are made implies the speaking dynamic within God referenced in Genesis: God said let there be light. And the through whom of the Son carries implied also the Psalms and wisdom literature that expand the sense of the WORD as issuing from God, and creative in itself.
The Creed makes no explicit reference to the WORD as title of the Son. This is all the more noteworthy because the Scriptural expositions that accompany the Trinitarian controversies before and after Nicaea are saturated with references to the interpretation of the Gospel of John, particularly the Prologue.
How to understand this? There is deliberate tendency at Nicaea and Constantinople to preserve the structure and content of the baptismal creeds, and of the Baptismal formula (See Ayres pos 4149 ff ). The title WORD, after all, is not invoked at the moment of baptism. Nicaea shows us that when the Church seeks to clarify an aspect of the transmitted faith, the instinct is not to change the received wording any more than the immediate issue requires. Thus older formulations continue in use but our understanding of them is specified. We still use the Apostles’ Creed, the older formulation, yet Nicaea informs how we rightly understand the earlier forms of profession.
The creedal formulation indicates that the title Son remains primary. This is an exegetical indicator on how to read the Johannine usage of both terms, Son and WORD. The term Logos / Verbum has a long prior history in philosophical circles. It is thus prone to interpretation along different lines, including that of an impersonal emanation, or as a participated creation of a more neo-platonic stripe. Scripturally, Son names more clearly a distinct personal relation within the Father. Through the right reading of the Johannine word Son, the Johannine word WORD, is rightly estimated.
With reference to the Spirit, Lord, giver of life, inGenesis it says “he breathed life into the clay”. The breath of God is associated to the Spirit. This usage is developed in the Psalms, like 147, 18, where it says He sends forth his word and it melts them; at the blowing of his breath the waters flow. And so the phrase Giver of life at Constantinople specifies a particular aspect of the Spirit’s work at creation.
There was discussion among the Cappadocians after Nicaea about the appropriateness of the phrase Life from Life as a parallel to the phrases God from God, light from light, true God from true God (See Maspero, Filioque 131-134). Gregory of Nyssathought it was a true phrase, but easily given to a purely physical understanding, tied as it is to breath and the physical life it sustains. In his Catechetical Instruction (Part 1, no, 3)Gregory of Nyssa puts it this way, citing Psalm 36,6 in the LXX version: By the Word of the Lord,” it says, “the heavens were established, and by the Spirit of his mouth all their host.” By what kind of “word” and what kind of “spirit”? For the Word is not a saying, nor is the Spirit mere breathing.
Throughout the controversies, the Cappodocian Fathers were working to purify our use of language away from physicalist understandings. And so, while true when properly understood (spiritually understood), such phraseology as Life from Life was not used in creedal elaboration of the Spirit. Still, the phrase Lord, giver of life, is a nod in that direction (See Ayres, pos 5618ff).
This triple reference to Creation in the Creed witnesses to an important theological perception that reached classic theological form during the years after Nicaea, namely the describing of the unity of God’s action ad extra. The Trinity acts as One with respect to creation. The Father creates, the Son creates, the Spirit creates: there is One Creator (See Ayres’ discussions at pos 4484).
7 The Spirit an d the Life of Glory
The phrase Giver of Life associated to the Spirit also expansively includes the giving of the new life, that is, access to the life of God himself in and through Christ. The Crucified Christ breathes out his Spirit from the Cross; the Risen Christ breathes forth the Spirit on the Church. God is life, we participate in it, by the Spirit: He breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20,22).
On this point, Athanasius and the Cappodician Fathers after Nicaea unfailingly link together the work of the Son and the Spirit in accomplishing our salvation. The language they use to describe how the Spirit and Word act in us is particularly careful and instructive. Our age tends to speak soppily of these things, and by doing so might unintentionally suggest that the Son and the Spirit are independent actors on our behalf. So, listen for a moment to Athanasius (to Sarapion 1.19.4), from a text dating from the 350’s:
But when we are enlightened in the Spirit, it is Christ who enlightens us in him. For it says: He was the true Light who enlightens every man coming into the world [Jn 1.9]. And again, the Father is the Fountain and the Son is called the River, and so we are said to drink of the Spirit. For it is written: we were all made to drink of the one Spirit [1 Cor 12.13]. But when we drink of the Spirit, we drink of Christ. For they drank of the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ [1 Cor 10.4].
This perception of the intimate and inseparable interrelation between the mission of the Son and the mission of the Spirit is an enduring aspect of the Catholic Faith, and its articulation during the period of Nicaea is both a gift and safeguard to us. Thinking with Nicaea on this point specifically can help us approach more profoundly the relation between Truth and Love in the life of the Church. This is so because the relation between truth and love in the life of grace is rooted in the prior relation between the Son and the Spirit together in the Godhead: distinct but never competitive or apart.
The action of the WORD and the Spirit in concert on our behalf aims to enfold us within the Glory of the Triune God. Around 374, 50 years after Nicaea and 6 years before the Council of Constantinople, Basil the Great wrote a work entitled On the Holy Spirit. Early on he mentions that the enemies of the Holy Spirit criticize him for the two doxologies he permitted for use in his Diocese of Caesarea. In one formula used at Caesarea the people sing: Glory to the Father, with the Son, together with the Holy Spirit. In another formula the Church in Caesarea sings: Glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit etc is sung. (See Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit,Ch 1, no. 3 ff). Here again, the prepositions are crucial for they speak of relation: to, with, through, together with. Over the course of several chapters, Basil defends the usage of the two different formulas as expressive of right faith and as traditional. Basil’s work is a reminder that liturgical useage in the church is never far from these controversies.
Just as the initiation rites culminating in baptism carried an ecclesial sense of the faith prior to the explicitation of Nicaea, so the traditional doxologies carried an implicit sense of how to account for the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. As he presents the full divinity of the Spirit as the traditional understanding of the Churches, Basil carefully focuses on the Scriptural prepositions and those used in the doxologies to speak of the Spirit.
What you will notice in the two doxological formulas referred to by Basil is their fairly close formulaic resemblance to two forms of doxology present in the tradition of the Roman Liturgy. The first is like when we say Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. The second is like what we have said since antiquity at the conclusion of the collect prayers in the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours. The collect prayer is directed ordinarily to the Father and concludes with through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen
The first doxogy in both Basil’s Church and in the Roman Rite announces to whom Glory belongs. The second form of the doxology announces basically how God has acted on our behalf such that we have learned the Mystery of to whom Glory belongs. Salvation is From the Father, through the Christ, in the Holy Spirit to us.Our doxology is thus directed back by the same path, in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. We have been taught of the True God, to whom we offer glory. The theological shorthand that distinguishes between these two kinds of doxologies is the distinction between praise of the Godhead in itself (the immanent Trinity), and the Godhead as acting in time on our behalf (the economic Trinity). Theologians subsequent to Nicaea take this distinction as given, but it was the work of Athanasius and the Cappodocians after Nicaea on the way to Constantinople that hammered it out in the defense of the teaching that the Spirit is in himself as fully of the same God- substance as the Father and the eternally generated Son
And with the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified is a statement about the immanent Trinity. Yet it rests on the prior instructive action of God. We can glorify the Triune Godhead because we do so in the Spirit through the Son back to the Father. Really, we can only glorify God by being in the God we glorify, and this means being in the Spirit. To be in the Spirit is already to be, in some real way, within the Godhead (See Maspero, Filioque, 140 ff).
This kind of human movement towards the glorification of the Godhead is an ascesis of truth and love, of truth in love, of Christ in the Spirit, moving us to intensify our participation in God’s own inner life. Thus the work of the economic Trinity leads us to our life of participation in the immanent Trinitarian relations within the One God.
One way of looking at this aspect of the work of the Son and the Spirit is to ask: What does the faith in what God has done for us in Christ say to us about the God who gives the gift of Christ the Son? St Bernard is a spokesman for the importance of this question in the Western monastic tradition: We move from loving God for what he does for us, up, to loving and knowing God in himself. The love moves us, and grants glimpses of sapiential perception into the truths of faith.
8 Toward the Final Ascent
The center of God’s action on our behalf is the self-emptying of the Son made flesh. We apprehend its meaning through the Spirit who enlightens us to perceive the love manifested in the gift given. The Spirit draws us into this Christ and transforms us at the center of the revelation which is the Crucified flesh of the Son (see Catechetical Discourse, Part 3, 32. 4-11). Here we learn in the Spirit that the glory of the Son consists in giving himself to the Father for our sakes. This is the pivotal point, the rendering accesible to us of an entry into the self-donating fullness of God. Dios no sabe otra cosa menos darse, as St John of Ávila says somewhere; God doesn’t know anything other than to give himself.
Our participations in Christ are a work of the Spirit and take us through Christ to the Father, who with the Son and in the Spirit is adored and glorified. Ascetical ascent is eschatological ascent, an intensified participation in the uncreated love whose inner life is pure fullness through self-donation (See Maspero, Metaphysics, 43 ff).
The Father pours himself out into the Son without losing the fullness of himself. And the Son by the Spirit pours himself back to the Father without losing his fullness as Son. This he does from eternity, and by becoming flesh he translates the mystery of the pure gratuitous giving of God into a language we can understand at least well enough to begin to learn it better. And the Spirit, in ways even more mysterious, is agent and recipient of the self-donating fullness that is the reciprocal self-donation of the Father and the Son. In the Trinity not One possesses what is not also ecstatically give away (See Athanasius to Serapion 1.30.4 ff).
The sources of the Church’s identity and mission lie within the Trinitarian life of God, precisely because the Church participates in this life by grace, in the Spirit. The rationes of our communion, our mission, and our eschatological finality are to be sought in nothing less than the Trinitarian life. If I had another hour to speak to you, I would try to point toward how the self-donating life of the Trinity is impressed upon the Church as the proper form of her communion. The Father is the Fountain and the Son is called the River, and so we are said to drink of the Spirit, as Athanasius says.This communion in the river of the Son moves us by the Spirit to pour out from ourselves to those who have not known the Self-Giving God revealed in Christ; pouring out from ourselves also to the poor and to the vulnerable, to those who cannot repay us. For the self-donation that is the Trinitarian life is given to us not for ourselves to possess, but for us to give away in whatever way we can, so as to begin to possess. If the River does not flow out of us, then it can never really fill us. But, I will leave these indications for your own lectio and consideratio going forward.
Thank you for your patience,
+df
+Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Works Referenced in the lecture:
Athanasius, On the Incarnation: Translated by a Religious of CSMV, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
Athanasius, Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit in Works on the Spirit: Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit and Didymus’s On the Holy Spirit Translated, with an Introduction and Annotations, by Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, and Lewis Ayres, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
St Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit: Translation by David Anderson, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse A Handbook for Catechists: Introduction, Translation, Notes, Glossary, and Bibliography by Ignatius Green, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019.
Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Electronic version, which is why positions are referenced not pages.)
Leo Donald Davis SJ, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Liturgical Press, 1983.
Henrí de Lubac, The Christian Faith, An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles’ Creed, Translated by Brother Richard Arnandez, FSC: Ignatius Press, 1986.
Giulio Maspero, The Cappadocian Reshaping of Metaphysics Relational Being, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross: Cambridge University Press, 2024
Giulio Maspero, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers: Eerdmans Publishing, 2023.
Words and Things 