The Creed, Article 8: The Holy Spirit
In brief
The eighth article confesses the third Person of the Trinity: "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spoke by the prophets." Every phrase was chosen to say plainly that the Spirit is fully God — not a force, not a lesser power, but the Lord, worshipped alongside the Father and the Son. This is the article expanded at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 to answer those who doubted the Spirit's divinity.
"the Lord, the Giver of Life"
The article begins by giving the Holy Spirit the same title Scripture reserves for God: "the Lord." In the fourth century a party sometimes called the Pneumatomachi — the "Spirit-fighters" — was willing to honor the Spirit but not to confess Him as God. The Council of Constantinople in 381 answered by expanding the Creed's clause on the Spirit, and the word "Lord" is the heart of that answer.
"The Giver of Life" names what the Spirit does. He is the one who hovered over the waters at creation, who breathed life into Adam, who conceived Christ in the womb of the Virgin, and who raises the dead. To give life in this way is a work only God can do. The Holy Spirit, the Creed insists, is not a gift God sends but God Himself present and life-giving.
"Who proceeds from the Father"
These words come straight from Christ's own promise: "the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father" (John 15:26). The Creed says exactly what the Lord said, and no more. The Father is the single source within the Trinity; the Spirit proceeds from Him.
This is the Creed's original wording, and the Orthodox Church has kept it unchanged. In the West a further phrase — Filioque, "and the Son" — was later added, so that the Latin Creed reads "proceeds from the Father and the Son." The East never received this addition, holding both that the common Creed should not be altered by one part of the Church acting alone and that the Father alone is the source of the Spirit. The disagreement became one of the deepest between East and West; it is treated on its own terms in the Filioque controversy. Here it is enough to note that the words Orthodox Christians confess — "Who proceeds from the Father" — are the ones the councils gave.
"worshipped and glorified… Who spoke by the prophets"
If the Spirit is worshipped "with the Father and the Son together," then the Spirit is God, for the Church worships God alone. This single phrase settles the question the whole article was written to answer. St. Basil the Great argued the point at length: we are baptized into the Spirit's name alongside the Father and the Son, and we cannot worship a creature.
"Who spoke by the prophets" reaches back over the whole Old Testament. The same Spirit poured out at Pentecost (Acts 2) had been speaking through Moses, David, and Isaiah all along — so the two Testaments are the work of one God. This clause of the Symbol of Faith binds creation, prophecy, the Incarnation, and the Church's own worship together as the single act of the one Spirit.