The Holy Spirit

From its first page, Scripture shows the Spirit at work: "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). The Psalmist says of every living thing, "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth" (Psalm 104:30). The Spirit is not one of God's creatures, then, but the Creator's own life-giving breath — and the Creed confesses Him accordingly: "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life... Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified."

That last clause was hard-won. In the fourth century some who accepted the Son's divinity balked at the Spirit's — the Pneumatomachians, "Spirit-fighters." The Church answered at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, which gave the Creed its article on the Spirit, and St. Basil the Great wrote the classic defense: everything the Father does, He does through the Son, in the Spirit. St. Paul can simply say, "Now the Lord is that Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:17). The Spirit is a divine who, not a divine what — a Person who speaks, teaches, grieves, and can be known.

Christ named the Spirit's origin precisely: "the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father" (John 15:26). The Father is the single fountainhead of the Godhead — what the tradition calls the monarchy of the Father — begetting the Son and breathing forth the Spirit from all eternity. The Spirit is sent to us through the Son in time, but His eternal procession is from the Father. This is why the Orthodox Church has never accepted the later Western addition to the Creed, the Filioque ("and the Son") — both because the common Creed of the whole Church was altered unilaterally, and because the addition, as the East reads it, confuses the Persons; the history of that dispute is told in its own entry.

The Spirit is not the junior member of the Trinity, arriving late in the story. He overshadowed the Virgin at the Incarnation; He descended "like a dove" upon Christ at His baptism (Matthew 3:16), the first clear public unveiling of the Trinity, which the Church celebrates at Theophany; He raised Christ from the dead; and at Pentecost He came upon the apostles in wind and fire (Acts 2:2-4), constituting the Church.

Everything the Church does, she does by calling on the Spirit. At the heart of the Liturgy stands the epiclesis — the prayer asking the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon the people and upon the gifts of bread and wine. Every newly baptized Christian is anointed in chrismation with the words "the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit" — a personal Pentecost. And nearly every Orthodox service and private prayer rule opens with the same invocation: "O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere and fillest all things; Treasury of Blessings, and Giver of Life — come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One."

Christ called the Spirit "another Comforter... the Spirit of truth," who "dwelleth with you, and shall be in you" (John 14:16-17) — not a substitute for an absent Lord but the mode of His deepest presence. This is why St. Seraphim of Sarov could teach, in the celebrated conversation recorded by his disciple Motovilov, that the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are means; the indwelling Spirit is the end. Where He abides, theosis is under way — for as St. Basil taught, souls in whom the Spirit dwells become radiant themselves, and shed grace on others.