The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

The Holy Spirit

The Spirit who proceeds from the Father, worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son.

  • Dogmatic definitionDefined by an ecumenical council or otherwise confessed by the Church as binding doctrine. Not every sentence a council wrote is a definition: its acts, letters and disciplinary canons are different things.
  • Received Orthodox teachingTaught consistently and received throughout the Orthodox Church, though not necessarily formulated in a conciliar definition. This is not a claim that no Father ever wrote differently.

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The divinity of the Holy Spirit became the disputed question only after the question of the Son had been settled. Some who accepted Nicaea on the Son stopped short of saying the same of the Spirit.

Basil of Caesarea's On the Holy Spirit, archived here in full, made the decisive argument, and made it from the way the Church prays and baptises rather than from speculation. The Council of Constantinople in 381 confessed the Spirit as the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.

The Latin addition filioque to that article has never been received by the Orthodox Church, on two grounds: that a conciliar creed was altered unilaterally, and that the addition says something about the Spirit's origin that the Orthodox tradition does not confess.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • The First Council of Constantinople

    The council that confessed the divinity of the Holy Spirit and gave the Church the Creed it recites today. It was not ecumenical when it met; the Church made it so by receiving it.

    Council

  • Basil the Great

    Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, organiser of monastic life and of the Church's care for the poor, and the theologian whose work on the Holy Spirit made the Council of Constantinople possible.

    Father or writer

  • The Holy Spirit and Pentecost

    How the Church came to confess the Spirit as God, and why Basil argued from the way the Church prays.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.