Article V. The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.
by Erin Risch Zoutendam
The presence of the Spirit in the opening verses of Scripture is as mysterious as it is powerful. In Genesis 1:2, we read that the Spirit of God (ruach elohim) hovers over the waters of the deep. Who or what precisely this Spirit is – the Hebrew word ruach can also mean breath or wind – is not immediately clear, and the uncertainty may already draw our minds to the puzzle that the Holy Spirit, unlike the Father and the Son, hardly seems to be a personal figure at all.
What is clearer is that the Spirit seems ready to bring order to the chaos, to the “welter and waste”[1] of the earth that is formless and void. John Calvin, who wrote so beautifully of the natural world, said of this passage that it shows “not only that the beauty of the universe…owes its strength and preservation to the power of the Spirit but that before this adornment was added, even then the Spirit was occupied with tending that confused mass.”[2]
Even then the Spirit was occupied with tending that confused mass. The church fathers, too, were thinking along these lines when they read Genesis 1:2, but with respect to the chaos of the human soul in addition to that of the natural world. Saint Jerome understood this passage to be a figure that pointed ahead to the sacrament of baptism, where the darkness and chaos of sin were dispelled by the Spirit-filled waters that brought new life.[3] What we see, then, is that the Holy Spirit’s activity is closely connected to life, and especially to spiritual life.
How and why the Spirit is so central to the Christian life is the question that lies behind the somewhat technical terminology of Article V. We will look at the three “movements” of Article V in reverse order, moving quickly at first and then lingering with the opening movement. We begin with the Holy Spirit – or Holy Ghost, in language derived from the Old English translation of the Latin spiritus – as very and eternal God.
That the Holy Spirit is “very God” is a positive claim: the Holy Spirit is, as the Nicene Creed says, the Lord, the Giver of Life. These titles belong to God alone. That the Holy Spirit is God is most evident in scriptural passages where the Spirit and the God are equated, or where the Spirit does work that only God does (Acts 5:3–4; Rom. 8:9–11; 1 Cor. 2:10–12, 3:16–17).
But the claim that the Holy Spirit is very and eternal God also tells us what the Holy Spirit is not. The Holy Spirit, as Oliver O’Donovan has pointed out, cannot – and must not – be “reduced without remainder” to the works of the Holy Spirit that appear in the Nicene Creed: the speaking of the prophets (and the writing and reading of the Scriptures), the life of the Church, the resurrecting power of grace.[4] The Holy Spirit, then, is not reducible to the power of God or the effects of God, nor to some vague cosmic force – the Holy Spirit is very God.
The second movement of Article V makes the claim that the Holy Spirit is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son. Here we see the foundational doctrine that within the Trinity there is both unity and distinction. William Beveridge, an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, offered this gloss on Article V: “[T]he Holy Ghost is, hath, and doeth, whatsoever the Father or Son is, hath, or doeth.”[5] The same worship is due to the Holy Spirit as to the Father and the Son; the same works are worked by the Holy Spirit as are worked by the Father and the Son; and all attributes of the Father and Son – love, holiness, goodness, transcendence, immanence, eternality – are attributes of the Holy Spirit as well.
The third “movement” of Article V – the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – is so simple and yet it is also the most difficult. So much hangs on this simple word, proceeds. It is one of the most opaque, one of the most troublesome parts of trinitarian doctrine – and yet also one of the richest.
The doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son (as opposed to only the Father) is known as the filioque, from the Latin for “and the Son.” This single word has been the site of much controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity. The procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son has some support in the patristic tradition but was not present in the earliest versions of what we now call the Nicene Creed. The language seems to have first been added to the liturgy in late antiquity, and it was a point of contention between the East and West, with the East claiming that the West had “added” the filioque and the West claiming that the East had “deleted” it. The filioque contributed to the great schism between East and West in 1054 and it remains a sticking point for some today.
However, the filioque disagreement is less a substantive disagreement than it is a disagreement about where the theological “accent” is placed in trinitarian theology. In the West, the great thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote: “If we take careful note of the statements of the Greeks we shall find that they differ from us more in words than in meaning.”[6] To say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is to emphasize the total equality – the theological term is consubstantiality – of the Father and the Son. Whatever the Father “doeth,” in the words of William Beveridge quoted above, the Son “doeth” also.
What then is this procession, sometimes called spiration, that has caused so much trouble? There is much to unearth in this one word; its simplicity both invites and resists straightforward interpretation. As we may have come to expect from the Christian life, the mystery of it all is often hidden in plain sight.
Historically, Christian theologians have suggested that the Holy Spirit’s procession – whatever it may be – indicates the very incomprehensibility and mysteriousness of the Holy Spirit.[7] The Son is begotten of the Father – that we can perhaps begin to understand. However, the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not begotten; this is much more mysterious. But of course, mystery in the Christian tradition is very often an invitation to go on talking, not to stop – so we can press a bit further into what procession might mean.
Whatever else it may mean, the procession of the Holy Spirit must be an indication of the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. We might think of procession as coming forth or pouring out. Thus Christ says in John 15:26: When the Advocate [sometimes translated Comforter] comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from [ekporeuetai] the Father, he will testify on my behalf. The Holy Spirit, here given a very personal identity as the Advocate or Comforter, is not self-generated. The Holy Spirit comes forth, goes out, proceeds. We can think of this as one of the things that distinguishes the Holy Spirit from both the Father (who neither proceeds nor is begotten) and the Son (who is begotten but does not proceed).
The tradition has gone yet further though. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and, in the words of theologian Gilles Emery, “proceeds in the manner of love.”[8] The Holy Spirit, then, is the bond of love that unites the Father and the Son. But we must be very careful, as Emery has noted, not to confuse the Holy Spirit with the act of loving. The Holy Spirit is, in Emery’s words, “Love in person.”[9] Gregory the Great framed it slightly differently but along the same lines in a Pentecost homily: “For the Holy Spirit himself is love.”[10] Our minds run also to 1 John 4:8: God is love. God is not an act of loving; God is love itself, God Godself is love. The Holy Spirit is Love in person.
What is love? Love, as the great mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius has said, “is a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance.” Love binds like things “in a mutually regarding union.”[11] In short, love draws the lover ineluctably toward the beloved, uniting the lover and the beloved, as anyone who has loved knows.
This, then, is the entrée into our own relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is – to begin to answer the question posed at the beginning of this essay – why the activity of the Holy Spirit is so essential to the Christian life. For while the Holy Spirit is first and foremost the Love between the Father and Son in person, the Holy Spirit is also the bond of love that draws us into and conforms us to the triune God.
The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross saw precisely this correspondence between the processional love of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity and the way we are drawn up into that same love by the Holy Spirit. Only a poet and a mystic of the caliber of John of the Cross could have phrased it so beautifully:
By His divine breath-like spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father, which is the Holy Spirit Himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation, in order to unite her to Himself. There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity…[12]
We breathe the same “spiration of love” that the Father and the Son breathe in each other, and we do so by the power of the Holy Spirit. The witness of Scripture tells us the same: By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit (1 John 4:13).
We see the Spirit drawing us into the trinitarian life most clearly at the baptism of Christ (Matthew 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22). Here all three persons of the Trinity are present and active. When Jesus rises from the waters, the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove and the Father pronounces Jesus the beloved Son. This is the model for our own life as Christians as well: at our baptism, we enter into a life in which the Spirit alights on us and dwells in us (Rom. 8:9). This leads directly into the whole of the Christian’s life – the dying and rising as described in Romans 8:11–17. The deeds of the flesh are put to death by the Spirit, and the Spirit raises us daily into our life as sons and daughters of God. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul writes, If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you (Rom. 8:11).
Theologian Eugene Rogers has described the way that the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives has tended to be marginalized. In becoming incarnate, Christ crossed the uncrossable distance between Creator and creature. But the Holy Spirit’s work seems much less appreciable: the Holy Spirit “crosses a distance of a different sort between the exterior history of the Son and the interior of the human heart.” The Holy Spirit makes present and real in each human life what the singular life of Christ accomplished. But, as Rogers observes, “believers tend to minimize the second distance and the Spirit with it. It’s just a few inches.”[13]
Anyone who has given a single moment’s honest glance to the hardness of her own heart knows that the conversion and conformation of the human heart to God is anything but negligible. The Holy Spirit accomplishes this task interiorly and exteriorly: by putting to death the deeds of the body (Rom. 8:13); through the teaching of the truth (John 16:13); through intercession on our behalf (Rom. 8:26–27); through the speaking of the prophets (Is. 61:1; Ez. 11:5; Acts 2:16-18), the life of the church (Acts 1:5, 4:31), the outpouring of God’s love in our hearts (Rom. 5:5). This gracious work of the Holy Spirit is distinctly trinitarian and amounts to nothing less than our salvation: as Sarah Coakley has put it, the Father, “in and through the Spirit, both stirs up, and progressively chastens and purges” our misdirected loves, and recreates and reforms our love in the likeness of the Son.[14]
Whether the Holy Spirit works on us from within or without, the grace is the same. In fact the internal and the external are at times indistinguishable, so subtle are the workings of the Spirit. Indeed, one might even say that the mysteriousness of the Holy Spirit is mirrored in the mysteriousness of the workings of grace in the human soul.
This work of grace is obviously not alien to the Father or the Son; rather the work of our reconciliation and conformation to God is common to the Trinity. But we nevertheless sometimes distinguish between the work of the persons of the Trinity in relation to each other, remembering that this is a manner of speaking that helps us better understand these relations. Calvin observed: “[T]o the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity.”[15]
The “power and the efficacy” of divine activity is thus the domain of the Holy Spirit. Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century poet and mystic, saw in the working of the Holy Spirit all that is good in the world and expressed it in a more lyrical fashion than Calvin: the Holy Spirit, she wrote, “has inspirited all wise spirits, and all swift spirits, and all strong spirits, and all sweet spirits: he inspirits them all. His name is poured out over all the earth, over men at large, to sustain and lead each of them…”[16] The Holy Spirit, in Hadewijch’s words, “inspirits” whatever is good and like God. The wise, the swift, the strong, the sweet – whether in the human soul or in creation more broadly, this is the domain of the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.
Erin Risch Zoutendam is
a doctoral student in religion at Duke University. Her research focuses on the history
of the Christian mystical tradition and the history of exegesis.
[1] Robert Alter’s memorable translation of the Hebrew tohu wabohu. See Robert Alter, Genesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 3 [Gen. 1:2].
[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.13.14.
[3] See, for example, Jerome’s Homily 10 on Psalm 76 (77) in The Homilies of Saint Jerome, trans. Marie Liguori Ewald (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 68–78. Augustine, too, thought of the human soul when reading Genesis 1:2; see Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 274–78 [13.2–9].
[4] Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (London: SCM Press, 2011), 38.
[5] William Beveridge, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (London: James Duncan, 1830), 196.
[6] Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 10, a. 5, qtd. in Gilles Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God, trans. Matthew Levering (Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 142. My account of the filioque controversy has relied in several places on Emery’s.
[7] See Emery, The Trinity, 136–37.
[8] Emery, The Trinity, 137.
[9] Emery, The Trinity, 151.
[10] My translation of Homily 30. PL 76:1220.
[11] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987),81 [4.12].
[12] John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, in John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 280 [39.3].
[13] Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., introduction to The Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 1.
[14] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6.
[15] Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.18.
[16] Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 101 [Letter 22.328].