“WHAT THEN? IS THE SPIRIT GOD?

CERTAINLY!”
ST GREGORY’S TEACHING ON
THE HOLY SPIRIT AS THE BASIS OF
THE WORLD’S SALVATION

Philip Kariatlis

Abstract: The writings of St Gregory the Theologian on the Holy

Spirit stand out among early Christian Patristic literature for their
cogency and spiritual depth. Whilst the Holy Spirit figures centrally in
numerous works, this paper focuses on his famous Fifth Theological
Oration, arguably the crowning work in the area of Pneumatology,
where St Gregory put before his audience the full flowering and
richness of the orthodox vision of the Holy Spirit. By ushering in
a new way of critical reflection on the Spirit’s deity, St Gregory not
only paved the way for a definitive settlement of the Trinitarian crisis
which plagued fourth-century Christianity but more importantly
ingeniously demonstrated how God continued to dwell in the Church
making salvation (deification) in actual human lives a genuine reality.

S
t Gregory the Theologian has long been recognised in the
Christian tradition for his consistent, erudite and focused teaching
on the deity of the Holy Spirit. Far from containing speculative
abstractions, his writings reveal a person profoundly steeped in the
Christian mysteries. His primary concern was to engage concretely in,
and respond effectively to, the controversies of his day employing the
best of Greek culture and learning in order to give an eloquent witness
to the truths of the Christian Gospel. More specifically, in light of the
vast number of divergent views on the Holy Spirit, especially those
put forward by the so-called Pneumatomachians,1 St Gregory declared
his position boldly and unequivocally that the Spirit is both ‘God’, and
‘consubstantial with the Father’,2 something which, up to that point, had

PHRONEMA, VOL. 26(2), 2011, 81-102

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not been explicitly stated by any other father of the Church.3 Indeed, his
theology of the Holy Spirit, especially at a time when denial of its divinity
was rife, initiated a new epoch – indeed of ‘seismic’ proportions – in the
history of Nicene theology making him a most formative and elaborate
writer of Pneumatology in the early Church. For this reason, his teaching
on the Holy Spirit has had perennial significance throughout the history
of the Church and, even though often eclipsed by modern scholarship,
remains to this day a decisive witness to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine
of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, by championing the divinity of the Holy
Spirit in a most penetrating and comprehensive way, he was arguably
also one of the first in his time to place in full view the doctrine of the
Trinity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,4 in this way paving the way for
a definitive settlement of the Trinitarian crisis which plagued fourth-
century Christianity. For this reason, he was acclaimed with the title ‘the
theologian’ at the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD, an epithet shared
only by two other saints in the Church.5

The key to understanding his insistence on calling the Holy Spirit

‘God’ is soteriological. Precisely because the Spirit of God, as witnessed
in the Scriptures, is indispensably involved in the salvation of the world,
it could not be a mere creature since only God can ‘save’. Or put another
way, any subordinationist understanding of the Spirit – depriving it of
its proper and equal dignity and honour with the Father and the Son
– would end up truly compromising, if not totally jeopardising, the
salvation of the world which, for St Gregory, was understood in terms
of theosis.6 Accordingly, this paper will endeavour to examine, clarify
and – to the extent that this is possible – synthesize St Gregory’s vision
of the Holy Spirit, from within the parameters of what he wrote – indeed
often difficult to decipher – in order to ascertain the extent to which his
teaching on the Holy Spirit was informed by his vision of salvation.

Elements of St Gregory’s Pneumatology

Identity of Attributes

Right from the outset of his Fifth Theological Oration,7 St Gregory

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clearly put forward his position regarding the deity of the Holy Spirit
by stating that all attributes belonging to God the Father – and for that
matter the Son – could equally apply to the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, if
God is eternal, or in the words of St Gregory “from the beginning [ἀπ᾽
ἀρχῆς]”,8 beyond the limits of time and space, all-knowing, all-powerful,
inconceivable and incomprehensible, known unknowingly to be utterly
transcendent – to name only a few of God’s limitless attributes as
presented by systematic theology today – so too is the Holy Spirit. More
specifically, confident of the Spirit’s Godhead, he noted that if one of the
inherent Scriptural characteristics of God the Father is that He is light,
then the Holy Spirit could equally be predicated with such a quality:

“He was the true light that enlightens every human person coming into
the world” – yes, the Father. “He was the true light that enlightens every
human person coming into the world” – yes, the Son. “He was the true
light that enlightens every human person coming into the world” – yes,
the Comforter… He was and He was and He was. But a single reality was
[ἦν, καί ἦν, καί ἦν· ἀλλ᾽ ἕν ἦν].9

By applying to the Spirit precisely the same attributes as those

belonging to the Father and the Son, St Gregory openly and succinctly
underscored the Spirit’s divinity. Indeed, towards the end of the Oration,
he rhetorically asked: “Is there any significant function belonging to
God, which the Spirit does not perform? Is there any title belonging to
God, which cannot apply to him?”10 Furthermore, in wanting to respond
to the accusations of tritheism levelled against him,11 he spoke of the
converging quality of light whose different beams tend to harmonise
into one reality – beyond affirming that there was one reality [ἕν ἦν], he
also wrote that there is “a single intermingling of light [μία τοῦ φωτός
σύγκρασις]”12 – in this way also demonstrating the unity within the life of
the Trinity. Consequently, not only was the unity of the Trinity affirmed
but also and more specifically, that this harmonious unity required the
Holy Spirit’s role in order to be perfectly complete.13

Fundamental to St Gregory’s teaching on the Holy Spirit is its

underlying soteriological focus. This is especially seen in an excerpt
immediately following his reflection on the Godhead in terms of light. In

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a concise manner, he wrote: “We receive the Son’s light from the Father’s
light in the light of the Spirit [ἐκ φωτός τοῦ Πατρός φῶς καταλαμβάνοντες
τοῦ Υἱοῦ ἐν φωτί τῷ Πνεύματι].”14 Clearly, the whole point to this
light analogy, for St Gregory, was to show that salvation – in this case,
depicted in terms of a vision of the uncreated and transformative light of
God – is made possible; namely, in the light of the Spirit, which in turn
enables the faithful to behold the unapproachable light of Christ coming
from God the Father. Simply put, it is in the Holy Spirit and through
Jesus Christ that the light of God the Father permeates the church and the
world thereby making salvation possible. In this way, the entire economy
of salvation, which the Eastern Orthodox Church consistently claims to
result from a Trinitarian action taking place from [ἐκ] God, through [διά
τοῦ] the Son, in [ἐν] Holy Spirit is alluded to.15 More specifically, in order
to highlight his main contention, namely the inextricable link between
the divine uncreated reality of the Spirit and salvation – or we could say,
between Pneumatology and Soteriology – St Gregory highlighted:

“If he has the same rank as I have, how can he make me God, or how can
he join me with deity [εἰ τέτακται μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ, πῶς ἐμέ ποιεῖ θεόν, ἤ πῶς
συνάπτει θεότητι].”16

For the Theologian, participation or fellowship in the life of God is

only possible because the Holy Spirit, as God, makes this possible. Put
another way, salvation in God would be rendered an impossibility if the
Holy Spirit were a mere creature since it could not make known, reveal
and testify to the divine life of God. Throughout the 31st Oration, St
Gregory returned to the soteriological ramifications of his Pneumatology
– namely the Spirit, as ‘true God from true God’, enabling and giving
rise to the salvific experience and knowledge of the incomprehensible
God. Consequently, a failure to designate the Spirit as ‘God’ would end
up relegating it to the ranks of worldly creatures and therefore depriving
the entire world of fellowship with God.

Consubstantiality with the Father

St Gregory focused his attention on showing that arguments previously

used to confirm the divinity of the Son would equally apply to the Holy

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Spirit. And so, in the same way that the Son of God was said to be
‘consubstantial with the Father’ [ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί], so too was the
Spirit of the very same essence with the Father. Indeed, over the course
of Oration 31, St Gregory wanted to show that such a statement did not,
in any way, introduce a “strange and unscriptural God [ξένον θεόν καί
ἄγραφον]”17 into Christian theology but could be hermeneutically derived
from the Scriptures when read “with penetration so as to see inside the
text to its inner meaning [ἀπόθετον κάλλος].”18 In this way, his theology
of the Holy Spirit was ingeniously based upon the ‘spirit’ – not the letter
– of the Scriptures in which one could find ample implicit evidence for
the Spirit’s deity. Accordingly, to reject biblical truths not explicitly
stated in the Scriptures would simply be a “cloak for irreligion”19, an
enslavement to the letter, rather than to the ‘spirit’ and real meaning in
the witness of the Scriptures. And so, after insisting on the Spirit’s deity,
by attributing to it the very same qualities as those characterising the
Father, he professed the Spirit’s consubstantiality with God the Father.
Worthy of note is the fact that St Gregory stated incontrovertibly that the
Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and more importantly was the first
to declare explicitly that the Holy Spirit is God. In a series of rhetorical
questions, he wrote:

“What then? Is the Spirit God? Certainly. Is he consubstantial? Yes, if

he is God [Τί οὖν; Θεός τό Πνεῦμα; πάνυ γε. τί οὖν, ὁμοούσιον; εἴπερ
Θεός].”20

Whilst this may seem self evident today, in the context of fourth century
theology, as correctly noted by Behr, this “was indeed a radical claim to
make.”21 Beyond its novelty as a descriptor for the Spirit, it seems that
St Gregory was not interested in extensively explaining what was meant
by the term homoousion – this had already been done by others before
him. Yet his understanding of the term homoousios from this excerpt can
be discerned when read punctiliously since it implicitly captures what
was essentially signified by the term at that time. By bringing together
the terms ‘homoousios’ and ‘God’ St Gregory reaffirmed that the Spirit
is divine with exactly the same divinity as God the Father. Consequently,
he was able to conclude that it was not logically impossible for both the

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divine Logos – as God’s eternally begotten Son – and the Holy Spirit
of God – as the breath of God – to be of the same essence with God the
Father even though one was an offspring and the other not.

St Gregory’s adversaries – at least from what is gathered in his

Oration – had argued that since the Holy Spirit was not God’s progeny –
like his eternally begotten Son was – then it could not be consubstantial
with God. Aware of the inadequacies of created analogies for the Godhead,
since it was essentially beyond all comprehension and circumscription,
he nonetheless responded by taking the Old Testament example of Adam,
Eve and their son, Seth. He pointed out that in the same way that all three
shared the same created human nature – namely, they were consubstantial
– even though only Seth was Adam’s offspring – Eve was Adam’s wife
– so too, in the case of the Holy Trinity, there need not be any logical
hindrance in affirming the Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father even
though only the Son of God was the Father’s eternal offspring.22 And
so, he concluded: “things with a different individual being can be of the
same substance.”23 He continued:

You have grasped the possibility of our position by means of human

illustrations, so will you stop fighting desperately against the Spirit for
your view that he must either be an offspring or not consubstantial and
not God?24

Clearly, the term homoousios was an expression which underscored the

full and absolute deity of the Spirit – thereby highlighting that it was
unlike any created reality – as well as re-emphasising the fact that all
properties and attributes proper to God the Father could equally be
attributed to the Spirit of God since “each of them [i.e. the persons] is in
entire unity as much with himself as with the partnership, by identity of
essence and power [τῷ ταὐτῷ τῆς οὐσίας καί τῆς δυνάμεως].”25

A Concrete and Distinctly Divine Hypostasis

Having emphasised the identity of essence and thus the essential unity
and commonality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son, it
follows that St Gregory would also want to affirm its hypostatic existence,

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namely, its real and genuine personal existence as the third divine Person
of the Holy Trinity – a concretely distinct divine entity and not a mere
energy or gift of God.26 Previously, the Spirit had often been thought to
be an impersonal power, energy or activity of God.27 And so, in answer to
this dilemma, St Gregory responded by a series of syllogistic arguments
showing that the Spirit acts in its own right and does not need to be
activated by someone else. In this way, he affirmed the full personhood
of the Spirit. He wrote:

If [the Holy Spirit were] an activity, clearly it must be activated, because

he has no active power… How comes it then that he does act? He says
things, he decrees.28

Proof of the Spirit’s full personhood, for St Gregory, were all those
references in the Scriptures where the Spirit is depicted acting in its own
right and not dependent upon the Father – or the Son in this case – to set
its actions in motion. That St Gregory saw the Holy Spirit as a divine
Person, and not a mere creature is clearly seen in the Scriptural testimony
which describes the Spirit of God itself initiating actions with no need
of any other person to activate these. Profoundly based on the Scriptural
descriptions of the Spirit, St Gregory noted its role as initiator:

The Spirit indeed effects all these things filling the universe with his
being, sustaining the universe. His being “fills the world” [Wis 1:7]….
The Spirit it is who created [Ps 104:30] and creates anew through baptism
[Jn 3:5] and resurrection [Ezek 37:5-14]. The Spirit it is who knows all
things [1Cor 2:10], who teaches all things [Jn 14:26]...29

As a distinctly divine hypostasis, the Spirit could be said to exist in its

own right as opposed to simply being an inherent property of the other
two divine Persons. St Gregory’s affirmation of the genuine hypostatic
existence of the Holy Spirit needs to be kept in mind especially today in
view of certain tendencies within Christian theology which might reduce
the Holy Spirit merely to an energy; namely, the love shared between
the Father and his beloved Son.30 In such an analogy, however, the Holy
Spirit can become depersonalised, reduced to an attribute and therefore
seen simply as an energy passing between God and his Son. The Spirit,
however, according to St Gregory, is a genuine person, hypostatically

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existent. The salvific ramifications are clear: humanity could only be

made divine by an action of a Person who is divine – in this case by the
Holy Spirit revealing the Father through Jesus Christ.

Procession – the Spirit’s Particular Mode of Existence

St Gregory turned his attention to emphasising the particularity of the

Holy Spirit. Based on the Scriptural witness found in St John’s Gospel
(Jn 15.26), he defined the eternal issuance of the Spirit from the Father
in terms of ‘procession’31 as distinct from the Son who was eternally
‘begotten’. Indeed, in his consistent employment of the Biblical term,
‘procession’ [ἐκπόρευσις]32 for the distinctive hypostatic property of
the Holy Spirit, he made an exceptionally important contribution to
Pneumatological terminology by also highlighting its particularity as a
concrete and distinctly divine hypostasis. And so, not only would the
unity and communion of the divine Persons within the life of the Trinity
be safeguarded but also their indivisible differentiation. In reflecting
upon the procession of the Holy Spirit, St Gregory wrote:

We say there is no deficiency – God lacks nothing. It is their difference

in, so to say, “manifestation” or mutual relationship, which has caused
the difference in names [τό δέ τῆς ἐκφάνσεως, ἵν᾽ οὕτως εἴπω, ἤ τῆς
πρός ἄλληλα σχέσεως διάφορον, διάφορον αὐτῶν κατά τήν κλῆσιν
πεποίηκεν]… The very facts of not being begotten [τό μή γεγεννῆσθαι],
of being begotten [τό γεγεννῆσθαι] and of proceeding [καί τό
ἐκπορεύεσθαι], give them whatever names are applied to them – Father,
Son and Holy Spirit respectively. The aim is to safeguard the distinctness
of the three hypostases within the single nature and quality of Godhead
[ἵνα τό ἀσύγχυτον σώζηται τῶν τριῶν ὑποστάσεων ἐν τῇ μιᾷ φύσει τε
καί ἀξίᾳ τῆς Θεότητος]. The Son is not Father; there is one Father, yet
he is whatever the Father is. The Spirit is not Son because he is from
God; there is one Only-begotten…. The three are a single whole in their
Godhead and the single whole is three in personalities [ἕν τά τρία τῇ
Θεότητι, καί τό ἕν τρία ταῖς ἰδιότησιν].33

St Gregory insisted that the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father
indicated: 1) its divinity – to the extent that the Spirit proceeds from the
Father it is no mere creature, and 2) its particularity – since the Spirit is

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not begotten like the eternally begotten Son of God, it is hypostatically

‘other’. For St Gregory, ‘procession’ in no way implied any deprivation
on the part of the Spirit but rather expressed its distinct mode of existence
or ‘manifestation [ἐκφάνσεως]’ in relation to the Father. In other words,
‘procession’ was the unique hypostatic attribute of the person of the
Holy Spirit and was not therefore to be applied to the one essence of
the Godhead. Having clearly distinguished the particularity and unique
mode of the Spirit’s existence in terms of procession, he went no
further, however, in discussing the manner by which this is so since the
‘perichoretic’ life of the Godhead – as this is termed by tradition – within
itself transcends the created limits of human comprehension; it is indeed
a mystery known by God alone. 34 In this regard, he wrote:

What then is ‘proceeding’? You explain the ingeneracy of the Father and
I will give you a biological account of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s
proceeding…. we cannot count the sand in the sea, the drops of rain or
the days of this world, much less enter into the depths of God.35

The purpose of the doctrine of the Spirit’s procession from the Father
alone was to underscore the particularity of the Spirit’s hypostasis
and its unique relation to the Father thereby affirming its deity once
again. Accordingly, the Spirit’s procession from the Father remains an
incomprehensible mystery beyond the created categories of time, space
and causality. But, as one of the Trinity, with exactly the same divinity
as the Father and the Son, the Spirit was responsible – and continues to
be – for leading the entire world back to the Father through Jesus Christ.

Derived From Yet Equal to the Father

Having underlined the Holy Spirit’s deity and distinctiveness, St Gregory

went on to affirm a certain taxis within the Trinity; more specifically, for
this paper, the Spirit’s derivation – and parenthetically the Son’s too –
from the Father without this in any way, however, implying any form
of subordination. Namely, in affirming that the Spirit proceeds from the
Father, St Gregory in no way implied that the Holy Spirit is deficient
when it comes to ‘what’ the Father is. And so, in wanting to affirm both
the Spirit’s derivation from, yet equality with, the Father, he wrote:

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We have one God because there is a single Godhead [ἡμῖν εἷς Θεός, ὅτι μία
Θεότης]. Though there are three objects of belief, they [namely the Son
and the Spirit] derive from the single whole and have reference to it [καί
πρός ἕν τά ἐξ αὐτοῦ τήν ἀναφοράν ἔχει]. One is not more, another less,
than God [οὐ γάρ τό μέν μᾶλλον, τό δέ ἧττον Θεός]. They are not sundered
in will or divided in power. You cannot find there any of the properties
inherent in things divisible. To express it succinctly, the Godhead exists
undivided in beings divided [ἀμέριστος ἐν μεμερισμένοις].36

In juxtaposing the realities of ‘Trinitarian taxis’ – expressed here in

terms of the Spirit deriving ‘from the single whole’ – with the unity and
communion of the three divine Persons – expressed in the referential
unity of the Godhead37 – St Gregory articulated his vision of the Spirit’s
ontological derivation from the Father in a profoundly symmetrical and
balanced way, leaving no room for any subordinationist understandings
within the Trinitarian mystery. Immediately before referring to this
ordering within the Trinitarian Godhead, St Gregory stressed the equality
of the Holy Spirit with the Father when he noted that: 1) the Holy Spirit
shares the very same Godhead as that of the Father and it is precisely in
this one Godhead that there is also one God, and 2) the Holy Spirit is
never separated from the Father but is always defined in reference to the
Father, namely, harmoniously united to the Godhead.38 Only after having
therefore responded against the charges of an alleged subordinationaism
and tritheism, did he turn his attention to the ontological derivation of
the Holy Spirit from the Father. According to St Gregory, as the sole
source of the Godhead, the Father timelessly issues forth the Holy Spirit
– or as we saw, the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father – and in this
way they remain ‘undivided’ rather than tending towards any type of
division. And so, instead of the divine Persons being mutually opposed,
they were, for St Gregory, seen simultaneously from the perspective of
unitive diversity and diverse unification. In integrating both the unity of
the Godhead – and therefore, implicitly here, the deity of the Holy Spirit
– and the ontological derivation of the Spirit from the Father, he found
the correct balance between the equality of all three divine Persons yet at
the same time the taxis within the Trinitarian mystery.

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Salvific Underpinnings

After having attempted to decipher some of the intricacies in St Gregory’s

theology of the Holy Spirit and present it in a systematic way, it remains
to investigate more closely, and hence validate in a more decisive manner,
the main contention of this paper, namely, that St Gregory’s Pneumatology
is driven by soteriological concerns. The paper already argued that a
study of St Gregory’s Fifth Theological Oration – or for that matter any
of his pneumatological works – without constant reference to its salvific
underpinnings, would be to miss the whole point of his Pneumatology
and the arguments put forward for the Spirit’s deity. Accordingly, we
saw that it was precisely these salvific concerns which constituted the
framework and basis of his Fifth Theological Oration. Only a ‘Spirit’ who
is both ‘God’ and ‘consubstantial with the Father’ could act within the
parameters of history – namely from the very beginning of the creation of
the universe to the life of the age to come – in order to save God’s created
world. Simply put, the Holy Spirit had to be divine since it, together with
the Father and the Son, continues to bring about the world’s salvation. Put
another way, it is the Spirit’s indispensable role in salvation – together
with the Son of God leading the faithful to the Father – that constituted,
for St Gregory, the reason par excellence for the Spirit’s divinity. To
repudiate the deity of the Spirit would be tantamount to being deprived
of access to the Father; that is, a disaffirmation of one’s salvation. This
indeed is the point of an excerpt found towards the end of Oration 31
where St Gregory, wanting to sum up, drew attention to the fact that all of
Christ’s redemptive work in the world was always accomplished together
with the Spirit. But if responsible for our salvation, together with Christ,
leading us to God the Father, then the Holy Spirit also had to be divine
in precisely the same way as God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.
Section 29 of the Oration enumerates a multitudinous array of biblical
references displaying the Spirit’s redemptive acts – it is the Spirit, for
example, according to St Gregory, who “knows all things, who teaches
all things, who blows where and as strongly as he will… [who] reveals,
illumines… He distributes graces”39 to list a few. However, before doing

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so, St Gregory set the framework in which all these salvific acts could be
properly interpreted:

Look at the facts: Christ is born, the Spirit is his forerunner; Christ is
baptized, the Spirit bears witness; Christ is tempted, the Spirit leads
him up; Christ performs miracles, the Spirit accompanies him; Christ
ascends, the Spirit fill his place [ἀνέρχεται, διαδέχεται].40

This passage – and indeed the entire 29th section in which it is found – is
usually understood in terms of providing proof-texts in order to sanction
biblically St Gregory’s main argument; namely, that the Spirit is divine
and consubstantial with the Father.41 Whilst this is not entirely incorrect,
St Gregory is doing something more profound here – what could be
called a ‘Spirit-filled Christology’42 or a ‘Pneumatologically-conditioned
Christology’ – in order to demonstrate the deity of the Spirit. Essentially,
his thesis in this case is, since salvation can only be brought about by
God, we observe this archetypically accomplished in Christ together
with the Spirit, who continues to make salvation a reality bringing it to
its completion. Consequently, it is the Spirit’s role in salvation, together
with that of Christ revealing God the Father that is ‘the more perfect
proof’ of the Spirit’s divinity. For St Gregory, it is precisely this unity
of action within the Godhead that makes salvation a real possibility and
which is beautifully and succinctly synthesised in St Gregory’s Fifth
Theological Oration.

Now, the importance of this claim lies in the fact that more
often than not in contemporary Christian theology, the work of Christ
and the Spirit are thought of in terms of independently successive
plans in God’s salvific action within the world.43 Whilst it is true that
the pneumatological foundation of salvation if obviously acknowledged
today, nonetheless, the reciprocity between the Son and Spirit in the work
of salvation is often overlooked. For St Gregory, however, God’s salvific
actions in the world as witnessed in the Scriptures betray a real mutuality
between the Son and Spirit: as stated by St Gregory, when Christ became
incarnate, joining in his person divinity with humanity, and in this way
making salvation a real possibility, it was the Holy Spirit by whom this

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took place. It was the Spirit who was with Christ throughout his entire
ministry and it is the Spirit who continues to make this communion with
Christ a reality throughout the ages. It is the Holy Spirit who continues to
further the work of Christ – cf. e.g. ἀναδέχεται – in this way giving the
faithful access to God the Father. Indeed, as underlined by St Gregory
all of Christ’s actions were accompanied by the Spirit. For St Gregory,
Christ and the Spirit were always seen together in God’s ad extra
operations from the very moment of creation. Whilst it is true that in its
linear historical development, it was Christ who came first and only after
He had ascended into the heavens was the Holy Spirit sent, nonetheless,
salvation, as depicted by St Gregory, was fundamentally deeper than this
– the work of Christ and the Spirit together leading the faithful back to
their heavenly Father. And so, for St Gregory, proof of the Spirit’s deity
was the reciprocating roles of both Christ and the Spirit in the work of
salvation.

Having affirmed the reciprocity between Christ and the Holy

Spirit, St Gregory underlined his vision of salvation in terms of theosis
and the Spirit’s constitutive role in making this a reality for the entire
world. This is seen in the following direct statement which affirms that
the basis of St Gregory’s Pneumatology was the Spirit’s constitutive
role in salvation understood as theosis and initiated through the rite of
baptism.44 According to St Gregory, precisely because the Spirit is divine
can it offer the faithful within the life of the Church through baptism the
possibility of becoming ‘gods’ by grace:

Were the Spirit not to be worshipped, how could he deify me through

baptism? If he is to be worshipped, why not adored? And if to be adored,
how can he fail to be God? One links with the other, a truly golden
chain of salvation. From the Spirit comes our rebirth [ἀναγέννησις],
from rebirth comes a new creating [ἀναπλάσις], from new creating a
recognition [ἐπίγνωσις] of the worth of him who effected it.45

The foundational basis of his entire teaching of the salvific role of the
Holy Spirit is summed up in this passage: namely the Spirit is worshipped
and adored because together with God the Father and his Son it deifies

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the faithful bringing forth their rebirth, recreation and recognition of

God. Clearly, that which informed St Gregory’s teaching on the Holy
Spirit was its deifying work in the Christian life. Now, the reason that
mention is made of baptism is that it was this rite which initiates the
lifelong transformative process of every Christian to become god-like.46
In reflecting upon the Spirit’s deifying work in baptism, he wrote that:
“[the Spirit] makes us his temple, he deifies, he makes us complete
and he initiates us in such a way that he both precedes baptism and is
wanted after it.”47 In denying the divinity of the Spirit, it could not be
possible, according to St Gregory, to receive the deifying gifts and grace
of baptism. As correctly summed up by Beeley, “the ground of Gregory’s
praise of the Spirit and his confession that the Spirit is God lies in his
own experience of the Spirit’s making him God, so that the Spirit’s work
in the Christian life is the source of the doctrine of the Spirit.”48

Concluding Remarks

An attempt was made throughout the paper to explore the teaching of

St Gregory the Theologian on the Holy Spirit especially as this related
to the salvation of the world. In so doing, we were invariably able to
ascertain that his ground breaking Pneumatology, far from being
preoccupied with any speculative or presumptive abstractions, remained
within a soteriological and existential context. Specifically, at the heart
of our study of St Gregory’s Pneumatological vision, whose writings
demonstrated for the very first time in the history of Christian thought
that the Spirit is both ‘God’ and consubstantial with the Father, we were
able to reflect upon five key aspects of his teaching which unambiguously
indicated the Spirit’s divinity: 1. the identity of attributes so that all
divine characteristics depicting the Father are equally applicable to the
Holy Spirit; 2. the Spirit’s consubstantiality with God the Father, namely
the incomprehensible and inexplicable essence of the Father was equally
shared by the Spirit; 3. the affirmation that the Spirit is a concrete and
distinctly divine hypostasis and not any impersonal power or energy; 4. the
Spirit’s unique mode of divine existence in terms of procession indicating
its particularity within the Godhead and finally, 5. an examination of

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St Gregory’s understanding of the Spirit’s derivation from the Father

without this in any way destroying its equality. A consideration of these
five dimensions in his teaching on the Holy Spirit showed the extent to
which they were inextricably linked with salvation. In reflecting further
we were able to highlight more closely the salvific underpinnings of his
Fifth Theological Oration and proposed that the divinity of the Holy
Spirit was seen in its intimate cooperation with Christ, what we called a
‘Spirit-filled Christology’; indeed, a remarkable contribution in the face
of so much confusion to this day on the synthetic relationship between
Christology and Pneumatology. It is only appropriate that St Gregory has
the last word:

Soul, why delay? Sing the praise of the Spirit! […] Let us bow in awe
before the mighty Spirit, who is God in heaven, who to me is God, by
whom I came to know God, and who in this world makes me God.49

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Revd Doru Costache

– a friend and colleague – and to the referees for taking the time to review
the paper and offer important comments for its improvement.

XXX

NOTES:
1
McGuckin warned against any oversimplification when referring to the term
‘Pneumatomachian’ as if its followers were one homogeneous group holding
to precisely the same beliefs. He highlighted the importance of bearing in mind
that this designation included divergent groups. For this reason, he wrote that the
term as such is “not very useful (except as an apologetic term) precisely because
of its historical imprecision. Some of those who fought against the Homoousion
pneumatology were certainly of Arian persuasion, since the Arians had resisted
the concept of the co-equal divinity of the Son, and were by no means willing
to admit the idea in terms of a third hypostasis. But many of them were not
of the Arian party. The homoousion of the Spirit was a concept that put heavy
stress on the relatively recent alliance with the Nicene Homoiousians, and to
that extent must have worried several theologians at the council of 381, not least

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the Antiochenes who sponsored it. Such pro-Nicene Pneumatomachians thought

that the problems of the previous generation of the Church had largely been
caused by the unfortunate word homoousion and did not see why now it should
be extended to the Spirit.” Anthony McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus: An
Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001),
301.
2
It must be remembered that there were fathers before St Gregory who had
referred to the Spirit as consubstantial with the Father. Cf. St Athanasius, Ad
Serap. 1.27: “τό πνεῦμα… καί τοῦ Θεοῦ ἑνός ὄντως ἴδιον καί ὁμοούσιον” PG
26, 593C. Undeniably, however, Gregory explicitly referred to the Holy Spirit
as ‘God’. On the Pneumatology of St Athanasius, see George C. Berthold, ‘The
Procession of the Spirit in Athanasius’, Studia Patristica 41 (Leuven, Paris,
Dudley: Peeters, 2006), 125-131.
3
Writing to Cledonius in 382AD, St Gregory referred to the Nicene Creed as the
standard of true faith but was also quick to add that the fathers of the Council in
Nicaea had ‘left out’ an important confession on the Holy Spirit and that it was
now important to declare openly “the Holy Spirit too as God.” The Second Letter
to Cledonius the Presbyter, Letter 102. 1, trans. Lionel Wickham (Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 167.
4
On this, Harkianakis concluded: “the terminology [St Gregory] developed
allowed him to express previously latent and insufficiently addressed elements
of the Trinity more clearly, and thus ward of any objections… while Basil
defended the Homoousion of the Son with the aid of the terms ‘Fatherhood’ and
‘Sonship’, he failed to find any equivalent for the Holy Spirit’s presence….”
Stylianos Harkianakis, ‘Die Trinitätslehre Gregors Von Nazianz’, Κληρονομία,
1.1(1969): 91.
5
Those being St John the Evangelist and St Symeon the New Theologian (b.
949AD).
6
For St Gregory’s understanding of theosis, see Norman Russell, The Doctrine of
Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 213-225.
7
Whilst the Holy Spirit figures centrally in numerous works, this paper focuses on
his famous Fifth Theological Oration, otherwise known as Oration 31, arguably
the crowning work in the area of Pneumatology, where St Gregory put before
his audience the full flowering and richness of the orthodox vision of the Holy
Spirit. For a brief yet insightful study regarding the development of St Gregory’s
Pneumatology, see Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory Nazianzus on the Trinity and
the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 156-164.
8
Oration 31.4. trans. Lionel Wickham (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary

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Press, 2002), 119. All quotations from this Oration, unless otherwise stated, are
taken from this translation.
9
St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.3. PG 36. 136B. Cf. also the following
from St Gregory: “If one existed from the beginning, so did all three” Oration
31.4. PG 36, 137A.
10
Oration 31.29. PG 36, 163B.
11
On St Gregory versus the Eunomians, see John Behr, The Nicene Faith, part 2,
Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2 (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press,
2004), 334-342.
12
Oration 31.14. PG 36, 149A.
13
For St Gregory, there can be no perfect Trinity without the Holy Spirit since only
an incomplete God would result. Cf. for example, Oration 31:4: “If you cast one
down, I make bold to tell you not to exalt the other two. What use is incomplete
deity? Or rather what is deity if it is incomplete? Something is missing if it
does not have holiness, and how could it have holiness without having the Holy
Spirit?”
14
Oration 31.3. PG 36, 136C.
15
Reflecting on the fact that all of God’s ad extra salvific actions are Trinitarian,
Meyendorff wrote: “all major acts of God are Trinitarian acts, and the particular
role of the Spirit is to make the “first contact”, which is then followed – as
existentially, but not chronologically – by a revelation of the Son and, through
Him of the Father. The personal being of the Spirit remains hidden, even if He
is active at every great step of divine activity: creation, redemption, ultimate
fulfillment. His function is not to reveal himself, but to reveal the Son “through
whom all things were made” and who is also personally known in his humanity
as Jesus Christ.” John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and
Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 168. Cf. also St
Basil’s earlier reflection on the meaning of the three prepositions in On the Holy
Spirit 4.6.
16
Oration 31.4. Elsewhere, St Gregory was even more direct: “If the Holy Spirit
is not God, let him first be deified, and then let him deify me his equal!” Oration
34.12. PG 36, 252C. Costache noted that the Cappadocian fathers in general
were in the same tradition as St Athanasius applying the same soteriological
arguments. Cf. Doru Costache, ‘Christian Worldview: Understandings form St
Basil the Great’, Phronema 25(2010): 31-33.
17
Oration 31.1. PG 36, 133B. Much of the Oration is dedicated to demonstrating
the Biblical basis/ proofs in favour of the deity of the Holy Spirit in order to

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refute those who had alleged that he had introduced a strange and unscriptural
God since the Scriptures were silent when it came to the deity of the Holy
Spirit. Reflecting on the charge brought against him regarding the silence of
the Scriptures as this related to the Spirit’s deity, St Gregory responded in terms
of the history of covenants. He proposed a unique understanding of history and
in so doing was able to explain why in fact the Scriptures did not explicitly
declare the Spirit’s divinity. He spoke of a certain order in the unfolding of
God’s divine economy according to “gradual states proportionate to [people’s]
capacities”. Indeed, this unfolding of God’s salvific plan for the world was so
transformative that it involved, in the words of St Gregory, three “shakings of
the earth” (Oration 31.26). On this, he wrote: “the old covenant made clear
proclamation of the Father, a less definite one of the Son. The new covenant
made the Son manifest and gave us a glimpse of the Spirit’s godhead. At the
present time, the Spirit resides amongst us, giving us a clearer manifestation of
himself than before It was dangerous for the Son to be preached openly when the
Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged. It was dangerous, too, for the
Holy Spirit to be made (and here I use a rather rash expression) an extra burden,
when the Son had not been received” (Oration 31.26). According to St Gregory,
the Spirit’s deity was not openly preached from the beginning because humanity
would not have been mature enough to receive this message. Rather, each stage
prepared God’s people by making them more receptive for the next covenant. In
this way each covenant brought about an increasing proximity of the faithful to
God through a gradual maturation process. Clearly, St Gregory’s narrative of the
covenants is meant to indicate the increasing awareness and illumination on the
part of the faithful regarding the Trinitarian existence of God. In other words,
St Gregory, in this case, was not advocating a theory of the ‘development of
doctrine’ put forward in the nineteenth century, which alleged the introduction
of new doctrines after the incarnation. Indeed, to read this as an affirmation, on
the part of St Gregory, of a progressive divine self-revelation theory is to have
missed the point of his argument because when God acts in the world, He always
does so together with his Son and Spirit even though the faithful needed to wait
for the fullness of time to experience this reality.
18
Oration 31.21. PG 36, 156C.
19
Oration 31.3. PG 36, 136B.
20
Oration 31.10. PG 36, 144A.
21
John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2: The Nicene Faith, part 2
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 363. He continued: “Not
only does Gregory categorically call the Spirit “God”, which most, even of the
Nicenes, had been hesitant to do, but he continues this with the assertion that the
Spirit is therefore consubstantial, just as is the Son.” ibid.

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22
For a discussion on the antecedents of the Adam-Eve-Seth analogy in depicting
the mystery of the Holy Trinity, see Alexander Golitzin, ‘Adam, Eve and Seth:
Pneumatological Reflections on an Unusual Image in Gregory of Nazianzus’s
“Fifth Theological Oration”’, Anglican Theological Review 83.3(2001): 537-
546. On this analogy, Orphanos wrote: “Therefore, Gregory, illustrating the
relations of the Holy Trinity, uses the analogy of the mode of being of Adam,
Eve and Seth. Adam is a type of the ‘unbegotten’, Seth is of the ‘begotten’ and
Eve is of that which ‘proceeds’.” Markos Orphanos, The Procession of the Holy
Spirit According to Certain Greek Fathers (Athens, 1979), 29. In reference to
Trinitarian analogies, however, St Gregory is very clear on the shortcomings of
analogies. He concluded: “In the end, I resolved that it was best to say “goodbye”
to images and shadows, deceptive and utterly inadequate as they are to express
the reality” (Oration 31.33).
23
Oration 31.11. PG 36, 145A.
24
Oration 31.11. PG 36, 145B.
25
Oration 31.16. PG 36, 152B.
26
It was in reaction to the Sabellian relativisation of the genuine existence of
‘persons’ that St Gregory the Theologian wanted to emphasize the concrete
and distinct mode of existence of the Holy Spirit. The same trend prompted St
Basil to attempt a consolidation of the concept of personhood in his theological
elaborations of hypostasis. Cf. Philip Kariatlis, ‘St Basil’s Contribution to
the Trinitarian Doctrine: A Synthesis of Greek Paideia and the Scriptural
Worldview’, Phronema 25(2010): 57-83.
27
Cf. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, ‘The Holy Spirit as Agent, not Activity: Origen’s
Argument with Modalism and its Afterlife in Didymus, Eunomius, and Gregrory
of Nazianzus’, Vigiliae Chrisianae 65(2011): 227-248.
28
Oration 31.6. PG 36, 140A. More specifically, in order to make his point, St
Gregory employed the Aristotelian categories of ‘substance’ and ‘accident’; the
former denoting a reality existing in and of itself, whilst the latter signifies that
which can only exist in a certain object, namely, the perceptible properties of a
substance which play no part in modifying the said substance.
29
Oration 31.29.
30
Those tendencies today which see the Spirit as the bond of love between the
Father and Son are to some extent reiterations of St Augustine’s teaching. Cf.,
for example, De Trinitate 6,7: “The Holy Spirit has his existence in the same
unity of substance and equality of Father and Son…. it is plain that the two
Persons [i.e. the Father and the Son] are joined together by a bond other than
themselves… One who loves him who is derived from himself, one who loves

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him from whom he himself is derived, and their mutual love.” Cited in Henry
Bettenson, The Later Christian Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 229. For a perceptive introduction into the Trinitarian theology of St
Augustine especially with reference to the Holy Spirit as the vinculum Trinitatis,
see, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to the Trinity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 83-92. In reflecting upon this
analogy of the Trinity, Ware wrote: “The disadvantage of St Augustine’s analogy
of love is that it likens the Trinity to two persons, not to three; for while love
and beloved are both persons, the mutual love passing between them is not a
third person additional to the other two. In this way the analogy is in danger of
depersonalising the Holy Spirit, although this was certainly not St Augustine’s
intention.” Kallistos Ware, ‘The Trinity: Heart of Our Life’ in Reclaiming the
Great Tradition, ed. James S. Cutsinger (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity
Press, 1997), 133.
31
Elsewhere, St Gregory described the way the Holy Spirit is issued from the
Father in terms of ἔκπεμψις and πρόοδος. Cf. Oration 25.15: “ἴδιον δέ Πατρός
μέν ἡ ἀγεννησία, Υἱοῦ δέ ἡ γέννησις, Πνεύματος δέ ἡ ἔκπεμψις.” PG35. 1221B.
32
It must be noted that the Johannine Gospel uses the verbal form ἐκπορεύεται as
did St Gregory the Theologian.
33
Oration 31.9. PG 36, 141C – 144A. Even though at first glance the Greek term
ἰδιότηνσιν would be translated as ‘characteristics’, in the context of what St
Gregory is writing, I agree with the translator’s choice of the word ‘personalities’.
34
For St Gregory’s understanding of ‘perichoresis’, see J.P. Egan, “Primal Cause
and Trinitarian Perichoresis in Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 31.14”, Studia
Patristica 27 (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 21-28.
35
Oration 31. 8. PG 36, 141.
36
Oration 31.14. PG36. 148D – 149A.
37
In his Pentecost oration he wrote: “the Holy Spirit always was and is and will
be, without beginning, without end, but is always ranked and numbered with
the Father and the Son [Τό Πνεῦμα τό ἅγιον ἦν μέν ἀεί, καί ἔστι καί ἔσται,
οὔτε ἀρξάμενον, οὔτε παυσόμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ἀεί Πατρί καί Υἱῷ συντεταγμένον, και
συναριθμοὐμενον]” Oration 41. 9, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison (Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 151. PG 36. 441AB.
38
Reflecting upon this excerpt under discussion McGuckin correctly noted: “This
passage ought not to be read as inferring a single common abstract “Godhead”
to which class three members belong; for this is what Gregory attacks in the
following section of the Oration (ch. 15). For Gregory, the Godhead is that of the
Father.” A. McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus, 306.

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39
Oration 31.29. Beeley offers some insightful remarks on this section of the
Oration. Cf. C. Beeley, St Gregory of Nazianzus, 180-185.
40
Oration 31.29. PG 36, 165B.
41
Cf. J. Behr, The Nicene Faith, 368-9.
42
What has been called a ‘Spirit-filled Christology’ in no way is to be interpreted
in any adoptionist way. It simply illustrates a concern in St Gregory and other
Christian fathers to affirm the intimate connection between Christ and the Spirit.
43
It falls beyond the scope of this paper to engage specifically with this matter.
This has been addressed by Zizioulas at length especially in his discussions on
the Pneumatological dimension of the Church where he argues for the need for
a proper synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology where the work of
the Son and Spirit are not seen as successive phases of God’s economy. In this
study, after warning of the dangers of separating the work of Christ and the
Spirit in the world, he concludes that “theology [today] has failed to assimilate
the synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology with which the early
church tried to solve its problems.” John Zizioulas, The One and the Many, ed.
Gregory Edwards (Sebastian Press, 2010), 77. See also, Boris Bobrinskoy, “The
Indwelling of the Spirit in Christ: Pneumatic Christology in the Cappadocian
Fathers”, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28.1(1984): 49-65.
44
In emphasising the importance of baptism, St Gregory would in no way espouse
any absolutist view that would preclude salvation from the unbaptised. On this,
he specifically wrote: “It is true that there is but one Lord, one faith, and one
baptism… But can we equally say that there is one road to salvation… and that
those who turn away from it are strictly in error, rejected by God and excluded
from heavenly hope? Nothing would be more dangerous that to give such advice
or to believe it on its own account!” Oration 32.33, cited in Donald Winslow,
The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge, MA:
The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 140.
45
Oration 31.28. PG 36, 165A.
46
Cf. Oration 31.29.
47
Oration 31.29. Elsewhere, St Gregory commented extensively on the saving
effects of the rite of baptism: “[Baptism is] a help for our weakness, a putting off
of the flesh, a following of the Spirit, communion with the Logos, an amendment
of the creature, the wiping away of sin, the possession of light, the overcoming
of darkness, a vehicle which leads towards God, a traveling with Christ, a
support for one’s faith, perfection of the mind, a key to the kingdom of heaven,
an exchange for life, removal of one’s chains, and the transformation of every
human person’s synthetic nature” Oration 40.4. PG 36, 361B.

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48
C. Beeley, St Gregory of Nazianzus, 175.
49
Poem on the Holy Spirit 1.1.3.1-4. PG 37, 408.

Philip Kariatlis is Academic Secretary and Lecturer in Theology at St Andrew’s Greek

Orthodox Theological College. He received his Doctor of Theology degree from the
Sydney College of Divinity having examined the notion of koinonia in Orthodox
ecclesiology as both gift and goal. His research interest lies in Church doctrine,
specifically its existential and salvific character. He translated the doctoral dissertation of
Archbishop Stylianos (Harkianakis) The Infallibility of the Church in Orthodox Theology
(2008) and has written in several peer reviewed journals within Australia and abroad.

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