The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit 

According to St. Athanasius of Alexandria: A New Anthropology.

John A. McGuckin  

Preliminary Contexts

    St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who lived between 296/298 and 373, was one of the most significant theologian bishops of the great metropolis at the mouth of the Nile; a city which in Christian antiquity rivalled Rome for its ecclesiastical prestige and, until the late fifth, century excelled all other centres for the vitality of its intellectual life both in the Hellenistic and the Christian schools. Athanasius’s mentor and immediate predecessor on the Alexandrian throne was Alexander (c.250-326), a  political force to reckon with as well as an intellectualist who wished to reclaim and reshape the tradition of Origen in the positive manner of his own predecessor Dionysius (248-264). Part of the motivation for this was to wrest the laurels of intellectual leadership away from the scholarly bishops of Caesarea Maritima, who had claimed that inheritance, and had posed a challenge to the Alexandrian tradition.  Much of Athanasius’ theology can be explained as a matter of trying to seal tight the loose ends of the weave that Alexander had left behind him locally, and of reasserting the pre-eminence of the moderated Origenian tradition that Dionysius and Alexander had initiated in Egypt, even though important Caesarean theologians such as Theotecnos (bishop c. 303), Pamphilus (c. 250-309) and Eusebius (c. 313-340) capitalized on the way on which Origen himself had moved his school and library to Caesarea Maritima, at Theotecnos’ invitation, in the face of  Demetrios of Alexandria’s mounting hostility after the publication of  On First Principles.

    Alexander had left to Athanasius a legacy which saw, as it were, two fires still burning in  the street. One was the  aftermath of the Egyptian persecutions that had resulted in a badly fragmented hierarchy. We know this today as the Melitian schism. In practice it meant that Alexander had considerable difficulty holding his  great diocese together. Unlike other ecclesiastical centres, which had adopted the principle of one bishop in a diocese whose teaching ought to be unchallenged and whose single rule was subject only to supervision by the local synod of surrounding bishops moderated in a conciliar manner by the senior hierarch of the provincial area, Alexandria had, at least from the previous century, developed a system where the metropolitan bishop had so imposed itself over the  hundreds of country bishops of Egypt, that he was basically their master, and they his suffragans, required to take oaths of loyalty to him at their consecration by his hands. This was a development eased by the fact that Alexandria itself was surrounded by a multitude of small country villages and very few significant towns. 

    The Melitian schism (under the banner, so they claimed, of having offered more faithful witness in times of persecution, and more rigorous observance in times of peace), also served to offer a loud ‘No!’ to this episcopal centralization. It had  its roots deep in the soil of the countryside parishes. Partly because of it, Athanasius’ succession to the throne seems to have been a contested one. It took more than a year after Alexander’s death for him to be elected to the see in 329, and since the terms of the Nicene settlement, in reconciling and validating the Melitian bishops, had made all their hierarchs subordinate to those originally loyal to Alexander, this meant that no Melitian voice at all could be heard in the process of election. Even though Constantine’s Nicene legislation had peremptorily reconciled the Melitian clergy to Alexander, at the time of the latter’s death, almost half of those who had signed the agreement reneged on their promise and opposed Athanasius’ incumbency.      

    The Melitians brought four legal complaints against him: first that he was too young and inexperienced to be the canonical Archbishop; secondly that he had acted illegally by demanding their  parishes supply linens for the use of the Alexandrian church (clothing imposts were solely the privilege of the military governors); thirdly the famous charge that he had murdered the Melitian bishop Arsenios  and cut off his hand for magical rites  (a complaint Athanasius answered by producing the bishop in question  and showing he had two hands); and lastly that his priest Macarius had brutally broken up the altar of the dissident cleric Ischiras smashing his chalice in the process. None of these charges were strong enough in themselves to work his overthrow but collectively they fuelled the growing impatience of the imperial court against him and later gave his enemies enough fodder at the Council of Tyre in 335 to effect the first of his five exiles; eventually forcing him to spend seventeen of his forty five years as Archbishop outside his own household. His third exile, 356-362, spent in the Upper Egyptian monasteries, was the period when he wrote the Apologias Against the Arians and the Letters to Serapion, and where his pneumatology and trinitarian thought is most clearly elaborated: which shall be our focus herein.

    This very brief background to Athanasius’ early years as Archbishop serves only to sketch in the fact we need to keep in mind that everything that he did in his administration and in his theological activity was to counter oppositional forces of a considerable nature. This is just as true of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or pneumatology, as it is of his great fight for the Christology of the Homoousion and his theology of the believer’s deification in Christ which flows from it. He is a profoundly situational theologian; but these three categories, if we can break them up artificially as: Pneumatology, Christology, and Soteriological Anthropology, are of course, exactly one coherent and sustained vision of doctrine in Athanasius’ hands. In fact this coherent unity of vision of our human perception of God’s power at work in the world, is entirely the chief point of Athanasius’ understanding of the Father, his Son, and their Holy Spirit. It is later commentators who have split the categories of investigation apart in their own alien, forensic and scholastic, fashions, disrupting Athanasius’ intent by the way in which so many text books, even and especially in modern times, have elevated anachronistic and non-patristic terms of analysis. 

    Athanasius’ body of work, for example, has sometimes been divided into dogmatic treatises and ascetical works; but again the classification is misleading. In each of his works the theologian consistently shows how salvation worked out on the grand scale by Christ’s incarnation and victory over death, has to be appropriated on the individual scale by the purification of mind and soul brought about by the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Deification in Christ, in short, is the activity of the Holy spirit. But this is a work that is  self-evidently  accomplished “In Christ” (in the Pauline sense of that key notion) since, for Athanasius, the  mystery of a creature being deified means to be brought into communion with God the Father by the process of being recognised by Him as one made into the image of the Word through the sanctification of the Holy Spirit: ‘It is through the Spirit,’ he says, ‘that we are all  said to be partakers of God…If the Holy Spirit were a creature we would have no participation in God, in him.’

    In this, Athanasius generally remains faithful to the overarching vision of God’s activity in Origen’s early architecture of the  Trinity: where the latter sees the  outreach of the Father through the Son reaching the faithful and being effected in them by the purificatory work of the Spirit. In short the system is: From the Father through the Son in the Spirit to the believer: From the believer by the Spirit, in the Son, to the Father; thus eliding revelation and salvation into one category and making the soteriological advent of God to humanity into no less than a radically reconstituted anthropology: a potentially theandric vision of the race.  

    One of Athanasius’ very early works as bishop was the Epistle to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms, echoed in  all respects by the authentic parts of his Expositions on the Psalter, where he implicitly answers the Melitian complaints that he is ‘too young’ to function as senior hierarch, by demonstrating his qualifications as both scholar and spiritual guide. That he took this Epistle with him in 330 on the occasion of his visit to the Thebaid desert, and successfully commanded the allegiance of the monks there, shows that this claim of his to be a spiritual master, not simply an administrative lord, was widely recognised even in his own lifetime. 

    This too is part of the motivation of his exposition on the  sanctifying role of the Holy Spirit in the Ad Serapion letters. Once more writing from the heart of the Thebaid to Serapion (one of Antony’s early disciples, to whom he had bequeathed his sheepskin coat) Athanasius now provides the  theological rationale and raison d’etre for the  entire monastic spirituality just as earlier, in the Ad Marcellinum he had given them a veritable Typikon of how to use the Psalter in  services of prayer. It is this consistent epideixis of himself as spiritual master (one can only exegete the Spirit if one possesses the Spirit) that not only won the monks’ admiration, but also secured the  loyalty of the country churches of Upper Egypt which might otherwise have been tempted to throw in their lot with the Melitians.    

    However, as well as tending to separate Athanasius’ pneumatology from his better-known Christological soteriology, a prevalent scholastic manner of treating patristics, that for so long has dominated both the church and scholarship, has led to the modern obscuring of Athanasius’ powerful and dynamic doctrine of the Holy Spirit. This is seen very clearly in the curious fact that the extensive translated library of Athanasius’ writings given in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series simply did not consider his writings on the Trinity or the Holy Spirit to be either relevant or interesting. They included none of them; and it fell to Shapland in 1951 to give the first English rendering of the Letters to Serapion which are not only focused on Pneumatology, but actually constitute the Church’s first-ever sustained treatise De Spiritu Sancto.  

        Sergei Bulgakov exemplified a general dismissive feeling enduring through the 20th century textbooks when he said: 

    ‘Dogmatically, to be sure, Athanasius confesses the Holy Trinity,  but theologically, his doctrine, though it includes the Dyad, does not, in essence, include the Trinity; and his trinitarian theology remains predominantly dyadic…In all his works which are dedicated to Logology, St Athanasius confesses the church dogma of the Holy Spirit, whose action he attributes to the Logos. He does not however, develop any theology of the Holy Spirit.’ 

And he goes on: 

‘This alone is sufficient to make his doctrine of the Holy Spirit…. incomplete and to give it a one-sided Christocentric orientation. St. Athanasius remains predominantly a logologist or christologist, even in his pneumatology.’

Bulgakov’s chief cause of complaint against Athanasius pneumatology was that  it never considered the Spirit :

‘[A]s a Creator, in relation to the creation of the world, but exclusively as a giver of grace, completing the work of salvation. That is, the Holy Spirit is viewed not cosmourgically, but charismatically.’

 Bulgakov thinks Athanasius relegates his action only to the ‘spiritual’ aspects of the world, not the ‘natural’ aspects, and in this fails to  attribute a full hypostatic existence to the Spirit within the Trinity. For Bulgakov  his approach represented a dead-end of theological thinking, something Bulgakov says which is ‘incomplete’, one-sided’ and ‘defective’. Fortunately, he thinks, Athanasius had no future influence on the later patristic tradition in this regard, and concludes: ‘This soteriological narrowing of the problematic in St. Athanasius remains, however, without influence on further patristic thought.’  

    All of this I find a bizarrely mistaken interpretation of the sources, and explicable only on the basis that Bulgakov did not realize how heavily conditioned he was by late 19th century German  Protestant thinking. His view of the  later transmission of influence contradicts  my own reading of the evidence where Athanasian pneumatology was surely the ‘required reading’ that directly inspired Gregory the Theologian’s, Basil of Caesarea’s, Gregory of Nyssa’s, and Cyril of Alexandria’s classic Trinitarian theologies. Bulgakov himself was hoping his own Sophianic doctrine would offer the coherent unified approach he claimed not to find in Athanasius, but reading the rapid survey of patristic pneumatology on  which he stands  in the first part of The Comforter,  it is clear he depended too much on superficial patrological handbooks of the late nineteenth century. 

    Nicolas Berdyaev was more acute when he expressed a similar dissatisfaction with the state of pre-Nicene and Nicene-era pneumatology and calls all ecclesial teaching on the Spirit: ‘The last unexplored frontier.’ It is something Bulgakov himself hinted at when he  remarked that the icon of the Holy Spirit cannot yet be drawn in this cosmos, because the fundamental iconic work in which the Spirit is engaged, namely the fulfilment of the Church, has not yet been accomplished and cannot be so until the Eschaton: though again, I would take issue with him and suggest that patristic theology might well have accepted the Holy Theotokos as exemplar of an icon of the Holy Spirit that was well enough finished in all its dimensions even before the Eschaton, and the Incarnate Lord himself as its prototype.  However, Joel Elowski bears keeping in mind when he says: ‘The Church’s confession of the Holy Spirit has always seemed somewhat unfinished – which is not necessarily a bad thing.’

    Anatolios Khaled who, far more that Bulgakov, has deeply immersed himself in Athanasius’ mindset, is more to the point when he observes that the pre-Nicene pneumatology is actually quite considerable – not least in Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen; but that the Arian controversies about the status and role of the Son led to a certain  ‘forgetfulness’ of the Church’s pneumatological tradition. I would add to that, only that it might be better expressed that the situational needs of apologia in the time of Arianism, like an out of control fire, took up much of the theological oxygen of the Orthodox fathers of the mid fourth century, but the church can hardly be accused of forgetting the Trinity: and this for two reasons. Firstly the faithful never once forgot the  doxology; and it was the doxology that, in the end, brings Athanasius, as well as Basil, back to realize the indissoluble connection between Christological soteriology as a proof of the divine status of the Son, and the Spirit’s role in the sanctification of Humanity: to realize, that is, that salvation in Christ and sanctification in the Spirit, were one and the same thing,  merely two different modalities of the self-same path that the Father had established back to communion in his life, for creatures. That the obsessive fight of the Nicene fathers to establish the Christology of the homoousion, led inexorably to the statement of the divine agency of the Spirit, is just another way of saying that anti-Arian apologetics are, from start to finish, an argument about the  tri-personed activity of the God who saves. And so,  perhaps ‘unfinished’ is a very  different matter from ‘forgotten’ or even ‘defective’ as Bulgakov complained of. 

    In the case of Athanasius, the problem of a sober and just critique resides in the fact that just as Christology and Pneumatology ought never be separated, so too never should the doctrine of God be severed from the doctrine of salvation; or, for that matter, the doctrine of creation from soteriological anthropology. The reality of God as Trinity is, in nuce, the salvation of the human race; just as the Trinity is the cause of its origin, the source of its being and the goal of its destiny. If the pneumatological argument of Athanasius is dense and if he seems, at first sight, to work in a restricted range of musical keys: it is his apologetic dialectical context that has shaped him. When in the Apologia Contra Arianos and the Serapion Letters he seems so often to tie the consideration of the Spirit’s person and role so closely to that of the Son, we ought to remember that he is breathing an atmosphere where so many of his articulate opponents denied the divinity of the Son. Having made his stand by the homoousion of the Incarnate Word, it is his entire argument that the divinity of the Spirit must be established by applying exactly the same arguments to him as he  had previously done to the Son. This must not be read as any form of subordinationism on Athanasius’ part: as would become clear in an instant if we understand that the Son’s homoousion, for Athanasius, means identity of essence (ταυτότης της ὀυςίας) not generic sameness. That he is clearly implying the same concept for the Spirit (and twice acclaiming him explicitly as homoousion)  ought to remove any suspicion on that front. And yet,  readers such as Bulgakov have clearly gone down that road. Compounding the error is the way in which  many later readers have also not sufficiently distinguished the times when Athanasius is talking about the eternal relations of God (what moderns often speak of as the Immanent Trinity) as distinct from the salvific agencies of God within  history in the Incarnation (what moderns often call the Economic Trinity).  The point, however, is that Athanasius strongly resists this facile modern separation of the two ideas: which in classic Christian theology are simply inseparable. Not that this means there is no distinction to be made: rather that Athanasius is not going to speak about the immanent intra-Trinitarian relations. His concern is to show the working of the Trinitarian economy of salvation within history. When he talks of the Son ‘sending the Spirit’ it is a Pentecostal theology he is invoking. But there is no question that in these treatises he is pressing on, logically-speaking, to the doctrine of the common operations of the triune Godhead, as we shall see shortly.

    So, when one investigates his pneumatological teaching at first hand, it is clear enough that it does turn around the relation of the Father to the Spirit  and on the role of the Spirit in the shaping of the Creation: both things Bulgakov negated. In the light of this double problematic, therefore: that of the  constricting contexts of Athanasius’ own time, and that of the dissatisfaction of several modern commentators, let us try to see what Athanasius himself articulated about the energy and presence of the divine Spirit. 

Athanasius and the Earlier Tradition    

    Athanasius’ church had one of the finest theological archives in the Christian world and there is no question that he also had access to libraries in the desert monasteries.  In the Thebaid in 358 he may not have had at his hand a whole set of critical editions of the earlier fathers, such as we take for granted today, but there is also no doubt that he knows the main lineage of previous pneumatological thought. Irenaeus is a considerable influence on him, with his image of the Logos and the Spirit as being the two ‘hands of God’ busily active in the world. For Irenaeus this was particularly in the creative outflow that made the world, and was especially continued in the shaping and hallowing of the Church, which was the energy of the sanctification of the world. Irenaeus is quite clear that the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son to transfigure the saints. Like most else in pre-Nicene trinitarian thought, this does not move much beyond the  Pauline teaching given in Galatians, Corinthians and Romans. To put this systematic in other words – it was the Spirit’s task to make an ancient humanity (Old dying Adam) into a New Humanity, in the New Adam who was Christ, the Incarnate Son of God; the God-Man who had personally conquered the  fatal necessity (ἀνάγκη) of human mortality. This was nothing less than a theanthropic reconstitution of humanity. Seeing this coherent vision of the Incarnation as the second creation of Mankind explains why Athanasius’ thought is a fundamental step forward in  the ancient world’s thinking about anthropology: a concept to which we shall return finally.   

    Athanasius follows Irenaeus’ lead here because of his deep pastoral involvements in a very conflicted time. It is not that he is neglecting the Spirit’s involvement in the wider ‘Creation’, rather that he is focusing on the community of Christians, wanting to change his people, and  being uncertain of how assured the presence of the Spirit might be outside the Church in a pagan environment, when even in the ostensible community of Christians such radical ‘departure’ (ἔξοδος) from the Spirit can be witnessed among the Arian deniers of the Son.

    But it is Origen’s influence (185-254) on Athanasius that is more immediate: and this in two senses. First of all in the positive sense of how Athanasius had himself appropriated (corrected and refined) the systematic of the great Alexandrian. Secondly in the negative sense of how he reacted violently to the manner in which Origen’s legacy had been abused (many would say) in the pro-Arian camp. In the latter case we have a very particular instance that affected Athanasius deeply, and that was Eusebius of Caesarea’s recent publication of his On Ecclesiastical Theology where he interpreted Origen in a highly reductionist manner, earning Athanasius’ disgust and leading to his classification of the ‘Eusebians’ as little better than the Arian mainstream. 

    Origen’s pneumatology, ‘rich and complex’ in itself, as Martens describes it  has often puzzled readers. He is quite clear, for example, that the Holy Spirit is hypostatically (meaning individually) divine. But we remember that in Origen’s theology only God the Father is God-in-Himself (ἄυτοθεος). The Son and Spirit are  properly speaking ‘divine’ (θέος) but not ‘God’ (ὄ Θεὸς ). For him  this means the Son and Spirit have divinity (separate frοm the created order) by participation (μεθέξις). The Spirit will share this participation solely with Christ’s redeemed after the Ascension of the Lord, though there is also a sense in which the Word and Spirit are given universally to the world in a new way after the incarnate economy.  Origen is sure that no knowledge of the Spirit has ever been given to humanity except through scripture, of which the Spirit is the Lord and the inspiration. For Origen, the Holy Spirit leads the  believer into fullness of life and understanding but the secure possession of him is dependent on a soul’s worthiness and continued purity. All in all, Origen’s approach to the Spirit is not a universal revelation (such as one might approach by the possession of reason/logos) but a particular one, most closely concerned with the way the Spirit sanctifies: and does this most especially by bringing the Word to life in the believer. This sanctification, he says, is a ‘ceaseless work’ of both the Father and the Son, operating in the world through the Holy Spirit.  He is one of the first to  define clearly that: ‘All knowledge of the Father is obtained by revelation of the Son through the Holy Spirit.’ The pattern is once more clearly doxological: from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, to the world; and this  passes on straight to Athanasius as the τάξις, or particular ‘order’, of the trinitarian operations in the cosmos. For Origen, where the Father and the Logos are concerned with universal (cosmic) effects, the Spirit is particularly concerned with working  sanctification among the saints , in order to make them participators in the Logos, and so gaining  for them union with God.  

    Athanasius retains this trinitarian  τάξις  but not in the very restrictive sense it has in Origen. Several commentators, not least Bulgakov, have seen in this an implied limitation and deficiency in the conception of the Spirit’s work (a ‘charismatic’ function as opposed to an ‘creational’ role). I believe, the contrary ought to be deduced. For that work of refined sanctification, the divinisation-through-Christ which the Spirit works, is surely the perfection (τελειώσις) of the general work of creation: its highest point and purpose (τέλος) in some respects. To think otherwise would be like criticising a heart surgeon for not attending to general nursing skills. In fact, in his original exposition of the  perfection of the Spirit’s work here, Origen himself ends by being worried he might have given the impression the Spirit is the greater of the three persons, and so he adds: ‘But, of course, nothing in the Trinity can be called greater or lesser, since there is but one single fount of godhead, who upholds the universe by his Logos and reason, and who makes holy by the Spirit of his mouth.’ This trinitarian τάξις is the solid core Athanasius has inherited from the earlier tradition, and  which he refines through the doctrine of the identity of essence, purging it of its earlier subordinationist colour.  

    And yet the earlier Alexandrian inheritance was complicated by the fact that Origen had added to his core idea a further speculation in his Commentary on John; and this is one that Athanasius certainly draws away from, while Eusebius of Caesarea, at the same time, woodenly exacerbated it. In the Commentary on John (and meant as a speculative word to ‘higher students’, as distinct from the exposition of apostolic tradition which he earlier had summarized in the De Principiis) Origen describes certain positions on the Holy Spirit that ‘might be adopted’ given that scripture says: ‘All things were made through [the Word]’ (Jn. 1.3.).  So, he asks, was the Holy Spirit also made  through the Word? Or could he be ‘Unbegotten’? Or does the Spirit not have any separate subsistence? Origen concludes that  it would be impious to conclude the Spirit is not one of the trinitarian hypostases. But since the Father alone is Unbegotten, and the Spirit is nowhere said to be begotten like the Son,  it is ‘more pious and true’, he says,  to hold that: 

‘The Holy Spirit is the most honoured of all the things made through the Word and that he is first in rank of all things which have been made by the Father through Christ….The Holy Spirit seems to have need of the Son ministering to his hypostasis, not only for it to exist, but also for it to be wise, and rational and just…   I think if I may put it this way, that the Holy Spirit supplies the material of the gifts from God to those who are called saints thanks to him, and because of participation in him. The material of the gifts… is made effective from God [the Father], is administered by Christ; but subsists in accordance with the Holy Spirit.’

Here, Origen is clearly trying to make sense out of the processes of trinitarian operations, not simply their energeia in the economy, but their eternal relationships. It is a matter of no small wonderment, however, that this great biblical commentator, even in a treatise dedicated entirely to John, does not treat of Jn.15.26 even once in all his writing: the verse which speaks of the Spirit’s procession (ἐκπορέυσις) from the Father, the terminology which would, of course, give the great theologian of Nazianzus his classical trinitarian solution in the late fourth century.  

    Nevertheless, this overall aspect of Origen’s pneumatology, its situation as a mediation from the Father through the Son to the world, in the Spirit (as in (my) italics above), is quite evidently, simply a re-statement of the traditional doxology of the confessing Church. Both in Origen and Athanasius, this is clearly founded on an explicit exegesis of Paul. Origen sees the latter as one of the chief visionaries inspired by the Holy Spirit of God  (alongside John the Evangelist). As for Athanasius, he is not dependent on Origen for his Pauline exegesis. In studying the Pauline prayers he has come to see, independently, that Origen’s subordinationist approach to the triad, is a dead-end. Both in his Christology and his Pneumatology Athanasius is conscious of making a major correction of Origen’s subordinationism. It  was his fight for  the homoousion, understood in his own sense of the  identity of essence (ταυτότης της ουςίας) that freed him from the pull of Origen’s current, and made him able to see Eusebius’ of Caesarea’s false step in elevating Origen’s speculation in the John Commentary over and above his explicit exposition of the apostolic tradition which he had offered in the De Principiis.

    The Apologia Contra Arianos and the Ad Serapion letters, were composed at around the same time,  during Athanasius’ third exile in the Thebaid, circa 358-359, and though both texts were revised later, they show, substantively what his thinking was at this period: in the heart of the Arian crisis. The first set of texts shows his pneumatology through a Christological apologia bent on  refuting Arian objections that if Christ was anointed with the Spirit of God, he cannot be considered to have been divine. It is important to understand that this approach is mainly concerned with  the attributes of the Logos in the incarnate economy: does he give or receive the spirit?  To which Athanasius answers – ‘both’. 

    As Shapland notes, even if the Letters to Serapion had not survived one would have been able to construct Athanasius’ intent from the Contra Arianos, even though the former work is more specific. Indeed the teaching of To Serapion 1.22-24, is  a repetition of Contra Arianos 1.47 where the same list of scriptures are exegeted. The Serapion Letters, however, deal more  closely with a specific argument  as to whether the Spirit is personally distinct and divine. Here he anticipates the substance of the later Neo-Nicene Trinitarian settlement by applying all the arguments he has hitherto used to show that Christ’s salvific work demonstrates his divine relation to the Father, to the self-same cause in relation to arguing about the Holy Spirit. Just as it is with the Logos incarnate - if the Spirit saves and makes  humans divine, then he cannot be a creature. Likewise with his insistence that all three divine persons are of the same substance, and individually subsistent, he has again stated the essence of the  subsequent Neo-Nicene settlement: lacking solely the technical terminology (one ousia three hypostases) of the Cappadocians.

The Apologia Contra Arianos

    In this refutation of Arian arguments that if the Son receives the Spirit he cannot be divine, Athanasius is chiefly concerned to argue that in the Eternal Trinity receiving and giving are one and the same thing: thus contradicting the popular Hellenistic theology that defined divinity as that which gives and mortal status as that which receives. He also wishes to  make opponents  note the distinction how the Lord receives in the humility of his Manhood and gives in the lordliness of his Godhead. Athanasius characterises the  position that thinks receiving the Spirit defines creatureliness, as an ‘excess of irreligion’.  The Word, who is in the Father, gives the Spirit to the believers as the very process of salvation, he says: 

Since the Word is in the Father and the Spirit is given from the Word, [the Saviour] wills that we should receive the Spirit, so that when we do receive it, and then possess the Spirit of the Word who is in the Father, we may ourselves be found to have become one in the Word on account of the Spirit, and so through him one in the Father…… For what the Word has in the Father by nature, this is what he wishes to be given to us irrevocably through the Spirit….and so shall we be accounted to have become one in the Son and in the Father, since that same Spirit is in us which is in the Word who is in the Father.

Clearly then, the Spirit is the effective power (as far as we are concerned) of the redemptive deification achieved in  the Incarnation of the Word, as sent from the divine Father.  But the Word’s gift of the Spirit (his ‘own Spirit’ as Athanasius often  repeats)  marks him out as Lord, not slave, but not thereby as ‘Lord of the Spirit’. In so far as he is shown as divine Lord, he is also manifested as ‘equal of the Spirit’:

Before the Incarnation the  Word gave out the Spirit as his very own.  Just so, now that he is made man, he sanctifies all with the Spirit….When the Lord gave the Holy Spirit to his disciples he showed his own Godhead and majesty; signifying that he was not the Spirit’s inferior, but his equal….. but through whom and from whom could the Spirit ever be given except through the Son whose Spirit he is? And when were we ourselves ever able to receive it except when the Word became man?

    It is necessary to remember, when Athanasius so often describes the Spirit as the ‘Spirit of the Son’ that he means it in a very different way to that Origen implied in the John Commentary. For Athanasius the Spirit  belongs to the Son and is intimately and inseparably bound up with the Son’s salvific mission, precisely because  he is the Spirit of the Eternal Father with whom both the Word and Spirit are homoousion. As he  himself summed it up in his earlier Exposition of the Faith: ‘The Word was before us and before all Creation, and is, the Wisdom of the Father. But the Holy Spirit, He who proceeds from the Father, is ever in the hands of the Father who sends, and of the Son who conveys Him, by whose means he filled all things.’    

    However, it is in the Serapion Letters that his thought  is even more refined, and to these we shall now turn.

The Letters to Serapion

    Serapion was a trusted friend of Athanasius, one of his local bishops in the town of Thmuis in the Nile delta. It is now  the ruins  at Tel El Timai, but in Athanasius’ day it was an important town, independent of the administration of the Prefect of Alexandria. Serapion initiated this correspondence with Athanasius (which allows him his clearest opportunity to focus on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and in which he develops the theology of the Apologia Contra Arianos),  by  informing  the metropolitan that he has come across a group of people who, although they accept the Nicene sense of the deity of the Son, refuse to acknowledge either the Spirit’s personal  distinctness in a putative Trinity, or his divine stature; seeing  him instead as a ‘ministering spirit’ of the kind mentioned in Hebrews 1.14: a superior kind of angel, but  a creature nevertheless. 

    There are four letters extant. It is the first one which contains the core argumentation. The others are developments of aspects. Shapland has argued persuasively that Letters two and three  in the Migne Patrologia Graeca edition, ought to be reconstituted as originally one single letter. In  this, Athanasius spends the first half arguing the shape and method of theological deduction of divinity (by scripture in tradition) from the case of the Son, and then in the second half synopsizes, once more, the argument of his first letter. The fourth letter (the third which Athanasius originally sent) is a reply to various objections which Serapion reports back have been made against his arguments by the dissidents.

    Athanasius begins by seeing the group as  somewhat allied to him (they accepted the divinity of the Incarnate Son) but ends by sensing he is not going to win them over. He labels them Tropici (which means ‘Metaphoricals’) from the way they read the scriptural references to the Holy Spirit as merely metaphors or ‘tropes’ for God,  and Pneumatomachi (or Spirit-fighters) a term that the Neo-Nicene movement will later find very apposite when they turn their arguments against the Macedonian party after Constantinople 1, in 381. Several commentators have identified the Tropici with the Macedonians, but this is a mistaken conflation. The latter party probably accepted the homoiousion, and though Athanasius did hold out an olive branch to the larger members of this group after his Synod of Alexandria in 362, it is clear from his argument here in the Serapion Letters, that he would not have dealings with any group who openly called the Spirit a creature (κτίστον). As he says quite explicitly, in affirming the divinity of the Son, but denying the deity of the Spirit, they not only lose the Spirit, but thereby lose their possession of the Son also.

    Athanasius does not call the Spirit ‘God’ explicitly in the Letters. In 358 he was already feeling his way towards a possible reconciliation with the Homoiousians who themselves acknowledged the Spirit as θείον but not θεὸς. But his theology of the divinity of the Spirit is, nonetheless, abundantly clear. Twice in the Letters he states that the Spirit is homoousion with the Father. He anticipates the  ‘conglorification’ (συνδοξάμενον) of the Council of 381 by his assertion that the Spirit is ‘confessed as God’ along with the Word. And no less than eight times he reiterates that the Spirit is not  a creature. Accordingly, it is certainly Athanasius who builds the high foundations of the settlement that will eventually be accomplished by the Cappadocians after his death.

    The Tropici had elevated two key biblical texts to support their argument. The first was 1 Tim. 5.21 (naming a triad of God, Christ and the elect angels); and the other was Amos 4.13 (God created the spirits). Athanasius chides them for not knowing when to take scripture metaphorically and when literally. If they  believe the verb ‘create’ denies deity to the Spirit, they are being inconsistent when they overlook the way Proverbs 8.22 applies it to the Wisdom of God whom they accept as divine. If the Son is divine, he says, and the Spirit is the Spirit of that Son, then he too must have the same unity with the Logos that the Logos has with the Father: in short he too must be divine: otherwise  we have introduced a foreign and created element into the Trinity which the Church confesses. The triune God whom the Church worships together is but One God.  Just as we  fail completely in our theology if we deny the divinity of the Son, so too we destroy the coherence of the Trinity if we assert the creaturely status of the Spirit.

    Much of the  text in the First Letter  to Serapion is concerned with scriptural exegesis – a  pattern of response to the Arian Christologians that was already  well established in Athanasian theology; and, as noted, Athanasius follows the same path of scriptural argument from Christology to Pneumatology to establish the divinity of the Spirit. Against the Tropici’s argument that  ‘Spirit’ is simply a vague and general cipher for ‘divine working’ in the scriptures, he agrees that  this interpretation applies to many allusions, but when the  personal presence of the divine Spirit is meant, the reference in each case has a special article: such as ‘Holy Spirit’ or ‘Spirit of the Father’ or ‘Spirit of the Son’. The Tropici have missed this completely. From the extensive list of texts Athanasius considers, he concludes that the elevated titles demonstrate  the Spirit is not a creature; especially (and this will lead on to be the focus for the pneumatological additions to the Nicene creed in 381) his titles as Lord (2 Cor. 3.17) and Life-Giver (Gen. 2.7 & Jn. 6.63) which are  not attributes any creature, human or angelic, can rightly claim.  Accordingly the Tropici’s assertion that the Spirit is an elevated angel (based on 1 Tim. 5.21) is a fundamentally flawed reading of scripture.

    Serapion reports to Athanasius that the Tropici have mocked the opinion that the Spirit is divine, by  arguing that the only categories  scripturally permissible for conceiving of the divine life are those of Unbegotten (ἀγένετος) or Begotten (γεννήτος); in other words Father or Son. If the Spirit is said to be divine, they argued, he cannot be called ἀγένετος  and so must be γεννήτος, and if this was allowed, then he would presumably be a brother to the Only-Begotten Son, which clearly  contradicts scripture, apart from being ridiculous (a reduction ad absurdum they intended).  Athanasius chides them for even thinking to make a joke about such holy things and says that he is more than reluctant to follow their lead into theologising about the eternal  intra-trinitarian relationships.  In this he sets the path Gregory the Theologian will follow after him in his First Theological Oration. Those who speak about divinely inaccessible things undertake a perilous path and must be purified or else they will fall into the pit of blasphemy. The implied irony of both Athanasius and Gregory the Theologian is, of course, that without the presence and charism of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,  humans cannot speak theology of this order and magnitude, since it is entirely the gift of the Spirit, which those who deny him, obviously cannot claim. The argument about intra-trinitarian relations once raised, however, leads Athanasius on to consider it.

    The Spirit is not the brother of the  Son, for the relations in the Trinity are constituted by the gift of the Father who is the  source and fount (πήγη) of the Godhead. This is why, Athanasius says, that the  scripture always distinguishes the  persons by the terms ‘Son of the Father’ and ‘Spirit of the Father’. The eternal (and by implication economic) relations are then sketched out in a consistent development of the image of the Source and the Stream: traditional theology since the early second century. If the Father is the fountain, Athanasius says, then the Son is the  stream,  and then we drink of the water of the Spirit (following Jn. 7.39). Or again: if the Father is light, then the Son is radiance, and we are illuminated (lit up) by the Holy Spirit. Or, if the Father alone is Wise, then the Son is the Wisdom, and we receive the gift of the spirit of Wisdom (are made wise). The idea is clear enough that there is an order, a τάξις, present here which concerns the manner in which the  Divine being runs out to the Word and Spirit, and flows through them to the created order in a particularised and mediated gift. It is always the same pattern as the ancient doxology: From the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, to the world. Then,  the-world-in-the Spirit is sanctified, so as to become conformed to the Son, and in the image of the Son is presented back as acceptable to the Father, and given union with Him, the adoption as Sons: made into New Adam, by participation in the New Adam, Jesus, by the work of the Holy Spirit. 

    The work of the Spirit is thus intimately and inseparably connected to that of the Son, for the Spirit is the ‘very image’ of the Son, as the Son is of the Father, Athanasius says. And the Spirit is ‘proper’ to the essence of the Son, just as the Son’s is to the Father and is in the Father. Origen (and I think Bulgakov too to an extent from  the character of his complaints) took this to imply a subordinated declension in the  taxonomy: Athanasius takes it to signify the logical result of both of the persons, of Son and Spirit, having the self-same essence; that of the Father.  But the ‘order’, the movement, in the Trinity is critically important here. This τάξις is witnessed within the eternal order of God’s life, about which human minds and tongues cannot say more, but also witnessed more appreciably and visibly, in the economic order of salvation;  in the manner of how God is revealed to  the cosmos and how he saves it. In short, the  Athanasian understanding of Trinity is that God himself is our salvation and the Trinity is the name for how the Unapproachable Godhead becomes intimate to Humanity in the cause of its rescue. 

    Athanasius sums this up by an early form of the doctrine of the commonality of Trinitarian operations: All the gifts that come from God are as one: and all come from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. As ‘there is only one Godhead of the holy trinity (Τρίας)’, therefore all the relations cohere in unity. Since the divine nature is but one singularity, all the operations are one, the holiness is one, and the eternity is one and the same: 

‘The trinity is holy and perfect, confessed as God in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, having nothing foreign or external mixed up within it. It is not compounded of  creator and creature  but is entirely Creator and Maker. It is identical with itself, and indivisible in its nature and singular in its activities. For the Father does all things through the Word and in the Holy Spirit.’ 

    This correlation in the Trinity (συστοιχία as he calls it) is an indivisible unity. The separation of the hypostases is, therefore,  perhaps notional but not theologically relevant, for who can make a separation between light and its bright radiance Athanasius says? At the end of this series of expositions Athanasius makes the telling conclusion that this, and no other doctrine, is the  ‘ancient and apostolic tradition of the Church’ given by the Lord himself for the observance of his disciples in his Great Command. So although Athanasius does not have in his writing the (later) Cappadocian formulae of ‘three hypostases one ousia’ it is clear enough that he has done much more than lay the foundations towards the solution adopted at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

    Like Gregory Nazianzen, Athanasius hones in on Jn.15.26, to supply the defining terminology of the manner of the Spirit’s ‘procession’ (ἐκπορέυσις) from the Father. The Spirit, thus, comes ‘From the Father᾽ (πάρα τοῦ) and is ‘Of the Son’ (τοῦ Ὑιου)  or simply ‘The Son’s’; but note - this time without preposition. These precise terms are very important: without noticing them several commentators have read the Athanasian account of the Spirit as if it were comparable to the Origenian subordinate declension – where the Spirit somehow depended on the Son for his relation to the Father within the deity. As Shapland had already noticed  this, in Athanasius,  is not an early form of double-procession doctrine (filioque) as Montfaucon the Benedictine Migne editor had glossed it. It is rather Athanasius’ insistence that since there is singular identity of (the Father’s) divine essence in the entire Trinity, then all that the Father has the Son also possesses, as does the Spirit, and thus the Spirit of the Father is de facto also the Spirit of the Son. 

    This double aspect in the Trinity – the essential unity allied with the  distinct way the trinitarian τάξις operates - is a fundamental and core part of patristic pneumatology, based upon the twin texts of Jn. 7.39, and 16.15; in the first of which we learn that the Spirit flows like a river out of the breast of the Incarnate Word, and in the second of which we learn that Christ’s possessions of the Spirit (as his own) is the most intimate testimony of his divine relationship with the Father. But since the Word and Spirit are the Father’s own outreach to the creation, for its salvation, it is evident at every step in Athanasius’ argument that the Son and Spirit will be most intimately associated together. As he says: ‘The Holy Spirit  which is said to belong to the Son, belongs to the Father.’ At this decisive stroke the  subordinationist inheritance of Origen was radically set aside; but the stress on the  correct order (τάξις) remains: the Son and Spirit work inseparably in the process of deifying creatures in the image of the Son, thereby uniting them with the Eternal Father. As Anatolios synopsises it: ‘If we look at his scriptural illustrations we can readily see that an appropriate conceptualization of the distinct role of the Spirit would identify the spirit as the one in whom the outward manifestation and activity of the Father and Son is actualized in relation to us. In each case the Spirit is thus characterized as the point of contact between God and Creation.’

    Some modern theologians have become accustomed to make a sharp distinction in speaking between the immanent trinity (eternal) and the economic trinity (God as revealed and working in history). This is not something the patristic witness wishes to stress: or to put it more precisely: it refuses to  speak clearly of the immanent trinity since it is beyond conception and speech, and refuses to make a chasm between eternity and history since the Trinity is God’s own bridge-building that makes that impossible discontinuity a reality – the  appearance within history of the Unapproachable Eternal itself.  Nevertheless, a confusion has risen among several commentators who, reading Athanasius’ regular elisions of the immanent and economic, have taken his remarks about the Son’s ‘gift of the Spirit’ (both his reception of it and his offering of it) as meaning immanence when he  was referring to the economy. This was a problem that arose when commentators never paused to ask, when Athanasius spoke of the “Son’s” possession of the Spirit, whether he meant the Eternal Son (the Logos)  or the  Son incarnated within history; and because of this many failed to observe his distinction between the Son’s possession of the Spirit within the Godhead, and the Son’s sending of the Spirit to the world after his Resurrection.

    Much of Athanasius’ arguments on this front, especially those in the Apologia Contra Arianos, were concerned with rebutting the Arian logic that if he ‘received of the Spirit’ he could not be God. His point being that he who also gave the Spirit (as Logos) also received it in all humility and grace (as Logos Incarnate): and this was what scripture meant by the references to the ‘Son’s anointing’ in the Spirit.  But Athanasius’ understands the relationship to be far more than simply a question of receiving/giving within the  historical ministry of the Lord.  As Fr. Dragas summed it up exactly, for Athanasius: ‘We cannot be God’s and know God apart from Christ, and we cannot be Christ’s and know Christ, apart from his Spirit.’   

    He thus sees that the sole path to God is through the Trinity alone, since this is the path by which the Unapproachable himself drew near to  creaturehood. Another way of explaining this is that the Trinity is only revealed in the Incarnation of Christ, and the purpose is to deify us by incorporation into Christ’s own  unique Sonship, by the transformative work of the Holy Spirit.  This work of Deification (θειοποιήσις), therefore is: from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit; and this is why Athanasius is most insistent that  the nature and work of the Holy Spirit cannot possibly be understood apart from that of the Incarnate Word. In  itself, of course, the divine ousia cannot be conceived by human, created, intelligence and certainly cannot be summed up in words. And this is exactly why Athanasius does not wish to specify the  propria of the  eternal relations of the  hypostases. It is not a defect in his thought: rather the  core of  the patristic understanding of God’s transcendence. A great deal of scholastically-led Trinitarian thought has been obsessed with differentiating and specifying the particular propria of the hypostases. Athanasius  (and Gregory the Theologian following him in his Five Theological Orations) is quite clear that to speculate on the eternal relations is both impious and unfruitful: precisely because all the related persons become one in  the process of salvation, which is none other than the Son’s admittance of the believer into Union with the Father through him, by and in the  Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes the believer into Christs (or Sons of God) in the image of the One True Son, and in this way both the Son and the Spirit make the believer into gods: that is, reunited with the Father by this gift of adoption: deification by grace (θειοποιήσις κατὰ χάριν). 

    Those who consider Christ’s ‘sending of the Spirit’ as a sign of the Spirit’s inferiority, therefore, have not understood the συστοιχία of the Trinity, as Athanasius describes it, or the logical implications of the identity of divine essence. But if they are thinking of the manner in which the Son sends the Spirit as Pentecostal gift on the world after his Resurrection, Athanasius says, why should he not have sent him? – since it is his very own Spirit that he sends on Mankind as the culmination of all his work to bring back the union of God and  humanity through the Incarnation. Before that culminating work of incarnate redemption, the Spirit had been given only to a few prophetic saints. Now it is the offer of salvation to all the human family. Christ’s Pentecostal gift is thus the crowning glory, the trophy, of his victory over death: the essence of the resurrectional mystery as it is given to the world. 

    All in all, therefore, the Spirit completes the victory of Christ and makes the Redemption personal to believers when he transfigures the old mortal humanity into the new being of the Resurrected Christ: Old Adam gives way to newly constituted life, in the immortal New Adam.  Apart from being a historically significant moment, when classical trinitarian dogma is set out before the Church by a Spirit-filled master, this is also nothing short of an entirely new anthropology, a completely new theandric philosophy, bursting like a supernova onto the antique world through the teaching of this extraordinary Alexandrian. His theology is self-evidently dynamic and transformative, but the trinitarian process, as Athanasius  depicts it, means that the  wisdom of Christ, the incarnate Logos, which the Spirit builds in the being of those who receive Him, is a personally-embodied wisdom: not simply some form of epistemic awareness  or set of moral axioms such as philosophy could offer; but rather a lived experiential wisdom that grows into a transfiguration from mortality to immortality. The Spirit continues this transformative work age by age, Athanasius teaches, through the  power with which he energizes the church’s sacramental activity. This process of divinization, which catches up the believer, thus becomes the true evolutionary goal of the New Humanity, which is the church of the Spirit. This entelechy, at the very core of Athanasius’ understanding of the redemptive incarnation and the life of the trinity it has revealed, is a radically new and theanthropic anthropology, the likes of which the ancient world had never conceived: and one which the contemporary world remains to grasp.

Further Reading

Primary:

ΑΘΑΝΑΣΙΟΥ    ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΑΙ ΠΡΟΣ  ΣΕΡΑΠΙΟΝΑ.     J.P. Migne. Cursus Completus                   Patrologiae  Graecae. vol. 26. cols. 529-676. Rue D’Enfer, Paris. 1857.    

Athanase d’Alexandrie    Lettres à Serapion sur la divinité du Saint Esprit. tr. J. Lebon.

Sources Chrétiennes, vol.15, Paris. 1947.

C.R.B. Shapland    The Letters of St. Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit. Epworth Press,                 London.  1951.

Secondary: 

K. Anatolios Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine.             Baker Academic, Grand Rapids. 2011. pp. 133-156.

L. Ayres.   Nicaea and Its Legacy. OUP. Oxford. 2004. pp. 211-215. 

N. Berdyaev.   Spirit and Reality. G. Bles & Co.,  London. 1946.

J. Bethune-Baker.   An Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine. Methuen.                 London. 1903.  pp. 209-212.

T.C. Campbell.  ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Athanasius.’ Scottish             Journal of Theology, vol. 27. (1974) pp. 408-440.

G.D. Dragas.   ‘Holy Spirit and Tradition: The Writings of St. Athanasius.’ in: Athanasiana.             (No publisher). London. 1980. pp. 75-98.

J. Elowski.   We Believe in the Holy Spirit, (Ancient Christian Doctrine vol.4.) IVP                 Academic, Madison. 2009. 

P. Galtier.   Le Saint Esprit en nous d’après les Pères Grecs. Analecta Gregoriana vol.             35. Rome 1946.

M.A.G. Haykin.   The Spirit of God: The Exegesis of 1 & 2 Corinthians in the                     Pneumatomachian Controversy of the 4th Century. Leiden. Brill. 1994.

A.H.M. Jones.   ‘The Date of the Apologia Contra Arianos of Athanasius.’  Journal of                 Theological Studies.  New Series. 5.2. October, 1954.  pp. 224-227.

P. R. Kolbet. ‘Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self.’ The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 99, No. 1. 2006, pp. 85-101. (Also  idem. ch. 4, of B. Daley & P.R. Kolbet edd: The Harp of Prophecy: Early  Christian Interpretation of the Psalms. University of Notre Dame Press.  Indiana. 2015).

J.A. McGuckin.    ‘St Athanasius  of Alexandria On the Interpretation of the Psalms.’

in: N. Dumitrascu (ed). The Fathers on the Bible. London, Routledge, 2020.

A . Meredith.   ‘The Pneumatology of the Cappadocian Fathers.’ Irish Theological Quarterly.             48. nos. 3-4. 1981. pp. 196-211.  

S. G. Papadopoulos    ‘Athanasius of Alexandria on the  Holy Spirit According to the Letters to  Serapion.’ Ekklesiastikos Pharos, vol. 53 (1971) pp. 33-70.

G. C. Stead.  ‘St. Athanasius on the Psalms.’  Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 39, No. 1. 1985, pp. 65-78.

H B Swete.   The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church. Macmillan, London. 1912.

G.M. Vian. ‘Il Testo delle Expositiones in Psalmos di Atanasio’, in: Studia Patristica             XVII, vol. 3, 1982. pp.1041-1045.