The Spirit and Man’s Redemption.

In the “economy” of salvation, the Son and the Spirit are inseparable: “When the Word dwelt upon the holy Virgin Mary,” Athanasius writes, “the Spirit, together with the Word, entered her; in the Spirit, the Word fashioned a body for Himself making it in conformity with Himself in His will to bring all creation to the Father through Himself.”⁸ The main argument in favour of the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Son and the Father — used by Athanasius, by Cyril of Alexandria, and by the Cappadocian Fathers — is the unity of the creative and redemptive action of God, which is always Trinitarian: “The Father does all things by the Word in the Holy Spirit.”⁹

But the essential difference between the action of the Logos and that of the Spirit was that the Logos and not the Spirit became man and thus could be directly seen as the concrete person and hypostasis of Jesus Christ while the personal existence of the Holy Spirit remained covered by divine incognoscibility. The Spirit in His action reveals not Himself but the Son; when He indwells in Mary, the Word is being conceived; when He reposes on the Son at the baptism in Jordan, He reveals the Father’s good will toward the Son. This is the Biblical and theological basis of the very current notion found in the Fathers and in the liturgical texts of the Spirit as image of the Son.¹⁰ It is impossible to see the Spirit; but in Him, one sees the Son while the Son Himself is the image of the Father. In the context of a dynamic and soteriological thought, the static Hellenic concept of image reflects a living relationship between the divine persons into which through the incarnation of the Son mankind is introduced.

We have already seen that in Greek patristic and Byzantine thought salvation is understood essentially in terms of participation in and communion with the deified humanity of the incarnate Logos, the New Adam. When the Fathers call the Spirit the “image of the Son,” they imply that He is the main agent which makes this communion a reality. The Son has given us “the first fruits of the Spirit,” writes Athanasius, “so that we may be transformed into sons of God according to the image of the Son of God.”¹¹ Thus, if it is through the Spirit that the Logos became man, it is also only through the Spirit that true life reaches all men. “What are the effect and the result of the sufferings, works and teaching of Christ?” asks Nicholas Cabasilas. “Considered in relation to ourselves, it is nothing other than the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church.”¹²

The Spirit transforms the Christian community into the “Body of Christ.” In Byzantine hymns for the day of Pentecost, the Spirit is sometimes called the “glory of Christ” granted to the disciples after the Ascension;¹³ and at each Eucharist, the congregation after communion chants: “We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit; we have found the true faith; we worship the undivided Trinity, for it has saved us.” Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, is the moment when the true meaning of Christ’s cross and Resurrection becomes manifest when a new mankind enters back into divine fellowship, when a new knowledge is granted to “fishermen.” This is the main theme of the feast of Pentecost in the Byzantine tradition; and, curiously, it matches the awareness of many modern students of Christian origins that full understanding of Christ’s teaching is indeed a “post-Resurrection” experience of the early Church: “The Spirit through His appearance in tongues of fire firmly plants the memory of those man-saving words which Christ has told the Apostles having received them from the Father.”¹⁴ But the “knowledge,” or “memory” granted by the Spirit is not an intellectual function; it implies an “illumination” of human life as a whole. The theme of “light,” which through Origen and Gregory of Nyssa permitted the association of the Biblical theophanies with Greek Neo-Platonic mysticism, also permeates the liturgical hymnography of Pentecost. “The Father is light, the Word is light, and the Holy Spirit is light; that light was sent to the Apostles as tongues of fire and through it the whole world is illumined and venerates the Holy Trinity” (solemn hymn, called exaposteilarion). For indeed, the Holy Spirit is the “glory” of Christ which not only transfigures the body of the historical Jesus, as in the case of the Transfiguration but glorifies as well His wider “Body,” i.e., all those who believe in Him. In fact, a comparison of the Byzantine liturgical texts of Pentecost with those appointed for the Feast of the Transfiguration (August 6) — and it is always important to remember that for the Byzantines the liturgy has been the highest expression of their faith and Christian experience — shows that the miracle of Pentecost is considered as an expanded form of the mystery of Tabor. On Mount Tabor the divine light was shown to a restricted circle of disciples, but at Pentecost Christ “by sending the Spirit has shone forth as the light of the world”¹⁵ because the Spirit “enlightens the disciples and has initiated them into the heavenly mysteries.”¹⁶

Examples can be easily multiplied and it shows that the Byzantine theological tradition is constantly aware that in the “economy” of creation and salvation the Son and the Spirit are accomplishing one single divine act without however being subordinated to one another in their hypostatic or personal existence. The “head” of the new, redeemed humanity is, of course, Christ, but the Spirit is not only Christ’s agent; He is, in the words of John of Damascus (which are paraphrased in the hymns of Pentecost): “Spirit of God, direct, ruling; the fountain of wisdom, life and holiness; God existing and addressed along with the Father and Son; uncreated, full, creative, all-ruling, all-effecting, all-powerful, of infinite power, Lord of all creation and not subject to any; deifying but not deified; filling but not filled; shared in but not sharing in; sanctifying but not sanctified.” ¹⁷

This personal “independence” of the Spirit is connected, as Vladimir Lossky points out, with the whole mystery of redemption, which is both a unification (or “recapitulation”) of mankind in the one divine-human hypostasis of Christ — the new Adam — and a mysterious personal encounter between each man and God. The unification of human nature is a free divine gift, but the personal encounter depends upon human freedom: “Christ becomes the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity. The Holy Spirit grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature. The one lends His hypostasis to the nature, the other gives His divinity to the persons.”¹⁸ There is, of course, one divinity and one divine action, or “energy,” leading mankind to the one eschatological goal of deification; but the personal, hypostatic functions of the Son and of the Spirit are not identical. Divine grace and divine life are a single reality, but God is Trinity and not an impersonal essence into which humanity would be called to merge. Thus, here, as we have seen above, Byzantine Christian tradition requires the distinction in God between the One unapproachable Essence, the three hypostases, and the grace, or energy, through which God enters into communion with creatures.

The mystery of Pentecost is not an incarnation of the Spirit but the bestowing of these gifts. The Spirit does not reveal His Person as the Son does in Jesus and does not en-hypostasize human nature as a whole; He communicates His uncreated grace to each human person, to each member of the Body of Christ. New humanity is realized in the hypostasis of the Son incarnate, but it receives only the gifts of the Spirit. The distinction between the Person of the Spirit and His gifts will receive great emphasis in Byzantine theology in connection with the theological controversies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Gregory of Cyprus and Gregory Palamas insisted, in different contexts, that at Pentecost the Apostles received the eternal gifts or “energies” of the Spirit, but that there was no new hypostatic union between the Spirit and humanity.¹⁹

Thus, the theology of the Holy Spirit implies a crucial polarity which concerns the nature of the Christian faith itself. Pentecost has seen the birth of the Church — a community which acquires structures and presupposes continuity and authority — and is an outpouring of spiritual gifts to liberating man from servitude giving him freedom and personal experience of God. Byzantine Christianity remains aware of an unavoidable tension between these two aspects of faith: faith as doctrinal continuity and authority and faith as the personal experience of saints. It generally understands that an exaggerated emphasis on one aspect or the other destroys the very meaning of the Christian Gospel. The Spirit gives a structure to the community of the Church and authenticates the ministries which possess the authority to preserve the structure, to lead, and to teach; but the same Spirit also maintains in the Church prophetic functions and reveals the whole truth to each member of Christ’s body if only he is able and worthy to “receive” it. The life of the Church — because it is created by the Spirit — cannot be reduced to either the “institution” or the “event,” to either authority or freedom. It is a “new” community created by the Spirit in Christ where true freedom is recovered in the spiritual communion of the Body of Christ.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 532