Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers

INTRODUCTION

History or Theology?

In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI visited the United Kingdom. Greg Bruke, then a journalist at Fox News, reported that during the Pope’s visit a young man could be seen protesting by himself in London carrying a sign made from a pizza box that read: "Drop the Filioque." Photos of the protester can still be found on the internet. It may be surprising that someone would feel the need to call public attention to a theological issue that seems to be of interest only to experts in ecumenical dialogue or historians of the Church. Perhaps this protest is an indication of a depth that cannot be relegated to the past, as if it is no longer relevant to us. There are, in fact, fundamental issues from our history that have a significant influence on our present life.

So, do we really have to drop the Filioque? Would we lose something? Or would we gain something? This volume was written to answer that question from the standpoint of the Greek fathers of the Church. It stems from the observation that although extraordinary monographs have been written on the historical issue, the theological investigation of such historical data can and should be further developed.¹ In particular, this research has three objectives:

To better understand the origins of the tension in the different approaches to the procession of the Holy Spirit and to show how the Filioque does not concern an unnecessary appendix of pneumatology, but instead answers an inescapable question posed by the historical development of the doctrine on the divine Third Person.

To add an element to the discussion that is mostly neglected in literature; that is, the doctrine developed by the Greek fathers in response to the Pneumatomachians, who accepted the divinity of the Son while denying that of the Holy Spirit.

To try to understand the basis of the misunderstanding between the Byzantine world and Augustine’s tradition, to see if the new information offered by this research can form the basis of a new ecumenical proposal on the second procession.

When at the end of the eighth century two monks from the Frankish monastery on the Mount of Olives returned to Jerusalem after a trip to Aachen and suggested that the Filioque be introduced into the recitation of the Creed in the Mass there, they might not have imagined the scope of the matter, which transcended the question of Charlemagne’s patronage over their monastery. The violent reaction of their Greek confreres, who accused them of heresy, led these monks to write to Pope Leo III asking for a selection of quotations from Greek and Latin authorities to support their position. The Pope passed the letter to the emperor, who summoned a council of Frankish bishops who met in Aachen in 809 and decided in favor of including the Filioque in the Creed recited in the Mass. But the following year Leo III, after examining the acts of the council and while saying he agreed with the patristic dossier that had been presented to him, strongly defended the exclusion of the formula from the Nicene Creed both to preserve the ancient formula and because the issue was not relevant for the salvation of souls. His approach was apophatic in the sense that the Christian mystery always remains greater than the ability to express it. So the Pope asked that recitation of the Filioque be suspended in the Palatine liturgy, considering that little by little it would fall out of use throughout the empire. Moreover, he had the Creed engraved in Greek and Latin without the Filioque addition on bronze plates placed beside the door of confession in St. Peter’s Basilica and in St. Paul’s Basilica.²

The position of Pope Leo III seems very interesting not only for the fact that it is politically balanced but also from a theological and a pastoral perspective. The key point is his acceptance that the patristic doctrine presents a tradition that is favorable to the Filioque without contradicting the Eastern position, which is focused on the defense of the paternal monarchy. He dropped and kept the expression simultaneously, distinguishing the level of form from that of content.

This observation is fundamental to the present study in which the term Filioque, with the theological discussions it inspires, is not understood in the medieval or contemporary sense, but in the patristic sense as:

affirmation of an active role of the Son in the immanent procession of the Spirit;

without this role being causal, thereby overshadowing the monarchy of the first divine Person.

This double definition marks a clear difference with respect to the medieval proposals, which in a context already distant from apophatic epistemology conceived the relationship between the Father and the Son as closed, so that the Second Person could be indicated as the cause of the Third Person. Anselm’s theology, with its logicalizing defense of the Filioque, goes in this direction, which can be dubbed Filioquism. At the same time, the issue analysed here in the context of Greek patristics relates directly to immanence and not only economy,³ where the role of the Son in the coming of the Spirit is obvious because the gospel indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Spirit is given per Christum, as sent by the Father but also by the incarnate Word. The question examined in the present research is whether this per Christum is an expression of a per Filium, which is the immanent root of the economic origin of the Spirit.

For this reason, the present theological study cannot neglect the question of how the theological reading of God’s immanence reflects on the relationship between creation and salvation history, a question which lies at the heart of the very possibility of expressing dogma in human language and in parallel with how icons can represent the mystery of the triune God without ever fully possessing or grasping it.

So, here we will not analyze the literal Filioque (i.e., the history of the insertion of the clause into the Symbol of Faith on the Latin side), a matter already examined in exemplary fashion by Peter Gemeinhardt⁴ and Henry Chadwick.⁵ Instead, the object of the present research is the theological Filioque, that is, this study analyzes the thought of the Greek fathers concerning the role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit or, in other words, the relationship between the first and second processions in the divine immanence.⁶ The epoch studied in this book essentially ends where Gemeinhardt’s treatment begins.⁷ Therefore, no attempt will be made to explain whether or not and why the Pope inserted the Filioque into the Symbol of Faith (that is, the Nicene Creed), nor will any attempt be made to analyze the historical reasons for the ecclesial divisions that originated from it. Instead, we have worked along the lines of a ressourcement in search of dogmatic elements that can explain why the Greek fathers were in communion with the Latin fathers while being aware of the mutual differences in their approach to pneumatology. We are, in fact, convinced that the history of dogma offers valuable insights unfortunately absent in the common narrative. Is Augustine really the father of the Filioque? Does this follow from the psychological analogy? Was all of this caused by the projection of an anthropology in the Trinity, according to the vulgate present in Eastern manuals?

In the light of these questions, the reader is asked to examine this proposal with an attitude of speculative virginity to avoid jumping ahead to the polemical perspectives that characterized the post-patristic era and instead stick to the proposed definition and allow the depth of the pneumatological doctrine of the Eastern fathers to reveal a dogmatic richness that is not reducible to dialectical categories.⁸

This epistemological virginity also seems correct from the perspective of history and the critical approach, since the fathers of the Church (despite a certain propensity of early Christian thinkers for confrontation and even conflict, as the history of the councils shows) have left us a testimony of communion, even in the pneumatological field.⁹

Indeed, epistemology plays a key role. The thesis proposed here is that there is an intimate correspondence between apophaticism, the true foundation of the theological method, and the ontological value of the development of dogma. In fact, the comparison with the various objections to the concrete forms that the formulation of the Christian mystery assumed over the centuries forced the fathers to revise the metaphysical framework inherited from Greek thought in order to reformulate the Aristotelian categories so as to affirm the personal distinction of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit within their perfect substantial identity. This task of reworking and resemantization continued after the fourth century with the deeper examination of christological doctrine,¹⁰ but the methodological approach had already been settled in the development of Trinitarian thought.¹¹

For the philosophical and linguistic background of Christian thought is the graduated metaphysical conception of Greek philosophy, which joined the first principle and the world in a single finite and eternal ontological order, internally organized as a descending scale in terms of perfection. In the first attempts of the second- and third-century thinkers, who were also in the wake of the Philonian inheritance, this construction is polarized into an ever clearer distinction between God and the created world, whose relationship is maintained by the Logos. The Logos is like an intermediary, the thought (and word) of the Father through whom He created the world. Thus, the Son is in an ontologically subordinate position with respect to the Father and has an existence that is at the service of creation. Origen will overcome this Logos-theology and open the way to the elaboration on the difference between the Trinity and the world in terms of physis, which would emerge in the fourth century as a response to the Arian crisis. From Athanasius onward, only the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are considered eternal because they constitute the one uncreated nature, while every other being is marked by finiteness in time and space. As we shall see, this Physis-theology was the starting point of the Cappadocians, who in their dual response to both the Eunomians and Pneumatomachians transformed it into a Schesis-theology, that is, into an ontological conception in which the identification of the three divine Persons is no longer given by the substance which is unique for them but by the relational distinction within this single substance. This marked the shift from the Logos ut ratio to the Logos ut relatio, that is, from an understanding of the Son as a necessary mediator (who is like an ontological bridge or step between God and the world) to a real relational perspective, where the Second Person is eternally in the divine substance and from there, out of love and in perfect freedom, became flesh, founding the possibility of real relationship between the Trinity and the human being.

But this new metaphysical conception necessarily translated into a new attitude toward knowledge, since the way to approach God could no longer be only the conceptual dimension, climbing the ontological steps going from (necessary) cause to cause, as the nature of the Trinity is totally transcendent with respect to the human being. This means that God radically overcomes the capacities of the latter but should be known through freedom and the personal relationship. This led to a new understanding of the value of history and the corporeal dimension. And this must be kept in mind as we approach this exciting theological epoch, without anachronistically projecting anterior or successive epistemologies onto it.¹²

From this standpoint, the dogmatic explanation proposed in this volume cannot be considered a static image, a kind of surpassing synthesis and Aufhebung à la Hegel, which leads to a final solution like an equation or a geometric problem. Instead, one must necessarily resort to a narrative, in which the meaning of each moment is given by their relationships with the other elements of the story, according to a structuring of thought that Gregory of Nyssa indicated with the Greek term akolouthia. Therefore, the proposed path should not be followed as if we were observing snapshots in a photo album, from which we choose the one we like best. Here the dynamic development and the set of all the moments count, like an arrow that points in a certain direction.

As Sarah Coakley highlights, we cannot just reduce the fierce disputes of past centuries to bad memories and mistakes in the name of a complementarity between East and West, which is stated in an ideological and irenic way.¹³ Like this scholar we should recognize that apophaticism makes it possible to hold together both the spiritual and the metaphysical dimensions among the factors of our analysis, without ever dialectically pitting them against each other: in and through the Spirit we are drawn to place our binary ‘certainties’ into the melting pot of the crucible of divine—not human—desire.¹⁴ The dialogue with Sarah Coakley has inspired and encouraged this research, pointing precisely to the Holy Spirit and the related issue of the Filioque as a way to rethink the dialectical binary oppositions, which Coakley rightly describes as idolatrous.

So this book is conceived as a contribution to the challenge of taking a fresh look at the relationships between East and West in order to overcome the simplistic vision of the opposition between an essentialist approach and a personalist one.¹⁵

In the end, this work aims to show the importance of the specific questions that are answered and the particular problems faced by the Greek fathers of the Church in order to reach a correct understanding of dogmatic history. The neverending attempt to formulate the mystery of the triune God in an appropriate way shows how every moment of dogmatic history is an answer to a specific question or a response to a conflict. Thus, in order to reach a full understanding of the theological content of the author’s answer, the modern reader must consider this answer within the context in which it arose, looking not only at the author himself but also at those to whom he was responding. Every word is always addressed to someone, and that is also true for dogma.

Thus, we cannot understand the Latin position without considering the contribution of Tertullian, who marked the whole of Western tradition with his a Patre per Filium. Every thought is expressed in a certain language, which conditions the thought itself. Thus we can say that the very first point of contact of Latin theology with the mystery of the procession of the Holy Spirit was linked to the role of the Son.¹⁶ This element will also be maintained in the fourth century after the distinction between economy and immanence has been clarified, as witnessed in the thought of Ambrose and Hilary of Poitiers.¹⁷

It is significant that when the latter proposes his thought on the relationship between the Son and the procession of the Spirit he always does so in an apophatic context, both when Hilary takes up the per Filium of Tertullian¹⁸ and when he formulates an explicit Filioque:

But it is neither appropriate to remain silent about the Holy Spirit, nor is it necessary to talk about Him. In fact, we cannot remain silent because of those who do not know Him, but it is also not necessary to speak of Him who is to be confessed to originate from the Father and the Son.¹⁹

This Latin father, who knew Greek theology well from direct experience during his exiles, also witnesses the dogmatic connection of John 15:26 and 16:12–15 with the distinction between the two processions, which we will see as fundamental in the response to Pneumatomachians.²⁰

Ambrose (another father who is much appreciated in the Eastern tradition) links Sir 24:5, John 1:1, and 14:10 to show that in the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, which the reference to the last verse clearly places in immanence, the Third Person does not separate from the first two:

Finally, the Wisdom affirms that She proceeds from the mouth of the Most High, not because She is external to the Father, but rather with the Father, because the Word was with God, and not only with the Father, but also in the Father. She says, indeed: I am in the Father and the Father is in me. But when She proceeds from the Father She does not withdraw from a place, nor does She separate herself from Him like a body from a body. Nor when She is in the Father, is She like a body enclosed in another body. And the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, does not separate from them.²¹

But if these are some fundamental stages of the Latin path, what were the stages of the Greek one? What linguistic and theological elements defined it? What fundamental moments in the elaboration of the relationship between the procession of the Spirit and the Second Person can be found? This is what we will try to show in what follows, proceeding more quickly in the areas already dealt with in the literature and dwelling in more detail on those elements practically absent in previous discussions that seem relevant to the discourse.

The proposed narrative starts from the Trinitarian doctrine of Origen which, as in any other theological field, is an essential reference point. It will show how his reflection can be traced back to two fundamental schemes, one linear and the other triangular (chapter 1). Each of them responds to a different need, but in the fourth century the tension between the two led to a reconstruction of the ontological framework, the aim of which was first to recognize the full divinity of the Logos by introducing it into divine immanence, then to repeat this for the Holy Spirit, affirming His active role in the creative act (chapter 2). This last clarification is addressed to the Pneumatomachians, that is, those who accepted the divinity of the Second Person while denying that of the Third. The different responses to their position can be deduced from the analysis of the works of Epiphanius and the Dialogi adversus Macedonianos of Pseudo-Athanasius (chapter 3). This will allow us to appreciate the strength of the Cappadocian response, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, who come to determine the Holy Spirit’s own personal proprium and, therefore, the difference between the first and the second procession—a difference that remained in the shadows in Athanasius’s theology (chapters 4 and 5). After having revealed the dogmatic heart of the pneumatology of the fourth-century Greek fathers and having highlighted how they identify an active, but not causal, role of the Second Person in the procession of the Third Person, we will try both to respond to possible criticism and to explain why the Filioque has become a painful point of divergence between Eastern and Western traditions. Three questions will be addressed for the sake of showing how the proposed reading is not simply a Latinizing approach: (1) whether it was only the Latins who felt the need to make explicit the relationship between the first and second procession; (2) whether the Latin Filioque is the offspring of Augustine’s psychological analogy; (3) whether the pneumatological reading in the proposed analysis can be considered a projection onto Greek theology of Augustine’s categories of thought. Thus, the geographical and linguistic question will be addressed first by exploring the Syriac tradition so as to show how the need to examine the question about the role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit was not only a Latin requirement (chapter 6). Looking at the dialogue between the Syriac, Greek, and Latin traditions will highlight the theological role of translation as an inescapable element of the process of the handing down of the tradition. Then, we will examine the connection of the Filioque with the psychological analogy, a theological element that is also present in the Greek context (chapter 7). Finally, a comparison between the ontological work of Gregory of Nyssa and that of Augustine will aim to highlight the independence of the results obtained from the theological perspective of the bishop of Hippo so as to also explain the Byzantine difficulty in accepting Western formulations (chapter 8).

This path’s conclusion leads to a paradox and a proposal. When rereading the claim to count Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor in the ranks of the authorities who support the Filioque against the backdrop of the suggested path, one comes to the surprising conclusion that their positions appear very different from one another, since the former is closer to Augustine in a more Nicene pneumatological perspective, while the latter remains in the Constantinopolitan line and is linked to Cappadocian theology and their response to Pneumatomachian criticism, which seems to be absent in the discussions related to the so-called Photian schism. Thus, paradoxically, it is precisely this second line of development that appears to be more coherent with the proposed form of Filioque, where the divine Second Person plays an active, but not causal, role in the procession of the Spirit. Hence the need to rethink the Filioque itself in order to ecumenically verify whether it is possible today to accept this form of Filioque as a common faith shared by the Greek and Latin fathers before the ninth century.

The need for this rereading seems to increasingly emerge in both the academic and ecclesial worlds. In fact, two recent conferences have offered extremely interesting material for the topic of the Filioque and the research presented in this monograph. In December 2016, the conference "Contra Latinos et adversus Graecos: The separation between Rome and Constantinople from the 9th to the 15th century," whose proceedings have just been published,²² was held in Venice. Then, at the beginning of September 2018 in Paris, at the Collège des Bernardins, the 14th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa was dedicated to the Oratio Dominica—a work which, as will be seen in chapter 5, was the focus of a heated discussion on the issue of the Filioque.²³ On both occasions, some moments of the discussion demonstrated the relevance of the purpose that motivates this work, the aim of which is to rethink the question of the role of the Second Person of the Trinity in the procession of the Third. In particular, some exchanges at the Paris conference offered the participants an opportunity to guess what the climate might have been like at the Council of Florence. On both occasions we were struck by the absence of all the work developed by the Greek fathers in response to the Pneumatomachians in the interpretation of the various passages marked by the polemical clash. Thus these two conferences were watershed moments in the completion of this research, which collects ten years of studies, some of which have already been presented and discussed in conferences around Europe, from Granada to Lublin, from Tübingen to Milan, and from Oxford to Cambridge (which is why some subtitles, especially in the first chapter, recall the names of English pubs).

After all, this book was written while imagining what would happen if those two Jerusalem monks of the early ninth century could have a beer with the young man in London who, at the beginning of the third millennium, wrote Drop the Filioque on a pizza box before waiting for the Pope to ride past. In fact, the Trinitarian revelation strongly points to the impossibility of getting at the truth if not in communion. That is why it is not possible to conclude this introduction without thanking those who motivated and supported the author throughout the whole process, starting with Sarah Coakley. The dialogue with her has been an inspiration and support from the very beginning of this project. A special thanks also goes to Richard Cross for his challenging remarks, which have pushed this research into new and particularly fertile ground. For the study of the Syriac tradition, Carlos Jódar Estrella deserves special gratitude for his patient and impassioned teachings, along with Peter Bruns and Gregory Kessel for their helpful suggestions. During these years, the conversations with Michael Stavrou and Robert Wozniak, whom I thank especially here, have also been really inspiring. Last but not least, I would also like to thank James Ernest of Eerdmans for his kind and patient help in the publication of this volume and Blake Jurgens for his careful and accurate editing.

The gratitude is all the more sincere and heartfelt because this research has been carried out in the hope of helping us overcome this real scandal which leads us Christians to find division in our theology about the Holy Spirit, the Third Person, hypostasis of the very unity of the Blessed Trinity. Both the Greek and Latin fathers’ judgment of us would be very pointed and severe.

Of final note, translations of the Greek, Latin, and Syriac text are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

1. Some of the most relevant publications of the last decade are A. E. Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); M. Böhnke, A. E. Kattan, and B. Oberdorfer, eds., Die Filioque-Kontroverse: Historische, ökumenische und dogmatische Perspektiven 1200 Jahre nach der Aachener Synode (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2011), Th. G. Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011); M. Coetzee, The Filioque Impasse: Patristic Roots (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2012); M. Gagliardi, ed., Il Filioque: A mille anni dal suo inserimento nel credo a Roma (1014–2014) (Vatican City: LEV, 2015). Special attention should be paid to the recent monograph of Ch. Lee, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, and the Filioque (Leiden: Brill, 2021), whose research converges in intention with the present work.

2. J. Grohe, Storia del Filioque prima del 1014 e il suo inserimento nel Credo, in Gagliardi, Il Filioque, 32–35, and P. Delogu, Leone III, santo, Enciclopedia dei papi (Rome: Treccani, 2000), 700.

3. The reader of the Orthodox perspective should keep in mind that with this distinction we do not refer to Karl Rahner’s immanent and economic Trinity, but we mean what, starting from the Cappadocians, the Greek fathers called theologia and oikonomia.

4. P. Gemeinhardt, Die Filioque-Kontroverse zwischen Ost- und Westkirche im Frühmittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter 2002).

5. H. Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church; From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

6. This explains why some important authors for Trinitarian theology and pneumatology, such as Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Didymus, are not addressed in this reconstruction.

7. The volume can be considered a theological and documentary deepening of chapters 2–4 of Anthony E. Siecienski’s book.

8. From this point of view, the present volume assumes an epistemological option in line with that of Khaled Anatolios in his recent Deification through the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). Doxological contrition and the attention to soteriology that characterized the thought of the fathers prevent any dialectical reductionism.

9. This option is also relevant from the point of view of postmodernity, as Piet Hein Hupsch notes: The interplay between doxology and apophasis that we find in Gregory is a salutary example for contemporary theology that can be characterised as postmodern (P. H. Hupsch, The Glory of the Spirit in Gregory of Nyssa’s Adversus Macedonianos: Commentary and Systematic-Theological Synthesis [Leiden: Brill, 2020], 348).

10. See J. Zachhuber, Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity, in Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy, ed. Ken Parry (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 52–77.

11. See G. Maspero, The Trinity, in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy, ed. M. Edwards (London: Routledge, 2021), 125–38.

12. See Sarah Coakley’s criticisms of Maurice Wiles and his thesis of a presumed pneumatological deficit in the first centuries in S. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116–21.

13. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 329.

14. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 331.

15. Cf. R. Cross, Two Models of the Trinity?, Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 275–94.

16. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, 4.6 (CCSL 2:1162).

17. On the Latin tradition, see M. Simonetti, La processione dello Spirito Santo nei Padri Latini, Maia 7 (1955): 308–24, and Il regresso della teologia dello Spirito Santo in Occidente dopo Tertulliano, Augustinianum 20 (1980): 655–69, and G. Bendinelli, Il dibattito sullo Spirito Santo in ambito latino prima di Agostino, in Pneuma: Il divino in/quieto; Lo Spirito santo nelle tradizioni antiche, ed. F. Pieri and F. Ruggiero, Supplementi di Adamantius 6 (Brescia, Italy: Morcelliana, 2018), 195–224; L. F. Ladaria, El Espíritu Santo en San Hilario de Poitiers (Madrid: Eapsa, 1977); N. Cipriani, La processione dello Spirito Santo in sant’Agostino, in Gagliardi, Il Filioque, 99–116.

18. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, 12.56.1–8 (SC 462:466).

19. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, 2.29.1–4 (SC 443:322).

20. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, 7.20 (SC 448:408).

21. Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto, 1.11.120.38–44 (CSEL 79:66–67).

22. A. Bucossi and A. Calia, eds., Contra Latinos et Adversus Graecos: The Separation between Rome and Constantinople from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century (Leuven: Peeters, 2020).

23. See the proceedings: M. Cassin, H. Grelier-Deneux, and F. Vinel, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Our Father; An English Translation with Commentary and Supporting Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

CHAPTER ONE

Images and Models: Origen’s Legacy

I. INTRODUCTION: CHRĒSIS AND KRISIS

Theology has a paradoxical nature, as its task is to walk along a tightrope between the desire to communicate the mystery of God and the inability or lack of words to do so. The impossibility of fully expressing this mystery is an essential part of the message of the gospel whose content exceeds human possibilities. This means that any attempt to rethink the Filioque should be discussed not only at the level of the relationship between tradition and translation but also more deeply in the framework of the disproportion between the content and a form capable of expressing the mystery of the triune God.

From this perspective, the first fundamental stage of the present account should be Origen. He forged many new concepts and discovered important expressive means of communicating the absolute novelty of the Christian revelation through a true reshaping of the conceptual tools at his disposal. His background is indebted to two principal influences: the Semitic milieu and the Greek philosophical tradition. These areas provided the linguistic tools relevant to his interpretation, although we cannot reduce his thinking to such influences.

At this stage, the key issue is not only the lack of words but, more essentially, the lack of actual concepts. Origen’s work is fundamental because he filtered through the different traditions of thought at his disposal. His extraordinary theological method paired chrēsis and krisis: judging (i.e., krisis) which elements could be kept and used (i.e., chrēsis) in order to express the mystery of the triune God.¹ The process itself was Trinitarian insofar as the key element for each decision was founded not only in the concepts but also in their mutual relations.² This chapter will outline this process in Origen’s theology with respect to Stoic philosophy, Gnosticism, and the imagery common in the Judeo-Christian world.

We have taken Origen as our starting point because his work also directly reveals the difficulties in the development of authentic Christian thought. From the beginning, the dynamic relationships between the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son have represented a serious issue together with the distinction between and the correlation of the two divine processions. From a bird’s-eye view of the great Alexandrian’s Trinitarian images, two main models will appear and through them the tension that will later lead to the Filioque debate will emerge. Here by model we mean a metaphorical and not a logical element, in the sense that every thought, including the theological one, needs representations whose dynamics influence its unfolding. While this is not new, the relevance of these models to the question of the Son’s role in the procession of the Spirit has not been highlighted before.

So the present chapter aims to present the relational background of Origen’s Trinitarian theology, that is, the set of questions to which Origen is responding in developing his theological thought. In this case, the central point is the determination of the absolute distinction between the Trinity and creation in terms of pure spirituality: only the three divine Persons have no material or corporeal dimension. But the elaboration of this point will highlight the tensions underlying the chosen formulation, tensions which become the driving issue in the subsequent theological development.

II. THEOLOGICAL INTENTIO

With his theological and expressive genius, Origen captures and formulates the specific difference between Christian and Jewish prayer.³ In describing the kinds of prayer, he writes:

It is good, after having started prayer with a doxology, to end it again with a doxology, praising and glorifying the Father of the Universe through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, to whom be glory forever and ever.⁴

God is the starting point and the end of every prayer, but for the disciples of Jesus these references are Trinitarian. The perspective of doxa is thus, from the outset, the basis of both theological reflection and the identification of the proprium of the Christian God. The examples are abundant.⁵ Prayer and worship are, in fact, essential for understanding the Sitz im Leben of the dogmatic elaboration of the early church and its scope.⁶

Origen pairs the citations of 2 Corinthians 3:18⁷ and John 7:39 together. Here, it is written there was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified (οὔπω γὰρ ἦν πνεῦμα, ὅτι Ἰησοῦς οὐδέπω ἐδοξάσθη). This point becomes particularly important for Origen, who seems to be the first to address the theological puzzle posed by the biblical text, a question that is also particularly relevant for determining the relationship between the Son and the Spirit.⁸ In fact, he asks, on several occasions, how some affirmations and prophecies in the course of Christ’s life are possible before His glorification and thus before the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Commenting on the Transfiguration in Matthew 17:1–8, the Alexandrian author is aware of the fact that his interpretation might be startling. According to Origen, Peter’s words, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents (Matt 17:4), were pronounced in a state of ecstasy or under the influence of a spirit (πνεῦμα), given that Mark and Luke underscore the fact that he did not know what he was saying (cf. Mark 9:6 and Luke 9:33):

Then you will address the question whether Peter said this either in an ecstatic state or spoke it in a spirit which moved him, a spirit which definitely cannot be holy. In fact John explained in his Gospel that before the resurrection nobody had received the Holy Spirit, when he said for there was no Spirit yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified (John 7:39). If there was no Spirit yet and [Peter] spoke without knowing what he was saying, moved by a spirit, this spirit which was prompting him to say such things would be one of those who were not yet defeated by the wood nor paraded in public together with those of whom it has been written: and he [Christ] has stripped the sovereignties and the ruling forces, and paraded them in public, behind him in his triumphal procession (Col 2:15) through the wood. Maybe this was the scandal to which Jesus referred, saying Get behind me, Satan! You are a scandal in my path (Matt 16:23).⁹

The Alexandrian asks who this spirit could be and concludes it can be none other than a fallen angel; the apostle would have still been under its influence, as confirmed by the sleep that falls upon the apostles and by the rebuke and reproach Jesus directs at Peter.¹⁰

It is evident that this theme is especially important for Origen; in his commentary on John he returns to it several times. In chapter 28, he mentions John 7:39 as evidence of the fact that Caiaphas, though prophesying, did not have in him the Holy Spirit, citing as an argument a fortiori that not even the apostles had received the Spirit yet.¹¹ In chapter 32 the argument reappears¹² in relation to the one who says Lord, Lord, but will not enter into the kingdom of heaven (cf. Matt 7:21) and the Pauline teaching that it is only by the Holy Spirit that one can say Jesus is Lord (cf. 1 Cor 12:3). In Origen’s logic, the argument is designed to inspire the reader to follow the Logos, as demonstrated by his recourse to these same New Testament verses at the end of the work regarding the apostles and their following of Christ.¹³

The importance of this exegesis is connected with a structuring principle present in all of Origen’s theology: the negation of the materiality of God and thus the anti-Stoic interpretation of pneuma in the properly spiritual sense as the distinctive character of the divine nature.¹⁴ To understand this necessity it is important to remember that for the Stoics pneuma was essentially material because God coincided with the world. Chrysippus writes: "God is body, even though He is intelligent pneuma (πνεῦμα νοερόν) and eternal."¹⁵

Origen’s concern is evident from the presence of this theme in the opening of De principiis¹⁶ and also in Contra Celsum.¹⁷ In both cases, Origen cites God is Spirit from John 4:24. Here pneuma is found with reference to adoration, expressed with the verb proskynein and not by the semantic family connected with doxa, though the theological meaning is the same. The Alexandrian’s interest is that of highlighting the absurdity of the attribution of corporeality to God on the basis of the physical images used in Scripture, that is, fire, light, and spirit. At the end of De principiis 1.1, Origen asks, with irony, how one could acquire intellectual knowledge and understanding of the truth from material light, concluding that it is necessary to interpret the text in a spiritual, nonliteral sense.¹⁸ In fact, on the basis of an obvious reference to the Lord is the Spirit (ὁ δὲ κύριος τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστιν) in 2 Corinthians 3:17, he writes:

But if we turn to the Lord where also the Word of God is and where the Holy Spirit reveals spiritual knowledge, then the veil is removed and with unveiled face we will "gaze upon the glory of