|

The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Part 4 of 7)

ByJobin

The Holy Spirit, the Living Breath

There is a prayer many of us have said so often that we have perhaps forgotten how strange and wonderful it is.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love.

It is one of the oldest invocations in the Christian tradition. And if you stop long enough to hear what it is actually asking, it is an extraordinary request. Not simply that God would help us, or guide us, or forgive us. But that God Himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit, would come and take up residence within us. That the third person of the eternal Trinity, the one through whom the Father and Son act in the world and in the soul, would make the human heart his home.

The Holy Spirit is perhaps the most immediately present and yet the most difficult to speak about of the three persons of the Trinity. The Father is the hidden source, beyond all images yet the ground of everything. The Son became visible, took a human face and human hands, spoke words that were written down and can be read. But the Spirit moves, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, like the wind: you hear the sound of it but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. The Spirit is the person of the Trinity who is closest to us, dwelling within us and among us, and yet the one whose own face is the hardest to see.

This fourth post in The Undivided Light series is about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. And we are going to approach the Spirit through the voices that know Him best in our tradition: St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose hymns on the Spirit remain the most beautiful and theologically rich pneumatological writing in the Syriac heritage; St. Jacob of Serugh, whose memre on the Spirit’s work in creation, baptism, and the life of the Church carry the Syriac tradition forward with remarkable depth; and St. Cyril of Alexandria, whose theology of the Spirit’s role in theosis brings the Alexandrian and Syriac traditions into direct conversation on the question that matters most: what does the Spirit actually do in us, and what does this tell us about who the Spirit is?

Before we come to the fathers, there is one word that deserves attention on its own, because it is the word through which the entire Syriac pneumatological tradition sees the Spirit. That word is ruha.

Ruha: the Spirit in Syriac

In the Syriac language, the word for spirit is “ruha” (ܪܘܚܐ). It corresponds to the Hebrew “ruach” and the Greek “pneuma,” both of which carry the same range of meanings: breath, wind, spirit. But what is distinctive about the Syriac word ruha is that it is grammatically feminine. This is not simply a linguistic quirk. It shaped, in profound and sometimes surprising ways, how the Syriac theological tradition spoke about the Holy Spirit.

Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the fourth century, made deliberate and sustained use of the feminine character of ruha in his theological poetry. He spoke of the Spirit as the one who hovers over the waters, drawing on the Genesis 1 image of the Spirit brooding over the face of the deep before creation. The Hebrew and Syriac verb used in Genesis 1:2 for the Spirit hovering, “merahepet,” carries connotations of a bird brooding over its nest, warming and bringing life to what is beneath it. Ephrem developed this into a rich theology of the Spirit as the life-giver, the one who brings the divine warmth and presence to bear on everything the Father wills and the Son accomplishes.1

It is important to say clearly what the Syriac tradition is and is not doing when it uses feminine imagery for the Spirit. It is not making a claim about biological gender, which is a category that does not apply to God. It is not constructing an alternative theology in which the Trinity consists of Father, Mother, and Son. What it is doing is using the full range of biblical and linguistic imagery available to it to point toward a reality that exceeds all human categories. The Spirit is not male in the way human males are male, and the Spirit is not female in the way human females are female. God transcends both. But the Syriac tradition’s willingness to use feminine imagery for the Spirit is a reminder that the divine life is richer and more encompassing than any single set of human analogies can express, and that the tradition has always known this.

With that in mind, we turn to our three fathers.

Ephrem the Syrian: The Spirit as Fire, Breath, and Hovering Presence

Ephrem the Syrian was introduced in the first post of this series as the greatest poet of the patristic era in any language, and it is in his pneumatology, his theology of the Holy Spirit, that his poetic gifts are perhaps most fully deployed. The Spirit, for Ephrem, is not a subject that lends itself to philosophical argument. It lends itself to image, symbol, and song, because the Spirit is the person of the Trinity who is most directly encountered in experience, and experience requires poetry to be expressed honestly.2

In his Hymns on the Holy Spirit, Ephrem develops a set of interlocking images for the Spirit’s person and work that are worth working through carefully, because each one illuminates a different dimension of who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does.3

The first and perhaps most dominant image is fire. The tongues of fire at Pentecost, which we considered in the first post of this series, are for Ephrem not a one-off supernatural event but a disclosure of something that is true of the Spirit always. The Spirit is the divine fire, the burning love that exists within the Trinity itself and that reaches outward to set human hearts alight. When Ephrem speaks of the Spirit as fire, he does not mean something destructive or terrifying. He means something purifying, warming, and life-giving. The fire of the Spirit is the fire of the divine love made present within the human soul, and its work is to burn away what is false and cold and corrupted in us, and to leave in its place the warmth of the divine life.

Ephrem connects this fire imagery directly to the Eucharist in a way that is deeply relevant for the Malankara faithful. In one of his most celebrated passages, he meditates on the coal of fire that the seraph takes from the altar in Isaiah 6 and touches to the prophet’s lips. Ephrem reads this as a type of the Eucharist: the burning coal is the Body and Blood of Christ, taken from the altar of the Trinity itself, and placed on the lips of the faithful by the hand of the Spirit. The Spirit, for Ephrem, is the one who makes the Eucharist what it is: not merely bread and wine, and not merely a memorial of something past, but the living fire of the divine presence given into human hands and placed on human lips. When we receive the Qurbana, the Spirit is the one who makes that receiving real.4

The second image Ephrem develops is breath. The Spirit as ruha, as the breath of God, appears throughout Ephrem’s hymns in the context of creation and new creation. In Genesis 2, God breathes into the nostrils of Adam and the man becomes a living being. Ephrem reads the creation of humanity through the divine breath as the first pneumatological event in the history of the world. The Spirit is present at the beginning as the breath that makes the dust of the ground into a living person. And the Spirit is present at the new creation, the resurrection, as the breath that will raise the dead and transform mortality into eternal life. For Ephrem, the Spirit is the breath of divine life that encompasses the whole span of human history: present at the first creation and present at the last, the one through whom the Father’s will to give life is enacted in every time and place.

The third image is the hovering presence, drawn directly from Genesis 1:2 and the image of the Spirit brooding over the waters. Ephrem develops this into a theology of the Spirit as the one who is always prior to the action, always already present before anything begins. Before creation, the Spirit hovers over the void. Before the Incarnation, the Spirit overshadows Mary. Before the ministry of Jesus begins, the Spirit descends on Him at baptism. Before the Church is born, the disciples wait in the upper room for the Spirit Who is coming. Wherever God is about to act, the Spirit is already there, preparing, warming, making ready. For Ephrem, this is not merely a pattern of sacred history. It is a statement about who the Spirit is: the one whose presence is the condition of every act of divine grace.5

There is one more dimension of Ephrem’s pneumatology that deserves mention here, and it is one that has direct practical relevance for the life of prayer. Ephrem writes about the Spirit as the one who intercedes within us, who prays in us when we cannot find words, who carries our inarticulate longings to the Father when our own speech fails. He draws on Paul’s statement in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. For Ephrem, this is one of the most intimate and consoling truths about the Spirit: that the third person of the Trinity takes up residence within the believer precisely to do what the believer cannot do alone, to bring the human person into the prayer life of the Trinity itself, to carry us into the conversation that the Son has eternally with the Father.

Jacob of Serugh: the Spirit as the Seal and Completion of All Things

Jacob of Serugh, whose memre on Pentecost and on the Nativity we have drawn on in earlier posts, brings a different but complementary angle to the theology of the Holy Spirit. Where Ephrem works primarily through image and symbol, Jacob tends to work through narrative and typology, reading the Spirit’s presence across the whole sweep of salvation history and finding in each moment a disclosure of the Spirit’s character and work.

For Jacob, one of the most important categories for understanding the Spirit is completion. The Spirit is the one through whom every divine act is brought to its fulfilment. The Father wills. The Son accomplishes. The Spirit completes. This is not a rigid schema that Jacob applies mechanically, but a pattern he traces through the biblical narrative with great care and considerable poetry.6

He develops this most fully in his memra on the creation, where he reads the six days of Genesis not simply as a sequence of divine acts but as a Trinitarian movement in which the Spirit’s role at each stage is to bring to completion what the Word has begun. When God says “let there be light,” the Word goes forth, but it is the Spirit who brings the light to its fullness, who makes it what it needs to be. When humanity is created, the Word speaks the divine image into being, but the Spirit breathes the divine life into the creature. For Jacob, the Spirit’s role in creation is not secondary or supplementary. It is the role of the one who brings the whole to its intended goal.

Jacob applies the same understanding to baptism, which he treats in several of his memre with great richness. In baptism, he says, the Spirit does to the individual believer what the Spirit did to the waters at creation: hovers over them, warms them, makes them the instrument of new life. The water of the baptismal font is not simply water that is blessed and used ceremonially. It is water over which the Spirit has come, and that coming transforms it into the womb of the new creation, the place where the old humanity dies and the new humanity is born. Jacob’s baptismal theology is deeply Trinitarian: the Father initiates, the Son’s death and resurrection are the pattern and foundation, and the Spirit is the one who makes it real and present in the life of each person who enters the water.7

Jacob also writes at length about the Spirit’s role in the life of the Church, and particularly in the reading and interpretation of scripture. This is an aspect of his pneumatology that is less well known but deeply relevant. For Jacob, the Spirit does not simply inspire the writing of scripture and then withdraw. The Spirit remains present to the reading of scripture, illuminating its meaning for each generation of readers, drawing out of the ancient text the living word that speaks to the present moment. This is why, Jacob says, the same passage of scripture can be read many times and yield new meaning each time: not because the text has changed but because the Spirit who dwells in the reader and in the community is always drawing the reader deeper into the inexhaustible life that the text carries within it.

There is a passage in one of Jacob’s memre on the Spirit that is worth pausing over at length, because it captures something essential about the Syriac understanding of the Spirit’s relationship to the other two persons of the Trinity. Jacob writes that the Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father, made present and active within the world and within the soul. This is a profoundly relational account of the Spirit’s identity: the Spirit is not simply a power or a force or even simply the third person alongside the Father and Son. The Spirit is the love that circulates within the Trinity, the bond of the divine communion, and when the Spirit enters the human heart, what enters is that very love, the love that has existed between Father and Son before all ages, now given to us as the gift of Pentecost.

Cyril of Alexandria: The Spirit and the Gift of Divine Life

Cyril of Alexandria, who has appeared in each of the previous posts in this series, brings his characteristic theological precision to the question of the Spirit, and in doing so he provides the Alexandrian complement to the Syriac poetry of Ephrem and Jacob.

Cyril’s most important contribution to pneumatology is his insistence that the Spirit is fully and truly God, sharing the one divine nature with the Father and the Son completely and without diminishment. This may sound like a statement of the obvious, but it was contested in Cyril’s time, and it has direct implications for everything else he says about the Spirit’s work.

Cyril develops his pneumatology most fully in the later books of his Commentary on John, particularly in his treatment of John 14 through 16, where Jesus speaks to his disciples about the coming of the Spirit. Cyril reads these passages with the same careful eye for Trinitarian structure that we have seen throughout his commentary.8 When Jesus says that the Father will send the Spirit in his name, Cyril reads this as a statement about the Spirit’s relationship to both the Father and the Son within the one divine being. The Spirit does not come as a replacement for the Son or as a higher stage of revelation beyond the Son. The Spirit comes as the one who makes the Son present and real within the believer, who takes the life that the Son has won and the truth that the Son has revealed and makes both fully available and fully operative within the human person.

This is what Cyril means when he speaks of the Spirit as the one who brings theosis to completion. Theosis, as we have discussed in earlier posts and will return to in the sixth post of this series, is the process by which the human person is drawn into the life of God by grace. It begins in baptism, is nourished in the Eucharist, and is the goal of the entire Christian life. But Cyril is clear that theosis is not something the human person achieves by effort or aspiration. It is something the Spirit does within the human person. The Spirit, because the Spirit is fully and truly God, can give the human person what no creature could give: actual participation in the divine nature, the real and genuine indwelling of the divine life within the soul.9

Cyril develops this through a careful reading of John 7:37-39, where Jesus stands in the temple on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles and cries out: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” John adds the explanatory note: “By this he meant the Spirit.” For Cyril, this passage is one of the most important pneumatological texts in the New Testament, because it identifies the Spirit as living water, as the divine life itself flowing from within the believer. The Spirit is not an external assistance offered to the Christian from a distance. The Spirit is the divine life given to dwell within, the living water that flows from the innermost depths of the person who has received him.10

Cyril also engages carefully with the question of the Spirit’s procession, the question of where the Spirit comes from within the Trinity. He is clear that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, in accordance with John 15:26 where Jesus says: “the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father.” But Cyril also insists that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, bearing the character and the life of the Son, sent by the Son as well as by the Father. This is a delicate point, and Cyril handles it with care. He is not asserting the Western filioque, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from a single principle. He is asserting something more relational: that the Spirit’s identity is bound up with both the Father from whom he proceeds and the Son whose Spirit he is. The Spirit is not separable from either, and it is precisely this inseparable relationship with both Father and Son that makes the Spirit the one who brings the fullness of the divine life into the human person.

The Filioque Question: A Note for the Careful Reader

The filioque is a word that appears in the Western version of the Nicene Creed and has been one of the major theological fault lines between Eastern and Western Christianity since the ninth century. The word means “and from the Son,” and it was added to the Latin version of the Creed by the Western church to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, rather than from the Father alone as the original Greek Creed states.

The Oriental Orthodox tradition holds the original form of the Creed, without the filioque. The Spirit proceeds from the Father. This is the position of Nicaea and Constantinople, of Ephrem and Jacob of Serugh, and of Cyril of Alexandria as carefully read. The filioque is not part of the Oriental Orthodox confession, and its addition to the Creed by the West is considered to have been made without the authority of an ecumenical council.

This does not mean that the Oriental Orthodox tradition denies any relationship between the Spirit and the Son. As we have seen in Cyril’s theology, and as Ephrem and Jacob both reflect in their own ways, the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, bearing the Son’s character, sent by the Son into the world, making the Son present within the believer. The Spirit’s relationship to the Son is real and intimate. But the Spirit’s origin, in the technical theological sense of where the Spirit’s personal existence comes from within the Trinity, is from the Father alone. The Father is the single source within the Godhead, as we explored in the second post of this series on the monarchy of the Father.11

The filioque question does not need to be resolved in this post, and it is not the main focus of what we are exploring here. But it is worth naming clearly, because it is a question that careful readers of the Syriac tradition will encounter, and the Oriental Orthodox position on it is clear, consistently held, and theologically principled.

The Spirit in the Malankara liturgical tradition

The theology of the Spirit that Sts. Ephrem, Jacob, and Cyril have given us is not merely historical. It lives and breathes in the liturgical life of the Malankara Orthodox Church in ways that most of us encounter every time we gather for worship, even if we have not always had the language to name what we are encountering.

The epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit during the Qurbana, is the most concentrated moment of pneumatological theology in the entire liturgy. In the Malankara Qurbana, the priest prays for the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine of the Eucharist, asking that the Spirit would make the offering holy, would transform it into the Body and Blood of Christ, and would make it the living bread that gives eternal life to those who receive it.12 This prayer is structured in exactly the way Cyril’s theology would lead us to expect: it is the Spirit who makes the Eucharist what it is, who brings to completion in the present celebration the once-for-all sacrifice of the Son, who makes real and present in the life of each communicant the divine life that the Son has won.

The invocation of the Spirit also appears at the beginning of the liturgy, in the opening prayers and doxologies. The service does not begin with a human community gathering to perform a religious ritual. It begins with an invocation of the Spirit, an acknowledgement that what is about to happen can only happen if the Spirit makes it possible, and a prayer that the Spirit would be present and active in everything that follows. This is the Ephremian instinct: the Spirit as the one who is always prior to the action, already present before the first word is spoken, hovering over the gathered community as once he hovered over the waters of creation.

The Shehimo, the daily prayer book of the tradition, is similarly saturated with pneumatological prayer. Every office begins with the invocation of the Spirit. The daily prayers for each day of the week include specific petitions to the Spirit and specific thanksgivings for the Spirit’s gifts. The morning and evening offices are framed as acts performed in the Spirit, carried to the Father through the Son, the Trinitarian structure of prayer that Ephrem describes when he speaks of the Spirit as the one who intercedes within us and carries us into the divine conversation.

For those who have prayed the Shehimo daily, or who have attended the Qurbana regularly throughout their lives, this pneumatological saturation is something that has been forming them whether they were aware of it or not. The Spirit who descends at the epiclesis, who is invoked at the opening of every office, who is thanked in every doxology, is the same Spirit whose person and work we have been tracing through Ephrem, Jacob, and Cyril in this post. The liturgy has been teaching the theology all along.

Why the Spirit Matters For How We Live

The practical question that every post in this series must eventually come back to is this: what difference does it make? What changes in the daily life of a Christian who takes seriously what the tradition says about the Holy Spirit?

The first thing that changes is the understanding of prayer itself. If the Spirit is truly the one who intercedes within us, who carries our inarticulate longings to the Father, who prays in us when we cannot pray, then prayer is no longer primarily a human activity directed toward a God who is at a distance. Prayer is a Trinitarian event in which the Spirit within us joins his voice to ours and carries us, in the Son, to the Father. We are never praying alone. The Spirit is always already praying in us, and our own prayers are caught up into that prior and deeper intercession. This changes not just the theology of prayer but the experience of it. The silences in prayer are not empty. The moments when words fail are not failures. They may be precisely the moments when the Spirit’s intercession, deeper than words, is most active.

The second thing that changes is the understanding of the Christian community. If the Spirit is the one who hovered over the waters and brought creation to its fullness, and who hovers over the baptismal font and brings the new creation to birth in the individual believer, then the community of the baptised is not simply a human organisation with a religious purpose. It is the community of those in whom the divine breath dwells, the new creation being brought to its completion by the same Spirit who was present at the first. This is why the Church’s divisions and failures are so painful: they are not simply institutional failures but wounds in the body through which the Spirit breathes. And it is why the Church’s moments of genuine love and genuine holiness are so striking: they are the Spirit’s work becoming visible in human flesh.

The third thing that changes is the understanding of holiness. If the Spirit dwells within the believer as the divine fire of which Ephrem writes, then holiness is not a human achievement. It is a cooperation with a divine presence that is already there. The Spirit does not wait for us to become holy before taking up residence within us. The Spirit takes up residence in order to make us holy, burning away the false and the cold and the corrupted, and warming into life what is genuinely ours as creatures made in the divine image. Growing in holiness is not striving to reach something distant. It is learning to yield to the fire that is already burning within.

A prayer to close

Ephrem closes one of his Hymns on the Holy Spirit with a direct address to the Spirit that has stayed in the tradition as one of the most beautiful pneumatological prayers in Syriac Christianity. It seems right to close this post in a similar spirit.

Holy Spirit, breath of the Father, fire of the divine love, living water flowing from the throne of grace. You hovered over the void before creation began, and you have not ceased hovering. You breathed life into the dust of Adam, and you breathe life still into those who come to the waters of baptism. You fell as fire on the disciples at Pentecost, and you fall still on every gathering of your people that asks for your coming. Come again now, to the reader of these words, to the writer of them, to all who seek the face of the God you reveal. Kindle in us what is cold. Complete in us what is unfinished. And carry us, in the Son, to the Father from whom you proceed and in whom we find our beginning and our rest. Amen.

Next Wednesday: One Nature, Three Persons. We will look at the grammar of Syriac Trinitarian theology, the vocabulary of kyano, qnoma, and parsopa, and how these terms serve the same Nicene confession that has been the thread running through this series from the beginning.

This series, The Undivided Light, is an observational study, the reflections of someone sitting with these texts and trying to share what he is finding along the way. It is offered in humility, not as finished scholarship. If you are reading this, your prayers for the completion of the series are genuinely asked and gratefully received.

Your brother in Christ
Jobin

Patristic References for those who are interested to delve deeper

  1. The Hebrew “merahepet” and its Syriac equivalent carry the connotation of a bird brooding over its nest. This image is foundational for Ephrem’s pneumatology and is discussed at length in Sebastian Brock, “The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition.” ↩︎
  2. The primary sources for Ephrem’s pneumatology in this post are his Hymns on the Holy Spirit and his Hymns on the Church, together with relevant passages from his Commentary on Genesis. ↩︎
  3. For Ephrem’s ‘Hymns on the Holy Spirit’: Sebastian Brock (trans.), “The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition” ↩︎
  4. For Ephrem’s Eucharistic pneumatology and the image of the burning coal from Isaiah 6: Sebastian Brock, “Fire from Heaven: From Abel’s Sacrifice to the Eucharist.” ↩︎
  5. For Ephrem’s imagery of fire, breath, and the hovering Spirit: Sebastian Brock, “The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian.” ↩︎
  6. For Jacob’s theology of the Spirit as completion and seal in his creation memre: Aelred Baker, “Syriac and the Scriptures: The Witness of Jacob of Serugh.” ↩︎
  7. For Jacob’s baptismal pneumatology and the image of the Spirit hovering over the font: Sebastian Brock, “The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition”. ↩︎
  8. The primary sources for Cyril’s pneumatology in this post are Books 9 through 11 of his Commentary on John, which treat Jesus’s farewell discourse and the promises of the Paraclete, and his commentary on John 7:37-39. ↩︎
  9. For Cyril’s theology of the Spirit and theosis, and the Spirit as the one who brings participation in divine life to completion: Daniel A. Keating, “The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria”. ↩︎
  10. For Cyril’s position on the Spirit’s procession and its relationship to the filioque question: Thomas G. Weinandy and Daniel A. Keating , “The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation” ↩︎
  11. For a clear and fair account of the Oriental Orthodox position on the filioque: Fr. V. C. Samuel, “The Holy Spirit in the Syrian and Coptic Traditions,” in “The Holy Spirit”. ↩︎
  12. For the epiclesis in the Malankara Qurbana and its pneumatological theology: Fr. Baby Varghese, “West Syrian Liturgical Theology”. ↩︎

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply