The Conglorified Life-Maker

Lost in Translation #114

In the Niceno-Constantinople Creed, the Holy Spirit is identified in a somewhat curious manner:

Καὶ εἰς τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον, τὸ Κύριον, τὸ ζῳοποιόν,

Which in Latin is:

Et in Spíritum Sanctum, Dóminum et vivificantem

And which I translate as :

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-maker.

I translate vivificans as “Life-Maker” rather than the more common “Giver of Life” for two reasons. First, the verb vivifico etymologically means to make life: vivus+facio. Second, as we have seen before, making and being made are important themes in the Creed. The Father is the Maker of Heaven and earth, the Son is He through whom all things are made, and now we learn that the Holy Spirit is the Maker of life. Calling the Holy Spirit a Life-Maker is a way of affirming His full and equal divinity.

But the word would not have entered the Creed were it not for the vicissitudes of history. The Pneumatomachians” or “Spirit-fighters” (also known as the Macedonians) denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and since He was not God, He was not a Life-Maker but a life-needer, that is, a creature who needed life from a higher source. It was Saint Basil the Great who refuted this error. Lifting a rare Greek term from the pages of philosophy [1], Basil called the Holy Spirit a ζῳοποιόs or Life-Maker. The Latin vivificans is rarer still, appearing only in ecclesiastical Latin. [2]

We can also attribute another line of the Creed, simul adoratur et conglorificatur, to Basil’s fight with the Spirit-fighters. The latter somehow got it into their heads that no glory should not be attributed to the Holy Spirit. Basil easily refuted their argument by noting all the places in the Scriptures that even creatures are given glory and then asking them:

While so many are being glorified, do you wish the Spirit alone to be without glory? “The dispensation of the Spirit,” Scripture says, “comes in glory.” How, then, is He unworthy of being glorified? According to the Psalmist, great is the glory of the just, but according to you, the glory of the Spirit is nothing. How, then, is there not an evident danger that from such words they bring inevitable sins from themselves? If the man who is saved by works of righteousness glorifies even those who fear the Lord, he would not defraud the Spirit of the glory that is owed to Him. [3]

The Creed is one of the ways that we do not defraud the Spirit of the glory that is owed Him.

Basil the Great

The Basilian fingerprints on the Creed are an instructive reminder about how doctrine develops. It is tempting to think of dogmatic development as a strictly logical process that deductively moves from first principles to conclusions, or from what is implicitly held to what is explicitly stated. But the truth is a little more complicated than that. Mostly, dogma is defined in reaction to a doctrinal crisis, and doctrinal crises are specific. Had the Spirit-fighters attacked some other aspect of the Holy Spirit, we would probably be saying something different in the Creed. If, for example, they denied that the Holy Spirit is Love, we might be saying every Sunday, Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et Caritatem. Fundamentalists are wrong to think that the Truth descends from Heaven in a hermetically-sealed container, and modernists are wrong to think that truth is at best in a Heraclitan flux. Doctrinal development reminds us that Catholic dogma is both historically conditioned and absolutely true, and that sometimes, it is easier to understand those truths when one knows the history behind them.

Notes

[1] See Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants 2.9.6; Proclus, Institutio Physica 145; Porphyry, acc. to Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 3.11; Damascius, On First Principles 80.

[2] See Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 2.10, 33; Prudentius, Apotheosis 234; Paulinus Nola, Hymn 26.207; Jerome, Epistle 108, 11.

[3] On the Holy Spirit, trans. Stephen Hildebrand (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 24.55.