Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

Chapter X.
Against those who say that it is not right to rank the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son.
24. But we must proceed to attack our opponents, in the endeavour to confute those
“oppositions” advanced against us which are derived from “knowledge falsely so-called.” 924
It is not permissible, they assert, for the Holy Spirit to be ranked with the Father and
Son, on account of the difference of His nature and the inferiority of His dignity. Against
them it is right to reply in the words of the apostles, “We ought to obey God rather than
men.” 925
For if our Lord, when enjoining the baptism of salvation, charged His disciples to baptize
all nations in the name “of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” 926 not disdaining
fellowship with Him, and these men allege that we must not rank Him with the Father
and the Son, is it not clear that they openly withstand the commandment of God? If they
deny that coordination of this kind is declaratory of any fellowship and conjunction, let
them tell us why it behoves us to hold this opinion, and what more intimate mode of conjunction
927 they have.
If the Lord did not indeed conjoin the Spirit with the Father and Himself in baptism,
do not 928 let them lay the blame of conjunction upon us, for we neither hold nor say anything
924 1 Tim. vi. 20. The intellectual championship of Basil was chiefly asserted in the vindication of the con-
substantiality of the Spirit, against the Arians and Semi-Arians, of whom Euonomius and Macedonius were
leaders, the latter giving his name to the party who were unsound on the third Person of the Trinity, and were
Macedonians as well as Pneumatomachi. But even among the maintainers of the Nicene confession there was
much less clear apprehension of the nature and work of the Spirit than of the Son. Even so late as 380, the year
after St. Basil’s death, Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. xxxi. de Spiritu Sancto, Cap. 5, wrote “of the wise on our side
some held it to be an energy, some a creature, some God. Others, from respect, they say, to Holy Scripture,
which lays down no law on the subject, neither worship nor dishonour the Holy Spirit.” cf. Schaff’s Hist. of
Christian Ch. III. Period, Sec. 128. In Letter cxxv. of St. Basil will be found a summary of the heresies with which
he credited the Arians, submitted to Eusthathius of Sebaste in 373, shortly before the composition of the present
treatise for Amphilochius.
925 Acts v. 29.
926 Matt. xxviii. 19.
Against those who say that it is not right to rank the Holy Spirit with…
927 The word used is συνάφεια, a crucial word in the controversy concerning the union of the divine and
human natures in our Lord, cf. the third Anathema of Cyril against Nestorius and the use of this word, and
Theodoret’s counter statement (Theod. pp. 25, 27). Theodore of Mopsuestia had preferred συνάφεια to ἕνωσις;
Andrew of Samosata saw no difference between them. Athanasius (de Sent. Dionys. § 17) employs it for the
mutual relationship of the Persons in the Holy Trinity: “προκαταρκτικὸν γάρ ἐστι τῆς συναφείας τὸ ὄνομα.”
928 μηδέ. The note of the Ben. Eds. is, “this reading, followed by Erasmus, stirs the wrath of Combefis, who
would read, as is found in four mss., τότε ἡμῖν, ‘then let them lay the blame on us.’ But he is quite unfair to
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