A Cappadocian Theology

The Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil, St. Gregory the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa

The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Johannine and Pauline Theologies: A Study in Mystical Contrasts and the Foundations of Christian Pneumatology 

By Bishop Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West) 

1) St. John and the Vision of Proceeding, Leading, and Enlightening: The Holy Spirit in Christ’s Baptism Shows His Messiahship 

In the Gospel according to St. John, we are granted a glimpse of the mystical theology of the apostles, which centered upon the deity of Jesus Christ and his eternal place with the Father. In one of the most profound openings in human literature, St. John intones, “Εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος ουτος ην εν αρχη προς τον θεον”. As in Philo before him, St. John grasps at the Logos/Mind of God, the out into the terms of Haraclitus, Plato and the Stoics, and then identifies it with the Old Testament’s “Wisdom of God” (“chokmah”, חָכְמָה). This Wisdom is then identified with the person of the Incarnation, the Lord Jesus Christ. In the process of describing Christ’s eternal relationship with the Godhead, St. John not only supplies the term “λογος”, so well known to English-speaking theology, but also the word “αρχη” which would be fundamental to the Greek Fathers’ philosophical quest to define the difference between the individuated hypostatic nature of the Father and that of the trinitarian Godhead itself, denoted by the ancient Greek plural word for “Gods”, “θεος”! 

To illustrate the profound claims of Christ’s position in this unique relationship within the Godhead, St. John describes the testimony of St. John the Baptist at the Jordan during Christ’s baptism, His Epiphany, and the revelation of the Holy Trinity to the world. He says, “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.” The Holy Spirit makes His first embodied appearance to show the world that Christ and His Father are One, revealing the Trinity for the first time to mankind, and showing the world a pathway to salvation!

The Wind Blows Where it Wishes

Immediately, the Holy Spirit features in Christ’s message of repentance, rebirth and resurrection. In the depth of night, he councils with a secret follower, a Pharisee who had much to loose from Christ’s revelation of the Trinity. “‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.’”

Christ is here telling Nicodemus that he must be “born of the Spirit”, and that in the Spirit one can “enter the Kingdom of God”. He also tells the Pharisee that the Holy Spirit’s presence and work is invisible, like the rushing of the wind. This “rushing wind” would manifest on the Day of Pentecost in the upper room, “suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit…”. There is no confusion or obscuring of this meaning. Christ is saying that in the Spirit we find God and His promise. How could this be if the Spirit Himself were not God? It also asks the question, if the Spirit is God, can man control it, or does the Holy Spirit manifest Himself to those who submit to Him through faith in the Gospel and repentance towards God? We will find all these answers clearly given in Scripture.

Christ in the Sending of the Spirit

While St. John mentions the Spirit in many other contexts, one significant to our study is found in John 14 and 16, where Christ mentions that He will send a “Comforter”, a “Paraclete”, when His work is finished and He returns to His Father. He says, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. “A little while longer and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also. At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me. “These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” “It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you. And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me… When He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.”

In this Scripture, all the issues of the Trinitarian doctrine are laid out. Christ is one with the Father, He does the Will of the Father, and the Spirit reveals Christ. They are one! Those who know Christ and His Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, will do the things that Christ commands. Their works will be the definition of their claims. Only those who obey Christ and in Christ and truly know His Spirit. These “friends” will be taught by the Spirit and will live in His peace. 

2) St. Paul and the Vision of the Spirit: Calling, Establishing, Anointing with Gifts, and the Unification of the Church

Galatians, the earliest book of the New Testament according to most scholars, mentions the Holy Spirit in a very experiential capacity, showing the fruits of the Spirit - saying in Chapter 5:16-26, “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law… The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.”

There is no better exposition of the life that the Church leads in Christ than this simple explanation. We are called to “new life”, and this life is manifest in us by the fruits of the Holy Spirit, which proves God’s activity in us, and enables us to function as a body. St. Paul reminds us that it is not an excuse for self-will, sin or strife, but that the Holy Spirit calls us to be “perfect, even as the Father in Heaven is perfect.” In this, the Church proves to be the perfection of both the “Image and Likeness” (the outward marks and the inner activities) of God, sealing us as a body as “the Spirit bares witness with our spirit that we are the children of God… joint heirs with Christ, so that we may be glorified with Him together”.

3) Placing St. Paul and St. John Together for a Contextual Reading of Early Pneumatology

In comparing St. John’s theology of the Spirit with St. Paul’s experience of the Spirit, several principles become apparent. St. John’s clear message is that the Holy Spirit is our connection with Christ, and that through Christ we have a relationship with God the Father. It is also clear that the Spirit works in our rebirth and our redemption, while manifesting in a process of sanctification in which we are obedient to His words and strive to keep His commands. The Holy Spirit’s role in the world after Christ’s “return to the Father” is to sustain, building up those who are “In Christ”, consoling the persecuted and suffering, and binding together the Church in a spirit of unity and love.

St. Paul’s experience with the Holy Spirit has cemented the idea in the mind of St. Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, that the Holy Spirit is, indeed, the Paraclete. In this conviction, we see how God revealed Himself through the Holy Spirit to the Apostles at Pentecost, called and converted St. Paul, filling him with His Spirit, and revealed Himself as already at work amongst the Gentiles, leading to great controversy on the part of the Jewish Church and those who would restrict the Holy Spirit’s work to those under the Jewish Law and the Old Covenant. St. Paul’s subsequent recognition by the St. James and St. Peter in Jerusalem, along with God’s work in St. Peter’s heart through the revelation of His Spirit (to those Gentiles that had not yet received baptism), led to the recognition (grudging, at best, on the part of Jewish Christians, who were constantly trying to undue the freedom that God had granted to Gentile believers through new life in the Spirit) of the Gentile Church, and the beginning of the Greek Tradition that we will examine throughout this paper.  

By examining the Scriptures and hearing the record of the Holy Spirit in them, we can clearly discern that the work of the Spirit in the lives of the Apostles and in the life of the Early Church was anything but predictable and “channeled by those who hold the keys to the kingdom by right of apostolic succession”. Instead, what we see is the apostles and their disciples striving to keep up with His calling and sovereign work, and realizing in every situation where they had built a system or “dialectic” (Circumcision, Jewish Law, submission to the ecclesial center of Jerusalem, dietary restrictions, etc), God would bring it to nought and show Himself to transcend the artificial human constructs by His own power. This realization gives us a particularly poignant perspective from which to view the unfolding of Christian history, one in which the tendency to erect barriers, canonical regulations, and liturgical boundaries to uphold the claims of authority and political advantage of those claiming to follow in the footsteps of the apostles is clearly evident. Through these Scriptural lessons we learn that man can never venture to believe that his “synergy” with the Holy Spirit is directed or controlled by his will, his culture, his traditions or his preconceptions. It is a manifestation of God’s power, His Energy, in human weakness, confusion, frustration and ignorance, and only evident in human repentance, reconciliation, submission to God, and struggle towards spiritual growth and maturity. A tradition can arise from this realization, and this is the “paradosis” of the Apostle Paul. Our only “worthiness” to participate in God’s work is found in repentance, for we can lay no claim to the holiness that the Holy Spirit imparts, “lest any man should boast.” The Church exists because of the activity of the Spirit, and the Spirit makes all those who believe, repent and are baptized in the Name of the Holy Trinity into the Body of Christ, to “work out their salvation in fear and trembling”, “shining more and more into the perfect day” when Christ returns! Realizing the Spirit’s Scriptural role and seeing God’s plan for our salvation brings faith, joy and hope, to those who would otherwise be lost, alienated and without a historical or canonical claim to God’s Kingdom. Such a message is life-giving and teaches us that all characteristics of the Holy Spirit’s work and the foundation of the Church itself can be found in the proclamation and reception of the Gospel!   

The Development of Pneumatology: St. Basil’s “On the Holy Spirit” and its Implications for the Development of Essential Doctrinal Categories and Trinitarian Personalism

The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s consubstantial nature with the Father, his action (energies) in the lives of believers, and the defense of the traditions of the Church in regards to keeping Christ’s ordinance of baptism, came to their final form in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers, and in particular, St. Basil the Great. St. Basil (330AD-371AD) was originally named Theodore, the son of Basil the Elder, a Greco-Roman rhetor and lawyer of Pontus. He was raised in Cappadocia, under the influence of Antiochian bishops and his grandmother, St. Makarina the Elder, who was a student of St. Gregory Thermaturgist. The famous “Wonder-Worker” was a missionary and church-planter in an Asian countryside, having started there after ten years with the famous Alexandrian Origen while in exile in Beirut. St. Makarina the Elder raised St. Basil, his brothers St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Naucratius, St. Peter Sabaste, Sicarius, Nyssan and his sisters, St. Macrina the Younger, Gorgiana and St. Theosebia - all of whom are venerated in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches as great saints and monastic leaders. They were truly a family of saints! St. Basil studied philosophy with Gregory of Nazianzus, and knew Julian the Apostate at the Academy of Athens. St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzus worked together to compile the writings of Origen into the first Philokalia, while trying to re-orient much of the Master’s teachings towards a more biblical and literal stream, and reflect much of the ethos of the Antiochian milieu’s concern with Alexandrian Christian Gnosticism while maintaining the valuable scholarship and theological terminological categorization that made Origen so effective. They were considered successful in their own lifetimes and both were actively involved in ecclesial politics, apologetics against the Arians, Apollonarians, the Eunominians, and the Pneumatomachians, and were a veritable “tag-team” in debating various heretics. St. Basil died at the young age of 41, worn out from asceticism and labor, without seeing his ecclesial or ministry goals reached. Despite his personal failures, he was widely thought of as the constructor of a doctrinal peace that held for almost 50 years between the Churches within a generation after his death. 

St. Basil’s Exposition of the Divinity of the Holy Spirit

St. Basil undertakes the reorientation of philosophical categories to Scriptural truths in his meditations on the nature, function and energy of the Holy Spirit, while addressing His consubstantiality with the Father and the philosophical, linguistic and conceptual problems that describing such a mystery necessarily incurs. In a passage that gets to the heart of his mastery of the Scriptural texts, and as an appeal to the authority of the foundations of the Christian Tradition against heretics, St. Basil argues: “But the Spirit is called Christ’s, as he has been made kin to him in nature. On account of this, “if someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” (Rom 8:9). Hence he alone (pg 81) worthily glorifies the Lord, for “he will glorify me,” he says, not as a creature, but as the Spirit of truth, who clearly manifests the truth in himself (Jn 16:14). As the Spirit of Wisdom, he reveals in his own greatness Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God. And as Paraclete, he portrays in himself the goodness of the Paraclete who sent him. And in his own dignity he manifests the greatness of him from whom he came forth. On the one hand, then, some glory belongs to nature, as light is the glory of the sun; on the other hand, some is external, and results from choice, given in a distinct way to those who are worthy. [The glory] itself is two-fold. For, “the Son”, Scripture says, “will glorify the Gather, and the slave will glorify his Master” (Mal 1:6). Of these two kinds, that which belongs to the slave is offered by creation, but that which belongs to kinship, if I may so put it, is accomplished by the Spirit. As he said about himself, “If I have glorified you on the earth, I have finished the work which you gave me to do (jn 17:4). He also speaks in the way about the Paraclete: “he will glorify me because he will take from me what is mine and proclaim it to you” (Jn 16:14). And just as the Son will be glorified by the Father who says, “I have glorified you, I will glorify you again” (Jn 12:28), thus also the Spirit is glorified through the communion that he has with the Father and the Son as well as through the witness of the Only-begotten who says, “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven you by men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven” (Mt 12:31). Here, St. Basil argues that the Spirit is manifest in glory, in equality with Christ, and in Christ’s recognition of blasphemy against Him as the “unforgivable sin”. 

St. Basil’s Understanding of the Hypostatic Icon of the Trinity Illuminated by the Holy Spirit

The second powerful paradigm that occurs in St. Basil’s monumental work is the analogy of sight and the picture of the icon and the Emperor’s glory, which rests behind the icon. This image will flow throughout the works of the Cappadocians, appearing in the two Sts. Gregory of Nyssa and Nazianzus, occurring again in the work of St. John Damascene in the “De Fide Orthodoxa”, the iconographic writings of St. Theodore Studite, and flowering in an analogous context throughout St. Gregory Palamas’ “Triads” and “The Declaration of the Holy Mountain”. Regardless of the context into which these analogies of sight, light, color, illumination, and knowledge are brought, they are insightful and address a question that modern theologians in the West have often puzzled over - how, if what we behold is not the “thing-in-itself”, can we know or maintain a relationship to that thing from whence we perceive its existence as a symbol? While modern philosophy has often tried to detach the comprehensible symbol from that which generates it, the Eastern Fathers clearly maintain that the image, the light, and the reflection of the Uncreated Light upon the created nous is found in the origin of the Light, the Divine Trinity, which soaks all of the world ineffably in its Presence, but is only visible to the eye that is illuminated and its nature restored by repentance and faith. 

St. Basil writes, “When through his illuminating power we fix our eyes on the beauty of the image of the unseen God, and through the image are led up to the more than beautiful vision of the archetype, his Spirit of knowledge is somehow inseparably present. He supplies to those who love to see the truth the power to see the image in himself. He does not make the manifestation from the outside, but in himself leads to knowledge. For, as “no one knows the Father, except the Son” (Mt 11:27), so, “no one is able to say Jesus is Lord, except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). He has not spoken through the Spirit but in the Spirit. And, “God is Spirit, and those who worship must worship him in Spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24). As it is written, “in his light we will see light”, that is, in the illumination of the Spirit, “the true light that enlightens every man coming into the world” (Jn 1:9). And so, he shows in himself the glory of the Only-begotten and furnishes to true worshippers the knowledge of God in himself. The way, then, to knowledge of God is from the one Spirit, through the one Son, to the One Father. And conversely the goodness and holiness by nature and the royal dignity reach from the Father, through the Only-Begotten, to the Spirit. In this way the persons are confessed and the pious dogma of the monarchy does not fall away. Thus, you may not to the “Thing-in-Itself”, the Essence of the Holy Trinity, but the Light that illuminates our hearts is no less real, no less of God, and no less deifying. This hypostatic revelation of the Names of God and His Attributes are God’s work in our lives, a Living Word, that manifests the Trinity in the power of Christ’s Incarnation, thus linking us with the life of God, and making the unknowable and incomprehensible a lived reality within the Church.

The Importance of “On the Holy Spirit” Today

To read St. Basil the Great is to see into his heart and mind through the context of his life, work and philosophical discourses. While his incomparable "On the Holy Spirit" is both illuminating and challenging, and it is merely an apologetic restatement of the Gospel in a highly educated, socially privileged, and culturally elite Eastern Roman cultural context. This kind of preaching is necessary in our own age, and St. Basil’s thought is still deeply relevant to us today, even as we realize the limitations of applying his Greek philosophy context universally and must maintain that the only truly universal context is Scripture itself. St. Basil did not loose sight of the simple, evangelical, faith-based message that most Christians involved in abstract theology and ancient canonical and theological claims are tempted to forget today. St. Basil knew that we did not "earn" our salvation, but he taught that we could only receive God's grace to the proportion that we submit to it.  Based on this radical call to obedience, he built hospitals, advocated for the poor and the sick, the stranger and the persecuted, and accepted and loved the pagan and the Jew, without distinction, even while preaching the orthodoxy of salvation through Christ as God, and the necessity of the Holy Trinity. Once we put ourselves into the context of St. Basil, we find his creativity and boldness sincerely astonishing. He was a biblicist with a love for a heretical Gnostic Christian, a staunch traditionalist who appealed to the conservative liturgical practices of his youth, but also a radical reformer who gradually embraced unbiblical philosophical language and exhorted others to put Greek Philosophy to the service of the Christian mission. He was a firebrand, an apologist, an advocate for the poor and needy, a revolutionary medical missionary, and a thinker who put the most abstract concepts to work for the intellectually impoverished and marginalized. St. Basil’s contribution to the Church is truly astonishing in its fundamental role of protecting core doctrine, and is remarkable because of its relevance and creativity for Christianity today. 

Cappadocian Theology and How the Doctrine of Consubstantiality Transform Our Rational Speculation into Genuine Knowledge of the Mystery of the Trinity 

In attempting to answer the question of the transformation of rational speculation into an experiential knowledge of the Divine Trinity, it is important to mirror the words of Vladimir Lossky, who was committed to protecting the vision of the Eastern Orthodox Church from unfair criticism and dismissal by those in the West who neither understood nor cherished its inheritance. His approach to theology was faithful to the spirit of the Cappadocian Fathers when he said, “Since the Word has incarnated Himself, the Word can be thought and taught - and in the same way the Word can be painted… Theology as a word and as a thought must necessarily conceal a gnostic dimension, in the sense of the theology of contemplation and silence. It is a matter of opening our thought to a reality that goes beyond it… So theological teaching locates itself with difficulty between gnosis - charisma and silence, contemplative and existential knowledge - episteme - science and reasoning. Theological language uses episteme, but cannot reduce itself to it without falling yet again from this world. It must set the spirit on the path to contemplation, to pure prayer where thought stops, to the ineffable.” He goes on to say, “Unknowability does not mean agnosticism or refusal to know God. Nevertheless, this knowledge will only be attained in the way which leads not to knowledge but to union - to deification. Thus theology will never be abstract, working through concepts, but contemplative: raising the mind to those realities which pass all understanding. This is why the dogmas of the Church often present themselves to the human reason as antimonies, the more difficult to resolve the more sublime the mystery which they express. It is not a question of surprising the antimony by adapting dogma to our understanding, but of a change of heart and mind enabling us to attain to the contemplation of the reality which reveals itself to us as it raises us to God, and unites us, according to our several capacities, to Him.” 

With the exception of St. John of Damascus, St. Maximos Confessor and St. Gregory Palamas and their various contributions to the development of Orthodox doctrine over the course of the first 800 years of Orthodox patristics, it is clear that no fathers had a greater impact on the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity than the Cappadocians. It is important, therefore, to chronicle their thoughts on the Trinity, how their terminology was developed, and the relationships that these terms represented. 

At the beginning of the Trinitarian Controversy in the mid 4th century, St Basil initially stood with his Antiochian bishop, Eustathius of Sabaste, against the term “Homoousios” as an innovation. He later changed this stance, arguing that the philosophical position that Christ was the same “essence” of the Father was a safeguard to Christ’s divinity and an answer to the problems of categorization that Nicene Bishops had in countering the claims of Semi-Arians. The Cappadocians contribution to the modification of the Nicene Creed at the Second Council is notable, where a further development of the pneumatology and a strengthening of the theological equality of the Son with the Father was inserted into the original, and imparting the “Constantinople” into the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan” Creed. St. Basil was the first to think of the distinction between Ousia and Hypostasis, which had the same meaning in Greek philosophy (one being an ontological state and the other a function) as a way of differentiating the Three Persons of the Trinity while maintaining their unity in the Godhead. This new distinction would be fateful for the study of Christology, which would not allow Christ to have two individuated, hypostatic realities, united in one person; instead, the classic formula was established at Chalcedon through ecclesiastical compromise between Alexandrian and Antiochian Schools that Christ was two natures in one hypostasis and one person, and one in ousia with the Father. As this would be reinterpreted by neo-Chalcedonianism, as developed by St. Maximos the Confessor, it would only allow for “humanity” to be incarnate in Christ and not a single, individuated human being. St. Basil divides Hypostasis and Ousia, which had meant the same thing in Aristotle (Categories V) and the early Fathers used it interchangeably, as they did to some extent with Physis. He excludes Ousia from Gnosis - Therefore, making Christianity “Agnostic” without abandoning the techniques of Alexandrian Christian Gnosticism and making the path of knowing and becoming exclusionary of what makes God Uncreated and man created, God’s true being. This is how the Cappadocians “saved” Origen and created a synthesis of his work that would undergird the development of Greek theology, culminating in St. Maximos Confessor’s monumental reversing of Origen’s categories into a process of purification, illumination and divinization in his “Ambigua”. 

From this it can be argued that Eastern Orthodoxy never really “solved” the theological problems of the 4th and 5th century, but so abstracted, obscured and obfuscated them that they could no longer be talked about in a way relating to any knowable human reality, and thus, “preserved the mystery”. It did this in a much better, more self-contradictory way than the dyophysites or the monophysites, which both verged on solving the contradiction with intellectual reasoning and thus produced something completely unknowable to a matter of human logic. In many ways, this “fence building” was what all the fathers tried to do, because the philosophical arguments could never explain the “what” or “how”, only give a structure so that the “why” was preserved. After the controversies on basic doctrine boiled down, what was left was a Greek philosophical explanation for what the Bible clearly proclaimed - God is One, but God is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons and three distinct roles, but one in godhood and eternally united in a communion of perfect love; and Jesus is both fully God and fully man, thus allowing humans to share in God’s nature by His Grace through out shared humanity. These doctrines are the core of Apostolic Christianity and are the stereotypical views that separated Christianity from all other creeds. All the possible nuances and re-interpretations of these simple truths on which our salvation depends were canceled and the proclamation of the Gospel could focus on the stability and maintenance of the Life of the Church and its pastoral calling. This approach insured that the theological method of the Eastern Church would never become dialectical, and would always remain within the existential sphere of experience.       

The Greek philosophical process of “Theosis” was first connected to Christian sanctification by Origen and Evagrius, borrowed from the “Henosis” of mystical Platonism in the Timeus and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus (later entering the Christian tradition verbatim through the Psuedo-Dionysius’s use of a further distillation of this theory of contemplative philosophy found in the great pagan philosopher, Proclus), but was rehabilitated and made biblically compatible by the Cappadocians. This philosophical process of “Kenosis/Henosis” that was the Platonic ideal of transformation and the unity of knowledge and action, was to be used, the Biblical distinction between God and Man had to be maintained - and this was accomplished through the setting apart of the Ousia and the establishment of apophatic limitations to human knowledge. Scripture does not focus on this philosophical process (its biblical foundations being constructed through the use of allegorical interpretation, because it is a record of God revealing Himself, which is innately a kataphatic process through the person of God’s own Son). Ultimately, all we can know about God has been revealed and handed to the Church, once and for all, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Only by Christ and the inner-working of the Holy Spirit, can we know anything about God. The framework of theosis did much to clarify a process of sanctification that could form the core of Christian praxis, and based on this understanding St. Basil founded his principles of monasticism that would cause the Latin West to call all Orthodox monastics “The Order of St. Basil”. 

St. Basil also rectified the manner in which God was a Monad, and the way in which God was a Trinity. By creating the distinction between these two forms of existence, Ousia and Hypostasis, then the strict monotheism of Judaism and Islam could be avoided, while the convolution of Persons into separate existences, and thus returning to polytheism, could also be canceled. St. Basil maintained the unification of terms Hypostasis and Prosopon that Apollonarius had introduced, even though they originated in separate Eastern and Western milieus and were both held suspect of modalism or polytheism, clarifying their meaning through his usage. St. Gregory of Nyssa further cemented the terms in his “16th Oration”. This perspective unites the divine names and prosopon/hypostasis as knowable through the revelation/activity of the Holy Spirit - this activity is called “energy”, and the human will’s ability to manifest it is called “synergy”. These energies defined as the manifestation of God’s grace and Presence through the Holy Spirit in the actions of a submitted and cooperating human will - synergy. Thus, God can only be known through virtue, the activities of the human will submitted to God’s will, which manifests His Presence and reveals God’s will. The result is a Cappadocian gnosiology that considers the acquisition of knowledge without virtuous acts as worse than futile, undercutting the basic premises of gnosticism and allowing the Greek philosophy to serve Biblical revelation. As Lossky says, “In St. Paul, knowledge of God writes itself into a personal relationship expressed in terms of reciprocity: reciprocity with the object of theology (which, in reality, is a subject), reciprocity also with those to whom the theological word is addressed. At its best, it is communion: I know as I am known…. Theology, then, is located in a relationship of revelation where the initiative belongs to God, while implying a human response, the free response of faith and love… The involvement of God calls forth our involvement. This coming and this presence are seized by faith which thus underlies, with priority and in all necessity, theological thought. Christian faith…is adherence to a presence which confers certitude, in such a way that certitude, here, is first. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge. ”

Ultimately, we cannot comprehend these mysteries, because they are beyond the capacity of our minds to understand via analogy and association. We can understand things within the created world because these things are like us, and we can infer the nature of created things from our own being. However, that which is beyond the created world, what created this realm and defines this existence, is beyond association. It can only be likened to silence, to darkness, to un-knowing, but even these analogies are but lies when compared with God’s unknowable Being. As Lossky again so aptly states, “The highest point of revelation, the dogma of the Holy Trinity, is pre-eminently an antimony. To attain to the contemplation of this primordial reality in all its fullness, it is necessary to reach the goal which it set before us, to attain to the state of deification; for, in the words of St. Gregory Nazianzen, ‘they will be welcomed by the ineffable light, and the vision of the holy and sovereign Trinity… uniting themselves wholly to the whole Spirit; wherein alone and beyond all else I take it that the Kingdom of Heaven consists.”

Bibliography:

1. St. Basil the Great, “On the Holy Spirit”, translated by Stephen Hilderand, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 2011
2. St. Basil the Great, “On the Holy Spirit”, translated by David Anderson, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 1980
3. Fr. Dr. John Meyendorff, “Byzantine Theology”, Fordham University Press, 2nd Ed., 1983
4. Vladimir Lossky, “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church”, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, reprint of 1957 St. Sergius Press impression
5. Vladmimir Lossky, “Orthodox Theology”, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 1978
6. J.N.D. Kelly, “Early Christian Doctrines”, Harper & Row New York, 1978
7. Williston Walker, “A History of the Christian Church”, Charles Scribner’s Sons New York, 1959
8. Plotinus, “Enneads”, translated by Stephen MacKenna, Penguin Classics Press, 1991
9. St. Maximos Confessor, “On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ”, translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken, St. VIadimir’s Orthodox Seminary Press, 2003
10. Dr. Carla Sunberg, “Discovering Holiness in the 4th Century”, a series of lectures entitled “Cappadocian Fathers and Mothers” at Azusa Pacific Seminary, May 2015
11. The Stephanus Edition of the Greek New Testament, 1552, PDF available at Archive.org