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| How the Word is the Maker of All Things, and Even the Holy Spirit Was Made Through Him.
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6. How the Word is
the Maker of All Things, and Even the Holy Spirit Was Made Through
Him.
“All things were made through
Him.” The “through4678
whom” is never found in the first place but always in the second,
as in the Epistle to the Romans,4679
“Paul a
servant of Christ Jesus, a called Apostle, separated to the Gospel of
God which He promised before by His prophets in Holy Scriptures,
concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the
flesh, determined the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of
holiness, by the resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
through whom we received grace and apostleship, for obedience of the
faith among all the nations, for His name’s sake.”
For God promised aforehand by the prophets His own Gospel, the prophets
being His ministers, and having their word to speak about Him
“through whom.” And again God gave grace and
apostleship to Paul and to the others for the obedience of the faith
among all the nations, and this He gave them through Jesus Christ the
Saviour, for the “through whom” belonged to Him. And
the Apostle Paul says in the Epistle to the Hebrews:4680
“At the end of the days He spoke
to us in His Son, whom He made the heir of all things, ‘through
whom’ also He made the ages,” showing us that God made the
ages through His Son, the “through whom” belonging, when
the ages were being made, to the Only-begotten. Thus, if all
things were made, as in this passage also, through the Logos,
then they were not made by the Logos, but by a stronger and
greater than He. And who else could this be but the Father?
Now if, as we have seen, all things were made through Him, we have to
enquire if the Holy Spirit also was made through Him. It appears
to me that those who hold the Holy Spirit to be created, and who also
admit that “all things were made through Him,” must
necessarily assume that the Holy Spirit was made through the Logos, the
Logos accordingly being older than He. And he who shrinks from
allowing the Holy Spirit to have been made through Christ must, if he
admits the truth of the statements of this Gospel, assume the Spirit to
be uncreated. There is a third resource besides these two (that
of allowing the Spirit to have been made by the Word, and that of
regarding it as uncreated), namely, to assert that the Holy Spirit has
no essence of His own beyond the Father and the Son. But on
further thought one may perhaps see reason to consider that the Son is
second beside the Father, He being the same as the Father, while
manifestly a distinction is drawn between the Spirit and the Son in the
passage,4681
“Whosoever
shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him,
but whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, he shall not
have forgiveness, either in this world or in the world to
come.” We consider, therefore, that there are three
hypostases, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and at the same
time we believe nothing to be uncreated but the Father. We
therefore, as the more pious and the truer course, admit that all
things were made by the Logos, and that the Holy Spirit is the most
excellent and the first in order4682
| 4682 Reading πρὸ
πάυτων, with Jacobi. | of all that
was made by the Father through Christ. And this, perhaps, is the
reason why the Spirit is not said to be God’s own Son. The
Only-begotten only is by nature and from the beginning a Son, and the
Holy Spirit seems to have need of the Son, to minister to Him His
essence, so as to enable Him not only to exist, but to be wise and
reasonable and just, and all that we must think of Him as being.
All this He has by participation of the character of Christ, of which we have
spoken above. And I consider that the Holy Spirit supplies to
those who, through Him and through participation in Him, are called
saints, the material of the gifts, which come from God; so that the
said material of the gifts is made powerful by God, is ministered by
Christ, and owes its actual existence in men to the Holy Spirit.
I am led to this view of the charisms by the words of Paul which he
writes somewhere,4683
“There are
diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and diversities of
ministrations, and the same Lord. And there are diversities of
workings, but it is the same God that worketh all in all.”
The statement that all things were made by Him, and its seeming
corollary, that the Spirit must have been called into being by the
Word, may certainly raise some difficulty. There are some
passages in which the Spirit is placed above Christ; in Isaiah, for
example, Christ declares that He is sent, not by the Father only, but
also by the Holy Spirit. “Now the Lord hath sent Me,”
He says,4684
“and His
Spirit,” and in the Gospel He declares that there is forgiveness
for the sin committed against Himself, but that for blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit there is no forgiveness, either in this age or in the
age to come. What is the reason of this? Is it because the
Holy Spirit is of more value than Christ that the sin against Him
cannot be forgiven? May it not rather be that all rational beings
have part in Christ, and that forgiveness is extended to them when they
repent of their sins, while only those have part in the Holy Spirit who
have been found worthy of it, and that there cannot well be any
forgiveness for those who fall away to evil in spite of such great and
powerful cooperation, and who defeat the counsels of the Spirit who is
in them. When we find the Lord saying, as He does in Isaiah, that
He is sent by the Father and by His Spirit, we have to point out here
also that the Spirit is not originally superior to the Saviour, but
that the Saviour takes a lower place than He in order to carry out the
plan which has been made that the Son of God should become man.
Should any one stumble at our saying that the Saviour in becoming man
was made lower than the Holy Spirit, we ask him to consider the words
used in the Epistle to the Hebrews,4685
where Jesus is
shown by Paul to have been made less than the angels on account of the
suffering of death. “We behold Him,” he says,
“who hath been made a little lower than the angels, Jesus,
because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and
honour.” And this, too, has doubtless to be added, that the
creation, in order to be delivered from the bondage of corruption, and
not least of all the human race, required the introduction into human
nature of a happy and divine power, which should set right what was
wrong upon the earth, and that this action fell to the share, as it
were, of the Holy Spirit; but the Spirit, unable to support such a
task, puts forward the Saviour as the only one able to endure such a
conflict. The Father therefore, the principal, sends the Son, but
the Holy Spirit also sends Him and directs Him to go before, promising
to descend, when the time comes, to the Son of God, and to work with
Him for the salvation of men. This He did, when, in a bodily
shape like a dove, He flew to Him after the baptism. He remained
on Him, and did not pass Him by, as He might have done with men not
able continuously to bear His glory. Thus John, when explaining
how he knew who Christ was, spoke not only of the descent of the Spirit
on Jesus, but also of its remaining upon him. For it is written
that John said:4686
“He who
sent me to baptize said, On whomsoever thou shalt see the Spirit
descending and abiding upon Him, the same is He that baptizeth with the
Holy Spirit and with fire.” It is not said only, “On
whomsoever thou shalt see the Spirit descending,” for the Spirit
no doubt descended on others too, but “descending and abiding on
Him.” Our examination of this point has been somewhat
extended, since we were anxious to make it clear that if all things
were made by Him, then the Spirit also was made through the Word, and
is seen to be one of the “all things” which are inferior to
their Maker. This view is too firmly settled to be disturbed by a
few words which may be adduced to the opposite effect. If any one
should lend credence to the Gospel according to the Hebrews, where the
Saviour Himself says, “My mother, the Holy Spirit took me just
now by one of my hairs and carried me off to the great mount
Tabor,” he will have to face the difficulty of explaining how the
Holy Spirit can be the mother of Christ when it was itself brought into
existence through the Word. But neither the passage nor this
difficulty is hard to explain. For if he who does the will of the
Father in heaven4687
is Christ’s
brother and sister and mother, and if the name of brother of Christ may
be applied, not only to the race of men, but to beings of diviner rank
than they, then there is nothing
absurd in the Holy Spirit’s being His mother, every one being His
mother who does the will of the Father in heaven.
On the words, “All things were made by Him,”
there is still one point to be examined. The “word”
is, as a notion, from “life,” and yet we read, “What
was made in the Word was life, and the life was the light of
men.” Now as all things were made through Him, was the life
made through Him, which is the light of men, and the other notions
under which the Saviour is presented to us? Or must we take the
“all things were made by Him” subject to the exception of
the things which are in Himself? The latter course appears to be
the preferable one. For supposing we should concede that the life
which is the light of men was made through Him, since it said that the
life “was made” the light of men, what are we to say about
wisdom, which is conceived as being prior to the Word? That,
therefore, which is about the Word (His relations or conditions) was
not made by the Word, and the result is that, with the exception of the
notions under which Christ is presented, all things were made through
the Word of God, the Father making them in wisdom. “In
wisdom hast Thou made them all,” it says,4688
not through, but in wisdom.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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