Читать книгу The Spirit over the Earth - Группа авторов - Страница 12

There is no doubt that the achievement of a fully trinitarian orthodoxy, one that speaks not just to the Son’s relationship with the Father but also includes the Spirit, would not have been secured apart from the efforts of theologians in the Eastern, or Greek-speaking, church in the fourth century. The Cappadocian fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—each played crucial roles in arguing against those who did not believe the Spirit to be divine as the Son and the Father.^[7] Against these so-called Spirit-fighters (Greek pneumatomachians) from the region of Macedonia,^[8] these champions of trinitarian faith followed out the theological logic of the church’s hallowed practices of baptism into the triune name and of prayer and worship offered to the Spirit, and insisted that such liturgical commitments sustained over centuries would be invalid apart from the implicit recognition of the Spirit’s divine essence and character. Their efforts not only secured creedal elaboration on the deity of the Spirit (at the Council of Constantinople in 381) but also have profoundly impacted the main lines of Christian pneumatological reflection even in the Western tradition.

For our purposes, however, it would be a mistake to overlook the distinctive features of early Syriac pneumatology given their shaping of Cappadocian thinking about the Spirit. Second- and third-century Syriac sources clearly delineate the role of the Spirit in the process of Christian initiation.^[9] The Spirit is invoked in the pre-baptismal anointing of new catechumens, is present to generate faith and active in healing, cleansing, and purifying them through their new birth of baptism in water, and enables their reception of the Messiah in their first Eucharist, thus accompanying their initiation from death to eternal life. While numerous biblical symbols for the Spirit are prevalent in these sources (e.g., the Spirit as fire, dove, or oil), it is the regenerative work of the Spirit that is prominent: to indwell believers, to catalyze new birth and sonship, to sanctify and bring about union with God. For these early Syriac pastors and leaders, then, this life-giving Spirit stimulated symbolic reflection about a divine motherhood that nurtured, refreshed, and purified human creatures in order that they might participate in the divine nature.^[10]

The Eastern emphasis on salvation as union with God and deification has given rise to a distinctive spiritual tradition across the Orthodox world. In this framework the life-giving work of the Spirit includes first and foremost the sanctifying formation of saints, and Pentecost becomes a symbol, then, of a community devoted to the spiritual path of disciplined ascent to the divine presence from the mundane and fallen world of creaturely passions.^[11] Yet this tradition of contemplative praxis has also, when explicated with certain intellectual resources informed by philosophical idealism and even gnosticism, opened up to controversial theological developments. The pneumatology of Russian Orthodox thinker Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), for instance, set against the backdrop of his Christian divine-humanity and Neoplatonic sophiology (philosophy of divine wisdom), led to charges of heresy that, although eventually formally absolved, marked his views as at least disconcerting, if not flawed and aberrant.^[12] Yet some of Bulgakov’s central notions, such as the kenosis of Spirit in creation and the Spirit’s gift of love being made available as a continuing Pentecost, resonate with important pneumatological themes both East and West, even as they are both consistent with and arguably intrinsic to Orthodox sensibilities and spiritual life. If Orthodox theologians have by and large prided themselves on retrieving the patristic tradition rather than reconstructing what has been received and handed down from the ecumenical church of the first millennium, Bulgakov is exemplary of those within this Eastern Christian milieu that have attempted to creatively reappropriate inherited resources according to the pneumatological dynamic of a continuing Pentecost.

Nevertheless, Orthodox pneumatology remains largely scriptural in foundation, liturgical in orientation, and poetic in expression. Contemporary Orthodox pneumatologies generally draw from the patristic heritage and attempt biblical articulation in ecumenically relevant categories.^[13] Over time, then, the main lines of Orthodox thinking about the Spirit have permeated Latin traditions and contemporary Western theologies so much so that it almost goes without saying that efforts to formulate a pneumatology relevant for the twenty-first-century global context will be deeply shaped by Eastern thought in essential respects.^[14] Yet it is important not to take for granted these Orthodox resources that remind us about the feminine dimension of pneumatology as well as the intimate and irrevocable connection between theological ideas and spiritual praxis.