As everyone who worships with me knows, the theology of our Church stresses the fact that all major acts of God are Trinitarian acts and secondly that the particular role of the Spirit is to make the first contact, which is then followed – existentially, but definitely not chronologically – by a revelation of the Son and, through Him, of the Father. The personal being of the Spirit, however, remains mysteriously hidden, even if He is active at every great step of divine activity in time: creation, redemption, and ultimate fulfillment. His function is not to reveal Himself, but to reveal the Son through whom all things were made and who is also personally known in His humanity as Jesus Christ. As St. Basil wrote: It is impossible to give a precise definition of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit and we must simply resist errors concerning Him which come from various sides. The personal existence of the Holy Spirit thus remains a mystery. It is an existence whose fulfillment consists in manifesting the kingship of the Word of God (i.e., the Logos or Christ) in creation and in salvation history.

For the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzus) the Trinitarian interpretation of all the acts of God implies the participation of the Spirit in the act of creation. When Genesis mentions the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, patristic tradition interprets the passage in the sense of a primeval maintenance of all things by the Spirit, which made possible the subsequent appearance of a created logical order through the Word of God. No chronological sequence is implied here, of course; and the action of the Spirit is part of the continuous creative action of God in the world: The principle of all things is one writes Basil, which creates through the Son and perfects in the Spirit.

Basil identifies this function of perfecting creation as sanctification, and implies that not only man, but nature as a whole, is perfectly itself only when it is in true and real communion with God and when it is filled with the Spirit. This is particularly true of man, whose nature consists precisely in his being theocentric. He received this theocentricity, which the Greek Fathers always understood as a real participation in the life of God, when he was created and when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This breath of God’s life, identified with the Holy Spirit on the basis of the Septuagint version, is what made man to be God’s image.

This Trinitarian focus truly distinguishes the Eastern Christian Church from that of the West!