On the Nestorian antecedents of a Photian argument

At Mystagogy §93, Photius writes:

“Therefore, in so far as He is man, Christ is anointed by the Spirit; and since the Spirit anoints Christ, He is called the Spirit of Christ. But you say, ‘Because He is called the Spirit of Christ, He certainly also proceeds from Christ.’ Accordingly, the Spirit of Christ will not come forth from Him because He is God, but because He is man; consequently, the Spirit will not have been existent from the beginning and together with the Father before the ages, but only from the time when the Son assumed human substance.”

(Holy Resurrection Monastery tr., p. 115)

In the last chapter of his point-by-point refutation of Photius’s Mystagogy, John Bekkos criticizes this argument; he says that, if Photius denies that the Spirit is from Christ, as eternal from eternal, neither will he say that Christ’s passion is the passion of God, nor his blood the blood of God…. (Refutatio Photiani libri de Spiritu Sancto 34; PG 141, 861B-864B). In other words, he rejects Photius’s argument as smacking of Nestorianism.

I think Bekkos has an important insight here. Nestorius was an extreme representative of Antiochene theology, which, like Photius four and a half centuries later, opposed the teaching that the Son of God is in any sense a source of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit. We see here how that opposition is grounded in christology.

The Nestorian view borders on something like this: the temporal Christ can only send the Spirit’s temporal gifts, cannot be a source of the eternal Spirit himself to believers. St. Cyril of Alexandria would answer that the temporal Christ is the eternal Son, and that, in whatever spiritual gifts the temporal Christ bestows, the eternal Spirit is hypostatically present. The unity of theology and economy is founded upon the unity of Christ’s person. For Nestorius, if I read him correctly, Christ’s temporal acts can only be acts of the temporal πρόσωπον, not the eternal one (I may be wrong in supposing that he says this, but this is doubtless how Cyril read him). In any case, a sharp division must be drawn, for the Antiochene theology, between acts whose subject is the human Christ and acts whose subject is the divine Christ.

(Perhaps there is some reason for the Antiochene position. Christ slept; Christ ate; Christ, in the garden, felt dread at the prospect of being crucified; Christ suffered and died. Traditionally, these actions are seen as revelatory, not of his divine nature, but of his human one. Doubtless Cyril would agree; but he would nonetheless insist that they are all actions of the same divine person who rose from the dead and existed with the Father from all eternity.)

For Cyril, it is the eternal Son who is the subject of the temporal Christ’s actions. Because of this, the temporal Christ’s breathing upon his disciples is revelatory of the eternal relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit. To make a sharp differentiation between theology and economy here is not only to miss Cyril’s point; it is to risk compromising the unity of Christ. Just as, when Christ suffers, it is the eternal, impassible Son who suffers, so Christ’s breathing is a breathing from the eternal Son. A breathing of the eternal Spirit, not just of temporal gifts.

A recognition of this undermines some recent readings of Cyril, e.g., that of André de Halleux (“Cyrille, Théodoret et le «Filioque»,” RHE 74 [1979], 597-625), who claims that Cyril’s language about the relationship of Christ to the Spirit, because it is stated in a christological context, has no bearing upon the question of the Spirit’s eternal origination. It seems, rather, that St. Cyril normally understood economy and theology to go together, for the reasons stated above: the oneness of Christ’s person implies that Christ’s temporal acts—at least, such acts as touch upon another divine person—are revelatory of his eternal relationships. So, if Cyril on many occasions speaks of the Holy Spirit as being from the Father and the Son and, in one place, implies that being through the Son and being from the Son are equivalent in meaning (De adoratione I, PG 68, 148A), it is a subterfuge and sleight of hand to allege that these statements have no implications for Cyril’s views on the Holy Spirit’s eternal procession. To argue thus is to read Cyril as an Antiochene theologian, or as having no basic disagreement with writers like Theodoret—something which de Halleux explicitly maintains, disingenuously in my view.