Augustine in His Own Words
On the Trinity 277
17. The Son is subject to the Father; the Holy Spirit is subject to the Son. 18. The Son does what the Father orders; the Holy Spirit speaks what the Son commands.
19. The Son adores and honors the Father; the Holy Spirit adores and honors the Son. . . .
24. The Father is greater than the Son; the Son is incomparably greater and better than the Spirit.
25. The Father is God and Lord for his Son; the Son is God and Lord for the Spirit. . . .
27. The Father alone adores no one, because He has no one greater or equal to adore; He thanks no one, because He has received a benefit from no one. Out of His goodness He has given being to all things; He has received His being from no one. There is, then, a distinction of the three substances: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and there is a difference of three realities: the unbegotten God, the onlybegotten God, and the advocate Spirit.15
Note the emphasis on the stark inequality within the Homoian trinity: the three Persons are "three substances" and "three different realities." Also note the way the Homoian author speaks of the Father as the Son's God and of the Son as an obedient second-in-command. These sorts of claims illustrate what Augustine and other pro-Nicenes feared and opposed. Recent scholarship has uncovered how Augustine, in the early books of On the Trinity, was alert to Homoian arguments and prooftexts and took pains to counter them.16 A few years after completing On the Trinity, Augustine actually met in a face-to-face debate with a Latin Homoian bishop named Maximinus.17
The issue was not simply the status of the Son. Note the way the Homoian author refuses to speak of the Spirit as God even in some derivative sense and strongly subordinates the Spirit to the Son. This reflects a shift in the debate that took place around 360. The new question became: Is the Spirit God, or not? This new question became the focus for the generation of pro-Nicene bishop-theologians after Athanasius. The leaders were the Cappadocian fathers: Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379); his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 396); and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–389).18 The Cap-
15. Arian Sermon 17–27 (CSEL 92:37–40); trans. Roland J. Teske, Arianism and Other Heresies, WSA I/18 (1995): 135.
16. Until recently, scholars have presumed that Augustine grappled with Homoian views only late in his career. Michel R. Barnes, "Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine's De Trinitate I," Augustinian Studies 30 (1999): 43–59, has disputed the stock interpretation that De Trinitate was written in an air free of polemics and has broken new ground by demonstrating that Augustine from an early date engaged theological issues (and biblical texts) raised by Homoians. His speaking of this engagement as "polemical" may overstate things, for De Trinitate is not overtly polemical the way Augustine's treatises against the Donatists or Pelagians are.
17. Debate with Maximinus, an Arian Bishop (Conlatio cum Maximino Arianorum episcopo), in Teske, Arianism and Other Heresies, WSA I/18:188–227.
18. See Stephen M. Hildebrand, The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought