The Holy Spirit and the Trinity: The Angelic
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY
Goodenough has pointed out! that in the second century the theory of inspiration of prophets and seers was widely accepted and required no defence per se—no more, we may add, than the authority of the 'holy man' in India today. What did need defence was the ascription of prophecy to the whole of the Old
Testament, much of which was not prophetic utterance. Justin and other early Christian writers used the entire biblical record
—narratives, discourses, statements about the past, and intimations of the future—as a foreshadowing of Christianity. Justin gives this explanation:
When you hear the words of the prophets spoken as in a particular character, do not think of them as spoken by the inspired men themselves, but by the divine Word that moved them. For sometimes he speaks as predicting the things that are to happen, sometimes he speaks as in the character of God the Master and Father of all, sometimes in the character of Christ, sometimes in the character of the people answering the Lord or his Father. You can see the same thing in your own writers, where one man is the author of the whole work but introduces different characters in dialogue. Not understanding this, the Jews, who are in possession of the books of the prophets, did not recognise Christ even when he came, and they hate us who declare that he has come and show that he was crucified by them as had been predicted.?
In other words whatever the literary or historical form of the utterance it is always the same Spirit or logos who inspires it.
The Spirit adopts different roles according to his purpose—in the character® of the Father,* of Christ, of the children of Abrahan,,® or of the apostles.'
What of the person and nature of this prophetic Spirit?
Justin's ideas are fluid, as with much second-century thought, and it would be a mistake to press individual phrases or use them as a yardstick to judge other conceptions appearing in his writings. Justin believed the prophets were inspired by the Spirit, but he calls this Spirit by various names—sometimes the Spirit, Holy Spirit, Prophetic Spirit, logos, or even God. Of these 'Holy Spirit' and 'Prophetic Spirit' are most frequently used and occur throughout his writings. The difficult problem
1 Theology of Justin Martyr, p. 178.
2 I Apol. xxxvi.
3 dio TPCOwTTOV.
4 T Apol. xxxvii. 1.
5 IT Apol. xxxviii. 1.
SR Dial GxVen Ve * Diala xls 2.
JUSTIN MARTYR
is whether the Spirit was, for Justin, a person distinct from the logos or whether this was simply an aspect of the activity of the logos. We have already seen:that Justin can speak of the logos inspiring the prophets.! In one remarkable passage he speaks of the annunciation:
We believe them, since the prophetic Spirit through the abovementioned Isaiah said that this would happen, as we noted before.
The Spirit and the Power from God (tiv dSuvapiv Trap Tol Se0U) cannot rightly be thought of as anything else than the Word, who is also the First-born of God, as Moses the above-mentioned prophet testified."
This seems decisive proof, at least on the surface, that for Justin Spirit and logos were two names for the same person. However, in Justin's theory of the Incarnation the coming down of the logos and entry into the womb of Mary was central. As however the traditional account spoke of the Spirit and Power Justin was forced to identify them as regards function. This however does not exclude the possibility of his believing in the Spirit distinct from the Father and the Son. Justin confused the function of the logos and the Spirit. There is however some evidence that he did believe in a personal Holy Spirit. After referring to Plato's discussion of the nature of the Son of God in the Tzmaeus
Justin says:
He placed him like an X in the universe... Plato, reading this and not clearly understanding, nor realising that it was in the form of a cross, but thinking it was Chi, said that the Power next to the first God was placed X-wise in the universe. And he spoke of a third, since he read what I have quoted from Moses, that the Spirit of God was borne over the waters. For he gives the second place to the Word who is with God, who, he says, was placed X-wise in the universe, and the third to the Spirit which was said to be borne over the water, saying, 'The third (order of) beings around the third'.®
Justin is clearly distinguishing between the logos and the Spirit who, although similar in nature, are unequal in rank.
Elsewhere he says that the Christians honour Jesus Christ in the second place after God and the prophetic Spirit in the third rank.* Four times he quotes the formula, 'In the name of the 1 I Apol. xxxili. 9, xxxvi. 1.
2 I Apol. xxxiii. 6.
° I Apol. lx. 6-7; cf. Plato 2 Epist. 312E—a very obscure passage.
* I Apol. xiii. 3, év tpitn THEE...
104s
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'.! In one remarkable passage Justin states that Christians worship the Spirit, but he introduces good angels before the mention of the Spirit:
So then, we are called godless. We certainly confess that we are godless with reference to beings like these who are commonly thought of as gods, but not with reference to the most true God, the Father of righteousness and temperance and the other virtues, who is untouched by evil. But him, and the Son who came from him, and taught us these things, and the army of the other good angels who follow him and are made like him, and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore (o¢Boyueba Kai TreookuvoUpev) .?
Attempts have been made to avoid the sudden introduction of the angels? in this passage, but it is hardly possible to read the passage otherwise than as it stands in the existing text. The construction of the sentence is against interpreting the angels as recipients of Christ's teaching. They are introduced to point the contrast with the evil daemons who oppose Jesus. As the Son is the captain of the angelic host (&pyiotp&tnyos) the good angels who follow him are to be reverenced.4 The fact that the Spirit is mentioned last implies that the Spirit is regarded as a distinct person.
As to the origin of the Holy Spirit Justin is silent. But we infer from his writings that he regarded the Spirit as a power
(Suvauis) of God.
Justin had no real doctrine of the Trinity. He worshipped the Father as supreme in the Universe; he worshipped the logos or Son as divine but in the second place; he worshipped the Holy
Spirit in the third place. This is the language of Christian experience rather than theological reflection. 'The Holy Spirit was, for Justin, the inspirer of the prophets, the guide of spiritual endeavour, the source of the spiritual gifts found in the Church.
Justin's experience of Christian worship and the Christian life took precedence over his logic. His philosophic idea of God, deriving from Middle Platonism, was too abstract for any real
1 J Apol. lxi. 3, 13, Ixv. 2, Ixvii. 2.
2 T Apol. vi. 1-2.
3 See Otto's note on the passage: S. Justini Philosophi et Martyris Opera (Greek text and Latin translation) (grd ed., Jena, 1876-9), 1. 1. 21.
4 Athenagoras Suppl. 10 mentions angels immediately after the Trinity as belonging to the SeoAoyia, whereas all that concerned the Incarnation belonged to the oixovopia.
JUSTIN MARTYR
distinction within the Godhead such as would equate the Love between the Father and the Son with the Spirit. In strict logic there is no place in Justin's thought for the person of the Holy
Spirit because the logos carries out his functions. Nevertheless, the fact that he has so much to say about the Spirit and refers to the traditional formulas shows that Justin is strongly influenced by Christian experience and worship as he knew it in the life of the Church. Moreover it should not be forgotten that the conception of a divine Spirit was everywhere known in both
Judaism and the Greek world in the time of Justin, and he was not therefore required to explain or justify his mention of the Prophetic Spirit.
THE ANGELIC POWERS
Justin held, in company with most of his compatriots in the second century, a belief in good and evil angels or powers. 'The good angels were closely associated with Jesus as messengers of God who would accompany him in his glory at the last day.
The evil angels occupied a larger position in Justin's thought than the good angels. These angels had been given freedom of choice! and some had chosen the way of evil—Justin is here following Jewish tradition?—so that they need repentance and salvation.? Some of the evil angels had overstepped the limit in having illicit intercourse with women, which resulted in the birth of children called daemons. Justin here seems to be following an earlier Jewish or Jewish-Christian interpretation of Gen. vi. 2-5 which is also found in the Ebionite PseudoClementine writings. The Hebrew of Gen. vi. 2-5 says that the children of God, having been attracted by women, united with them and produced giants. In the LXX vioi 6e00 and &yyeAo1
QeoU are synonymous and sometimes alternatives® and a tradition grew up in Greek Judaism that it was the union of angels
1 Dial. cxli. 1, cxl. 4, Ixxxviii. 5; IT Apol. vii. 5.
» Pappos interpreted 'Man has become as one of us' as meaning 'Man has become as one of the angels' (quoted by Goodenough, Theology of Justin
Martyr, p. 197). Akiba added that to be as one of the angels meant to have a free power of choice, to follow the way of life or of death.
S Dialexliy * Clem. Hom. vi. 18.
° See J. S.Sibinga, The Old Testament Text of Justin Martyr. 1. The Pentateuch (Leiden, 1963), p. 146.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY
and women which produced giants.! Justin in substituting daemons for giants is following another line of interpretation which may be reflected in Papias' references to 'the angels who had formerly been holy'.2 Later Jewish tradition vacillated in its interpretation of Gen. vi. In Bresh. R. on Gen. vi. 2
R. Simeon ben Jochai (c. A.D. 130-60) pronounces a curse on those who say that 'the sons of God' are angels, but the Zohar on Gen. vi. 4 agrees with Justin as do R. Judah (c. A.D. 200) and another, according to Pirge de R. Elizer xxii.
After the fall of the angels the daemonic children multiplied to form a whole army of evil powers. These daemons lurked everywhere seeking to bring the human race into subjection.
The consciousness of the daemonic element in the universe was central to Justin's world view, as to so many of his contemporaries, and we do him an injustice if we minimise it. These daemons were more real to Justin than the good angels associated with Our Lord.
Justin says little about the origin of the angels or daemons apart from this one passage:
But (they assert) that this power can never be cut off or separated from the Father, in the same way that, as they say, the light of the sun on earth cannot be cut off or separated, though the sun is in heaven. And when the sun sets the light is borne away with it. So the Father, they affirm, makes, when he will, his power to spring forward, and, when he will, he draws it back again into himself.
They teach that in this way he also made the angels. But that therefore angels are, and ever remain, without being resolved again into that out of which they came into existence, has been demonstrated.?
The purport of this passage is clear. As the logos has a separate, permanent existence from the Father so there are angels which have a permanent existence. In addition there are angels which have a temporary existence, coming forth from God and being reabsorbed by him. Justin, in this latter belief, is following a good Tannaitic tradition, commenting on Dan. vii. 9-10:
'Every single day angels that minister (to him) are created from 1 This was later challenged by Philastrius Haer. 107 and Chryst. on Gen. vi, Hom. 22.
2 Fr. 4.
8 Dial. cxxviii. 3-4. But Justin has not demonstrated this in the existing text of the Dialogue.
JUSTIN MARTYR
the stream of fire! and they utter a song, and cease to be'; 'from every single utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be he; is created one angel, for it is said,
By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host'.2 However, there are no references in rabbinic tradition to a beliefin the permanent existence of some angels' such as was held by Justin. His reason for asserting this is made plain by the context of this passage. Justin has just stated* that the God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush was the second God, the logos. Some Jews disputed this and claimed that the appearance was of an angel, so ruling out the existence of a second divine Power in the universe.
Justin agrees with this to a point, but asserts that there are angels which are permanently sustained and not reabsorbed into their source. So Jesus, the logos, is a unique Power who is separate from the Father, the source of all Being. It is Justin's Christology which is at the root of his theory of the origin of angels. He follows good Jewish tradition but supplements it to provide a parallel for the generation of the logos—Christ, but he does not bring his theory into relationship with his other belief in the fall of the angels to which we must now return.
The leader of the host of daemons or evil angels was Satan who had fallen as a result of his deception of Adam and Eve.®
Justin, in a remarkable passage,® says that his name really means apostate-serpent, an interpretation also found in Irenaeus.' The activity of this evil host of daemons was everywhere to be found in the universe. By deceitful magic and by terror they had reduced the human race to servitude. War, adultery, crime—all were due to their influence. Pagan poets
1 A stream of fire was regarded as a ray of light in Jewish thought and by Justin.
2 T.B. Chagiga 14a. Cf. also Gen. Rab. 78; Echa. to 3.23 quoted by Goodenough, Theology of Justin Martyr, pp. 190-1.
3 This would in any case undermine Jewish monotheism.
4 Dial. cxxviii. 1.
5 Dial. cxxiv. 3.
6 Dial. cili. 5. Sata, in the language of Jews and Syrians, is 'decline from religion' or 'apostate', while nas is serpent. Vachash is the usual Hebrew word for serpent. It is interesting that the Samaritans, among whom Justin lived, omitted the guttural between two homogeneous vowels in their pronunciation. See A. L. Williams, Dialogue with Trypho (London, 1930), p. 216.
" Adv. Haer. v. 21. 2; Preaching 16.
™ 108 \
THE HOLY SPIRIT, AND THE TRINITY
and mythologists were equally led astray by their mistaking them for gods! and singing their evil deeds.? When the mythologists spoke of the sons of God, born of women, of Bacchus, riding on his ass, and of his violent death and ascent into heaven; of Perseus Virgin-born, of Hercules 'strong as a giant', of Aesculapius raising the dead—the daemons were multiplying false fulfilments of scripture prophecies. The poets, ignorantly, were tools of the Devil as Plato had said.' So again the daemons confused human instincts with law, and framed laws to suit their own wickedness. Since the Christian dispensation the daemons had renewed their activity. They had caricatured Christian ordinances, such as the Eucharist, in the services of Mithraism,* and baptism, in the rites of pagan temple purifications.® They had attempted to produce confusion by prompting heretics to pervert the knowledge of the true way as revealed in Christ.®
Indeed all along they had inspired persecution of those who were moved by the Spermatic Word, such as Heraclitus, Musonius and Socrates. Now these daemons were urging the persecution of Christians, not being able to stop the knowledge of Christ's advent, or of the last judgement, but by prompting wicked livers to hate and kill them.' The judges who persecute
Christians are, in fact, inspired by the devil.® Although, in Justin's view, the activity of the daemonic host was terrible in the extreme yet it was not beyond limitation and control. Before the Christian era the power of the daemons was broken by exorcism in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.® Since then their power had been broken by the coming of Christ as was symbolised by the coming of the Magi to the infant Christ.1° The dominion which Christians now exercise over the daemons is an omen of their utter overthrow at the second coming of Christ when they will be cast into eternal fire. This present dominion is seen in the rite of exorcism in the name of Christ by which the power of the daemons is broken." It is this foreknowledge of his coming final overthrow
1 [ Apol. v. 4.
2 II Apol. v.
3 IT Apol. x.
4 I Apol. \xvi. 4; Dial. Ixxviii. 6, Ixx. 1.
5 T Apol. \xii. 1.
8 Dial. \xxxii. 3; I Apol. lvi. 1, lviii. 1.
7 I Apol. Wii.
8 II Apol. i.
9 Dial. Ixxxv. 3.
10 Dial. \xxviii. 9.
11° Dial. Ixxxv. 1, 2, Ixxvi. 6, cxi. 2; IJ Apol. vi. 6. The rite of exorcism culminated in the recital of an embryonic creed: [J Apol. vi. 6: Dial. Ixxxv. 2.
JUSTIN MARTYR
which makes Satan desperate and unrestrained in his present assaults against men.
Justin's account of the good and evil angels (or daemons) is remarkably similar to that found in the Synoptic Gospels although he deals in greater detail with the activity of the evil host. It might be thought that he is merely expounding what he found in the 'Memoirs'. This however would be to misunderstand Justin's own background. He has no doubt as to the intense reality of the good, and especially the evil, angels. Their existence was a fact and their activities everywhere to be seen.
His own experience confirmed what he had read in the 'Memoirs' and what he knew of Jewish and early Jewish
Christian speculation about the angelic powers." In delineating the picture of Justin as an apologist to the Greek world it should not be forgotten that his main practical concern, as with his fellow Christians, lay in winning the increasing fight against evil spirits which were seeking to win control of the universe and the souls of men.
1 According to Justin the daemons never discovered in prophecy the sign of the Cross although the symbol is everywhere to be found.
2 Justin, however, nowhere names the angels as did Jewish and later Christian tradition.
Tio ™