The Holy Spirit and the Angels

Regarding this point, they say, moving all sorts of weapons against the uninstructed, and asserting snatchingly: 'Praise the Lord, for it is a good psalm; praise is sweet to God,' (Ps 146:1) and 'It is good to confess to the Lord and to sing to your name, exalt.' (Ps 105:4) But nowhere do we find it written: 'Praise the Holy Spirit.'

One should answer them thus: if you accept regarding the Father the voices you have brought forward, you cast out the Son; but if regarding the Son, the opposite, then when the Holy Spirit is also called 'Lord' and it is written, and it is unclear regarding which hypostasis it is written now, 'Lord.' Consider then, whether you have not used things contrary to yourselves.

As for the Holy Spirit, because he is not a creature, it is easy to learn that he is co-praised with God, both from his being arranged with Him and from the exhortation to praise all creation by name, both the three children and the psalmist; not, however, the Spirit of God, as the saints have a habit of naming. For if, as the heretics say, he is of a nature between God and angels, more honored and higher than all, it would have been necessary, since he is especially one, either to exhort him by himself to praise, or even to name him first and generally take up the others with him; not, however, as they arbitrarily imagine, the reverse, that he is named with the Father and the Son.

And regarding the heretical opposition: creation is not numbered with God. For what is common to that which exists in diminution compared to the All-Supreme and above all existing things in excess, or to the one who made it? But the all-venerable Spirit, as God, is named with the Father and the Son, as when the master gives the rule concerning baptism, and as when the apostle writes to the Corinthians the second thing: 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you;' (2 Cor 13:13) or with one of them the hypostases; or even as a permanence, as is remembered in the first book mentioned.

From the intention of the outcast and rejected Valentinus, having become a Manichaean, and from his madly speaking with other absurd myth-making, the Macedonians say that the divine Spirit rushes toward the angels. Paul wrote to Timothy:

“I testify before God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the chosen angels.” But the Holy Spirit, as you perhaps appointed to the angels, was passed over in silence. From the abundance of their own heart, this is the concept.

For even if a memory of the Holy Spirit is not at times personally generated, it is taken up with God the Father, since it is His spirit by nature; that is, when God the Father Himself was not remembered by word, but by faithful thought, and the Son and the Holy Spirit were remembered, or vice versa. Whereas Valentinus, not being obligated to remember, called the sanctifying spirit “Paraclete,” just as the Lord Christ was called “Paraclete” from the sense of being called to one's side; but he called the sanctified ministers “angels.”

In addition to this: nowhere in Scripture do we find angels being remembered together with God for creation, or for mysticism, or for doxology. But regarding the communion of the Holy Spirit with the Divinity, Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the second epistle: “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor 13:13), and in others: “if any communion of the Spirit.”

Indeed, the Psalmist cries out with such words regarding the substitution of the unbegotten Word and the divine Spirit for the liturgical spirits, and the fact that there is no association of them, but rather by these self-existent hypostases and through them and by them, just as through God the Father, to create the angels and to bring all things to perfection and to sustain them: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were established, and by the spirit of his mouth all their powers” (Ps 33:6). For it must be understood that the “Word” is that through which all things, the “spirit of the mouth of the Lord” is the Holy Spirit, and the “powers of the heavens” are both their compositions and indeed the angels and principalities and authorities and powers. And again: “Who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire” (Ps 104:4).

And the Apostle also is conflicted toward them, crying out: “We were watered by one spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). Just as it is impossible for the radiance to be separated from the light, and the wisdom of the wise man—that is, the Son—from the Father; so also the Holy Spirit from Him, who is Spirit, as to us...