ABSTRACT
The Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit were penned ca. 357, during Athanasius’s third exile (356-362), which he spent in the refuge of monastic communities in the desert of Egypt. They were written in response to a request made to him by his friend and supporter the bishop Serapion of Thmuis, who a few years earlier, in 353, was head of a delegation that had traveled to Milan to plead the cause of Athanasius.1 Serapion alerts Athanasius to the existence of a group of Christians who accepted the doctrine of the full divinity of the Son but shirked from extending that confession to the Holy Spirit. Using the language of Aetius and Eunomius, this group maintained that the Holy Spirit was “unlike” (anomios) to the Father and the Son in being. Aside from the general observation that the Scriptures do not directly refer to the Spirit as God, the scriptural warrants offered on behalf of this doctrine were Am 4:13 (“I am the one who establishes thunder and creates spirit and declares to people his Christ” (LXX)) and 1 Tim 5:21 (where the apostle exhorts, “I charge you in the sight of God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels that you observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing by partiality”). The first of these played an analogous role with regard to the doctrine of the Spirit, as did Prov 8:22 with regard to that of the Son; here, it was the Spirit that was claimed to be described as “created.” The verse from Paul’s Letter to Timothy was taken as an indication that the Spirit was an angel or “servant,” as seems to be indicated also in Heb 1:14: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”
