Gregory Hillis - Pneumatology and Soteriology according to Gregory of Nazianzus and Cyril of Alexandria

In my paper I will examine whether Cyril of Alexandria’s conception of the Holy Spirit’s soteriological work was influenced by Gregory of Nazianzus.  In the concluding chapter of his 2008 monograph on Gregory’s Trinitarian thought, Christopher Beeley suggests that much of Cyril’s thought – including his pneumatology – was heavily influenced by Gregory.  While Beeley has since written specifically about the Christological points of convergence between Cyril and Gregory, the degree to which Cyril’s pneumatological thought was indebted to Gregory has not yet been explored.  An in depth comparison of their conceptions of the Holy Spirit is outside the scope of this short communication. I shall thus focus my attention on their portrayals of the Spirit’s role in human salvation in an effort to establish whether this facet of Cyril’s pneumatology is reliant on Gregory.  It will be demonstrated that, while some correlations between Cyril and Gregory on the Spirit’s saving work exist, Cyril’s account places far greater emphasis on the Spirit’s role in our adoption as children of God.  Gregory describes the Spirit’s soteriological operation in large part with reference to deification.  Although Cyril occasionally refers to deification with reference to the work of the Spirit, he devotes much more attention to the idea that, through the Spirit, we are transformed so as to enter into a filial relationship with God, a relationship that both encompasses and transcends our deification.  I shall argue that Cyril’s emphasis on divine filiation is rooted in his understanding of the Holy Spirit’s identity as the Spirit of the Son who, as the Son’s likeness, transforms us to become by grace what the Son is by nature – children of God.  Through an analysis of the logic of Cyril’s conception of divine filiation through the Holy Spirit, as articulated in a number of significant passages in works written prior to the outbreak of the Nestorian controversy in 428, I shall demonstrate that Cyril’s account of the Spirit’s role in salvation appears to rely little on Gregory’s thought.  Indeed, it will be argued that Cyril’s portrayal of the Spirit’s saving work is much more developed and complex than that put forward by Gregory.