Yuliia Rozumna: Person and Activities of the Holy Spirit in the Monastic Lives and Writings of Late Antiquity

Whereas previous scholarship has focused on the Christological inspiration of early Christian asceticism, few thought to look at the role of the Holy Spirit in this context. After fierce debates which lasted for most of the century, the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (381) affirmed the divine nature of the Holy Spirit. Although discussions on the nature of the Spirit and his relations with the Father and the Son weakened after the Council and reappeared only in the seventh and eighth centuries, in the debates about the filioque, the presence of the third Person of the Trinity in monastic lives and writings never disappeared and continued to play an important role. In this paper, I will examine perceptions of the third Person of the Trinity and his role in the lives of ascetics in such Greek-language writings as the ‘History of the Monks of Egypt’ (400), the ‘Lausiac History’ (419/420) by Palladius, and ‘The History of the Monks of Syria’ (440) by Theodoret of Cyrrhus. I will look at how these authors described the lives of ascetics and their relations with the Spirit and how monks themselves viewed these relations. Even though we will discover that they approached the Spirit as a living Person and not as a rational concept, it would nevertheless be of interest to examine whether the doctrines on the Spirit made their way into literary ‘lives’ of the saints and in what way.