It may be noted with regard to the question that concerns us that in this passage St. Leo distinguishes very clearly between the Holy Spirit as a Person and the Holy Spirit as grace or gift (or action or energy).94

This grace, which the Holy Spirit communicates to people, is regarded as belonging to the common nature of the three Divine Persons.

At the beginning of this text, St. Leo distinguishes the substance (or essence) of the Godhead, Who is unknowable, unapproachable, incommunicable, and everything that is His "sign" and manifestation is related, as he says, to His gift and to His creation (opus, which can be translated as action or activity), or also to His "power" (virtus), to His glory, to His "eternity" – to the fact that what else can be called His "actions" (a word used by St. Leo himself) or His energies. At the end of the text, a distinction is made between substance and power, will and action, which, as St. Leo asserts, are the same for the three Divine Persons.95 The assertion that "the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son" does not mean, as some interpreters have claimed, that the Father and the Son are the Cause of the Spirit, or that the Spirit posits its existence from the Father and from the Son. This expression is clearly related to what the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit possess together in order to understand the divine essence and its possession and the energies that belong to it and manifest it: St. Leo says that "the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son [...] as having life and power with the One and with the Other, and as eternally existing, to proceed from that which is (ex quod est) the Father and the Son."

(5) This expression "eternally existing to proceed from that which is the Father and the Son" does not refer to the origin of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from a common cause presented together by the Father and the Son as hypostases,96 nor even from their common nature, but affirms that the Spirit is eternally possessed of the same nature and consequently the same possession, the same power, and the same energy, both the Father and the Son, as the context of this passage points in many ways.97

It will be noted that to exist eternally in the proceeding of That which is the Father and the Son, seems to be equivalent to having life and power with the One and with the Other, that is, to possess the same Divine goods belonging to the same common Divine nature. This is confirmed by the assimilation that later occurred between "eternally existing" and "possessing all things," and "all" here means the divine "goods," which are here presented as one and the same in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

St. Leo refutes in advance the interpretation that follows from the Filioque with the assurance of Christ: "From Mine [from My good things – author's note] He will take and declare unto you" (John 16:14), emphasizing that what Christ designates as His own belongs equally not only to the Father but also to the Holy Spirit, and refers to the goods rooted in the common Divine nature, which manifest themselves as energies or actions and are transmitted as gifts of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. In general, it seems that St. Leo, in asserting that "the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son (Patris Filiique)," since He "eternally exists out of that which is the Father and the Son (ex eo quod est Pater Filiusque subsistens)," does not transform the Son into the Cause of the Spirit, but strenuously emphasizes that the divine essence is one and indistinguishable for the three Divine Persons, and that his triadology also meets the criteria, established by the Monk Maximus in his letter.

St. Gregory the Great

The last remark of Maximus the Confessor is also valid for similar expressions of Pope St. Gregory the Great (almost a contemporary of St. Maximus), for example, when he asserts that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the One and the Other (utrorum).98 We also find in St. Gregory the classical assertion that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and takes from the Son (de Patre procedens, et de eo quod est Filii accipiens).99 Some of the statements concerning the procession from the Son are clearly placed in the perspective of oikonomia. Thus, St. Gregory notes that Jesus Christ pours into the hearts of His disciples the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from Him (qui a se procedit).100 Or when he writes that "the sending of the Holy Spirit is a process when He proceeds from the Father and from the Son (missio Spiritus Sancti processio est qua de Patre procedit et Filio)." Likewise, from the perspective of oikonomia, we must understand the famous expression that "it is evident that the Spirit of the Comforter proceeds always from the Father and from the Son (Paraclitus Spiritus a Patre semper procedit et Filio)": the context actually refers to the sending of the Holy Spirit to the disciples after Christ's ascension. Further, in another place, St. Gregory points out that that which was sent down upon the Apostles by Christ (and which proceeds from the Father and from the Son) is not the Spirit as a Person, but as energy, more precisely as love: [Christ] says [to His disciples]: "For if I do not go, the Comforter will not come to you" (John 16:7). It is as if He said openly: "If I do not take My Body away from you, I will not show you what the love of the Spirit is".103

Another statement of St. Gregory, often recalled, is that the Holy Spirit is "per substantiam profertur ex [Christo]." But the verb used here means proferre in its usual usage: exposed, manifested, or discovered. It does not mean, therefore, that the Son is the cause of the Spirit in His hypostatic existence, but means, from the perspective of oikonomia, the manifestation of the Spirit in the world through the Son. In the passage under consideration, St. Gregory explains that the Son sends and gives the Spirit, Whom "per substantiam" He has always present in Himself in its entirety (while the saints receive Him only by grace and in part).105 We find here an expression which we have encountered in other Latin Fathers, which is analogous to the formula used by St. Cyril of Alexandria." As St. Such a formulation does not mean that the Son is the Cause of the hypostatic existence of the Spirit, nor that the Spirit as a Person proceeds from the substance of the Son, nor even that He receives from the Son the essence or divine nature, but testifies that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son in the sense that we have already encountered, and strongly expresses the unity of the nature of the Father. The Son and the Holy Spirit. This is what it means to "manifest" from Christ, "per substantiam": it is not the hypostasis of the Spirit, but the Spirit as the sum total of the goods, actions, or divine energies contained in Him, which the Son also has in Himself, having received them from the Father in order to manifest them and transmit them to men. St. Gregory the Great is presented in this way at once, also among those Latin Fathers whose | the Monk Maximus had in mind in his letter.

Vl. THE EXCLUSION OF BLESSED AUGUSTINE