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Abstract
This dissertation attempts to provide some documentation for the often-asserted but little-investigated thesis that the worship life of the Church plays a formative role in the development of doctrine. It does so by examining references to the Holy Spirit in liturgical documents contemporary with the late fourth century development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The liturgical documents employed are the initiatory catechesis and mystagogy of Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose and John Chrysostom. This dissertation thus considers in what sense the worship life of the Church, as focused in the liturgy of initiation, could be said to be the matrix in which the affirmation of the Holy Spirit as equal in divinity to Father and Son came to birth.
The analysis of the treatment of the Holy Spirit in the initiatory works of Cyril, arose and Chrysostom is divided into three sections. In the first section the three Fathers' use of Scriptural material on the Holy Spirit is examined in the context of their method of using Scripture as a whole in catechesis. In the second section there is analysis of references to the Holy of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy and Christian living. The third section treats the few more conceptual doctrinal statements concerning the Holy Spirit made in these initiatory works. In all three sections references to the Holy Spirit in each Father's work are analyzed separately, with comparison where appropriate.
The final chapter of the dissertation considers the relationship between the understanding of the Holy Spirit emerging from these initiatory works and that in the contemporary treatises on the Holy Spirit of Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose. It is concluded that certain ways in which Scriptural material on the Holy Spirit was used in the liturgy of initiation shaped the thinking of those who denied that the Spirit could be a creature and that this can be seen in their arguments for His divinity.
