The Power of the Spirit to Forgive

To have been begotten of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, as has been said, the pre-eternal and pre-cosmic Spirit of God was present with the Creator of our nature from the beginning, not as one needing help, but with identity and equality of divinity and will, just as light is not severed from light. Therefore, Macedonian, establish this with the holy ones: they do not call the divine Spirit a creature, but say it proceeds from God as His Spirit according to nature; or, as is your custom to assert, that it is inferior to God by nature and superior to angels, having received a middle nature and rank—prove that they have spoken thus; for those things have been justly honored by the God of yours and of Arius. And not as the law of art and sophistry gives, since you have dared to leave your own words against the divine Spirit; for its divine nature, even if you had the eyes of the intellect so many and such as the Scripture gave to the cherubim, you would have been able to behold it, how much more so. For who can grasp the invisible and uncontainable divinity? Or, recognizing your own impiety, you stand apart from the first ones.

But let us return again to the hypothesis from the beginning, that it sanctifies and justifies, as we said before. That it provides salvation, and provides salvation even to those who fall; which is the sole property of the almighty essence. For without God, to do anything created is impossible. 'Nor even as to grape-harvesting with eyes circling.' For the apostle said to the Philippians such things: 'For I know that this will turn out for my salvation, through your prayer and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ' (Phil 4:19). Just as it is hymned concerning the Father in the Psalms: 'But not me, you shall not know; and saving, there is none besides me' (Ps 135:6); and concerning the Son in the Acts: 'And in no other is salvation. For there is no other name under heaven given among men, in which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12).

that it frees from death and forgives sins, because the immortal and propitiatory Spirit bears fruit from the paternal root of essence. But it is not possible for a creature to be either sinless or one of these two things by its own nature. For none of the spirits, as has been shown, is sinless; nor perhaps, exceeding the word, is the non-existent rational being. For the heaven itself and the sun are not blameless in regard to the purity of God.

For even if they appear at times to have done such a thing as apostles, they did not succeed by their own power, but by that of the one who said: 'In my name you will do greater things than these' (John 14:12); and by that of the Spirit of the Father who spoke in them, as Paul teaches the Romans: 'For the law of the Spirit in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and of death' (Rom 8:2). And the Master, through John, giving to us the Holy Spirit, who had lost us through the ancient disobedience, breathed into the faces of the disciples and said: 'Receive Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain them, they are retained' (John 20:22-23). Here is so much of the authority of the unremembered Spirit: that it itself through itself forgives sins, and in its name and in its power the apostles and all who believe in it provide remission of sins.

For that only God forgives sins, glorious sayings of God indicate: 'I,' for he says, 'am he who wipes out your sins' (Isa 43:25), and: 'If your sins are as scarlet, I will make them as white as snow; if they are red, they shall be like wool' (Isa 1:18). And the Savior, as a child of God, said to the paralytic: 'Child, your sins are forgiven' (Mark 2:5), and: 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world' (John 1:29). That it works together with the Father and the Son; and that Christ performed signs and wonders and cast out demons through the power of the Spirit.