Pneumatomachian ('Macedonian') Christianity

By about 360 the argument had moved. A body of churchmen in Constantinople and Asia Minor had come to accept, or nearly accept, that the Son is of one being with the Father - and then declined to say the same of the Holy Spirit, who they held was a creature, or at best a ministering spirit of some third order. Their opponents called them Pneumatomachians, Spirit-fighters, and attached to them the name of Macedonius, a deposed bishop of Constantinople, on evidence later writers found thin. Basil of Caesarea wrote On the Holy Spirit in about 375 to answer them, and did it carefully: he argued the Spirit's divinity largely from how the church already prayed and baptised rather than from a bare proof-text. Gregory of Nyssa wrote against them too. The Council of Constantinople in 381 settled it by expanding the creed's third article, which had previously said almost nothing about the Spirit, into the clauses still recited every week.