This is reality

Fr Aidan Nichols on the gifts of the Holy Spirit

We might be surprised to learn that the third panel of the Credal triptych is devoted to the Holy Spirit. At first sight when we look at the Creeds, the Holy Spirit seems to be simply the initial item in a long list of add-ons, varied if (no doubt) important extra issues that otherwise might have been forgotten.

But that first glance is misleading. Everything that follows the name of the Holy Spirit in the Creed is governed therefore by the thought of, ‘Our Lord the Spirit’ as the playwright, poet, and novelist Charles Williams loved to call the third Trinitarian Person.1 The seeming ragbag of extra issues that rounds off the Creed is in reality an account of the distinctive work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, a work that brings the work of the Son, the Second Trinitarian Person, to its completion.

When a French priest gave his book on Pneumatology the title ‘The Holy Spirit, this Unknown One’,2 he had in mind not least that there is something especially discreet about the Holy Spirit which makes his presence rather incognito. The Father is revealed in the Son and the Son becomes visible in the human nature he took in history, so that anyone who sees Jesus has seen the Father (compare John 14:9). But how for the evangelists is the Holy Spirit visible? Only at best in two or three widely separated symbolic phenomena – the descent of a dove onto the head of Christ at his Baptism in the Jordan, the bright Cloud which overshadowed Jesus at the moment of his Transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the tongues of flame seen flickering round the heads of the apostles at Pentecost.

The Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky thought that, even in the Age to Come, we shall only see the person of the Spirit in the glory on the faces of the saints. Likewise, in our lives on earth, St Paul tells the Romans (8:26) that when we do not know how to pray, the Spirit prays in us with sighs too deep for words: an underground presence, then, urging us on toward the Father even when we cannot find words with which to formulate our desire for God.

For the school of St Thomas, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit listed elsewhere by St Paul, Gifts such as ‘counsel’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘understanding’, are what explain mystical prayer, ‘hidden’ prayer. ‘Hidden’ is one of the meanings of the Greek word mystikos.

Such hiddenness reflects the Spirit’s role in the Holy Trinity. Just as the Son finds his identity in loving self-surrender to the Father, so the Spirit finds his identity in facilitating the love-exchange between the Father and the Son. He is the ‘Go-Between’ in God, and Go-Betweens don’t carry out their function properly if they draw attention to themselves rather than to those their job is to join together. Purifying and enlightening the apostles at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit did not teach them about himself. Instead, he taught them the truth about the Father and the Son, as was duly celebrated at the First Ecumenical Council, Nicaea I, in 325. It would not be until the Second Council, at Constantinople in 381, that, by a kind of afterthought, the Spirit’s own divinity was acknowledged and even then it was in tacit form.

We do not say in so many words in the Creed that the Holy Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and the Son, one unique divine substance with them. We content ourselves with saying that with Father and Son he is co-adored and co-glorified.

Yet there is also a visible work of the Spirit, and it is named in this last portion of the Creed. His visible work is the Holy Catholic Church. In Holy Church, with her (perfectly visible!) sacramental and ministerial structure, sanctifying grace and the divinely bestowed ‘virtues’ of faith, hope and charity and the Gifts of the Spirit that enable mystical communion are made available through Baptism as sealed by Confirmation. ‘Available’ but many things are available that in practice people do not avail themselves of. We are not visibly a Church of saints, and if holy Church is meant to be the visible work of the Holy Spirit that is a problem. Of course, for those Protestants who hold the Church to be essentially invisible the problem goes away. But not for us.

Here is where another perspective on the Holy Church of the Creed may be helpful. In that other perspective we call the Church the indefectibly holy Church because her ‘matrix’ at the Cross is Mary. In the way the Church came from this matrix – in the Cenacle, where Mary prayed, surrounded by the apostles – ‘she’ is essentially a Marian affair. However mediocre or even downright ghastly Church folk may be, we can still legitimately call the Church the ‘immaculate’ Church, the ‘virgin’ Church, the Church ‘our Mother’, owing to this perpetually fruitful Marian matrix. For these are all titles that we give first and foremost to the Panaghia, the all-holy Mother of God.

But Mary is not alone, thank Goodness, in manifesting the visible work of the Spirit. There is also, as the Creed goes on to say, a ‘communion of saints’. Both in Latin and in Greek that phrase can bear one or both of two senses. Communion of holy people, yes, but also communion of holy things, holy gifts, meaning by that the sacraments and above all the Holy Eucharist (for Baptism, the other chief sacrament, has its own distinct mention in the Creed of Nicaea). The ‘communion of saints’ refers to the interflow or interchange by which the members of the Church militant, suffering, and triumphant – the Church on earth, in Purgatory, and in Heaven – can pray and make satisfaction for one another. The ‘communion of the Holy Gifts’ refers to the Eucharist: so important to the interactive life of the saints that it can be called by the same name. Like the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the Mass comes from the Paschal Mystery of the death and resurrection of the Son. The Spotless Lamb offered himself to the Father once for all in the eternal Spirit and now that Spirit renders the Eucharistic Gifts identical with the glorified crucified Son in his continuing posture of intercession for us. This is the deepest meaning of transubstantiation.

1. Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove. A Short HistoryoftheHolySpiritintheChurch (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2017 [1939]), p. 10.

2. René Laurentin, L’Esprit-Saint,cetInconnu.Découvrir soneexperienceetsaPersonne (Paris: Fayard, 2018).

And so we come to the topic of forgiveness of sins. The Swiss mystic Adrienne von Speyr, a convert from Calvinism, called the Atonement the Saviour’s confession, made on the Cross when he confessed the sins of the world which he carried there, by way of expiation, in his own divinehuman person. And similarly, she calls the Resurrection the Father’s act of absolution: absolution not of course of the sins of Jesus, for he had none, but of that same sin of the world for which Jesus had made such abundant recompense. That ‘absolution’ is God’s act of forgiveness passed on to us in the reiteration of Baptismal grace that is found in sacramental Confession. 3

Next the resurrection of the flesh, for the Apostles Creed prefers the crude language of flesh, which we also use for sirloin steak, to the more refined language of the risen body. Like ancient Gnosticism modern eroticism underestimates the flesh because it fails to see how flesh can be the carrier of spirit, and even of the Holy Spirit. Believers in the Incarnation are not likely to make that mistake.

Our future risen flesh will be on the model of the Resurrection of the Lord which enables Christ’s relations with the disciples to be sheer communion, which not even solid walls could prevent. In the risen flesh our gestures in the body will be likewise, we must assume, more efficacious, more eloquent of personal relationship. Our bodies now are not always reliable conduits for the message our souls would send to others.

Finally, then, the Life everlasting. ‘I have come that they may have life’, says the Jesus of St John’s Gospel, ‘and have it to the full’ (John 10:10). And indeed, it all comes together in the life the Creator gives as Redeemer through the Holy Spirit, the Consummator. My ‘I’ will at last fit perfectly with the corporate ‘I’ of the Church as the Bride of Christ in her perfected beauty, one with him in the life of the new and everlasting Covenant. Heaven is that eternal life fully received, Purgatory that same life awaited in full assurance, Hell the same life known as rejected for evermore.

When we conclude the Creed by saying ‘Amen’ we mean, Yes, this is how things are. This is reality.