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State of the question. Often in the Scriptures this
name is common to the divine persons, for example, "But
if I by the Spirit of God cast out devils."[402]
Further, the Holy Spirit does not imply a reference to
someone else as the Father and the Son refer to another.
Moreover, the name "Holy Spirit" appears to be a
divine attribute, as when we speak of the spirit of this
man, meaning his mind or his manner of judging.
In the Scriptures, however, especially in the New
Testament, "The Holy Spirit" is used personally in
many places, for example, in the formula of baptism, and
in the instances cited in the introduction.[403]
St. Thomas also refers to the Johannine comma, which
is at least an expression of tradition even if its
genuineness is not entirely clear.
In the body of the article St. Thomas concludes that
although the name, Holy Ghost, is not in itself a
proper name, it has been adapted by its use in the
Scriptures to designate the third person. St. Thomas
explains that those things that pertain to love often do
not have a proper name, and some common name is
adopted.[404] This happens because love is
ineffable. The reason is that we give proper names to
those things that we understand properly and distinctly,
but we are not able to understand the things pertaining to
love properly and distinctly in the abstract. Why?
Because the elements of love are less known to us than the
matters that pertain to the intellect, and this for the
following three reasons.
1. The intellect knows those things that are in itself
better than those things that belong to another faculty,
as the will.[405]
2. Good, which is the object of love, is not formally
in the mind like truth, which is the conformity of
judgment with the thing, but the good is in things since
the good is the very perfection of that thing that is
amiable and alluring. Therefore the immanent term of love
goes without a proper name.
3. Love as inclining to the good which is in things,
like every tendency or inclination, contains something
potential, and things are not intelligible except so far
as they are in act and determined. A thing is known as an
act or as a form; but love is rather a tendency, an
impulse, or the weight by which the lover is drawn to that
which is loved. St. Thomas said above: "The
procession that takes place in the nature of goodness is
not understood as being in the nature of a similitude but
rather in the nature of something impelling and moving
toward another."[406] He goes on to say: "This
procession remained without a special name, but it can be
called spiration" because of its inclination to a terminus
not properly named. Love tends to the good that is in
things; first it inclines after the manner of desire
before it possesses the thing. The possession takes place
by intuitive cognition, that is, by sight and touch in
the sensible order; as long as the possession continues,
love quiesces by fruition in that which is loved.
Therefore bliss or the possession of the thing is not in
love but in the intuitive cognition of what is loved, and
this is the assimilation of the thing.[407] This
tendency of love and this fruition are known experimentally
and it is difficult to obtain a speculative knowledge of
them which can be expressed by a special and distinct
name. Hence we said above that the terminus of
intellectual enunciation has a proper name, namely, the
word, but the terminus of the act of love has no special
name.[408]
Because of this ineffability of love some say that love is
something higher than knowledge and that knowledge is a
kind of disposition for love. Such was the teaching of
Plotinus, who speaks of a supreme "hypostasis"
above the second "hypostasis", which is
intellect; the supreme "hypostasis" of Plotinus
is the One-Good, which is not intelligible but which
can be contacted by love. Later Scotus taught that bliss
is essentially in the love of God. But St. Thomas
showed that the intellect is simply superior to the will,
which it directs, because the object of the intellect,
that is, being, is more absolute and universal than the
good.[409] Although in this life the love of God is
better than the abstract knowledge of God, in heaven the
possession of God takes place by intuitive vision, which
is necessarily followed by love just as the property is
derived from the essence.
The following should be noted about the ineffability of
love, which many consider superior to the intellect.
When voluntarists and dynamists (like Bergson) say that
there is more in motion than in immobility, they confuse
the immobility of inertia, which is inferior to motion,
with the immobility of perfection, which is above motion
and which is the stability as something more perfect
opposed to the instability of mobile things. These
philosophers never use the terms stability and
instability. There is more in motion than in the terminus
from which the motion began, but there is not more than in
the end of the motion itself, more in esse than in fieri
(more in being than in becoming), more in a man than in
the embryo. If you deny the superiority of this second
kind of immobility, the stability of perfection, you must
say with Eduard Le Roy that God Himself is in
perpetual evolution and is creative evolution itself. In
the treatise on the One God, St. Thomas asks whether
God has life.[410] He replies that God possesses
immanent life of the highest degree, subsisting
intelligence itself whose measure is the one stable instant
of eternity, namely, the stable now, not the fluid
moment of time which is ever fleeting and ever unstable.
When, therefore, many say that the intellect is more
imperfect than love because it is static and immobile,
they do not take into consideration sufficiently the
distinction between the imperfect immobility of inertia and
the perfect stability which is the goal of the highest
contemplation of immutable truth. Absolute dynamism ought
logically to deny the immobility of God Himself and
confuse God with mundane evolution. And
anti-intellectualism, professed by many voluntarists,
ought to take the stand that the intellect is not a simply
simple perfection and that God does not know Himself as
Plotinus taught about the supreme "hypostasis"
which he had placed above the first intelligence. This
is, of course, absolutely inadmissible. We can
concede, however, that the human intellect as such
sometimes materializes the life of the spirit inasmuch as
it knows the spirit in the mirror of sensible things. In
this way the human intellect understands spiritual
qualities according to the analogy of quantity and speaks
of a high or broad spirit or of the height of
understanding.
Because of this ineffability of love it follows, as St.
Thomas says in this article, that the relations which
arise from the procession of love are unnamed. Wherefore
the name of the person proceeding in this manner is not a
proper name but a name accommodated from the usage of the
Scriptures, namely, the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit)
as we see it used in the formula of baptism.[411]
The accommodative application of this name has two
advantages: 1. since the third person proceeds from the
two first persons, who are spirits, this third person
is, as it were, their spirit; 2. since the term
"spirit" in corporeal things denotes a certain impulse
and it is a property of love to move or impel the will of
the lover to that which is loved.
Reply to the first objection. Many texts of the Old
Testament use the term "spirit of God" as a common name
rather than a personal name. Such is not the case,
however, in the New Testament, where this accommodation
is obvious as in the formula for baptism and in the promise
of the Holy Ghost.
Reply to the second objection. The name "Holy
Spirit" was adopted to signify a person distinct from the
others only by relation and as spirated by them.
Reply to the third objection. Why can we say, "our
Father," and "our Spirit," but not "our Son",?
We cannot say "our Son" because no creature can be
considered the principle with regard to any of the divine
persons. On the other hand we depend on our heavenly
Father, and spirit is a common name as when we say the
spirit of Moses or of Elias. Even the Holy Spirit,
dwelling within us and inspiring us to holy deeds, can be
called our spirit in the sense that He is the life of our
life. In this sense we say that we have received the
Spirit of adoption of sons.
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