Jesus' Sevenfold Anointing

When I first visited Chartres Cathedral back in 2017, I immediately fell in love with the Arbor Iesse window inside the west facade, over the north doors (whose tympanun sculpture features a mash-up of the Ascension and Pentecost).  It was one of the early depictions of the passage from Isaiah 11:1-3a,

And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise out of his root.  And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him:  The Spirit of Wisdom, and of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel, and of Fortitude, the Spirit of Knowledge, and of Godliness.  And He shall be filled with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord.

(In a later post, I will explain why this passage--taken from the Douay-Rheims Version--is somewhat different than what you are likely to find in your Bible.  Suffice it to say for now that this passage is based upon a Greek translation of the Old Testament, whereas most modern Bibles' Old Testaments are taken from the Hebrew Masoretic text.)

It is often forgotten that "Christ" means, precisely, The Anointed One, and here the prophet Isaiah shows the sevenfold anointing of Jesus that was constitutive of His being Christ.

The earliest writing of St Thomas Aquinas is his Commentary on Isaiah written while he was a Bachelor of the Bible, the first step towards becoming a professional theologian, after which came being a Bachelor of the Sentences--and all of this after earning a Bachelor of Arts!  Today's theologians would have been looked upon by the Mediaevals as little more than superlative catechists.

On the basis of St Thomas' commentary on the "Tree of Jesse" passage, I would like to highlight three elements in Jesus' unique and unrepeatable Anointing (since our anointing is but an overflow of His--see Jn 1:16).  These three elements are taken from three verses:  "The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him"; "The Spirit of Wisdom...", and "He shall be filled with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord."  These three elements refer to what St Thomas called the permanence of Jesus' Anointing, the multitude of the gifts which Jesus had, and the fullness of grace in His soul.

Regarding the verse "The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him," St Thomas also retrieved John 1:32, "And John [the Forerunner] gave testimony, saying:  'I saw the Spirit coming down, as a dove from heaven, and he remained upon Him.'"  From this, the Angelic Doctor concluded three sub-elements.  First, "grace was not increased in Him," that is, Jesus was so chock-full of the Holy Spirit that there was no more 'room' for an additional infilling.  We speak of "filling" and "pouring" metaphorically, of course, because grace is a created effect in the soul (a point St Thomas explains at great lengths in his commentary on St Paul).  Second, this grace was "not interrupted" in Christ.  Whereas Christians, when they are guilty of grave sin, evict the Holy Spirit from their soul (though the mark of ownership remains) and, by repentance and receiving divine mercy, have the gift of the Holy Spirit restored to them.  But Jesus, on account of His perfect sinlessness (2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15), never had an interruption of the Holy Spirit's indwelling.  Third, this grace was never troubled "by the battle of the flesh," which is to say that on account of the stability of Jesus' moral perfection, His Anointing was steady.  You and I, as Christians, on account of carnality (whether it be in regards to food, impurity, or worldliness) "fluctuate" in terms of fervency.  But since Jesus enjoyed a perfect integrity of the powers of His soul such that His emotions were perfectly ordered by his reason, He had a certain evenness and stolidity in His Anointing.

Regarding the verse "The Spirit of Wisdom...", St Thomas deduces that Jesus had all seven of the gifts.  It might seem as though it doesn't logically follow, but when we bear in mind that the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit is, really, an indivisible 'cluster' of gifts such that one cannot be separated from the rest, and when we bear in mind, furthermore, the ancient Hebrew understanding of "seven" as connoting fullness, it is easy to see that by His possession of Wisdom, the other six gifts follow in its train, since "Wisdom" is the climax of the Seven Gifts.

Now the "Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit"--we'll call them the "sevenfold grace" for short--are gifts that sanctify a person or, in traditional catechetical language, are the elements of sanctifying grace.  Now St Thomas doesn't explain this in depth but from this verse he also infers that Christ also had all the charismatic graces.  The puzzler here is that the Angelic Doctor--as does the whole Catholic tradition--insists that it is possible to exercise the charismatic graces while in the state of mortal sin (cf Mt 7:22; 1 Cor 13:1-3).  So why does he annex the charismatic graces to sanctifying grace?  It would seem that, in light of what later Catholic doctrine called the "indelible mark" Christians receive as a result of their baptism and confirmation, even believers in the state of mortal sin are still in the "state of salvation" and still have the mark of God's ownership on them.  Thus, only Christians enjoy the use of the charismatic graces, even if they have evicted the Holy Spirit from their souls as a result of sin.  All the more, then, does the Holy One, Jesus the Anointed, also have the charismatic graces--such as healing, raising the dead, and so on.  The principal difference between sanctifying grace and the charismatic graces is that, whereas the former is in the soul habitually, the latter is at our disposal ad-hoc.  Thus the multitude of the gifts in Christ:  Since He has all Seven Gifts, His humanity is thus marked by the Father's ownership over Him that He has, also, all the charisms at His disposal--though He did not necessarily use every single charism.

Finally, "...He shall be filled with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord" refers to the plenitude or fullness of His Anointing.  To this, St Thomas retrieves John 1:14 when the Evangelist calls Jesus "full of grace."  At first glance, this might seem a redundancy to the aforementioned "multitude" of the gifts in Christ, but the Angelic Doctor here means to say that He had a 'fatness' of grace such that whereas the "multitude" of the graces spoke of their variety in Christ, the "fullness" speaks of Him having all of them such that His soul's powers was brought to perfection and--as I argued in my recent paper at Ave Maria University and as I will argue in Chapter Two of my dissertation--thus constituted the full and perfect humanity of Jesus defined at the Council of Chalcedon.

It should be added that St Thomas often refers to the verse "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov 9:10; cf Job 28:28; Ps 111:10), such that the sevenfold anointing begins with Fear and climbs upward to Wisdom.  Just as Wisdom has the other six gifts in its train, Fear likewise immediately soars through all the six other gifts to arrive at Wisdom as its climax.

So Jesus' sevenfold Anointing constituting Him as the Christ entailed (1) the permanence of the Holy Spirit indwelling Him, (2) the multitude of the Seven Gifts in Him and the charismatic graces at His disposal, and (3) the fullness of the gifts such that the powers of His soul was brought to utter perfection.

Whenever I am at Chartres Cathedral, I love to sit on the backmost row of chairs facing the west facade, and watch the colours dance through the Jesse Tree window as the sun sets, the daily twilight heralding the twilight of the universe that began with Incarnation.  It was there that I received my inspiration to undertake doctoral research on Jesus' human nature's sevenfold anointing which, in turn, overflows to us believers as from Christ to Christians.

It is also my life's work:  To turn Christians' gaze to Christ, whose Anointing is outpoured upon us in a perpetual Pentecost, thus empowering us with the wherewithal to win the world for Him.