The Church of the Holy Spirit

Just as I have been reading St John Climacus' The Ladder of Divine Ascent since the beginning of Pre-Lent and will conclude on the afternoon of Holy Saturday, I have set aside Fr Nicholas Afanasiev's The Church of the Holy Spirit for my reading throughout the Easter Season and the Pentecost Octave.  The first few paragraphs of Fr Afanasiev's book included the following, tantalising observation:

The conflict of the [C]atholic [C]hurch with Montanism is perhaps the strangest conflict ever found in church history.  Everyday routine and stagnation are inevitable in the life of the [C]hurch, but the [C]hurch of the end of the second and beginning of the third centuries by no means intended to deny the gifts of the Spirit.  By fighting against Montanism the Church was not rejecting prophecy--that was something it could not do.  Rather it was fighting for its own existence.  Seeking inspiration, Tertullian did not see that he had entered the path that would lead him out of the Church, since Montanism was destroying the Church, and by destroying the Church, it was denying also the gifts of the Spirit (N. Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit [South Bend:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2012], 1).

When St John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, it was not without the solemn intonation of the Veni, Creator Spiritus in front of the tomb of St Peter and, moments later, his opening allocution where he said to the Council Fathers that

...all of you are here so that, readily obeying the heavenly inspirations of the Holy Spirit, you may eagerly set to work so that your efforts will appropriately respond to the desires and needs of the various peoples. For this to happen requires of you a serene peace of mind,  fraternal harmony, moderation in your proposals, dignity in your discussions, wisdom in all your deliberations... (Opening Allocution, Gaudet mater Ecclesia, ¶22 [11 October 1962]).

It is worth highlighting just how the Fathers were to obey "the heavenly inspirations of the Holy Spirit":  By "peace," "fraternal harmony," "moderation in your proposals," "dignity in...discussions, and "wisdom."

In point of fact, the pope's Apostolic Constitution Humane salutis formally convoking the Council included the following prayer which he proposed to all believers:

Renew Your wonders in our time, as though for [by] a new Pentecost and grant that the holy Church, preserving unanimous and continuous prayer, together with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and also under the guidance of St. Peter, may increase the reign of the Divine Savior, the reign of truth and justice, the reign of love and peace.  Amen (¶4 [25 December 1961]).

Clearly, there was a "Pentecostal" thrust for the Council and the Church intended by John XXIII.  And when I, for one, read the documents of the same Council, it is clear to me that the Holy Spirit indeed did respond to the Church's prayers for his intervention during that tremendous moment.  I shall never forget my very first encounter with the Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium.  I was an undergraduate in New York City on my way to the university, but decided to stop at Starbucks' Coffee on Lexington Avenue for my usual fare of Irish cream coffee after getting off the 79th Street station on the red line.  The Council's description of the Church's worship was astonishing beautiful and it resonated deeply with my 'Byzantine bias.'

Years later, however, whilst a graduate student in Berkeley studying the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, it was clear to me that the "triumph" of the Council of Nicaea left in its wake a deeply tumultuous Church.  St Athanasius, in fact, described the internecine fights of the post-Nicene Church as both sides "shooting arrows in the dark."  Even in the capital of the empire, only a dinky house-church pastored by St Gregory the Theologian upheld the faith of the Nicene Creed.  It would take well over a hundred years for the Body of Christ to get comfortable with the clause "consubstantial with the Father..."  As I wrote my thesis, I distinctly recall saying to myself--"This isn't entirely different from the Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council."

Why is that?

Well, the long answer is the dissertation I am writing, The Anointed One and the Anointing One:  The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Soul of Christ in the Biblical Commentaries of St Thomas Aquinas.  Among other things, I point out that Jesus Christ, the very God-Man, Himself a divine Person, needed still another divine Person alongside Him in order to carry out His ministry--namely the Holy Spirit.  Otherwise He wouldn't be "Jesus Christ."

In the conclusion of my dissertation, I issue the following challenge:

If the God-Man, Himself a divine Person, needed yet another divine Person accompanying Him (as St Basil the Great put it), how much more do we, who are anything but divine, need the Holy Spirit to accompany us?

It seems to me that we--the Church--have mistakenly projected the sacramental principle ex opere operato onto the Church's goings-on as if, despite everything, the outcome of most ecclesial action is guaranteed to be what the Holy Spirit willed.  Not only does this forget that the principle ex opere operato does not apply beyond the sacraments, and not only does it misunderstand the doctrine of the Church's indefectibility, it fundamentally misunderstands how grace works, especially in terms of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.  (The fact that the majority of Confirmation prep modules pay little attention to the Seven Gifts and even less--if at all--to how the Seven Gifts are used ought to clue us in in this regard).

I have been in full-time pastoral ministry since 1999, and I have been ordained since 2012.  Personal experience and reports from my colleagues in ministry, as well as a plethora of anecdotes, have shown me that many within the Church wish to recast it in their own image and likeness rather than to explicitly and deliberately seek out the guidance of the Holy Spirit as to what purpose he has for the Church in the wake of the Council.

Sure, there are claims of appealing to the Holy Spirit.  Yet when one turns to the world and takes the latest sociopolitical concern as cues, we must recall the words of Jesus, "the Father...will give you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him..." (Jn 14:17).  Such an assumption that latest social concern is necessarily divinely willed forgets that, according to St Thomas Aquinas, God is in all things "essence, power, and presence" but is "known is in the knower, and the beloved in the lover" only by sanctifying grace, that is, in the baptised and especially confirmed Christians' obedience to the Holy Spirit (S.th., 1a, q. 43, art. 3, resp.).

Likewise, claims of appeal to the Holy Spirit must be called into question among those circles where the reliability of the Bible's testimony is denigrated and where the possibility of "signs and wonders" is not only slighted but also denied.  Nor can we imagine that the Holy Spirit is something like baseball players' "team spirit" or the sticky emotionalism or groupthink of a Call to Action conference.

A direct consequence of what I've just outlined is an undue overdependence on human ingenuity and administrative prowess to run the Church, or even those kinds of pastoral planning that rely on "programmes" and the like.  A further consequence is something far more disastrous:  Creating a "church" after our own image and likeness--the very stuff of idolatry.

And need I say anything about power struggles at various levels in the Church's bureaucracy?

The manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Jesus' baptism inaugurated His public ministry.  The Synoptic Evangelists all agree that Jesus afterward went immediately into the desert.  Mark, however, uses an interesting verb to describe what Matthew and Luke said about how Jesus "was led" (Mt:  ἀνήχθη; Lk: ἤγετο) by the Holy Spirit into the desert; Mark, on the other hand, says that Jesus was ἐκβάλλει into the desert--that is, tossed or thrown or even hurled into the desert, from the Greek compound verb ἐκβάλλω with the preposition ἐκ ('out of') and the verb βάλλω ('to throw, cast').  It suggests a vigorous movement on the part of the Holy Spirit on Jesus.  It is almost a crude description of the effects of Jesus' being filled with the Holy Spirit.

What are we to make of this?  Two things, quite simply:  First, that Jesus surrendered His humanity to the movements of the Holy Spirit without compromise and, second, we Christians also need to be uncompromisingly surrendered to the Holy Spirit.  In fact, St Thomas tells us that the whole point of the Seven Gifts is to be amenable, to be docile, to be yielding and open to the Holy Spirit's movements in our lives in such a way that we have honed and polished our instinct to move, act, and speak upon his inspirations.  But it's not something that comes automatically, but with spiritual maturity which we have grown into after much training, discernment, and prayer.

Only then can we truly begin to live out the prayer of St John XXIII for a "new Pentecost."

I would suggest, therefore, that we need to rethink aggiornamento not as in opening the windows to let in the stench of worldliness but, rather, to let in that "rush of a mighty wind" (Acts 2:2).

Only then can we be a Church of the Holy Spirit.