Written for Mission of the Spirit (STL 928) under Dr. Dan Keating, 11 December 2020, for the Licentiate in Sacred Theology.
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ” Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (Jn 7:37-39)
“As yet the Spirit had not been given” (Jn 7:39a). St. John makes a bold and striking claim here. This Gospel is proclaimed in Roman Rite Masses on the Eve of Pentecost every year and it almost demands an interpretation from the preacher. In what way had the Spirit not yet been given? An investigation of the interpretation of this verse throughout the tradition yields some captivating insights about the newness of the new dispensation. When we understand the newness of the new dispensation, it helps us to examine whether we are drawing on all the riches of that newness. One ministry that is possible because of this new givenness of the Holy Spirit is spiritual direction. It is a ministry that emerged in the early Church but then became quite rarified and specialized. It has been re-emerging strongly and broadly in our own time and a greater attentiveness to the unique work of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament would greatly benefit the way this ministry is carried out.
DISAGREEMENT ON THE NEWNESS
Throughout the tradition there have been diverse interpretations about St. John’s statement that the Holy Spirit had not yet been given (Jn 7:39a). Without attempting to resolve all contradictory claims, most of the claims can be harmonized. In each case, however, we find that the difference supports a proposal that spiritual direction is a ministry particular to the New Testament. This proposal is significant for understanding the unique and important role spiritual direction plays in the formation of saints. It also helps us contrast the Holy Spirit in the New Testament dispensation from the Old Testament or from other non-Christian religions. In this section we will consider the interpretations of John of St. Thomas, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, the Great Commentary of Cornelius Lapide, some patristic quotations from St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea, St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica and Commentary on the Gospel of St. John.
We start with a very useful observation of John of St. Thomas. He allows for the full gift of the Spirit in the Old Testament while at the same time noting a greater gift of the Spirit in the New Testament. He explains it with the image of a kiss from the Song of Songs: “It is as if the love of the holy Church began where the life of Moses had its end. Where the law given through Moses had its consummation, the law of spiritual love found its beginning.” In particular, he taught that this kiss of the Church took place on Pentecost Day. And so the whole Church at its beginning was given on that day the same kiss that Moses had at the end of his life. This shows the great dignity bestowed on every Christian. The heights of holiness that the great lawgiver and prophet reached in his lifetime becomes the starting point for those immersed by Baptism in the Church of Pentecost.
St. Cyril says that the Holy Spirit was breathed into the first Adam by God, lost through original sin and restored to the human race through the Second Adam who breathed Him into us after the Resurrection. Although He was at work in the prophets, He shone on them only from the outside and did not dwell on the inside of man as in a Temple until after the Resurrection. St. Cyril makes a stricter contrast between the “external” work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Yves Congar claims that this is a particularly eastern Christian approach in contrast with the western patristic teaching that emphasizes the full working of the Holy Spirit in significant Old Testament figures:
Almost all the theologians working in the Western, Latin tradition—Augustine, Leo the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Thomists such as Franzelin, Pesch and Galtier—have, however, accepted a difference in regime between the two dispensations, but insisted that the righteous in the Old Testament were personally, on the basis of their faith in Christ who was to come, subject to the same condition as later Christian believers and that, like them, had the quality of sons and possessed a substantial indwelling of the Holy Spirit. All that the Incarnation and Pentecost brought about was a wider and more abundant dissemination of that grace and that presence of the Spirit.
It turns out, however, that his generalization is not fully accurate. St. John Chrysostom, an eastern Doctor, acknowledges the Holy Spirit’s work in the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs and even that they possessed the Holy Spirit. Consequently, he interpreted John 7:39a as saying that the Spirit had not yet been given to the disciples. By the time that Christ approached His Passion, however, Chrysostom says that grace had been totally lost: “grace itself was retrenched and removed and altogether departed from the earth from the day on which the words were uttered: ‘Your house is left to you desolate.’ [Mt. 23:38]”. The restoration came through the paschal mystery. St. John Chrysostom taught that a gift is usually bestowed on a friend and so we needed to be restored as friends of God by the sacrifice of Christ before we could receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit.
Furthermore, when the Holy Spirit was given anew after the glorification of Christ, He was given with greater gifts: “Not only would the gift be more abundant, but it would be accompanied by greater gifts of grace.” He particularly names the capacity to give the Holy Spirit to others, which was possible for the apostles in a way that it never was for the prophets.
We can draw two important points from the teaching of St. John Chrysostom. First there is a transformation of our relationship with Christ through the paschal mystery. Namely, our friendship with Him is restored. This is the friendship the prophets enjoyed, and even deeper than a friendship it is truly a divine indwelling. Second there is now the possibility not only to receive the Holy Spirit, but also to share Him with others.
St. Gregory Nazianzen likewise emphasizes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Christian disciple. He contrasts the presence of the Holy Spirit in His energies with the substantial indwelling of the Holy Spirit that we currently enjoy through the mystery of Pentecost. It is this substantial indwelling which is at the heart of our journey to holiness.
Cornelius Lapide, drawing from patristic commentaries on scripture, analyzed John 7:39 and explains that the Spirit was given to the disciples only after the glorification because our flesh was too weak to contain Him. He does not explicitly account for the work of the Holy Spirit in the great figures of the Old Testament, but these could be simply miraculous exceptions. He quotes the same passage from St. Cyril, as mentioned above, contrasting the light shining before the prophets from the outside with the indwelling of the Spirit in the post-Pentecost disciples. Lapide also emphasized the breadth and abundance of the Spirit’s outpouring in our post-Pentecostal time. From Lapide’s commentary we derive a new insight about the way our weak flesh is strengthened through our participation in Christ’s glorification and consequent ability to receive more of the Holy Spirit.
As Congar did not account for the eastern doctor, St. John Chrysostom’s acknowledgement of the full gift of the Spirit in the prophets, he also did not acknowledge the western Doctor St. Augustine’s claims of difference between the Old and New Testament gift of the Spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas’s patristic commentary on the Gospels, the Catena Aurea, included the quote already given from St. John Chrysostom asserting the Holy Spirit had disappeared completely from the world. Interestingly, he also selected a quote from St. Augustine: “It was to have a peculiarity at His coming, which it had not before. For we nowhere read of men under the influence of the Holy Spirit, speaking with tongues which they had never known, as then took place, when it was necessary to evidence His coming by sensible miracles.” From Augustine we learn another difference between the old and new dispensations, namely the gift of tongues. Although he focuses on that particular gift named by St. Paul in 1Cor 12 and 1Cor 14, we might infer that the other gifts described in those passages are available to the Christian in a way they never were to non-Christians as well.
Lastly, we consider some texts of St. Thomas Aquinas which speak again to the similarity and difference between the Old and New Testament gift of the Holy Spirit. First a similarity: “Nevertheless there were some in the state of the Old Testament who, having charity and the grace of the Holy Ghost, looked chiefly to spiritual and eternal promises: and in this respect they belonged to the New Law”. He does not apply this to all in the Old Testament, but also recognizes that “prophecy is not a habit but a light given in a passing manner to the prophet, as St. Thomas proves ” On the contrary, the faithful in the New Testament possess the Holy Spirit with His Gifts as a habitus: “I am of the opinion that the fact of the presence of the gifts of the Holy Ghost in the faithful and of their supernatural character is so much a part of the faith that the opposite would be heresy.” But all now receive the habit of the Holy Spirit and belong to the new law through Baptism. This shows us again the greatness of the new dispensation in which the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is not just for a few prophets and patriarchs, but that it is offered to everyone through the Baptism of water and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, we see how much greater this is than the particular gifts received by the Prophet only temporarily.
APPLICATION TO SPIRITUAL DIRECTION
The spiritual director assists the directee in the path of holiness in several ways. A primary way is through guidance in prayer, which constitutes the most direct expression of our relationship with God: “Training in holiness calls for a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer. … prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit’s touch, resting filially within the Father’s heart.” The mode of spiritual direction is not so much instruction, however, as it is a one-on-one relationship, focused on the directee’s relationship with God. The tenor of that relationship is a context of profound trust in which the directee is able to share the deepest interior movements with the spiritual director. The more closely the spiritual director’s receptivity and responses are able to model the Heart of God, the more the directee will be able to deepen his relationship with God.
Spiritual direction is, in fact, essentially the work of the Holy Spirit and so we can also say that it is a ministry proper only to the New Testament. In the previous section, we considered the various aspects of the greatness of the Holy Spirit as given to us in the New Testament. Now we can highlight how these aspects are operative in spiritual direction. The more attentive the spiritual director is to the work of the Holy Spirit in these areas, the more effective an instrument he will be for the sanctification of the directee.
The first quality we consider is the indwelling and internal working of the Holy Spirit. There is some dispute about whether there were Old Testament figures who also had the substantial indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Apart from that controverted question, however, there is no dispute about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit through New Testament Baptism. And recalling the image of the kiss from John of St. Thomas as presented in the previous section, we can see how the consummation of the Old Testament becomes the very beginning of the New Testament. It is not surprising therefore that spiritual direction, which necessitates the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in both the director and the directee, would be a ministry of the New Testament rather than the old.
Another important aspect of spiritual direction is an openness to the word gifts. The first spiritual directors, the desert fathers, were celebrated for the powerful words they delivered to those who sought their counsel. These words carried a divine wisdom that moved their hearers to remember them and record them in works such as the Apophthegmata Patrum. These words continue to speak to us today. In fact, they are often the first idea that people have about spiritual direction and sometimes distort our concepts of spiritual direction. The method of the desert fathers was not merely to pull words out of the air, but first to receive, to listen and even to live with and mentor their directees. Then after the directee’s heart is manifested through the work of the Holy Spirit in cooperation with the humility and vulnerability of the directee’s self-revelation, the director can speak in a very human way and yet with a power, insight and conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit. It is no wonder that such inspired responses to the human heart of the directee made such an impact and were collected in the Sayings. We see this as a cooperation of the divinized human expertise of the director together with the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit through prophecy in the form of a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom. The fact that the Holy Spirit dwells in the Christian in a stable way to make him a prophet (Eph 4:11), together with the charismatic gifts acknowledged by St. Paul in 1 Cor 12, again points to the fittingness of spiritual direction as a ministry proper to the New Testament.
St. John Chrysostom noted that the Holy Spirit’s return to the soul is based on the restoration of friendship with Christ which takes place through the paschal mystery. Spiritual direction fits into the role of facilitating that friendship with Christ. The spiritual director often plays a kind of sacramental role, incarnating the attention, tenderness, and unconditional love of Christ for the directee to experience in a human way. That becomes an entryway to a deeper friendship with Christ in the rest of the directee’s life. Furthermore, it is the directee’s friendship with Christ that becomes the very subject of the conversation in spiritual direction. The direct discussion of intimate friendship with Christ serves to solidify the encounter with God in prayer that cannot be proven, but only experienced in faith. The spiritual director supports the faith of the directee to help him or her fully take hold of the experience.
St. John Chrysostom also claimed that part of the new abundance of the gift of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament was the impartation of the Holy Spirit to others. While this is found among the Apostles, it was not part of the experience of the holy men and women of the Old Testament. This impartation of the Holy Spirit takes place formally in the Sacraments of initiation, but it is also a critical part of spiritual direction. The spiritual director, always called the “spiritual father” in the Christian East, begets spiritual children in a real way through his spiritual fatherhood. Although he does not initially fill souls with the Holy Spirit, he can often be the instrument for the Baptism in the Spirit. This Baptism in the Spirit can be described as a subjective reception of the grace of Baptism. Because the Sacrament of Baptism is applied in a nascent phase of the disciple’s journey, there is often a need for a deeper reception that takes place in various ways, but spiritual direction is one privileged setting for it.
Finally, we find in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas a recognition of the New Law of the Spirit that is lived out by the men and women of the New Testament. Although he acknowledges that some men of the Old Testament may have had this special grace, it is universally in the New Testament. Not nearly as prescriptive as the Old Law, the New Law of the Spirit requires a new form of discernment that benefits so much from spiritual direction, especially in areas of the spiritual life that move into trials of purification and require deeper surrender to God. “And he who can direct others during such a trial, would not be able to direct himself, for here there is no longer ‘any road traced out in advance,’ as St. John of the Cross says; one must follow the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and not confuse it with something that might resemble it. At this time, souls given to prayer have a more special need of an enlightened and experienced director.” God provides fewer prescribed guard rails for the Christian especially as he moves into the more rarified levels of love and holiness. Rather, He prefers to provide a relationship. As Pope Leo XIII noted, this relationship comes through the magisterium on the one hand and the spiritual director on the other:
Moreover, as experience shows, these monitions and impulses of the Holy Spirit are for the most part felt through the medium of the aid and light of an external teaching authority…. This, indeed, belongs to the ordinary law of God’s loving providence that as He has decreed that men for the most part shall be saved by the ministry also of men, so has He wished that those whom He calls to the higher planes of holiness should be led thereto by men…
In all this we see that the new outpouring of the Spirit, which is at least more universal and at most contains a power beyond any example in the Old Testament, corresponds with the inauguration of a New Testament ministry in spiritual direction. The more that the spiritual director can learn to be docile to the Holy Spirit dwelling in him and help the directee to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, the more fruitfully the directee will traverse the paths of holiness.
Works Cited
Acklin, Fr Thomas, and Fr Boniface Hicks. Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father’s Love. Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017.
Anthony, Metropolitan. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Translated by Benedicta Ward. Revised edition. Kalamazoo, Mich: Liturgical Press, 1984.
Barbu, Liviu. “Spiritual Formation as an Art: Adult Faith Formation in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition.” Journal of Adult Theological Education 9, no. 1 (June 2012): 28–43.
Congar, Yves. I Believe in the Holy Spirit: The Complete Three Volume Work in One Volume. Revised edition. New York: Herder & Herder, 1997.
Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Rev Reginald. The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life. Translated by Sr. M. Timothea Doyle, OP. Vol. 1. 2 vols. St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1947.
John of St Thomas, and Dominic Hughes OP. The Gifts of the Holy Ghost. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951.
Martinez, Archbishop Luis M. True Devotion to the Holy Spirit. Sophia Institute Press, 2013.
Pope Leo XIII. “Divinum Illud Munus: On the Holy Spirit,” May 9, 1897. http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_09051897_divinum-illud-munus.html.
———. “Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae: Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism,” January 22, 1899. https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm.
Pope St. John Paul II. “Novo Millennio Ineunte,” January 6, 2001. http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/2001/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20010106_novo-millennio-ineunte.html.
St. Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. Translated by James A. Weisheipl O.P. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Albany, N.Y.: Magi Books, Inc., n.d. https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/SSJohn.htm.
Notes and references
John of St Thomas, Dominic Hughes OP, trans. The Gifts of the Holy Ghost (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), 37. Cyril of Alexandria. (1874). Commentary on the Gospel according to S. John (Vol. 1, pp. 546–552). Oxford; London: James Parker & Co.; Rivingtons . Yves Congar , I Believe in the Holy Spirit: The Complete Three Volume Work in One Volume , Revised edition (New York: Herder & Herder, 1997), vol. 2, 75. John Chrysostom. (1959). Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 48–88 . (T. A. Goggin, Trans.) (Vol. 41, pp. 36–41). Washington, DC: The Catholic U niversity of America Press. Ibid. Thomas Aquinas. (1845). Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out o f the Works of the Fathers: St. John . (J. H. Newman, Ed.) (Vol. 4, pp. 274–275). Oxford: John Henry Parker. ST I-II q.107 a.1 r.2 (ST II-II, q. 171, a.1) as quoted from John of St. Thomas. Gifts, 46. Ibid, 43. Pope St. John Paul II, “Novo Millenni o Ineunte ,” January 6, 2001, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/2001/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20010106_novo-millennio-ineunte.html . nos. 32,33. Fr Thomas Acklin and Fr Boniface Hicks, Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father’s Love (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017), 18. Pope St. John XXIII, “September 9, 1962 Address to Seminary Spiritual Directors,” in The Encyclica ls and Other Messages of John XXIII (TPS Press, 1964), 129–35. Pope Leo XIII, “ Divinum Illud Munus : On the Holy Spirit,” May 9, 1897, http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_09051897_divinum-illud-mu nus.html . Metropolitan Anthony, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection , trans. Benedicta Ward, Revised edition (Kalamazoo, Mich : Liturgical Press, 1984). Liviu Barbu , “Spiritual Formation as an Art: Adult Faith Formation in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition.,” Journal of Adult Theological Education 9, no. 1 (June 2012): 28–43. Rev Reginald Garrigou -Lagrange, OP, The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life , trans. Sr. M. Timothea Doyle, OP, vol. 1, 2 vols. (St. Lou is, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1947), 261. Pope Leo XIII, “ Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae : Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism,” January 22, 1899, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm .