Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth… John 16:13.
There is a real haziness about the Holy Ghost which infects great numbers of Christians, and the main cause is that teaching on the Doctrine of the Trinity is sorely neglected. As Catholics, we have a wonderful patrimony of such teaching in the Ecumenical Councils which officially formulated the Doctrine of the Trinity, and in the Fathers, both before and after the Councils, who wrestled with, proclaimed, and defended the doctrine.
Protestants, relying as they claim on Scripture alone, are somewhat hamstrung when it comes to clear teaching on the Trinity. Once one is aware of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity as fully proclaimed by the Church, one may go back into Scripture and see that the doctrine has a firm Scriptural foundation. But leave aside the Holy Tradition of the Church, and Scripture alone is rather vague about the Trinity. No matter how exhaustive a Bible concordance you have, you will search in vain for the word “Trinity”, which nowhere occurs in Scripture. There are several fundamentalist denominations which deny the Doctrine of the Trinity precisely because it is not explicitly stated in Scripture. In the end, there are two things for which almost all Protestant denominations are inescapably indebted to the Catholic Church: the canon of Scripture and the Doctrine of the Trinity. However, neglect of the Catholic context in which the canon of Scripture was proclaimed also leads to a neglect of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
However, if Protestants are hazy about the Holy Trinity, they tend to have very definite ideas about the Persons who make up the Trinity, and especially about the Holy Ghost. In the context of Protestantism, and especially in its evangelical and charismatic branches, the Holy Ghost has a central place in the practical task of daily Christian living. If there is a problem among Catholics, it tends to be a downplaying of this centrality of the Holy Ghost, or on the other hand, a sloppy adoption of charismaticism and its doctrinal haziness. There are those who flee from the emotional craziness of charismatic worship by embracing the comparative stillness of liturgical worship, and there are those who want to rescue liturgical worship from its comparative stillness by importing the emotional craziness of charismatic worship.
Among those who concentrate heavily upon the Holy Ghost, there is often a very facile connection made between one’s own definite feelings and convictions and the promptings of the Holy Ghost. I grew up in an evangelical setting where strong feelings regarding any aspect of the spiritual life were taken definitively to be the work of the Holy Ghost. Most often, this didn’t do any real harm, but my favorite Sunday School teacher from high school left his wife, divorced her, married a much younger woman, and believed that this was what God wanted him to do. I once had a lady in my office who said, “God has finally shown me the man he wants me to be with for the rest of my life, and I can’t help it that he’s married to my daughter”. All of this comes from a misunderstanding of the Person and work of the Holy Spirit.
Now it’s interesting to note that “Holy Ghost” or “Holy Spirit” is really not a Proper Name at all in the way that “Father” or “Son” is. “Father” and “Son” tell us something about the relationship of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity; “Holy Ghost” does not tell us anything about the relationship of the Third Person to the First or Second. In fact, since God is holy, and God is spirit, “Holy Spirit” could apply with equal accuracy to the Father or the Son. The Name of the Holy Ghost tells us nothing about His essential subsistence within the Trinity.
This anonymity, if you will, is by design. Our Lord tells us that the work of the Holy Ghost is to glorify the Son, and that the Holy Ghost does not “speak of himself” (Jn. 16:13). At Pentecost, when the Apostles were filled with the Holy Ghost, they did not spill into the streets to speak of the experience of being filled with the Holy Ghost; they did not, like so many in the Pentecostal movement, concentrate on the feelings and sensations which were the result of the action of the Holy Ghost. Under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and with His inspiration, they spoke of Christ, and were able to communicate the Gospel to all those who heard their voices. The Holy Spirit is God, and should of course be worshipped and adored as God, but He does not, as it were, draw attention to Himself, but ever calls to mind Jesus and enables us to love Christ more and more. “I will not leave you comfortless,” Jesus tells the disciples early in the Farewell Discourse; “I will come to you” (Jn. 14:18), and this coming of Jesus is none other than the coming of the Holy Ghost, so closely is the work of the Holy Ghost associated with glorifying Jesus and calling to mind the things of Christ.
The works of the Divine Nature as they are manifested in creation are referred to by theologians as works of economy. Most of what we know about the Holy Ghost, then, is economic: that is, we know about Him through His acts within and upon the created order. And one of the chief of these acts is, Christ said to the Apostles, “to guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13). Notice that this promise is given to the Apostles assembled together. It is not a guarantee of individual infallibility applied to any one of them alone. St. Peter, we are told in Scripture, went astray in siding with the Judaizers and requiring new converts to be circumcised and to keep many of the dietary restrictions of the Mosaic law. He maintained this error and was confronted by St. Paul. The two of them then submitted themselves to the authority of the Council of Jerusalem, detailed in Acts Chapter 15, in which St. James, speaking for the Council, declared the truth of the matter. The declaration of the Council, sent to the churches, identified the teaching of the Council with that of the Holy Ghost: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28). This is an early example of how the Holy Ghost guides “into all truth”. There is a direct identification with the teaching of the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops of the Church, with the work of the Holy Ghost. For the great truths of the Faith, for doctrine and for dogma, the voice of the Holy Ghost is the voice of the Church speaking through time in the office of its Bishops. And this is for our comfort, so that we don’t have to fret about what is true and what is not, and so that we can proceed with the serious business of our journey to salvation with confidence that the road-map set before us is accurate and reliable.
This is not to say, of course, that the Holy Ghost does not illuminate individuals with certain truths applicable to themselves. This He certainly does, especially as one prays or meditates upon Scripture. In fact, without the aid of the Holy Spirit, neither our prayers nor our time spent in Holy Scripture is of any use to us. We are expressly told in Scripture that our prayers have efficacy because the Holy Spirit assists them with “groanings deeper than words”. And yet, it is important to state emphatically that the Holy Ghost never inspires or directs individuals to do or think anything contrary to what He has revealed in the teaching of the Church. If more people were aware of this, there would be a lot less individual anguish, and a lot less nonsense of the sort I heard from my old Sunday School teacher or from the lady in my office. St. Paul warned the Galatians that even if an angel from heaven delivered a message contrary to the teaching of the Gospel, he would be accursed; and he told the Corinthians that Satan can appear as an angel of light. If Satan and his angels can do these things, it is no surprise that they can lend a spiritual power to the misguided thoughts of our own hearts so that we mistakenly believe we are hearing the Holy Ghost.
In fact, in our individual lives, the work of the Holy Ghost is almost always hidden and quiet. The Holy Ghost tends not to call attention to Himself, and because our souls are infused with His presence at Baptism, we would be in some danger if it were otherwise. Our souls are weak from sin, and so God usually treats us gingerly, allowing awareness of His presence in us and of his leading to grow gradually, almost imperceptibly. Were it otherwise, our weakened natures would be tempted to fasten on God’s manifestations in us, rather than on God Himself. And when
for some reason we didn’t feel anything at one time or another, we’d tend to believe that God had gone from us. And so the Holy Ghost normally operates in hidden and quiet ways within us.
But if we give ourselves to God, and allow Him to have His way with us, the Holy Ghost will invariably be operating within us. Even if imperceptibly, He will be guiding us, leading us, ad comforting us. Our Lord repeatedly calls the Holy Ghost “the Comforter”. More specifically, He calls the Spirit “another Comforter”. The word “Comforter” is the Greek word “Paraclete”, which has the sense of one who comforts by interceding for or acting as advocate for another. Jesus is our Paraclete, and the Holy Ghost acts in his stead, not replacing or supplanting, but fulfilling and completing the mission of Christ. When Jesus walked this earth, he could reach only those people who had access to Him: he was willingly constrained by the limits of His human nature. But after the Ascension, when he is seated at the right hand of the Father, the Holy Ghost can make him manifest to all people, everywhere.
He does this most sufficiently and most excellently in the Eucharist. Every liturgy of the Church acknowledges the role of the Holy Ghost as the agent of the Eucharist, as the One who makes present the Sacrifice of Calvary and makes that Sacrifice efficacious for us. It is perhaps in the Liturgy that the role of the Holy Ghost as Comforter is most plainly set forth for us, just as it is in the Sacraments generally that we see the most objective signs of the Holy Ghost’s operations in our lives. I am convinced that there is no better way to discern the operation of the Holy Ghost within you than by devout reception of Holy Communion and by the practice of sacramental Confession.
In all of His works, the Holy Ghost shows us, not Himself, but Jesus Christ, and testifies of Him. The best way, then, for us to be open to the working and operation of the Holy Ghost is to be open to Christ, to be always thinking of Christ, to be dwelling in heart and mind in the company of Christ. We need the Holy Ghost even to be able to make a start, but if we offer our feeble, storm-tossed wills to God, the Comforter will lift us up and make possible for us what we could never accomplish on our own. And the more we abide in this mindful, loving attention to Christ, the more the Holy Ghost will do the work of our sanctification, by showing us the truth in Christ’s Church, by leading us into that truth through personal illumination, by enabling us to come into Christ’s real Presence in the Eucharist, and by enabling us to make a good Confession. We cannot see the Father, and we cannot see the Holy Ghost; we can see the human face of Christ, the Son of God, and when we fix our gaze on that face, the Holy Ghost will sanctify us and fill us so that the Son may present us, perfect and finished, before the Father.
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