By Henry Aloysius Barry
CHAPTER XIII. PROCESSION OF THE HOLY GHOST FURTHER TREATED.
The Holy Ghost proceeds from love, He proceeds from the love of the divine essence. As we find this love in the Father, it is seen to consist in the love of Himself and the Son. As we behold it in the Son we find it to consist in love of Himself and the Father. This is what is purported to be conveyed when the Fathers of the Church say to us that the Holy Ghost proceedeth from mutual love. This love, whilst a mutual one, is, however, not a double affection, but rather a love that is one and single. This same productive love is the love of the divine essence, inasmuch as this is goodness,communicable— without—through participated good, especially by participated sanctity, which bears a close resemblance to the divine substantial goodness and holiness. This thought is profound and, far from being a purely speculative truth, it is, on the contrary, an eminently practical one. There are persons who believe in God and make no account of the trinal God. Others again, in theory, take account of the three divine Persons but in practise set on one side the divine personalities. These two classes are represented on the one hand by, for example, Unitarians and on the other by uncultured, unrefined, indifferent Catholics, who with irreverent neglect lack the enlightened and systematic view of their marvelous faith and the spiritually scientific, so to speak, analysis of its finer points; who do not cut into the heart of their glorious religion and are deprived of the divine witchery of its hallowed depths. God— simply God! The matter of a revealed theological process of reaching God by a method of divine and revealed personalities is deemed superfluous in their eyes. It is to such persons that the present profound thought offers convincing assurance of the impropriety of such indifferent system and the necessity of cultivating the trinitarian idea which so emphatically asserts itself in the Holy Scriptures. Strange is it and appalling how one's own opinions will unconsciously creep into places where only obedience is proper.
The Fatherhood of God, of which so much indecorous cant, sophistry and jargon go the political and socialistic rounds today, has its proprieties, its laws, its etiquette. These are not left to men's judgment; they are corollaries at least of revelation. The Fatherhood of God has its appointed approaches, its avenues, its stairways, its gates. The insinuated democracy of the charlatan and the dreamist that forgets and leaves out of question this system of religious piety excites the coarse fancy of the multitude by its unconventionalizing, but it does so at the expense of the divine dignity and truth. As a matter of fact, the corelative duty of Fatherhood is piety,which St. Gregory calls worship of God—"What," asks the saint, "is the worship of God but His love, whereby we desire to see Him,hope and believe that we shall see Him and, as far as we advance, do see Him now in enigma, but then manifestly," (Trinit. xiv, c. 1.) St. Thomas says: God loves Himself and every creature in the Holy Ghost inasmuch as the Holy Ghost proceeds as the love of the highest goodness, according to which the Father loves Himself and every creature. (1 q. 38, 2.) These are significant words.—"God loves Himself and every creature in the Holy Ghost." We cannot then in theory, neither can we in practise, ignore the links that bind us to the Fatherhood of God, namely, the Holy Ghost. St. Thomas says in addition to this that the divine goodness is the principle of creature-love, (ex loco.) The lustre therefore of the creature's goodness is the goodness communicated to us by the Holy Ghost in Whom the created goodness is a sharing in the resemblance of the divine goodness, from which it is irradiant. Whilst to erase the personality of the Holy Ghost in theory is, as we all know, positive heresy, to set Him on one side as a practical factor spells great detriment to the soul, for, the Holy Ghost is the gate-way that lets us through to the love of the Father and the Son toward one another and to the love which the Father and Son have for us, the personnel of mankind, made each one of us to the image and likeness of God.
Another point is accentuated by our present theme, one, besides, that should be seriously taken up for the truer and more enlightened service of the soul—The Arians pointed back to the moment — fictitious of course—when the Father had not as it were yet produced the Word and the Father and Son had not produced the Holy Ghost by their mutual love. Such attempt would of course imply that there was a moment when God did not act, within. As a matter of fact, St. Thomas tells us that "we ascribe to God, beside outward operations, another kind also inasmuch as we say that He is intelligent and wishful, wherein His perfection is signified, for, He cannot be perfect unless He were by act intelligent and wishful, and hence it is that we confess that He is 'living'. According to this operation we allude, in divine things, to the procession of the Word and of love. The Arians gainsay that the Son and Holy Ghost are co-essential with the Father. St. Athanasius tells us that 'they seemed to say, consequently, that God is not a living and intelligent but rather a dead and mindless God'." (St. Thomas. De. Potent. Q. 10. a. 1.) The point in the matter which we choose to assimilate is this: God eternally operated— within, that is to say, in Himself. His perfections eternally demanded action; the Father eternally begot the Word; the Father and Son eternally produced, by their mutual love, the Third Person, namely, the Holy Ghost. To deny the eternal activity of God is a denial of the very divine life, which, as we have seen, must, to be perfect, be in act. Love in action is never without love produced. St. Thomas remarks here, "The action of God is His very essence, and essence is His will, and, it follows that in God there is no will, that is merely potential or habitual, but one of downright action." (Contra. Gen. iv, c. 19.)
Now with us, in our human faculties, we find mere potentialness rather than action. We have mind and will, but, these faculties are not in action, especially the will. Theoretically, they survive, practically they are dead, yet, as it is with God, essentially, so it is with us practically— action is life, action is perfection, aye, existence. Inaction means death to the human faculties and organs, to all of them. It works the same results as, and is but another form of, abuse, for, it means decay. The inactive mind becomes imbecile; the inactive will loses its sway, its character and is a will only in name; the inactive body becomes a fetid sink of disease. This law extends to the spiritual faculties so that without activity, effort and labor these become practically dead, and as love is the basic principle of will subsistence, the absence of it is but too evident in the sad, sad spectacle of a dead-living soul as in hell is to be seen the living-dead soul. St. Paul, in the thirteenth chapter, second Corinthians, points this out, "we shall live with Him by the power of God." The apostle begins by asserting his own religious vitality or livingness as a result of his correspondence to luring grace. He then goes on to say to us,—"Prove ye yourselves. Know ye not yourselves, that Christ Jesus is in you? Unless you be, perhaps, reprobates."
He makes it clear that without works there is no assurance of one's being a christian at all and that inactivity is reprobation, that is to say, a living death. The apostle informs the Corinthians and, of course, ourselves, that the antithesis of this dreadful state is religious activity. "We pray God you may do no evil." Here we find asserted a negative activity or positive resistance to evil, for without positive resistance the natural current will cause us to drift in an opposite direction to good. The apostle continues his exhortion, "That you may do that which is good." Here is positive activity of the aggressive type not merely to withstand the stream of evil, but to take deep inhalations, to excite the muscles, so to speak, of the soul, to rouse the whole spiritual being to action, to fight the flood, go up against the stream and row with might and main against the tide of evil. Let us repeat that, as with God essentially, action constitutes perfection, the apostle accordingly exhorting the Corinthians to rouse themselves, to be active, says, "This also we pray for, your perfection." He asserts in unmistakable terms and in unevasive clearness the law of salvation, that mankind has universally acknowledged in other spheres of life, namely, that practice makes perfect. This is true of the sluggish and indolent in art, in literature, in music, in fact in each and every art, craft and perfection; that is to say, full growth, full strength and the full sweep of the beauty of the thing is debarred. The culminating text of the chapter is the apostle's blessing, which is the summing up of his wishes, the realization of his apostolic yearning, wherein he unfolds the means to accomplish all, "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Church of God, and the communication of the Holy Ghost, be with you all." The mechanism of the modern electrical vehicle supplies us with illustration of this point. When the trolley is ungrooved, the electric current is shut off and the moving body must come to a standstill. When likewise we are guilty of a serious sin we lose the charity of God, we cut ourselves off from it, as a wire may break, and the trolley be deprived of its fluid. The same effect may happen to us, unless we keep a supply of the fluid of grace, in other words, keep, up the communication of the Holy Ghost. The sacraments of the Church and prayer —the power-house of the soul— are the appointed means, without which there can be no promise of spiritual locomotion in our lives, that is to say, there can be no salvation for us. 'Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Catholics who do not cultivate the sacraments are dead wires. Such men reduce the christian state to the plane of a mere paganistic philosophy that pretends to do good and avoid evil for any length of time by the force of natural powers, or they are indifferent to salvation and in the very teeth of our Lord's words decline to "work out" their eternal happiness. Who for one instant could suppose that our dear Master would needlessly have excited us by telling us to struggle and toil —"work out" our future happiness if all this were indeed superfluous and our end might have been attained by less positiveness of action and a reduced rate of pain and anxiety. Let your watchword be "work out" your salvation and you shall find that the laborer is worthy of his hire.
