Pints With Aquinas - 123: The role of the Holy Spirit in the life of Christ, with Fr. Dominic Legge, OP

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

See show notes at PintsWithAquinas.com Please become a patron at Patreon.com/mattfradd SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name's Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Termos Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today we're joined around the bar table by Father Dominic Legg to discuss the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of Christ. Good to have you back here at Bites with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. And today, my friends, we are going to delve into deep, deep, deep theological waters. So I don't know if you should have a pint of beer or a pint of coffee, to be quite honest. I have a pint of coffee in front of me. I want to give a shout out to the folks at Guadalupe Roastery. You can find them at guadaluperoastery.com.

This is a great Catholic group that produces really top-notch coffee, not Catholic coffee, just coffee. They're doing a lot of good work as well, so check them out at guadaluperoastery.com. But I can't tell, man, if you need a beer or a coffee. I said to Father Dominic in this interview, I said, I think I have to go back and listen to this interview, which I conducted, I get like two or three more times just to fully grasp what was spoken about today. We are reading, just so you know, from the Tertiopas, the third part of the Summa Theologiae, question 7, article 13. I'll throw the show notes up at pintswithaquinas.com as always. You might want to read along today.

as always. You might want to read along today. Wow, have I gotten some angry emails over the last few weeks. Ah, gosh. Lots, especially about my interview with Dan Mattson. It's really surprising to me that there are people who call themselves Catholic that get really angry when I say that homosexual acts are sinful. That's strange to me. You're a Catholic, aren't you? You've read the catechism. You've read Thomas Aquinas. Did you somehow suspect that the church's position on this was changing or that I should somehow not address it? Or if I have to address it, not address it full on, I think that's a real shame. But you know what's been really cool? Even though there's been a lot of emails I've been receiving, and even phone calls from people who've been pretty angry, more than that, so many people have started supporting Pines with Aquinas on Patreon. I have to say thank you, because even

though a lot of people dropped out, a lot of people stood up. And it was actually really cool because on one side, I've got all of this deafening criticism. Some of it might be legitimate, but I mean, I obviously think most of it isn't. Hey. So you've got this deafening. And then on the other side, you've got people who aren't even writing me emails, but are just like, hey, here's 10 bucks a month. Here's 10 bucks. Here's five bucks a month. Here's 20 bucks a month over on Patreon. So it's just been amazing. I've said it before, and I do realize that when I say it, it sounds like a massive advertisement for Pints of the Quietness. That's not why I'm saying it. But I really do think Patreon is amazing. Because you think about like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago, whatever,

if you wanted to kind of make a living as part of a Catholic group or ministry, you would belong to quite a big organization with a lot of overheads, health insurance costs, all sorts of things, office space, and what have you. And then, of course, if you have that, and of course, there's a lot of big Catholic organizations who are doing great work. I'm not disparaging any of them. But if you could imagine that, okay, so if you're this big Catholic company and you need a lot of money to cover your 50 whatever employees and their health insurance and all the rest, that you've got some big donors, right? And imagine if a big donor comes to the head of this Catholic organization and he says in, you know, maybe not so many words, but he implies strongly that he'd like you to back off this particular teaching of the Catholic church.

And you say to him, well, we're going to teach the Catholic faith. He says, I understand, but you know, it would mean a lot to me if you, you know, maybe just, let's just at least just not discuss it for a little bit. You can see stuff like that happening. This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is what happens. Here's what's great about Patreon. I don't care. I don't care if you're up. I mean, I want you to support me, of course. I'm very grateful for that. I don't want anyone to be upset with me, of course. But if you come to me and say, I don't like what you had to say, and therefore I'm leaving, it doesn't bother me because I don't have one or two donors. I have over a thousand people giving me a small amount, which is so great because it means I can

remain faithful to Catholic teaching, whether or not it upsets people and causes them to leave, you see. So I just think this is fantastic. and not just for me, but for the other Catholics who are doing such great work on social media and who are traveling and who are running podcasts and videos. It really is terrific, so a big thanks. All right, enough of that. Enough of that business. Here's the show. Father Dominic Legge, thanks again for being on the show. Well, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Now, I think last time we chatted, Father Thomas Joseph White was the head of the Thomistic Institute, but you've taken that baton from him. Is that right?

That's right. So tell us a bit about the Thomistic Institute. Well, the Thomistic Institute is a research institute of our faculty, that is the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies. It's a mouthful, but most people know it just as the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. And we originally started putting on theology conferences to kind of bring Thomism into the contemporary academy and make it something that contemporary theology would want to engage with. And I mean,

actually, I would say Thomism is a very important current in contemporary theology. So that was our beginning point in hosting academic conferences and things like that. And we really developed a great network of Catholic intellectuals and other scholars. And as we worked on that, we realized, you know, there's a great demand for some of these things on secular university campuses. And so we began doing a few events on different campuses where we had some connections, and we just discovered a tremendous interest. So we developed a program to have students on these secular campuses create their own student chapter of the Thomistic Institute. They organize as a campus group, and then we give them a kind of menu of speakers and topics from this network that we've developed.

It's quite extensive now. We've got about 130 speakers who are in our kind of regular roster. And we tell the students, you know, if you want to invite any of these people to your campus, we will help you do that. So as of right now, we've got about 30 campus chapters, you know, in a lot of the lead schools, Yale, Harvard, Brown, a lot of the Ivy League, some prominent state schools, University of Virginia, for example. We're at Baylor. We're at Tulane, UCLA. We're opening a chapter at Stanford this coming year. We're hoping that by the end of this year, we'll be somewhere between 35 and 40. And so it's just grown at an enormous rate, partly because we have tremendous students

who are interested in this kind of thing. And what's great for us is that this is really a student-based, student-centered initiative, you know, so it's the students who decide what the topics are going to be, the students who plan the events on the ground. You know, we help them do that. But really, it's a student-led initiative, and that gives it a lot of energy, and the students bring their friends to these events. So it's a great way to bring people to encounter some of these ideas who might not normally be going to church or might not be connected with a Catholic chaplaincy on campus, that kind of thing. They're just interested in some serious questions like, does neuroscience prove that you don't have a soul? That's something that we find is very popular.

Does the Big Bang contradict the Bible? Or what about evolution and sacred scripture? predict the Bible? Or what about evolution and sacred scripture? Or larger questions about faith and reason, or philosophical questions about what is a human person, or what is good for human beings, or what is the natural law, or how is law connected with morality? And then some theological topics like, what is the Eucharist, and how is the Eucharist really the body and blood of Christ? Or how does Christ's death on the cross redeem us? Do you think there's always been this hunger for these deep theological and philosophical issues? And we haven't kind of capitalized on that?

Or is this the Dominican moment, as Father Nicolai Austriaco said to me a few weeks back, maybe because of what's going on in our culture? Well, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's always been a hunger for these kinds of questions or for answers to these kinds of questions. I think they're existential questions, but I think there's a particular need in this particular time. And that is, you know, there's a kind of crisis, I think, in a certain sense of university education in the mainstream mode. And that's because you have a great deal of specialization and a lot of, you know, a lot of really excellent work being done in individual subjects. But a lot of students

going to the contemporary university don't really understand how it's all connected. Right. Isn't that, that's where the word university comes from, right? Unity in diversity, and that's what we lack when you have such specialization. Yeah, exactly, and as a result, no one, you know, no one ever tells them how to fit together the literature class they're taking with the sociology and the history and the science, and maybe, you know, maybe they're taking courses in neuroscience that's questioning whether they actually have any measure of human freedom or whether it's all determined by chemical brain states and things like that and so forth, chemical impulses or electrical impulses in the brain. And on the other side, you've got someone in psychology

who's presupposing or in sociology or transgender studies who's exalting human freedom over the human body and saying, oh, you know, human freedom can completely reshape the physicality of the human body. These are totally incompatible positions. And no one's trying to figure out what the real truth is. And this is what the universal doctor can do, huh? Thomas Aquinas, I mean, his Summa is very much bringing all of these things together, like epistemology and morality and cosmology. He does a great job at that.

That's right. I mean, the other thing that is, I think, also true is that in previous epics, there were more representatives on secular university campuses of the kind of Christian intellectual tradition or the Western, maybe more broadly, the Western intellectual tradition. That's increasingly sidelined and you don't have nearly as many. And in some of these elite campuses, actually, you have very, very few people who would represent the great Christian intellectual tradition or the Catholic intellectual tradition. And so, students are just ignorant of it. I mean, they don't even really

know that it's out there. When you tell them that there is this sort of way of looking upon the whole and that it's kind of coherent and you can have unity and diversity, how does that strike them? Does it strike them as naive or maybe a beautiful, fresh thought or what? No, I mean, I think a beautiful, fresh thought, a lot of them get extremely excited. Now, of course, it's not everybody. It's maybe not even the majority. Certainly, it's not the majority of students on these campuses who are coming to our events. Yeah, yeah. a significant subset. And what we've found is that a lot of these students are some of the brightest students, and they've encountered these real existential questions. How do I put this together in my own life? Yeah. I imagine, like, I think when I was about 17, right prior to my conversion, I would have said I was agnostic because atheists hadn't become a shorthand way

of saying I'm more intelligent than you at the time, right? This was back in 1999. If I was to encounter someone like yourself or one of these lecturers, I think it would have really impacted my life in a profound way because I was just sort of muttering the old cliches about, you know, well, who created God and all these sorts of things and was thinking I was rather profound. So it must be, I don't know, shocking, exhilarating, frightening when an atheist meets one of your lecturers who can really go toe-to-toe with them. Well, it's been, you know, that was my experience too when I was in university. I remember going to the first time I went to a mass preached by a Dominican. And I thought, wow, I've never heard this stuff. I didn't even know this existed. And I began to realize that it was possible. Now I was raised as a cradle Catholic, but did not have a great formation in my faith, even though

I went to Catholic schools. I mean, it always was presented in kind of an overly simplistic and touchy-feely way, and it just never resonated with me at all, certainly not on an intellectual level, as like seriously credible. It seemed like, you know, other approaches to philosophy were much more, you know, serious. And then I discovered that actually there are these Christians who have – these Catholic priests who are extremely intellectually serious about these issues, and they have better answers. And it was like, oh my gosh. This is a real – this is a living possibility for me. Just had a question then. I mean there's – philosophers debate all sorts of things like consciousness and free will and whether anything exists outside my mind.

And it doesn't seem like any of these questions are going to be settled in the sense that, because it seems like there's a million people who are just as smart, if not smarter than them, out there online who hold a contrary view. And so, for many people, they just think, well, I guess I just don't know. What would you say to them? Yeah, you know, actually, this is one of the objections that you find in St. Thomas Aquinas when he's talking about the relationship between faith and theology. And he says, you know, when you look at the world of philosophy, what you discover is that there's tremendous diversity out there and a lot of disagreement, and very few figures who agree completely with any other figure, you know, like the great philosophers, you can list them off,

and they all are going to disagree on in some measure. And he said, that's one of the tremendous witnesses of the Christian faith is that it created such tremendous unity in very subtle and difficult points of belief, you know, so that there is actually a kind of coherent and cohesive and unified Christian profession of faith. I mean, we would say, okay, look at the catechism, and you've got, you know, like a whole lot of the globe that actually is agreed on this. Yeah. Yeah, it just goes to show the necessity for divine revelation. Aquinas talks about this, saying one of the reasons is we're not smart enough, or many of us don't have the time to investigate all these issues. And even if we did have the time, what we would come to think is true

would, you know, there'd be a lot of error involved in it. And I'm seeing today, maybe Catholics, certainly evangelicals saying something like this. And I think it's because they've been rattled by this. I don't know, maybe it's not the new atheism. But it's this idea that we can't really know much about God. And so you'll hear people say, well, all I know is that God's bigger than me. And you think, what the heck does that mean? That's all you know? That's it? You know, as if it's a mark of arrogance to hold to something the church has taught infallibly, whether that have to do with transubstantiation or, you know, homosexual acts or contraceptive acts. I'm seeing this sort of what I guess I'd call like a false humility.

It's like if God has revealed something through the church and we can know it, then to say, well, what do I know? That's not the path to enlightenment, is it? Well, that's right. I mean, actually, you see this on many pages of the gospel, you know, Jesus asks us, you know, he speaks and he tells us that, you know, actually our relationship to the Father, our eternal destiny depends on our relationship to him and whether we accept him or not, or whether we believe what he says. And those who don't believe when they've really heard his message are, well, they're in a much more precarious position. I mean, of course, we are not in a position to know the state of anyone's soul. And so we always have to be very circumspect about making judgments about individual persons.

So I wouldn't want anyone to interpret what I'm saying along those lines. But I mean, it is rather clear, I think, in the Gospels that Jesus comes to reveal God to us, and he also makes demands on us. You know, the demands are, you have to turn to me to be saved. And anyone who is saved is saved through Christ. Now, this could get us into a much deeper discussion about salvation of people who don't have an explicit relationship, like either in the Catholic Church or to Christ explicitly, and the question of implicit faith and the salvation of non-Christians. That's a very deep subject, and there is a very sophisticated Catholic teaching on all of that, so maybe I've opened a can of worms by bringing this up.

Another episode, yeah. Yes, exactly. That's another episode. It's a very important subject, and the Catholic Church does have an account of that about how to understand how it's possible for those who are not explicit members of the Catholic Church or even have an explicit faith in Christ can be saved. In fact, Thomas Aquinas has this account too. This is not a new idea. And really, Aquinas has all the principles that you need. And the Second Vatican Council, when it dealt with this issue, cited Aquinas, interestingly, in a very important footnote. So, you know, that's something that we, Thomasists like to talk about too. Do you find, before we get into today's topic, do you find that there's this temptation

on the part of Dominicans or self-declared Thomists to sort of read Aquinas as kind of almost inerrant, that they struggle to kind of criticize Aquinas when maybe they should? Oh, yeah. No, I think there's, we have to be realistic to recognize that Aquinas when maybe they should? Oh, yeah. No, I think we have to be realistic to recognize that Aquinas is a fallible man who lived in a particular historical circumstance. And so, you know, his teaching is not the same as the doctrine of the church. It's not dogma. church. It's not dogma. It's a theological account of the doctrine of the church. Now, he has a status that is higher, I think, than most, you know, most any other theologian. Even Occam?

In the church's history. That was a joke. Even Occam. Continue. Even higher than Occam, yeah. But that doesn't mean that we just accept uncritically everything that he says. I mean, why do we turn to any figure like this? It's because there's a tremendous wisdom there, and we want to learn from a master. And we all need that, actually. It's kind of a modern conceit to think that we can figure all this out on our own.

We really do need to have good teachers. So that's why we turned to Aquinas. Yeah. All right. Well, today we want to talk about the Trinity, the Holy Spirit in particular, and whether or not Christ needed the Holy Spirit, what that means, and so forth. You've written a lot on this topic, and when I turned to the table of contents in the Summa, outside of the treaties on the Trinity and the Prima Pars, it doesn't seem like Aquinas has a lot to say about the Holy Spirit, at least not directly. So, what do you say to people who might claim that Aquinas sort of downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit?

claim that Aquinas sort of downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit? Well, you know, when you look in certain parts of the Summa and you're looking for, you know, where's the part that's devoted to the Holy Spirit, you don't find it. That's why some people have made this criticism that Aquinas doesn't make a sufficient accounting of the Holy Spirit. But in fact, that's just a matter of mistaken appearances, because the Holy Spirit shows up everywhere. And Aquinas doesn't always explicitly name the Holy Spirit in every place where he shows up, because he makes very clear early on that whenever we're talking about charity or grace in our lives, really we're talking about the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. So that's something, you know, Aquinas wrote the Summa as a, it's literally a summary of theology. I mean, that's what Summa means. And he wanted it to be concise. So he says at

the beginning, I'm not going to keep repeating myself. So when he says at the beginning, I'm not going to keep repeating myself. So when he says at the beginning, in the first part of the Summa, that about the Holy Spirit being present whenever we're talking about grace, in fact, then you discover that the whole discussion of grace in Aquinas is actually a discussion of, in a certain way, the effect of the Holy Spirit in us. So before we talk about whether or not Christ needed the Holy Spirit, how that worked, why don't you explain to us a little about what Christ is? Who is Christ? What is the hypostatic union? Those sorts of things. Yeah. So, you know, the theological tradition of the great councils, you know, back in the fourth century and so on in the church, developed specialized

terminology to talk about the mystery of Jesus Christ. So what we want to profess is that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. Okay, so that's very basic, simple profession of faith. He is one person, the person of the Son, with a human nature and a divine nature. So how do we understand that? Obviously, he pre-exists as God. The person of the Son exists eternally as consubstantial and co-equal, absolutely equal to the Father. He's God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made. Okay, that should sound familiar to you, right? Consubstantial with the Father. So that's what we profess about the Son's eternal existence as divine. But then in time, he assumed a human nature and became man. So when we talk about Jesus, we are talking about the son

incarnate in his human nature. So there he has assumed a human nature to himself, and the union between his divine nature and his human nature is called the hypostatic union. That's a technical term that comes from the Greek word hypostasis, which is referring to the fact that the Son is a person in God. So one hypostasis among the three hypostases of the Trinity, the three persons of the Trinity. It's a Greek term that is used to designate that reality of the person of the Son. So that person now has two natures, unites to himself a human nature. So when we talk about a hypostatic union, we're talking about the union in the person of the Son of the human nature to the divine nature. So a divine person, not a human person, and this divine person has two natures, divine and human.

So what comes along... That's exactly right. What comes along with this nature? Does it include its own will? Yes. Okay. So now this is where you begin to get—a lot of people, when you begin talking about this, you know, say you're just talking about this with somebody who's not formally studied theology, they will immediately begin asking these questions. of sort of clarification by the church over centuries to make sure that we rightly understand the mystery of Christ. I mean, that's actually, we're not trying to split hairs here.

We're just trying to get clear on what is the mystery of God incarnate in Christ. So he has a complete human nature. He's like us in all things but sin. So that means, yes, he has a complete human body and also a human soul. And that human soul has all the same powers that our human soul has. Namely, it has a will. It has an intellect. He has emotions. He can feel pain.

He gets hungry. And he can feel tired and so forth. And all of that belongs to his humanity. Do you want to talk about this distinction between monophysitism and diophilatism? Yes. Okay. So these are very complicated mouthfuls of words that designate different theological positions that have either been problems or not. Monophysitism refers to, it literally means in Greek, one nature-ism. So, physis is nature, mono, one. So, monophysitism is the position which was condemned by the church that there was only one nature in Christ after the union. So, on this view, which is a heretical view, the human nature is kind of absorbed into the divine nature and produces some new third thing, which is neither just a divine nature nor just a human nature, but is some mixture of the two or some composite of the two that is a combination of natures.

So that is a problem because there you no longer have a Jesus who is human like us. And it's very important for us to say theologically that he is human like us, because we want to say that he redeems our human nature. And so he needs to have taken on our human human nature just like we have this human nature. So, if you give him a different kind of nature, all of a sudden you're going to run into problems in the domain of what we call soteriology. That's the theology of salvation, how salvation is wrought by Jesus. So, the reason I bring this up is the article we want to look at today is from the Tertiopaz, Tertiopaz, question 7, article 13, whether the habitual grace of Christ followed after the union. And so, I want to read the respondio and have you comment on it, but one

of the two things he keeps talking about, which I want you to define for us, is the grace of union and habitual grace. Yes. Well, do you want to talk about that now? Yeah. I mean, just before we, unless you want to read the article and talk about it. No, exactly. I mean, I think these are technical terms that Aquinas uses. Okay. So grace of union, that's referring to the fact that in Jesus, you have one person with two natures united together in person. So the divine nature and the human nature, or to put it another way, that he has assumed a human nature into the unity of his divine person. So the grace of union is just the fact that this person now subsists as man and as God, or in a human nature and a divine nature. Is grace of union then synonymous with the hypostatic union?

Yes, basically. It's just a different way of talking about it to talk about the, it's to speak about it as a grace. In other words, it is a grace, of course, of God, that this man would be God in person. And then here's how the catechism describes habitual grace. I want to make sure Aquinas is using it the same way. Habitual grace, the permanent disposition to live and act in keeping with God's call is distinguished from actual graces, which refer to God's interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification. Yeah, exactly. So, the Catechism is drawing from the Thomistic tradition on this point,

and there's this general distinction among graces. Okay, grace of union, that only applies to one person, Jesus, right, or to the Son incarnate. There's no one else who's ever experienced a grace of union. So that's absolutely unique to Jesus. When we talk about habitual grace, however, we're talking about a category that includes us. Like if you're in a state of grace, that's what we're talking about. You have habitual grace. In other words, you have habitually in your soul the disposition to believe God by faith, to love God by charity, to hope in God by the theological virtue of hope.

That's what we're referring to when we say habitual grace. It doesn't mean that you are always actually believing him or actually loving him. You might be asleep. You might be eating your breakfast. You might be thinking about other things. And so those, that, that disposition to be faithful, to be loving towards God and towards to love God above all things, that is kind of, you might say to use a computer analogy, it's running in the background, you know? It's not what's at the front of your mind, but the disposition is there so that you are ready and able to make those acts of faith, hope, and love at any moment. So you can put them

into action. Now, when we talk about actual grace, there we're talking about a different kind of grace. This is a grace by which God actually does give you a particular gift, like an impulse to act in a particular moment. So it's kind of a different sort of thing. It's punctual, whereas habitual grace is like a stable background disposition that puts you in a living relationship with God as an adopted son or daughter of God. So, habitual grace is actually a very powerful idea and very, very important idea. It's synonymous roughly with talking the way we do in contemporary terms about being in the state of grace. So, then, has anybody asked, I'm sure they have, why does Christ need habitual grace if he has the grace of union?

In other words, like if Jesus is God, does he need the Holy Spirit as well? Yeah, okay. So actually this is the core of the subject that this article is dealing with, and it's a very, very important subject, because there have been some people who have wanted to emphasize so much the grace of union or the hypostatic union, the fact that Jesus is God and man, get Jesus in his human nature all that he needs to do all the things that he does. So, you know, be saying, well, of course, he's really God. Therefore, he is going to have a kind of tremendous supernatural knowledge or he's going to have a perfect

charity. That is his human will. Now, remember, we said just a minute ago, Jesus has a human mind, a human intellect, and a human will that are, these are distinct from his divine intellect and his divine will, because he's got a complete human soul. So, his human will, because he's got a complete human soul. So his human will, you know, if you take this view that the hypostatic union is all you need, you'd say, oh, well, just by virtue of the fact that Jesus is the son, he doesn't need anything in his humanity that helps his human will be perfectly supernaturally conformed to the divine will. And actually, Aquinas notes this position actually as an objection. And it's not in this article that we're looking at right now, but it's in an earlier article. And he says, well, actually, no, Jesus does actually need habitual grace.

What's the reason? The reason is when you have the union, the council, the Council of Chalcedon, this is one of the great early Christological councils, emphasized that it did not change the human nature of Christ by the union. That's an important point because we don't want to say that Jesus is not fully human. So there needs to be a second principle. Now, of course, it's closely related to the fact that he's truly God, but there needs to be a second principle by which we account for the sanctification of his sacred humanity. And that second principle is the habitual grace of Christ. And it's precisely there where you find the place of the Holy Spirit in the life of Jesus. So could you say that the, see, see, this always gets very complicated when you start

talking about nature and persons, but so the divine, could you say the divine nature didn't need the Holy Spirit, but the human nature did, or no? Well, something like that, I mean, the divine nature, yeah, I mean, of course, the Holy Spirit is God. So when you're talking about the divine nature, you are, if you say the divine nature of the Son, well, he shares that very same nature with the Holy Spirit. So if we're in the domain of Trinitarian theology, we have to be careful there to not confuse things and make it seem as if we've got separate gods here, you know, because the divine nature, the Father is the divine nature and the Son is the divine nature, and the Son is the divine nature, and the Holy Spirit is the divine nature. It's one absolutely identical divine nature.

So there's no distinction there. The distinction on the side of within the Trinity, the distinction between the persons is purely a relation of origin the, the son speaks or generates eternally, uh, his word, sorry, the father speaks or generates eternally his word. And the word is eternally spoken or is eternally from the father. And likewise, the Holy spirit is breathed forth by the Father and the Son, or is the spiration of love of the Father and the Son as their mutual love. So those are relations of origin. We're getting here into some deep Trinitarian waters. But that's necessary to say when we are talking about, you know, the divine

nature. Now, I'm trying to remember exactly how you posed your question. Well, I suppose I'm just trying to figure out, like, the human nature, since Christ is human, like I am human, like you are human, and we need the Holy Spirit, and we need habitual grace. Is this something that Christ had from his conception, something he grew in, like, or received more of? Yeah, that's a great question. So, Aquinas' answer is Jesus received the fullness of the Holy Spirit at the first moment of his human existence. So, of course, the person of the Son has an eternal existence and is eternally consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

man, Jesus, begins to exist, he's existing in that very first moment of his conception as the eternal Son. And so, with that union of natures in the person of the Son comes also the gift of the Holy Spirit to his sacred humanity so that dwelling in him from the first moment is every possible gift of grace that is the perfect fullness of grace. And there are scripture texts that refer to this. You might think of the prologue of St. John's Gospel where it says, of his full, you know, we saw him full of grace and truth, and of his fullness we have all received. So, Aquinas takes those texts as kind of capital texts to understand how Jesus was always imbued with the Holy Spirit. Okay. Well, this gets us to today's question in Article 13, Question 7 of the Tertia Paz,

and that is whether the habitual grace of Christ followed after the union. So, what I thought we could do is just read through this. Aquinas gives us three reasons, and then I thought we could stop at each, and you could kind of help us understand it. Is that okay? Yeah, yeah, great. Although, could I suggest that we start with the said contra? Oh, sure. Yeah. Because that's actually very beautiful. Do you have that in front of you? I do, yeah. Oh, here it is. You go for it. Yeah, Aquinas writes, on the contrary, you know, in a Summa article, he often has this, it's usually an authority, sometimes from Scripture, and here he quotes Isaiah 42. It says, on the contrary, said Contra, it is written, Isaiah 42, 1, behold my servant, I will uphold him, and farther on, I have given my spirit upon him.

And then Aquinas goes on, and this pertains to the gift of habitual grace. to the gift of habitual grace. That's a very important point. Namely, Jesus, prophesied by the prophet Isaiah, has the Holy Spirit upon him. And what does that cash out as? It cashes out in his human nature as habitual grace. So, now this may sound a little technical, but in fact, it's very illuminating when you get into it. The Holy Spirit comes to each of us and dwells in us in person. And, you know, that's a very beautiful teaching. You find, for example, in Jesus' farewell discourse in the Gospel of John, he talks about how he will send us the Holy Spirit, and he also talks about how he and the Father will dwell in us, this theme of divine indwelling in our souls. And the teaching, the way Aquinas kind of works this out is to show that the divine persons really come in person to dwell in us. And this causes an effect in our souls. It's the effect

of the personal presence of the divine persons. And it's an effect that makes us like those persons. So when the Son comes to dwell in you, in your soul, he makes you like the eternal word, which is the Son, who proceeds by way of intellect. The Father, knowing himself perfectly, generates this eternal word, which is identical to himself. And the likeness of that word is reproduced in your soul according to the virtue of faith. So faith, the theological virtue, is a proper effect of the Son's presence in you. And likewise, charity in your soul is the proper effect of the Holy Spirit's personal dwelling in you. So when you have sanctifying grace, and therefore the theological virtues, above all faith and charity, you have the effects of those divine persons who are really dwelling in you. So that is the, and when you talk about habitual grace, you're talking about the habitual possession of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and

love, and especially faith and charity. Charity is in a way the most important of these, because it's by charity that we are made spiritually alive. It's possible to have a dead faith, but it's not possible to be spiritually dead and be animated with a living charity. So that's why the Holy Spirit, who is the person who is love in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit makes us like Himself when He gives us the gift of charity. And as we become like Him, therefore, everyone who has sanctifying grace has charity, and therefore has the Holy Spirit dwelling in person in them. Okay. And so then he follows in the said contra, his point is that the assumption of human nature to the unity of the person preceded the habitual grace of Christ. And

that's what he's about to flesh out in the respondio. So I'm really interested to see why it's even worth talking about this, you know, that one followed the other. So I'm sure you will get to that. But he says, let me see here. The union of the human nature with the divine person is the grace of union precedes the habitual grace of Christ, not in order of time, but by nature and in thought. And this for a triple reason. So I'll just read the first reason, then let you address that. Yeah, well, maybe I should just make absolutely clear to everyone listening what this first sentence is saying. The union of the human nature with the divine person, we're talking there about the incarnation, right? That a divine person would unite a human nature to himself, and that's the grace of union. And Aquinas is saying this precedes the habitual grace of Christ,

that is the graces in his humanity, not in order of time. So it doesn't come before it in a sequence of time as if at one moment you had the union and then later you get the habitual grace. He's saying they're simultaneous in time, but by nature and in thought, the habitual grace is after the grace of union, or it flows from it. So, someone could hear this and say, why does this even matter? Yeah, okay, it matters. It makes a very big difference. And here's what's at stake here. Did Jesus have the Holy Spirit from the first moment of his conception? That's the first issue.

And Aquinas is saying, yes, he did. He did. You could say a second question would be, does Aquinas' theory of Christ leave any room for the Holy Spirit to do anything? And actually the answer to that is also yes, actually it leaves a very great deal of room. and including contemporary theology, to try and come up with an account of Christ that puts the Holy Spirit more clearly in the picture or even in the center. It's called spirit Christology. Okay. You know, because when you read the Gospels, you read texts like, you know, Jesus was led by the Spirit or filled with the Spirit. Jesus did this.

led by the Spirit or filled with the Spirit. Jesus did this. And you see the Holy Spirit descending on Christ at the baptism. And people read those texts and say, oh, well, maybe Jesus didn't really know what he was doing, but he was just like, you know, kind of like a prophet being impelled by this Holy Spirit that was giving him kind of inspirations at individual moments of time. And is that an adequate account of the mystery of Jesus? And Aquinas is saying, no, it's not an adequate account. But at the same time, he wants to say that the Holy Spirit does have a very important place in Jesus' life, and it's a place that comes from the fact that Jesus is true God and true man. That necessarily entails or produces the complete sanctification of this man, Jesus, by the Holy Spirit. complete sanctification of this man, Jesus, by the Holy Spirit.

Okay. So, if Christ had habitual grace, the fullness of grace from the get-go, what was the deal with the descent of the Holy Spirit at His baptism? Was that just for our sake? Yeah, that's a great question. And yes, in short, that's the answer, that this is a visible manifestation, what's called a visible mission of the Holy Spirit. So you see this sign, which was for the sake of those standing around, not for the sake of telling Jesus some new information. You know, you are my beloved son. You know, that's the voice that comes from heaven at that moment. Jesus is not surprised to hear that. There are some people who think that, you know, that this was a revelation to him. The traditional view is that Jesus had a perfect understanding of his identity, his divine

identity from the beginning of his human life, and in fact, had a perfect vision of the Father, you might say. He had the beatific vision. And that reminds us, too, of the Transfiguration, where the Father says sort of a similar thing, this is my beloved Son, and there again, this wasn't something, I mean, what was revealed to the apostles was something Christ always had. That's right. And actually now here's a very interesting point that Aquinas makes in connection with, to kind of link those two episodes, because obviously they're linked, the voice coming from heaven saying a very similar thing in the one and the other case. So what does the voice from heaven say at the baptism? It says,

this is my beloved son, or you are my beloved son. And then at the transfiguration, the voice adds something. It says, listen to him. And so Aquinas reads that and says, well, read that and says, well, what you have at the baptism of Christ is a manifestation by God to the apostles of the power that's accorded to Christ to institute the sacraments. And of course, that's what we understand him to be doing at the baptism. Why is Jesus baptized? It's not because he needs to be washed, but rather he is giving the power to, you might say, all the water in the world to be used in this divine sacrament of baptism, which creates the spiritual cleansing. And so it's a kind of manifestation of the power that Christ has over the sacraments. And then at the transfiguration, you get a similar manifestation with respect to the teaching of Jesus.

All right, well, let's read this first one, the first point he makes. He says, first with reference to the order of the principles of both. For the principle of the union is the person of the Son assuming human nature, who is said to be sent into the world in as much as He assumed human nature. But the principle of habitual grace, which is given with charity, is the Holy Ghost, who is said to be sent in as much as He dwells in the mind by charity. Now, the mission of the Son is prior in the order of nature to the mission of the Holy Ghost, even as in the order of nature, the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son and love from wisdom. Hence, the personal union according to which the mission of the Son took place is

prior in the order of nature to habitual grace, according to which the mission of the Holy Ghost takes place. You've already touched upon some of this, but... Yes, okay. So, this is actually very beautiful. And you know what? We're right back in Aquinas' Trinitarian theology in reading this, even though this is the part of the Summa that deals with Christ. So, this is a link, a very important link between Aquinas' Trinitarian theology and his theology of Christ. So what is the key point that Aquinas is making here? It's that in the order of nature, not in time, so we're not talking about a sequence in time, but just in a sequence of logical priority, you might say, the Son is the first procession of a divine person. The Son proceeds from the Father, and then the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

So, you first have to have in mind the procession of the Son before you can understand the procession of the Holy Spirit. Or to put it another way, the Son proceeds by way of intellect, the Father. So the analogy, the famous analogy that Aquinas takes from St. Augustine and develops is that the Father is, as it were, thinking himself and therefore conceives in the divine mind the perfect image of himself. And of course, that's another proper name for the son. He's the image of the father and the word of the father. So this father speaks this one word, which perfectly represents himself. And that's the procession of the son or the generation of the son. Then, not in a second moment in time, but logically following on that,

Not in a second moment in time, but logically following on that, you have the Father and the Son loving each other or loving. You might think of the Father loving his word and the word loving who he is and loving the Father. And this produces a second divine procession, which is the procession by way of love of the Holy Spirit who comes forth from the Father and the Son. Okay, so that's in God. That's eternal. And that is the foundation for what Aquinas is saying in this article about the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Jesus. Okay, what's the relationship? The Son assumes a human nature in time. He is sent by the Father. We call this the mission. That comes from the Latin word missio, to send or to be sent. So, the Son is sent by the Father into the world to take on a human nature. That's the incarnation of the Son in the

womb of the Virgin Mary, and we could talk about the grace of union or the hypostatic union there. Okay. Okay, so that's what we're talking about there. The second moment, then, is that the Holy Spirit also is present in that humanity of Christ, but he's present in a different mode, not by union, but by habitual grace or by the charity of Christ's human soul. All right. Secondly, Aquinas says, the reason of this order may be taken from the relation of grace to its cause, For grace is caused in man by the presence of the Godhead as light in the, I love this line, it's so beautiful,

as light in the air by the presence of the sun. Hence, it's written in Ezekiel, the glory of the God of Israel came in by the way of the east and the east shone with his majesty. But the presence of God in person, there is a kind of refulgence that unfolds from that divine presence in his humanity. What is that unfolding of the kind of radiance of the divinity in Jesus' human nature? That is his human sanctification. And the principle of that human sanctification is not just the Son or the Father. It's also the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is personally present as a kind of – the technical term for this is a proper accident.

So everywhere you find the presence of rationality, for example, you find – this is a classic example, risibility. So someone who is, all human beings are capable of laughter because we're rational. And that's something that belongs to being rational is that you're capable of laughing. We don't define being rational by being capable of laughing. We don't put laughter in the definition of rationality, but it is always present with it. Right. Would you, another similar analogy, the light is a proper accident of the sun? Yes, or radiance is a proper accident of the sun, I think. So it may not be the definition of the Son, but it always is going to be there. And so, where you have the presence of the eternal Son of God in a human nature,

you will have the radiance, as it were, which is the charity of the Holy Spirit. Okay. Well, let's just get through this last final bit here. This is really deep, great, fantastic stuff. I'm also aware I'm keeping you a while. It kind of says, thirdly, the reason of this union can be taken from the end of grace, since it is ordained to acting rightly and action belongs to the suppositum. What does that mean? That just means the individual, basically. The subsisting individual. Okay, and the individual. Hence, action and, in consequence, grace ordaining thereto presuppose the hypostasis which operates. Now, the hypostasis did not exist in the human nature before the union, as is clear from above.

Therefore, the grace of union proceeds in thought, habitual grace. Yeah, so these are technical words, suppositum, hypostasis. These can, in certain contexts, be interchangeable. We're talking about the individual person. So action, here's this very basic point. Action belongs to a person. So when we talk about Jesus acting, we're talking about the action of who? The action of the person of the Son. So that action belongs to the person. But it's in virtue of a nature. So you act by your human nature.

You and I have only one nature. So all of our actions are done through our humanity. But Jesus, of course, had is acting as man, and that requires certain, well, dispositions just the way we require certain dispositions to act well. I need virtues in order to – I need the virtue of charity, for example, to love God above all things. I need the virtue of charity, for example, to love God above all things. I need intellectual virtues. I need even just the habitual knowledge of English to have this conversation. So, Jesus too, because he's truly man, he needs those dispositions in his human mind, in his human soul, just like your knowledge of English or your theological virtue of charity in order that you can love God above all things. And Jesus needs that so that he can act as man in the way that is going to bring about our salvation. is going to bring about our salvation. That's all Aquinas is saying, is that that's a third reason why the grace of Christ, the habitual grace of Christ, or the Holy Spirit flows from the very

fact of the incarnation. It's because God is going to give to that human nature everything that Jesus as man needs in order to accomplish perfectly the revelation of God and the salvation of the world. And so Jesus receives the fullness of every possible grace. And actually, if I can add, Matt, just one additional point on top of this, which Aquinas is going to make in the very next article in the Summa, Jesus becomes the source of grace for all of us. So, that's another reason why He has the fullness of grace, because every grace that is dispensed to us is passing through Him, as it were. So, He receives it all, and then we receive a share in what He has. This is dense stuff. Would you, without just repeating the said contra,

how would you kind of like sum up the point that Aquinas is trying to make and why we should be interested in it? Well, that the Holy Spirit is really a very important part of our account of Jesus and His life. It accounts for how Jesus as man, while being truly man, is perfectly sanctified and made capable of being the instrument of the divinity. I mean, the humanity of Jesus is the perfect instrument of his divinity. And it's also very powerful idea because Jesus receives the Holy Spirit in full, in absolute plenitude. And then, now this would take us to the next topic perhaps. On the cross and after the resurrection, he breathes forth the Holy Spirit on the world. So having received in full as man, the Holy Spirit, and

acting by the Spirit in all that he does in his earthly life, including the Holy Spirit's charity impelling him to the cross, he dies on the cross for us. And then what does he do? As man, he returns and he pours out the Spirit on the church. So it's the same Spirit that we receive. We receive it from Jesus as God and as man. And it's fascinating that just as you talked about that first spiration of the Son from the Father and the Father sending the Son and that happening in incarnation, when Christ breathes upon the apostles, he says, as the Father sent me, so I send you. Yeah, that's exactly it. You've got it. Absolutely. So what you have there, I mean, what this enables us to see is that there is a pattern in God,

in the Trinity, of how the divine persons come forth from the Father. And that pattern is reproduced in the world through Jesus and His sending of the Holy Spirit, so that we receive this gift of salvation according to the pattern of the eternal processions of the Holy Trinity. Awesome. Thank you. I'm going to have to go back and listen to this episode like three more times. But why does this interest you so much? Was it because there hadn't been much work done on this area of Thomas's thought? Yeah, that's right. And I mean, if I can plug the book that I wrote on this very subject.

Plug away. Yeah, The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas. When did it come out? Oh, it's about to. Well, it came out last year, but it's coming out in paperback next month in October 2018. Wow. And so it's going to be available rather cheaply. I think you can even pre-order it now on Amazon. And really, I mean, this was a subject that makes me passionate because it's rediscovering the Trinitarian pattern in the whole economy of salvation, in the whole dispensation of Christ, in the life of Christ,

basically. And it shows you how all of theology is really found, you know, it all goes back to the Trinity and how the doctrine of the Trinity is actually the central mystery. It's not just like some technicality that we profess in the creed, but we don't really, you know, it doesn't really affect us. It's actually the central mystery and it suffuses everything in our faith. Yeah. So I'll put a link in the show notes there. The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas by Oxford University Press. Congratulations. I'm sure that was a labor of love, but exhausting as well. It was, but I love, yeah, it's great when the labor is over. Okay, I've got to ask you this question, and I know we could spend like three hours talking on it.

Obviously, we don't have that kind of time or attention span, at least I don't. But, you know, I go to a Byzantine Catholic church, and the Byzantine Catholic church says the creed, the way it was formulated in Nicaea, and the Orthodox, of course, are very passionate about this in saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone and not from the Father and the Son. Any thoughts on that? Yes. Well, okay. That would be another great topic for another podcast. Yeah. That would be another, that would be a great topic for another podcast. But, I mean, I can say very briefly, one, the Orthodox and the Catholics are perhaps not as far apart on this as sometimes seems, depending on what you understand them to be professing. But Aquinas will argue very firmly for the need to affirm that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son. Now, I think

you can see in the Church Fathers, the Greek Fathers, the very Fathers that the Orthodox are relying on, this same idea. So, I don't think it involves a contradiction. There's a lot more complicated history behind why there's a difference between these two creeds. Having to do with the language as well, right, with Latin and Greek communicating things differently? Yes, but also it has to do with just – I mean basically what you had in the West was this clarifying phrase that was added, and there were all kinds of political reasons why, um, that was, uh, seen as provocative and, and, you know, created problems. Um, I don't think in the end, the divine mystery, uh, I don't think there's as much of a difference in understanding the divine mystery as, as sometimes people assume when they, when they see these two different,

um, ways of speaking about it. All right. Well, just in conclusion here, let's try to apply this to our spiritual lives. You know, it's often said that we pray to Jesus, we pray to the Father, but, you know, some people will say, do you have a relationship with the Holy Spirit? And of course, we do by virtue of our baptism. But has this work and this studying of what Aquinas has to say on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, has this led you to have a more profound relationship with the Holy Spirit? What does that look like and how can we perhaps cultivate that in our lives? Yeah, I think it's very important actually, and it does absolutely lead me and I think lead, can lead all of us there. It's to, it's to dwell more on this truth

that the Holy Spirit is really in you if you have, if you're in a state of sanctifying grace. So, um, what makes you more like the Holy Spirit? Loving God more. And, And that means not just like more intensely doing it, but doing it more often, you know? So, you have this habitual disposition. You have the capacity by the grace that God has already given you to make an act of love. And the whole point of the Christian life is that you would start doing this more and more all the time. And that is the Holy Spirit's work in you. What does that look like practically? What does an act of love look like practically? Well, you just turn your mind and your heart to God and say, I love you. I mean, it's very simple. You know what's really great is I recently interviewed

Father Thomas Joseph Wyatt, and he spoke a lot about the, what do you call it, the fighter's virtue, and that being the virtue of hope, and talked about making acts of hope throughout the day. So I love that now we have the new head of the Thomistic Institute telling us also to make acts of love. Soon we'll be talking about acts of faith. But yeah, that's cool. Yeah, let's not overthink this, right? Just, I love you, God. Well, and, you know, what are you going to be doing in heaven? You're going to be doing that always, actually, eternally with a perfect, you know, the most

perfect act you can muster. You're not going to be distracted by any other loves. You're going to love all other things in God and God first, you know, God in a kind of dominating primary way. God and God first, you know, God in a kind of dominating primary way, that's going to absorb everything because you will see God face to face. And that's the goal actually in our life even now is to not just do the minimum, but to be progressively growing in that love of God. And if I can add just one other thing, it's also this. It's that the love of God would come to inform or be so rooted in our souls. It would inform everything else that we do. That is, it would shape everything else that we do. And I think that this is something that you experience.

I mean, I especially feel like this is true in the religious life. If you enter a monastery or you enter the Dominicans like I've done, the life is designed to shape you over the course of time so that the very structure of your life is more and more ordered to God and to loving God and knowing Him. And that is the point of growing in. I mean, that's what it means to grow in charity is to be able to always, in everything that you do, be referring it back to God. You know, Dostoevsky and the Brothers Karamazov, he has Father Zosima, I think it was, yeah, the elder, talking about love in dreams and love in action. And I imagine there's a lot of people listening right now who have that love in dreams idea that, well, if only I could be a

Dominican like you, then sure, that'd be great. But like, I'm up to my, you know, eyeballs and kids throw up and toys on the floor. And, you know, it's always easy to think if the circumstances in my life were different, then I'd be able to love God more. But that's not true, even though I keep falling into that lie. Well, you could even, I mean, part of what you're doing is you're figuring out how to do those things out of the love of God. Like you're cleaning up the throw up out of the love of God because this is living out your vocation. And the more you are able to explicitly make that connection and have it motivate you and shape the way that you clean up the throw up. Yeah. You know.

No, this is powerful stuff. That can change your life at home. That you become somebody who is going to give of yourself to your spouse, to your children, to your family in a different way precisely because you're doing it as a form of the love of God. Right. An act of charity. And so, instead of looking at those dishes in the sink and thinking, why hasn't my son or daughter or wife or whoever cleaned them up, saying to yourself, like, I'm going to do this act, you know, in as much joy as I can for the love of God and for the love of those in my family. Well, it also might involve calling your son over and saying, out of the love of God and the love of you, I want to form you in virtue.

And so you're going to do these dishes now. Yeah, that's true. Oh, this is awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell people now how they can sort of follow the Thomistic Institute, even if they're not part of a university right now, how they can listen to the lectures, how they can follow you? Yeah, we put up all of our lectures online. They're available through SoundCloud, our SoundCloud

page. Just look for Thomistic Institute, or you can go to our website, which is just ThomisticInstitute.org, and you'll find that there. We're also available through iTunes or the iPhone podcasts or other podcast apps. So we have hundreds of theology lectures up there. And we'd love to have people following us. Yeah, they're so excellent. So I've got to say, if anyone's listening to this podcast and enjoys this podcast, you're going to absolutely love the Domestic Institute. So be sure to subscribe to the Domestic Institute on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Dominic, thanks so much for being on.

Thanks for having me. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for listening to this week's episode of Pints with Aquinas. Hey, if you're not yet subscribed to Pints with Aquinas on iTunes or wherever you listen to these, be sure to do that because we sometimes have random episodes that come out throughout the week and you're not going to know about them unless you subscribe. Also, we always appreciate getting reviews on iTunes. So if you want to leave us And I would give my whole life To carry you, to carry you

To carry you, to carry you you