“The Wind Blows Where It Wills”: Understanding the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

The Second Vatican Council, in its document Gaudium et Spes, teaches us that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light, that Christ fully reveals man to himself. The goal of this article is to shed more light on one facet of Christ’s self-revelation to humanity, namely, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are first realized in Christ’s own humanity and then participated to us, or shared with us. After seeing Christ’s own human spiritualization, we realize that human nature has the capacity for these graced instincts, too, which are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.

First, we will lay the groundwork for thinking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit as virtuous habits, in a certain sense. Then in the second part of the article we will consider how the gifts are present in Christ’s own humanity, and how we are given to share in them. In other words, this article is about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. First, what they are, what they do, how they work: the answer, by the Holy Spirit. Second, what do they look like, and where do we look for them? The answer, in Christ.

The guiding principle is an attempt to understand John 1:14–16 together with Romans 8:29, which is to say that this article is a theological reflection upon the Son who is “full of grace,” “from whose fullness we have all received” in order “to be conformed to his image.”

What Are the Gifts of the Holy Spirit?

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us much about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and he is clear that the gifts are habitus. In Aquinas’ vocabulary, this means a stable disposition, a shaping of the person toward something.¹ In particular, the gifts are habitus which shape the believer so as to embrace the movements of the Holy Spirit. But the gifts are habitus in a different way than the virtues are usually understood as habitus. While the virtues shape a human power to act in a certain way, the habitus of the gifts of the Holy Spirit pertains rather to a sensitivity to the movement and prompting of the indwelling Spirit.

Aquinas’ reason for this is straightforward: whatever is moved must be proportionate to its mover. In other words, as human beings we can naturally do what is proper and common to human beings. Divine gifts, precisely as gifts from God, are not under our own power but rather must be “moved” by God Himself. We can naturally perfect our own moral virtues under the governance of our natural reason. This is because natural virtues shape natural powers, like being able to prudently evaluate a situation well or remain courageous if necessary. As for operations introduced to us in grace, though, as in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, this supernatural movement exceeds our nature: we cannot claim to wield the gifts since we are not their source. The gifts operate in us from beyond us, as it were. There must be a proportionate extrinsic initiator, as Aquinas puts it, which just means that if something supernatural occurs in us, something supernatural must cause it — namely, God Himself, the indwelling Spirit. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are precisely this “extrinsic mover” inspiring us. The habitus that corresponds to the gifts is not a new human power or faculty, nor are they modifications of our natural powers as the theological virtues are. The habitus is nothing more than the shaping the person to be able to easily “hear” and follow divine inspiration and the Holy Spirit’s gifts when they come.

The traditional account is that while our virtues are active because we wield them, act with, and according to them, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are thought of as passive because we receive them. John of St. Thomas uses the example of a boat. When the Holy Spirit dwells in a baptized person who is in a state of grace, the person is like a boat with raised sails that will catch the wind if it were to blow, but the sails do not wield or command the wind: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The sails are lowered if one forfeits their state of grace by mortal sin, rendering the person incapable of catching the wind of inspiration.

In my conversations with Fr. Wojciech Giertych, who has taught moral theology at the Angelicum in Rome for more than a quarter of a century and who still holds the office of Theologian of the Papal Household after being appointed in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI, I discovered that Fr. Giertych teaches using a different example — a transistor radio. Sanctifying grace builds the antenna, so to speak, to be able to catch radio waves from the radio station, but neither the existence of the radio nor the antenna demand that the radio station emit any signals. The sails and the antenna illustrate the same principle: the gifts of the Holy Spirit are passive with respect to us; we do not demand or wield them, rather, they come by God’s Providence, and we have only to be sensitive to them, to listen carefully for the prompting of God Himself.

What does this look like practically? Fr. Cajetan Cuddy tells us, in his introduction to John of St. Thomas’ Gifts of the Holy Spirit, that the gifts can be viewed as God’s Providence manifested in our lives. He says that “while John of St. Thomas’ book is titled The Gifts of the Holy Spirit, it could also bear the title (with equal accuracy): How God Guides Us in Truth and Love.”² He means that, practically, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are how we can understand a typical way in which God operates in us and for us.³

The Church teaches that without the movement of the gifts, supernatural perfection would be impossible. The gifts, then, are indispensable for the Christian life.⁴ They are not an added or extra means of already Christian living, or only just one of the means of spiritual perfection. They are necessary for our supernatural perfection. As Fr. Romanus Cessario puts it, “No believer can advance without the aid of the Holy Spirit” so “the gifts remain an indispensable complement to the moral and theological virtues.”⁵ St. John Paul II in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical dedicated to moral theology, explains that the full moral life that we are called to in the New Law of the Gospel is a “possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace”:

To imitate and live out the love of Christ is not possible for man by his own strength alone. He becomes capable of this love only by virtue of a gift received . . . Love and life according to the Gospel cannot be thought of first and foremost as a kind of precept, because what they demand is beyond man’s abilities. They are possible only as the result of a gift of God who heals, restores and transforms the human heart by his grace…the promise of eternal life is thus linked to the gift of grace, and the gift of the Spirit which we have received is even now the “guarantee of our inheritance” (Eph 1:14) . . . we are speaking of a possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace, by the gift of God. And further, summing up in a remarkable way the great tradition of the Fathers of the East and West, and of Saint Augustine in particular, Saint Thomas was able to write that the New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit given through faith in Christ.⁶

Through His gifts, the Holy Spirit becomes our spiritual teacher, and not just teaching us from afar, but God Himself spiritualizing us from within and making us familiar with divine things.⁷ The Holy Spirit Himself is our spiritual teacher,⁸ and by His gifts He inspires us from within in our commonplace daily operations too, elevating the manner in which they are carried out as motivated by God Himself.⁹ We must “associate the gifts with everyday Christian life [because] they form part of the life of every believer,” as opposed to thinking of them as only being reserved only for certain rare and mystical moments.¹⁰ Indeed, the gifts should be thought of as God’s infinite Providence concentrated in our own lives: “What is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:5).

In Aquinas’ words, God Himself provides us with the gifts “because Our Lord Himself wished us to be conformed to Him.”¹¹ He shares with us a “divine instinct, [so] there is no need to take counsel according to human reason, but only to follow their inner promptings, since they are moved by a principle higher than human reason.”¹² This familiarity with divine things is already a foretaste of our full spiritualization, as now “the gifts of the Holy Spirit render the human mind amenable to the motion of the Holy Spirit: which will be especially realized in heaven, where God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28), and man entirely subject unto Him.”¹³ This is to say that the gifts of the Holy Spirit can totally spiritualize man’s operations, such that in our own moral lives God may be all in all.

It is important to note that Aquinas pairs each of the seven gifts with a virtue, one of the four cardinal or three theological virtues, to show that the whole moral life can be taken up and shaped by the Holy Spirit’s movement, or interior teaching.¹⁴ By annexing the gifts to each virtue, Aquinas is saying that the Holy Spirit can guide the whole moral life; man has the capacity to have all of his operations spiritualized, guided from within by God Himself.

The Gifts Are From Christ’s Humanity

Where do we look for the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Scripture. Christ. Consider Isaiah 11, prophesying the anointing of the Messiah:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him:

a spirit of wisdom and of understanding,

A spirit of counsel and of strength,

a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord,

and his delight shall be the fear of the Lord.

According to Pope Benedict XVI, “in the Old Testament, anointing was regarded as the visible sign that the person anointed was being invested with the gifts of office, with the Spirit of God.”¹⁵ He continues that “the words Messiah and Christ mean ‘the Anointed.’”¹⁶ Because the effect of anointing is being invested with the Spirit of God, when the Spirit of God descends upon Jesus and remains on him (Mt. 3:16; Mk. 1:10; Jn. 1:32), it signals that He is the Anointed One. Jesus’ Baptism is understood as the anointing event of the Christ prophesied by Old Testament passages like Isaiah 11.¹⁷ Those gifts prophesied by Isaiah (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord) are in the Messiah, and “from his fullness we have all received” (Jn 1:16). Through His humanity, the Anointed One participates to us the Spirit of God, his very own anointing.

In her book on deification in Aquinas, Daria Spezzano offers Aquinas’ interpretation and synthesis of John 1:14, 1:16, and Romans 8:29, Jesus is the Anointed One who is “full of grace,” “from whose fullness we have all received” “to be conformed to his image.”¹⁸

Christ’s humanity is real and created. His humanity is not by its nature divinized. Dominic Legge, in The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas, elaborates more on this point: “in order for Christ to undertake these human actions, his human nature stands in genuine need of the operative habitus given in habitual grace.”¹⁹ Christ’s humanity stands in genuine need of sanctifying grace, the indwelling Spirit, which we receive at baptism. Even though the Second Divine Person’s humanity subsists according to the very esse personale (personal mode of existence) of the uncreated Son, and His soul is as close as a created thing can be to the source of grace (God Himself), Legge is very careful to spell out for us that the grace of union by which the Son is joined to a humanity alone is not the source of Christ’s habitual grace. Christ’s habitual grace “is not reducible to the hypostatic union, which is formally distinct from it.” But Christ’s habitual grace “inseparably follows” the hypostatic union in the same way the eternal procession of the Spirit inseparably follows the eternal generation of the Son. Just as the Son’s generation implies the Spirit’s procession, the Son’s visible mission (the Incarnation) implies the Spirit’s invisible mission (holiness) in the humanity that the Son unites himself to.²⁰ In Legge’s words, the missions of the persons are necessarily simultaneous, inseparable, and coordinated.²¹ While “Christ’s human nature is united to the Son alone, it is simultaneously filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit because the Son and Spirit are never apart.”²² Aquinas uses a natural analogy, “like splendor flowing from the sun.”²³

So in Christ’s soul is grace “possessed in its highest possible excellence and in its greatest possible extension to all its effects,”²⁴ not by the hypostatic union alone, but by the Spirit’s presence in His humanity, which necessarily follows his Incarnation. Spezzano agrees saying that “grace belongs to [Christ’s] human nature maximally but not essentially.”²⁵ Maximally, because The Divine Person of the Son receives the Spirit’s indwelling perfectly and without measure, but not essentially since his humanity remains a created nature that is not essentially ordered to divine life.

How and why Christ receives the gifts of the Holy Spirit directly impinges on our concern in this article because Christ took on our very own humanity. Our humanity, therefore, can be divinized and familiarized with divine things, in the same way that Christ’s humanity is divinized and familiarized with divine things. “To be sure, [the gifts of grace received by Christ, even as he can use them as he wills] remain gifts in his humanity — they do not come from the principles of his human nature itself.”²⁶

Spezzano includes a helpful history of the instrumentality of Christ’s humanity in Aquinas. Early in Aquinas’ career, Aquinas does not see Christ’s humanity as an instrumental cause of grace to the faithful, but merely as a dispositive cause. Christ, as man, merely disposes humanity to receive grace from God by his perfect human sacrifice and by his moral exemplarity. Later, Aquinas realizes that Christ’s humanity does not merely dispose us to receive grace from God, but grace only flows to us through Christ’s humanity: Christ’s humanity is a true instrument of His Divinity. This true instrumentality allows for participation language. Christ “participates” us, by and through his common humanity, into His very own life of grace. Just as everything that is (everything that exists), is a participation in God’s being, everything that is holy is a participation in Christ’s holiness.

Spezzano also calls our attention to Aquinas’ use of the notion of Christ’s grace of headship. This is the name we give to the grace mediated to the Church through Christ the one mediator and head of the Church. Spezzano makes clear that Christ’s habitual grace and the grace of headship that flows to us are the same grace. As John tells us that it is “from [Christ’s] fullness we have all received,” Aquinas says that Christ “is our head, in that we receive from Him. Therefore, he is our head, inasmuch as he has the fullness of grace. Now he had the fullness of grace, inasmuch as personal grace was perfectly in Him . . . Therefore according to his personal grace he is our head. And so his capital grace and personal grace are not distinct.”²⁷ We can refer to them separately since the words signify different aspects of the one grace: His habitual grace refers to His own holiness, while His grace of headship refers to the grace that He shares with the faithful. The point, though, is that this is one and the same grace. Because these graces are the same, we can truly say that our holiness is a participated perfection in Christ; we participate in His very own personal holiness.

So just as Christ received the gifts and was sensitive to the Spirit’s prompting his humanity — being “driven” into the desert, for example — so is human nature capable of receiving these very same inspirations and acting upon them in trust.

Conclusion

Aquinas says that “by the Incarnation human nature is raised to its highest perfection,” and this should happen in time and for the sake of salvation.²⁸ Fr. Thomas Joseph White tells us that indeed Christ “is the most perfect instantiation of what it means to be authentically human . . . nevertheless he is this only by the gift of God’s grace, the grace of union of the humanity of Christ to the Word and the gift of infused, habitual graces in the human mind and will of Christ.”²⁹ Christ’s humanity is the conjoined instrumental cause of our deification, since the graces that Christ merits for us flow to us only through His humanity, which is conjoined to His divinity. Christ is the source of grace through whom all grace flows: “Christ is both our model and the causal exemplar of our deification.”³⁰ To reframe this in terms of Gaudium et Spes 22, as we began with, Christ reveals man to himself not only by his example, but also by deifying us from within, participating us in his very own graced humanity so that we can be led by the same Spirit from within. Christ’s self-revelation to humanity is both because he is the most perfect instantiation of what it means to be authentically human and because he shares his very own grace with us. Christ takes on a humanity and shows forth humanity’s highest perfection, from the inside out, so to speak. The visible mission of the Son of the Incarnation, and the Holy Spirit’s simultaneous, inseparable, and coordinated mission of holiness, are displayed at the Baptism of Jesus where he is revealed to be the prophesied Anointed One. Christ shows us what it means to be fully human and provides the means for us to be conformed to him by sharing his anointing with us. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are God Himself teaching us about Himself. To repeat Fr. Cessario, “The Holy Spirit . . . pushes the believer beyond the restrictions of human inclination and judgment in matters that pertain to eternal life. This ‘leading’ equals a kind of pedagogy in divine things.”³¹