Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History
“Magnum principium, et regni ejus non erit finis. Deus fortis, dominator, princeps pacis.”
In order to complete the view taken in the preceding chapter of the work of Christ as the second Adam over against the work of the first Adam, it is necessary to dwell at greater length upon a point of which only cursory mention was made therein. It was our object there to bring out the relation of Christ to the Church, but this cannot be done without fully exhibiting the relation to the same Church of the Holy Spirit. To the Incarnation the Fathers in general give the title of the Dispensation of the Son, and as the equivalent, the result, the complement and crown of this Dispensation, they put the Giving of the Spirit.91 This Giving of the Spirit occupies the whole region of grace, and is coextensive with the whole action of the Incarnate God upon men whom He has taken to be His brethren. The Holy Spirit in this Giving is He who represents the Redeemer, and executes His will, not as an instrument, not as one subordinate, but as the very mind of Christ between whom and Christ there can far less enter any notion of division or separation than between a man and his own spirit. He is that other Paraclete, abiding for ever, who replaces to the disciples the visible absence of the first Paraclete, the Redeemer Himself: He is the Power constituting the Kingdom of Christ; the Godhead inhabiting His Temple; the Soul animating His mystical Body; the Charity, kindling into a living flame the heart of His Bride; the Creator and Father of His Race.
This connection between the Dispensation of the Son and the Giving of the Spirit was delineated by our Lord himself when He first appeared to His assembled disciples after His resurrection. As they were gazing in wonder and trembling joy on that Body which had undergone His awful passion, as He showed them the wounds in His hands and His feet, He told them how His sufferings were the fulfilment of all that in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms had been written concerning Him. And thereupon it is said, He opened their mind to the understanding of these Scriptures. It was thus that the Christ was to suffer, it was thus that He was to rise again on the third day. Hitherto He has dwelt upon His own dispensation, as the fulfilment of all prophecy, now He proceeds to its fruit: that in the name of this Christ repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you,” He says, “are the witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but stay you in the city of Jerusalem until you be endued with power from on high.” Again, at another occasion of equal solemnity, when He was with His assembled disciples in visible form for the last time, at the moment preceding His ascension, He uses the same emphatic words, charging them not to depart from the city, but to await there that promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost, which they were to receive in common together, which was to be the power in virtue of which they should be His witnesses for all time unto the ends of the earth: the power which instead of restoring a local kingdom to Israel, as was in their thoughts when they questioned Him, was to create an universal kingdom to Him in the hearts of men. It is then as the result of His passion, and the token of His resurrection, that the Son sends down upon His disciples the promise of the Father, that is, the perpetual presence of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit of Truth and Grace, that permanent and immanent power from on high, who, dwelling for ever in the disciples, makes the Church.
But these words, so singular and so forcible, which He uses on these two occasions, at His resurrection and His ascension, are themselves a reference to the long discourse which He had held with His apostles on the night of His passion. It is in this discourse, from the moment that Judas left them to the conclusion of the divine prayer – and if we can make any distinction in His words, surely these are the most solemn which were ever put together in human language, since they are the prayer not of a creature to the Creator, but the prayer of One divine Person to Another – it is in this discourse that He describes the power from on high with which, as the promise of the Father, He, the Son, would invest His disciples. It is here He says that He would ask the Father, who should give them another Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, to abide with them for ever: whom the world would not receive, nor see, nor know, but whom they should know, because He should abide with them and be in them. This other Paraclete, coequal therefore with Himself, whom the Father should send in His name, and whom He should send from the Father, the Spirit of holiness as well as the Spirit of truth, should teach them all things and remind them of all His teaching. And His coming, though invisible, should profit them more than His own visible presence. For while He declared Himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life,92 He revealed to them here that it was by that very way that the Spirit of truth should lead them by the hand into all truth. It was in this Truth, that is, in Himself, that they should be sanctified, and that they should be one, the glory of the Incarnation, which had been given to Him, passing on to them as the members of His Body, by the joint possession of the spirit of truth and holiness, whose presence was the gage that the Father loved them, as He loved Christ, the Body being identified with the Head. In all this He was describing to them the work of that other Paraclete, His own Spirit, “who was to sanctify what He had redeemed, and to guard and maintain possession of what He had acquired.”93 This is but a small portion of that abundant revelation, which our Lord then communicated to His apostles, concerning the Power from on high with which they were to be invested.
The words of our Lord to His apostles at the three great points of His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension, stand out beyond the rest in their appeal to our affections. The last words of a friend are the dearest, and these are the last words of the Bridegroom, and they are concerning His Bride. When He was Himself quitting His disciples He dwells upon the Power which was to create and maintain His Church, upon the gift of His Spirit, His other self, in which gift lay the formation of His kingdom. It is thus He expresses to us the point with which we started, that the Giving of His Spirit is the fulfilment of all that Dispensation wherein the eternal Word took human flesh.
It is not only then the unanimous voice of the Fathers which sets the Giving of the Spirit over against the Incarnation of the Son. They are but carrying on that which our Lord so markedly taught; their tradition was but the echo of His voice, as their life was the fulfilment of it.
But it was a double malady in man which God the Word became man to cure. It was the whole nature which was affected with a taint, and the soul through the whole race touched in both its powers of the intellect94 and the will. That false worship which we have seen spreading through the earth, and that deep corruption of manners which was interlaced with it, were the symptoms of this malady. The perversion of the truth concerning the being of God, and all the duties of man which grow out of this being, was inextricably blended with the disregard of these duties in the actual conduct of man. It was in vain to set the truth before man's intellect without a corresponding power to act upon his will. Therefore the apostle described the glory of the only-begotten Son, when He dwelt as man among us, by the double expression that He was “full of grace and truth.” Viewed as the Head of human nature, its Father and new beginning, He is the perpetual fountain to it of these two, which no law, not even one divinely given, could bestow. For the law could make nothing perfect, because it could not touch the will; and the law gave the shadow, but not the very truth of things. But when that unspeakable union of the divine nature with the human had taken effect in the unity of one Person, Truth and Grace had an everlasting human fountain in the created nature of the Incarnate Word. Now was the fountain to pour forth a perpetual stream upon the race assumed. And this it does by the descent of the Spirit. In this descent upon the assembled Church the Grace and Truth of the divine Head, with which His Flesh, carried by the Godhead, overstreams, find themselves a human dwelling in the race. Such an operation belongs only to the Divine Spirit, for God alone can so act upon the intellect and will of creatures as to penetrate them with His gifts of Truth and Grace, while He leaves them their free will, their full individuality, as creatures. This, then, was the range of that power with which our Lord foretold to His apostles that they should be invested, and for which He bade them wait. The whole field of truth as it respects the relation of God to His creatures as moral beings, and the whole extent of grace, as it touches the human will, for the performance of every act which a reasonable creature can execute, made up the extent of that divine indwelling in men which the Spirit of Christ assumed upon the day of Pentecost. This was the power of the Holy Ghost which then came down upon men. Through the whole divine discourse which preceded His passion, our Lord dwells upon this double power, referring to Himself as the Truth, to His Spirit as the Spirit of the Truth, to Himself as the Vine, and so that root of grace which should communicate its sap to the branches, and to His Spirit, who should take of His and give it to them; uniting both ideas of Truth and Grace in that one word, “Sanctify them in thy Truth,” that is by incorporation with me, who am the Truth, in my Spirit, who is the Truth. And so the eternal Word, having assumed a human Body, when He withdraws His corporal presence, proceeds to form that other human Body, the dwelling-place of His Spirit, in which His Truth and Grace are to become visible.
Thus the transfusion of Truth and Grace from the Incarnate Word to His mystical Body is the generic character of the Giving of the Spirit.
Two differential marks distinguish this giving from any which preceded the coming of our Lord.
First, the Spirit should come upon them, but should never depart from them. “He shall give you another Comforter, to abide with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth.” This giving was not an intermittent operation, whether extraordinary, such as had shown itself in Moses and the Prophets, for their inspiration in writing, or their guidance in particular trials, nor that ordinary one whereby from the beginning He had enabled all the good and just to lead a life acceptable to Him. It was a far higher gift,95 wherein, as S. Augustine says, by the very presence of His majesty no longer the mere odour of the balsam, but the substance itself of the sacred unguent was poured into those vessels, making them His temple, and conveying that adoption in virtue of which they should not be left orphans, but have their Father invisibly with them for ever. No intermittent operation, and no presence less than that of His substance, would reach the force of the words used by our Lord, “I will ask the Father, and He shall send you another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to abide with you for ever;” for that word “other” conveys a comparison with Himself, from whom they had never been separated since He had called them, in whose continuance with them alone was their strength, their unity, their joint existence and mission, without whom they could do nothing. All this to them that “other” Paraclete was to be, in order that the departure of the Former Paraclete should be expedient for them. For in this continuity of His presence was involved the further gift that the Paraclete was to come to them as a Body, and because of this manner of coming He replaced the Former. Had He come to them only as individuals, they would have suffered a grievous loss, the loss of the Head who made them one. But He came to them as the Body of Christ, and by coming made them that Body, being the Spirit of the Head. That rushing mighty wind filled the whole house in which they were sitting, and they all were filled together with the presence; and as a sign that the old confusion and separation of mankind were in them to be done away, speaking in one tongue the one truth which was evermore to dwell with them, they were heard in all the various languages of the nations present at the feast. “The society by which men are made the one Body of the only Son of God belongs to the Spirit,”96 and He came upon all together in one House to indicate, as He made, that one Body. “The mode of giving,” says S. Augustine, “was such as never before appeared. Nowhere do we read before that men congregated together had by receiving the Holy Ghost spoken with the tongues of all nations.”97 “Therefore He came upon Pentecost as upon His birthday.”98
It is His presence alone which confers four gifts upon the body which He vivifies.
It was the will, says S. Augustine,99 of the Father and the Son that we should have communion with each other and with Them by means of that which is common to Them, and by that gift to collect us into one, which, being one, They both have; that is to say, by the Holy Ghost, who is God, and the gift of God. For, says S. Thomas,100 the unity of the Holy Spirit makes unity in the Church. It is not by similarity, or by juxtaposition, or by agreement, how much less by concessions and compromises, that unity exists in the body of Christ, but because the Spirit is one, because all gifts, however various, all functions, however distinct, are distributed by this One.
For the same reason truth dwells in this Body, because He is the Spirit of Truth. Our Lord Himself has defined His great function in this particular, to lead His disciples by the hand101 into all truth, to teach all things, and remind of all things which made up His own teaching. This function began on the day of Pentecost, and lasts to the day of judgment, and belongs to the Body of Christ, and to it alone, and belongs to it because it is animated by the Spirit of Truth. And this animation is like the Head, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not of any past time more or less than of the present or the future. It is the illumination which belongs to that whole last day, through which the Body of Christ grows, teaches, labours, and suffers, until the mortal day break into the light of eternity.
His third gift to the Body is that of charity, and for the same reason, because He is this Himself. He who is not only the Unity of the Father and the Son, but their mutual Love, coming as the gift of that Divine love which redeemed the world by the sacrifice of its Maker, and as the Spirit of that Love, who invested Himself with human flesh, creates in this human dwelling-place that one charity which bears His name, and is of His nature, and which in that one body joins the wills of men together as His Truth joins their intellects. If the Body of Christ has one prevailing charity, which reaches to all its members, and encompasses the least as well as the greatest, it is because the heart is divine.
The fourth gift which He bestows upon the Body is sanctification, and it may be said to be the result of the other three. This, again, is His own name and nature, and many have thought and said, His personal attribute, to make holy; and that, as Fathership indicates the First Person, and Sonship the Second, so the making holy names the Third, the bond of the most blessed Trinity. But this, at least, may be said to be the final cause of the body which He animates, the imparting of holiness. In virtue of this gift, all the means and aids and rules of holiness are stored up in the Body. And this does not mean that there is not a continual falling away from the rule and practice of holiness in particular members, but it means that while these, in spite of the Body's nurture and solicitude, fall away from it and perish, the Body lasts for ever, the rules and aids and means of holiness lasting for ever within it, because it is the Body of the Spirit of holiness.
Now these four gifts, Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, can none of them exist in the Body without the other, and all of them exist together there, because they have one divine root, that indwelling of the Holy Spirit which is the fruit of the Incarnation, and whereby the mystical Body of Christ corresponds to His natural Body. Of this Body the beginning is Unity, the substance Truth, the bond Charity, the end Sanctity. Countless heresies and schisms have sought to break up the coinherence of these gifts, but in vain. The only success which the indwelling Spirit allows them is to detach from the Body those who are unworthy to remain in it, and to prolong for a time their maimed existence by some portion of some of His gifts. Truth, for instance, has such a vitality that many a heresy will live for ages on that fragment which it has detached from the mass; unity and charity have such force that even their shadow, that is, the joint possession of a fragmentary truth, and the good-will thence proceeding, will prolong for a time a sort of corporate existence. Holiness has so attractive a power, that zeal and self-denial, which present the seeming of it, will make the fortune of a sect for a time. But in the union and the completeness of these four gifts, the great Body of Christ stands out through all the ages inimitable and unapproachable. Alone it dares to claim them thus united and complete, for alone it can present their realisation.
These four gifts, then, dwell in the Body in a higher degree than that in which they adorn the members of the Body, as in it, by force of the Spirit's indwelling, they ever exist together. Let us now see the qualities which the Spirit imparts to the members of the Body, by virtue of their incorporation into it.
First of all is the forgiveness of sins. The Spirit takes them out of that state of alienation in which they are born, and unites them to His Body; and in so doing He effaces both the birth-sin and every actual sin which they may have committed. This is that plenary forgiveness of sins, the pure gift of God unpreceded by any merit on man's part, which greets the new-comer out of Adam's body of sin into the Body of Christ. It is imparted by and from the Body, and to its members alone.
The second quality is that illumination of the mind, irradiated by the truth, the whole compass of which exists in the Body. This illumination is the root of the virtue of faith, by means of which the individual mind appropriates the divine truth presented to it. The force of the virtue differs in the individual as the keenness of sight in the natural man, but the visual power is the same in quality in all. By it the mind of the believer lays hold in ever varying degree, one more and one less, of that great harmony of truth which is held in its completeness, its manifold applications, and all but infinite relations, only by the Body. For the truth with which we deal is not unlocalised and scattered, the prey, as it were, of the individual mind, which can hunt it down and take it as a spoil, but it is a divine gift, orbed in the sphere which was created for it, the Body of that Word who is the Truth. Hence the first question to the applicant for baptism: What askest thou of the Church of God? and the answer is, Faith.
The third quality is the adoption of Sonship, which flows directly from incorporation into the Body of Christ, and to which man has no sort of title in himself or from his own nature, but which comes to him only by kindred with Him who, on the morning of His resurrection, greeted that great penitent who bore the figure of the Church with that paschal salutation of the Second Adam, “Go to my brethren, and say, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.” And the divine virtue of hope well corresponds to this quality, the effects of which in a state of trial and conflict are to so great a degree future and unseen. It seems, moreover, to be as a special link and tie between the virtue which purifies the intellect, and that which corrects the will and makes it obedient. Thus through it we pass on to the fourth quality of Sanctification, which is the completion of the other three and their end, the harmony of each individual will with the divine will, the work of charity. That divine virtue is the special fruit of the passion of Christ, which was to gather up into one what sin had disunited and torn away, first from its Author, and then from the order by Him created, which was to heal the animosities thus introduced, and to change the world from a conflict wherein each sought to better himself at the expense of his neighbour, into a community cemented together with mutual affection. It was with reason, therefore, that S. Augustine would not allow the possession of charity, save in the unity of that one Body which Christ had created,102 and without charity there is no sanctification.
The four qualities thus slightly sketched, forgiveness of sins, illumination of faith, adoption to sonship, and sanctification by charity, which come to the individual by and with incorporation into the Body, are not given to him irrevocably, but are conditional upon his perseverance. They are portions and derivations of that vast treasure of Truth and Grace which the Body holds in their entireness and for ever, because of the perpetual indwelling of the Spirit who makes its life, but which He dispenses as it pleases Him to the members, and which He may withdraw from them in default of their coöperation. Vast are the losses thereby incurred, not to the treasure-house which remains inexhaustible, but to those who fall out of it back into the world, or rather that body of Adam from which they were taken. But these losses touch not the beauty and the glory of that Body of Christ, which goes on through the ages, and takes up its own, fulfils its appointed work, and reaches its intended end.
Thus on the day of Pentecost a new Power, the Spirit of the Incarnate God, descended not upon single men, but upon an assembly of men, binding it in a unity, conveying to it a truth, kindling in it a charity, and working through these a sanctification never before known; which Power, thenceforth dwelling in that Body, was to collect and draw into itself out of all nations and ranks of men those who should form the Church, that is, the Kingdom and Temple, and House, and Body, and Family of Christ. In it was to work and from it to go forth henceforward to all time the virtue of Him who had assumed our flesh, not transiently, but for ever; in the Head and the Body, through the life of His Spirit, Christ should teach and bear for ever that witness to the truth of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate, and concerning which He said that “this gospel of the kingdom should be proclaimed through the whole world, for a witness to all nations, and then that the end should come.”103 To the continuance, the indissolubility, the purity of this power He has pledged His word in such a way that they who deny it must in doing so deny Him. He has even made the unity of this Body the special mark to men of the truth of His mission, beseeching His Father in that last prayer, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for those also who through their word shall believe in Me, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.”
There are three analogies104 which illustrate this creation of our Lord – a creation in itself as singular as His assumption of man's nature.
First, that of the relation between the soul and body. The soul is the life of the body; the body, as it were, the mansion and home of the soul, its bearer. Through the body the qualities of the soul become visible and known; its powers exercise themselves, and personal unity so binds the two together that we love or hate, admire or despise, the one for the sake of the other; the grief of the soul acts upon the body, the sickness of the body depresses the soul. Through the acts of the body we learn the very existence of the soul, and in these acts it portrays itself. Human nature has been so made by its Creator that the qualities of soul and body, of spirit and matter, are imputed in the individual man to each other. Now to the Body we have been considering the Spirit of Christ is, as it were, the soul. It is nothing strange, then, if it was His will to create such a Body, if it be the result of His Incarnation, that the like effects which exist in the case of every human soul and body should take place here. To this Body also the power and virtue of its soul are communicated; and, since Christ by His Spirit animates it, in honouring it He is honoured; in despising it, He is despised. There is an imparting to it of the qualities which He has; and thus it is that unity and sanctity, truth and charity dwell in it as the operation of His mind. Thus every man contains in himself, in the union of soul and body, an image of that tie by which Christ and His Church are one.
Secondly, because God has created man for society, He has implanted in him an irrepressible instinct of communion with his brother men. This instinct it is which, under circumstances of every possible variety, results in one end, the State. The human commonwealth, whatever external shape it wear, whatever division of its powers it make, springs from this. In virtue of this original formation of man, that he is made to live together, and gregariously, not separately, the supreme power of government, the power of life and death, dwells in the community, and obedience to it has a divine sanction. Thus, the commonwealth has a variety of powers which the individual has not, and not only so, but it also has powers which do not arise from the mere aggregation of individuals, rather which belong to it as a community, as a whole, for instance, sovereignty in all the details of its exercise. But now the very object for which Christ became Incarnate was to constitute a divine commonwealth. He is the King: it is the tenderness of a God Incarnate that He calls and makes His Kingdom His Body. The powers, then, which belong to the earthly commonwealth belong, with the changes which the change of subject carries, to the Divine. They who have so great a reverence for human government, who respect in the nation an ultimate irresponsible power, ought, if they were consistent, when they acknowledge Christ as having come in the flesh, to acknowledge His government in the kingdom which He has set up. All that his country is to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is contained a reminder of the Christian's relation to the Church, and a picture and ensample of the Church's authority.
Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural life105 through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as Adam's, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit's unity working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers, that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate God.106 Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together, they form that society which failed through Adam's sin. In the first creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second, having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who, with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.
Thus in the union of the soul and body, in the constitution and authority of the human commonwealth, and in the race's natural unity, God holds before us three analogies, which each in some respect, and altogether very largely, illustrate His finished work, to which all natural productions of His providence are subordinate, His work of predilection, His work of unbounded love and sovereign magnificence, the creation of that which is at once the Body, the Kingdom, and the Family of the Incarnate Word.