Grace, Actual and Habitual: A Dogmatic TreatisePohle, Joseph
Religion
Grace, Actual and Habitual: A Dogmatic Treatise
Pohle, Joseph
Grace (Theology)
b) While theologians are unanimous in accepting the doctrine of the
personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the just as clearly contained in
Sacred Scripture and Tradition, they differ in explaining the manner in
which He dwells in the soul.
α) The great majority hold that the Holy Ghost can not dwell in the soul,
as the human soul dwells in the body, _per modum informationis_, nor yet
by a hypostatic union, as godhead and manhood dwell together in the Person
of Christ; and that consequently His indwelling is objectively an
indwelling of the whole Trinity, which is appropriated to the Third Person
merely because the Holy Ghost is “hypostatic holiness” or “personal love.”
This view is based on what is called “the fundamental law of the Trinity,”
_viz._: “In God all things are one except where there is opposition of
relation.”(1144) Sacred Scripture speaks of the personal indwelling of the
Father and the Son as well as of the Holy Ghost. Cfr. John XIV, 23: “If
any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we
will come to him and will make our abode with him.”(1145) St. Athanasius
concludes from these words that “the _energia_ of the Trinity is one....
Indeed when the Lord says: I and the Father will come, the Spirit also
comes, to dwell in us in precisely the same manner in which the Son dwells
in us.”(1146) And St. Augustine teaches: “Love, therefore, which is of God
and is God, is properly the Holy Spirit, by whom the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts,—that love by which the whole Trinity dwells in
us.”(1147) Accordingly, the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost consists
in the state of grace as bearing a special relation to the Third Person of
the Trinity; the “higher nature” which sanctifying grace imparts to the
soul is not an absolute but a relative form (σχέσις), by which the soul is
mysteriously united with the Three Divine Persons and, by appropriation,
with the Holy Ghost, thereby becoming a throne and temple of God. It is in
this sense that the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the soul is called the
climax of justification.(1148)
β) Other eminent theologians (Petavius, Passaglia, Schrader, Scheeben,
Hurter, _et al._) regard the explanation just given as unsatisfactory.
They contend that the Fathers, especially those of the East, conceived the
indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the souls of the just, not as an
indwelling (ἐνοίκησις) of the Trinity, appropriated to the Holy Ghost, but
as a union (ἕνωσις) of the Holy Ghost Himself with the soul.(1149) This
union, they say, is neither physical nor hypostatic, but an altogether
unique and inexplicable relation by which the soul is morally,
accidentally, and actively united to the person of the Holy Ghost.(1150)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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