Copyright 2002 St Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary Press 23. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit Until we have been cleansed from the passions, the gifts of the Holy Spirit received during the Mystery of Holy Chrism aren’t fully manifested, although they too work in a covered way through each virtue. But once the passions which cover them are removed, the gifts of the Holy Spirit blaze up in our consciousness, from the hidden part of the heart, in all their brilliance. Strictly speaking, in distinction to the grace of Baptism which directs the work of mortifying the old man and of the general growth of the new, they are intended to remake and intensify the powers of the knowledge of the soul and of courageous perseverance in God, after he has known Him. They are first of all the gifts for enlightening the mind, and precisely because of this, gifts for its fortification in its orientation toward God. Therefore they show their full efficiency only when our intellectual powers, which work with them, have been sufficiently developed. They are the fruits of a Mystery which imparts to us the gifts of the Holy Spirit; they are meant to open the spirit in us and to make rich the life “in the Spirit,” but this can’t be realized before purification from the passions. Only after the termination of the work of purification, driven especially by the powers of Baptism and of repentance, does the work of the gifts of the Holy Spirit appear first and foremost.
Of course this doesn’t mean that the soul is left only with these gifts, but the beginning of the activation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit also means an activation of His direct influence. Where grace is, there is the Spirit; this is why the words grace and Spirit are used alternately. By the Mystery of Holy Chrism, the Holy Spirit built Himself a dwelling in the hidden interior of our nature. Since then He has been in constant contact with us. From there, the grace of Baptism sets in motion the gifts of the Spirit; their work is to pierce the heavy layers of the passions, so that finally the light of these gifts, in other words, of the Holy Spirit, might flood through the opening into the deepest region of our nature. But already before flooding in freely at the end of the total cleansing of the passions, this light becomes stronger. By each virtue, won at the removal of every passionate layer in us, it becomes more transparent. But first we feel the power which works in us during this cleansing. That is, the Holy Spirit at the beginning shows more of His power, and later more light, until illumination breaks out fully in our consciousness. In this way we must understand that of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit-the spirit of the fear of God, the spirit of strength, the spirit of counsel, the spirit of understanding, the spirit of knowledge, the spirit of comprehension, the spirit of wisdom, the first two almost exclusively indicate the power of action: The spirit of the fear of God keeps us from evil, the spirit of strength urges us to good. From this initial phase, knowledge is lacking. It only comes later and is represented by the other five gifts. After we have made some progress in the winning of the virtues, the horizon of our consciousness begins to redden with the first glow of illumination so that on the peak of dispassion the whole sun of the Holy Spirit might rise. This is how St. Maximus the Confessor interprets the gifts of the Holy Spirit: After the cessation of sin by the fear of God and after the action of the virtues by strength, we win by the spirit of counsel the skill of discernment. This helps us to carry out with the best judgment the divine commands and to best size up the circumstances of every situation. At the beginning we act mostly from the fear of God, carrying out the commands for the simple reason that God has given them. Later, however, we begin to realize by our own judgment that what God commands us to do is good, but what stops us is evil. At the same time, we begin to understand what is most suitable to fulfill from the commands in each circumstance. From this first flickering of light, we progress to a brighter one by the gift of understanding, which teaches us how to realize in a practical way the blessings which have been revealed to us by the commands, in such a way as to gain the virtues. Because it can happen that someone can realize what blessings are contained in the commands and nevertheless not know how to execute them in the most satisfactory way, because he works without judgment. The gift of understanding then is what teaches us how to do a good thing with judgment. Next follows the gift of knowledge, which in distinction to the gift of counsel, no longer discerns only in a general way the blessings in one command from the evil in another, but it reveals the very reason or deeper motivation of each command and virtue. Now I no longer just know in general that it is better to be humble than arrogant, but I realize that by humility I reach the point where I can see the glory of God; I realize that arrogance blinds me-it lets me see only myself. From this gift we are raised to that of comprehension which changes the most theoretical penetration of the logoi of the virtues into a personal, affective identification with them, which “produces a fusion of our natural powers with the ways and the logoi of the commands,” or “it changes our natural powers into the known logoi of the virtues.” From this gift we advance to the last, which is the gift of wisdom. This makes us: ... ascend to the cause of the spiritual logoi in the commands and to union with it. By this we know, as far as is humanly possible, in an unknown way, the simple logoi of things found in God; we take out the truth from everything, as from a gushing spring of the heart, and we also share it in different ways with others. In other words, this gift brings us to the simple and exact contemplation of the truth in all things. “Going on from here we shall bring to light many and varying logoi of the truth by the wise contemplation of perceptible things and of intelligent beings.” In everything that we do or understand, we now have a vision of the whole, of the relationship of our deed or thing with the universal order. We have reached wisdom after we have gained all the virtues, in other words after we have gained the state of dispassion. It is full sunlight, after it was anticipated by stronger and stronger rays. With this full sunlight, illumination, in the strict sense of the word, begins. In all the partial virtues which preceded dispassion a ray of wisdom appeared in each one; we saw a little of it. Each one was a gift from the illuminating gifts of the Holy Spirit. Now the whole of wisdom appears, concentrated and simple at the same time. It is always united with the fullness of the illuminating gifts of the Holy Spirit. The wise person understands in an all-encompassing way the truth in all things, that is, he sees them in an interdependence, each with its purpose and at the same time its cause, that is God. Wisdom is the gift of seeing God simultaneously with all things or through them, as the Maker, Sustainer and effective Guide of all things. It helps us to understand at a glance our past life, its purpose, the path that we should follow, the interdependent meanings of the events of human life, of the things in nature, because the unique Power and Cause which stands at the base of all things and shows its action simultaneously in them also explains them. On the basis of this concurrent overview and comprehension, we can then grasp the meaning of each thing and the norm of each act that must be carried out. If at the beginning we were raised gradually from the partially known to the universally unknown, now, from the peak of the view of the whole we sometimes lower our eyes to one detail, sometimes to another, immediately finding its place, immediately understanding its purpose and function in this landscape. In another place St. Maximus the Confessor distinguishes between discernment and knowledge (diakrisis, gnosis). The first is born from virtuous activity, the second, from faith; the first is of a practical nature, the second of a contemplative. By the first we distinguish good from evil, by the second we know the logoi of visible and invisible realities, they have their foundation in God. We could identify the first with the gifts of council, understanding, knowledge, and comprehension, and the second with the gift of wisdom, because elsewhere St. Maximus doesn’t consider that faith develops into knowledge along the distinct line of the virtues. But we could consider that practical discernment and contemplative knowledge or wisdom are two convergent peaks, which meet in love, and give birth to a higher, mystical knowledge of God, distinct from wisdom, or from the knowledge of him in the things of the world. The gifts of the Holy Spirit guide us and sustain us in the mediated knowledge of God. Distinct from it is the direct knowledge of God, which will constitute the third phase of the spiritual ascent, or the phase of the union of the soul with God, or of the vision of the divine light. In this second phase, or of illumination, we will concern ourselves with the knowledge of Him by means of nature and of human actions, individual and collective. It is a knowledge which follows immediately after the step of dispassion, which is a cleansing of the passions, but not yet of the simple images of things too. Only after the mind is cleansed not only from the passions but also from the simple images and representations of things, will the direct knowledge of God be produced, a theological knowledge, in phase three. But because the mediated knowledge of God is also a knowledge by the Holy Spirit, that is, by His gifts, already in this second phase man’s knowledge has become a knowledge in the Spirit. But it is a knowledge by the Holy Spirit, that is by His gifts already in this second phase because it takes place after man by the virtues and by the Holy Spirit has unlocked or actualized spirit in himself, as the central and intimate place of the mind; he has opened the eye destined for the vision of God. The illuminating gifts of the Holy Spirit become obvious to man only by this opening of this eye of his, of this room meant to be filled with divine light. The Holy Spirit makes Himself known to us only by the activation of our spirit. So the knowledge by the Holy Spirit is one of the mind returned to its spirit, from the disorder at the surface. The knowledge in the spirit is one in the intimate interior of man, in the midst of the divine light which fills this spirit. By this light all things become transparent before the one who knows in spirit. His vision, the surface of things and of human actions are no longer an opaque wall, but their meanings and relationships with God become crystal clear. He is no longer stopped by the passions at this surface-he has penetrated beneath his own surface, and through the thick surface of things. This vision into the depths of things and of human destinies is a great mystery. These depths can’t be opened only by the sensory comprehension of things because then anybody could grasp them, as they grasp their perceptible structure by their logoi . They could be understood by the bundle of common attributes of the examples in the same species, by the so-called “notions” or “essences” of things. But if the depths become transparent only to the one who has attained knowledge “in the spirit” to the one who has been raised “in his spirit” from his thick shell, it means that this spirit is a power which penetrates the depths of things. Either the light from the spirit penetrates beyond the opaque layer of things, or it makes the light hidden in them transparent. Only in the measure in which someone becomes transparent to himself, are things also made transparent to him, because this power which works in him later reaches the exterior. The holy Fathers use this comparison: For our eyes to see the natural light and the things in it, they themselves must be filled with it already; so too, for the eyes of our soul to see the light of intelligible and divine realities, that is the depths of things, they must first be filled with the light which radiates from these depths. In him who sees must be found something of what is seen. Thus St. Maximus calls the depth of Scripture its “spirit,” just as the depth in man he calls his “spirit.” The one who looks into Scripture from his spirit, understands it. In other words, the depths of man and of things are illuminated by a common light, or a common light radiates from them. A common light unites the subject with things or with his neighbors. He who has received this light has penetrated into the zone of the depths distinct from himself. His self and these depths form by this light a dual unity; in a more reduced measure such a unity and a visible zone of the world is formed by the natural light which envelops it, or penetrates it, with the seeing power of the bodily senses. A Christian thinker says that this mystical knowledge “transcends the gnosiological distinction between subject and object and the absorption of reality into the world of either of them.” Spiritual experience, upon which realist symbolism rests, lies altogether beyond the antithesis between subject and object and the substantialist conception of them. Spiritual life is no more subjective than it is objective. The symbolism of it, that is, its embodiment in forms belonging to the natural world, may be understood as an objectification, but that is precisely why it is not objective in the rationalist sense of the word. The symbolic mode of thought includes both subject and object within itself, and that at an infinitely deeper level of consciousness. If objectification is nothing more than a process of symbolization, then for that very reason all objective rationalism and all naive conceptions of an object-substance cease to possess justification. What are called objective realities are in fact only realities of a secondary order, for they are merely symbolic and possess no reality in their own right. But subjective realities, such as the reality of the affective life and that of the subject and its subjective world, are likewise merely secondary and symbolic in character. On this plane the separation between subject and object are surpassed, without the two becoming confused. The subject and object are distinct, but not separated. The separation of the subject from the object is surpassed and nevertheless both are preserved, because the subject in its depths experiences an “object” distinct from itself. But the “object” experienced within, as a spiritual reality or connected within with the subject, is in a continuity or intercommunion with the knowing subject and both, with the supreme Subject who is the base of all things. Of course this spiritual reality isn’t uniform, but varies; it is a world full of reason, from which the structure proper to each thing in its visible aspect, in the structure proper to each person, to each distinct action is incorporated. But it isn’t less true that they are woven into a whole, or that they are bathed in this same understanding and comprehending light. And when this light has filled us within, it doesn’t appear to us to be limited to our nature alone, but it extends over everything with which we are united by purity and love. We have said that by this light individual things and nature in totality become a transparency by which their higher logoi and their relationships with God become transparent. God Himself in some way is seen through things. We will now proceed to describe this knowledge of God in creation, because it constitutes, according to Evagrius and St. Maximus the Confessor, the essence of phase two of the faithful’s ascent to deification, the phase of illumination. ___________ *Footnotes have been omitted. Please refer to the original for more information. Comments are closed.
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