"The Holy Ghost Himself is Love"

* "GREGORY says (Hom. xxx, in Pentecost.): The Holy Ghost Himself is Love.

"...The name Love in God can be taken essentially and personally. If taken personally it is the proper name of the Holy Ghost; as 'Word' is the proper name of the Son."

─S.T. I, Q. 37, A. 1.

* "AUGUSTINE says (De Trin. iv, 20): "As 'to be born' is, for the Son, to be from the Father, so, for the Holy Ghost, 'to be the Gift of God' is to proceed from Father and Son." But the Holy Ghost receives His proper name from the fact that He proceeds from Father and Son. Therefore Gift is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.

"...Gift, taken personally in God, is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.

"In proof of this we must know that a gift is properly an unreturnable giving, as Aristotle says (Topic. iv, 4)─i.e. a thing which is not given with the intention of a return─and it thus contains the idea of a gratuitous donation. Now, the reason of donation being gratuitous is love; since therefore do we give something to anyone gratuitously forasmuch as we wish him well. So what we first give him is the love whereby we wish him well. Hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Ghost proceeds as love, as stated above (I:27:4; I:37:1), He proceeds as the first gift. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. xv, 24): By the gift, which is the Holy Ghost, many particular gifts are portioned out to the members of Christ."

─S.T. I, Q. 38, A. 2.

~St. Thomas Aquinas

Pentecost, by Barnaba Da Modena.
Egg tempera on wood,1377; National Gallery, London.

G.K. Chesterton on St. Thomas and Martin Luther

* "IT will not be possible to conceal much longer from anybody the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. The sectarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were essentially obscurantists, and they guarded an obscurantist legend that the Schoolman was an obscurantist. This was wearing thin even in the nineteenth century; it will be impossible in the twentieth. It has nothing to do with the truth of their theology or his; but only with the truth of historical proportion, which begins to reappear as quarrels begin to die down. Simply as one of the facts that bulk big in history, it is true to say that Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies. It is a fact, like the military strategy of Napoleon, that Aquinas was thus fighting for all that is liberal and enlightened, as compared with his rivals, or for that matter his successors and supplanters. Those who, for other reasons, honestly accept the final effect of the Reformation will none the less face the fact, that it was the Schoolman who was the Reformer; and that the later Reformers were by comparison reactionaries. I use the word not as a reproach from my own stand-point, but as a fact from the ordinary modern progressive standpoint. For instance, they riveted the mind back to the literal sufficiency of the Hebrew Scriptures; when St. Thomas had already spoken of the Spirit giving grace to the Greek philosophies. He insisted on the social duty of works; they only on the spiritual duty of faith. It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."

* "WE must be just to those huge human figures, who are in fact the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong, be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world. So it is with that great Augustinian monk, who avenged all the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not, as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell. That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal. He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two figures hulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world."

~G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas.

Maritain: "Democracy of the person"

THE subject treated in this chapter is, truly speaking, the fundamental subject of all social and political philosophy. But, at the same time, I must admit that it is an extremely difficult subject, and one which, in the beginning at least, is unavoidably arid.

Whence this aridity? It is due to the fact that it is impossible to discuss such matters without first embarking upon rather abstract philosophical considerations concerning individuality and personality—two notions which are usually confused and whose distinction I consider to be highly important.

After attempting to explain how man is as a whole an individual and also as a whole a person, and how at the same time the focus of individuality is quite different from that of personality, I will consider the applications of this distinction, especially in social matters. Lastly, I shall conclude by saying, that 'humanism of the individual' and democracy of the individual, in which the nineteenth century had placed its hopes, must be replaced to-day—if we want to save civilization—by humanism of the person and by democracy of the person.

~Jacques Maritain: Scholasticism and Politics, Chap. III, 'The Human Person and Society.'

Continue reading here.

Heresy and Schism

"HERESY and SCHISM are distinguished in respect of those things to which each is opposed essentially and directly. For heresy is essentially opposed to faith, while schism is essentially opposed to the unity of ecclesiastical charity. Wherefore just as faith and charity are different virtues, although whoever lacks faith lacks charity, so too schism and heresy are different vices, although whoever is a heretic is also a schismatic, but not conversely. This is what Jerome says in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians [In Ep. ad Tit. iii, 10]: "I consider the difference between schism and heresy to be that heresy holds false doctrine while schism severs a man from the Church." Nevertheless, just as the loss of charity is the road to the loss of faith, according to 1 Timothy 1:6: "From which things," i.e. charity and the like, "some going astray, are turned aside into vain babbling," so too, schism is the road to heresy. Wherefore Jerome adds (In Ep. ad Tit. iii, 10) that "at the outset it is possible, in a certain respect, to find a difference between schism and heresy: yet there is no schism that does not devise some heresy for itself, that it may appear to have had a reason for separating from the Church.""

~St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, II-IIa, q. 39, art. 1, ad 3.

Read more: Q. 39

"The canonization of Saint Thomas"

"Friar Giacomo di Viterbo, Archbishop of Naples, often said to me that he believed, in accordance with the Faith and the Holy Spirit, that our Savior had sent, as doctor of truth to illuminate the world and the universal Church, first the apostle Paul, then Augustine, and finally in these latest days Friar Thomas, whom, he believed, no one would succeed till the end of the world." (Testimony of Bartolommeo di Capua at the hearing of the case for the canonization of Saint Thomas, August 8, 1319.)

~Quoted by Jacques Maritain in St. Thomas Aquinas, Chap. 1─The Saint.

***

"He was the flower and the glory of the world."

For younger readers, see Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Angel of the Schools, by Raïssa Maritain at Sophia Institute Press, or read online at the Jacques Maritain Center.

Virgin and Child with Sts Dominic and Thomas Aquinas,
by Fra Angelico. 

Detached fresco transferred to canvas, c. 1445; 

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.

John Paul II: "Philosophy's proper concern"

"THOMAS recognized that nature, philosophy's proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation. Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God. Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness. Faith is in a sense an “exercise of thought”; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice."

~John Paul II: Fides et Ratio, 43

Pope St. John Paul II

On Peace and Personal Dignity

By Jacques Maritain

WE all know that, if peace is to be prepared in the thoughts of men and in the minds of the nations, it can only be done if those minds come to a profound conviction of principles such as the following: that a good policy is first and foremost a just policy; that every nation must endeavour to understand the psychology, development and traditions, the material and spiritual needs, the personal dignity and historic vocation of other peoples, because each nation must keep in mind not only its own interests, but the common good of the family of nations; that this awakening of mutual understanding and of the consciousness of the civilized community, though it requires a sort of spiritual revolution, in view, alas, of the age-old habits of human history, is a necessity for public welfare in a world which henceforth is one for life or death, though remaining tragically divided as regards political interests and passions; that to place national interests above all is the surest way of losing all; that a community of free men is inconceivable without the recognition by it that truth is the expression of what is right and just and not of what, at any given moment, is most advantageous to a group of men; that it is not possible to put an innocent man to death because he has become a useless and costly burden to the nation or because he obstructs the activities of a particular group; that a human being has a dignity and which, in its own interests, it must respect, and that as a human being, as a civic being, as a social or working being, he has fundamental rights and duties; that the common weal must take precedence over industrial interests, that the working world is entitled to undergo the social changes demanded by the fact that it has come of age historically, and that the masses are entitled to their share of the benefits of culture and of the intellect, that freedom of conscience is inviolable; that men of different creeds and different spiritual associations must recognize mutually their rights as fellow-citizens in the civilized community; that, for the common good, it is the duty of the State to respect religious liberty and freedom of research; that because of the essential equality of men, racial, class or caste prejudices and racial discrimination are an affront to human nature and to personal dignity and are a crucial threat to peace.

Source: Christianity and Democracy, and The Rights of Man and Natural Law

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