The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

246 The Person of the Holy Spirit
gives one a profound and coherent way of understanding the action of the
Holy Spirit as it is witnessed to by revelation. The Summa Contra Gentiles
discusses this activity in three sections: the Holy Spirit acting universally, the
gift of the Holy Spirit to human beings, and the Holy Spirit acting to unite
human beings to God. The Wrst section begins with an exposition of the
creative causality of the Holy Spirit.112 Thomas aYrms that,
As we have already seen above, the goodness of God is his reason for willing that other
things be, and it is by his will that he makes things to be. The love, then, by which He
loves His own goodness is the cause of the creation of things: this is why some ancient
philosophers held that ‘the love of the gods’ is the cause of all things, as Aristotle says
in the Wrst book of the Metaphysics; and Dionysius says in the Divine Names book four
that ‘the divine love does not allow itself to be without seed’. But it was held in the
foregoing that the Holy Spirit proceeds by way of the love with which God loves
himself. Therefore, the Holy Spirit is the principle of the creation of things. And this is
signiWed in the word of the Psalmist: ‘Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created’
(Ps. 103.30).113
It Wts into the outlook of the Summa Contra Gentiles for God to be taken to
be present to himself by loving himself through the Holy Spirit, understood as
the imprint of love. As we have seen, the Summa Theologiae follows up this
gambit with the notion of mutual love. And love is the direct source of every
activity. All beings act in search of the good matched out for them, where ‘the
good’ means their end. With God, there is no action for the sake of obtaining
an end which he had hitherto missed out on; he is, rather, his created reality’s
end: he communicates his goodness to them, and this is what it means for
the Creator to love.114 Here the theologian assimilates the philosophical
reXection which, at its own level, can conceive the universal causality of divine
love: even some Presocratic philosophers had an obscure sense of this.115
112 The same teaching is observable in Thomas’ biblical commentaries. Thus, for instance, in
his John Commentary, Thomas explicates the work of the Spirit in a like-minded way. Revelation,
teaching within us, the remission of sins, the gift of grace, sanctiWcation and Wlial adoption,
indwelling, and so forth, are the works of the Holy Spirit. See In Ioan. 14.17 (no. 1916: because
he is Love in person, the Holy Spirit reveals the mystery of God); In Ioan. 4.10 (no. 577: the Holy
Spirit himself is given to us in grace); In Ioan. 20.22–23 (nos. 2541–2544: the Holy Spirit gives
life and remits sins because he is charity in person); In Ioan. 14.26 (no. 1957: the Holy Spirit
conforms believers to the Son and confers Wlial adoption upon them); In Ioan. 7.38 (no. 1090:
the Holy Spirit who dwells in the hearts of believers is the source of all gifts); and so on.
113 SCG IV, ch. 20 (no. 3570).
114 ST I, q. 20, a. 2; q. 44, a. 4.
115 Thomas notes in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (I, lect. 5, no. 101) that some
Presocratics had perceived that love is the Wrst principle, ‘even though they did not formulate
this explicitly or clearly’. In this same ambience, there is a similar reference to the philosophers in
I Sent. d. 10, q. 1, a. 1; cf. Albert the Great, I Sent. d. 10, a. 2 (in the context of speaking about the
Holy Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son); see our book, La Trinité créatrice, p. 377.