The Need for the Holy Spirit: Notes on Reading Dominum et Vivificantem (Part 1)

Pentecost

In John 16:7 Jesus said

"... it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I don't go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go away, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgement: of sin, because they do not believe me, of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more, of judgement, because the ruler of this world is judged."

 Sin in this context means

• people did not believe Jesus
• they did not recognize him
• they rejected his mission and condemned him to death

Righteousness in this context means

• the justice restored to Jesus by the Father when he grants him the glory of his Resurrection and Ascension

Judgement in this context means

• the Spirit of Truth will show the guilt of the world in condemning Jesus to death

But, Jesus did not come to judge or condemn, but to save.

It is the Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus after his departure, that have the mission " to convince the world concerning sin." Jesus' words in the Gospel can be taken in a narrow sense- the context mentioned above- , what Jesus was intending to say to his disciples, in the upper room, at that particular point in time. It can be taken also in a broader sense, as to be applied to all humanity, for all time, because of the universal character of the Redemption won by Jesus.

The world in this context means (as expressed in Gaudium et Spes)

"... the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; that world which is the theater of man's history, and the heir of his energies, his tragedies and his triumphs; that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker's love, fallen indeed into the bondage of sin, yet emancipated now by Christ, Who was crucified and rose again to break the strangle hold of personified evil, so that the world might be fashioned anew according to God's design and reach its fulfillment."

Christ prophecies of the coming of the Holy Spirit find its complete fulfillment on the day of Pentecost.

From the very beginning after Pentecost, it has been the mission of the Holy Spirit to "convince the world of sin." This convincing of sin  "  is linked inseparably with the witness to be borne to the Paschal Mystery: the mystery of the Crucified and Risen One. " ( DEV #31)

This convincing has as its purpose a call to conversion

Conversion requires convincing of sin; it includes the interior judgment of the conscience, and this, being a proof of the action of the Spirit of truth in man's inmost being, becomes at the same time a new beginning of the bestowal of grace and love: "Receive the Holy Spirit."¹¹⁸ Thus in this "convincing concerning sin" we discover a double gift: the gift of the truth of conscience and the gift of the certainty of redemption. The Spirit of truth is the Counselor.

This Spirit of Truth is the only one that can convince the world of the "ineffable truth" that, through his death, Jesus conquered death and brought us life. The Spirit searches not only the depth of man but the depth of God drawing "God's response to man's sin".

It is through the Holy Spirit that man can be "convinced" of the reality and depth of sin, but also it is through the Holy Spirit that we can be convinced of the reality and depth of the mystery of redemption.

Sin has its beginning in original sin, that first disobedience, man's will butting heads with God's will.


The Spirit of God is witness to the mutual love between the Father and the Son. The love from which creation came about. Furthermore, the Spirt is this love, it is " the eternal uncreated gift", the "source and the beginning of every giving of gifts."

To create means to call into existence from nothing: therefore, to create means to give existence. And if the visible world is created for man, therefore the world is given to man.¹³¹ And at the same time that same man in his own humanity receives as a gift a special "image and likeness" to God. This means not only rationality and freedom as constitutive properties of human nature, but also, from the very beginning, the capacity of having a personal relationship with God, as "I" and "you," and therefore the capacity of having a covenant, which will take place in God's salvific communication with man. Against the background of the "image and likeness" of God, "the gift of the Spirit" ultimately means a call to friendship, in which the transcendent "depths of God" become in some way opened to participation on the part of man. The Second Vatican Council teaches; "The invisible God out of the abundance of his love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that he may invite and take them into fellowship with himself.

In other words, the gift of the Holy Spirit is a call to friendship with God.

Man is in constant pressure to reject God

The analysis of sin in its original dimension indicates that, through the influence of the "father of lies," throughout the history of humanity there will be a constant pressure on man to reject God, even to the point of hating him: "Love of self to the point of contempt for God," as St. Augustine puts it.¹⁴³ Man will be inclined to see in God primarily a limitation of himself, and not the source of his own freedom and the fullness of good. We see this confirmed in the modern age, when the atheistic ideologies seek to root out religion on the grounds that religion causes the radical "alienation" of man, as if man were dispossessed of his own humanity when, accepting the idea of God, he attributes to God what belongs to man, and exclusively to man! Hence a process of thought and historico-sociological practice in which the rejection of God has reached the point of declaring his "death." An absurdity, both in concept and expression! But the ideology of the "death of God" is more a threat to man, as the Second Vatican Council indicates when it analyzes the question of the "independence of earthly affairs" and writes: "For without the Creator the creature would disappear...when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible."¹⁴⁴ The ideology of the "death of God" easily demonstrates in its effects that on the "theoretical and practical" levels it is the ideology of the "death of man."