Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 55

The Trinity: Intellectum
Intellectum, the holy Spirit, “the giver of life, the one in whom the inscrutable Triune
God communicates himself to human beings, constituting in them the source of eternal life”
(DeV, n.1). The holy Spirit who animates the body as He guides God’s people in living a moral
and prayerful existence as expressed by the Church,
We have received ‘the Spirit that is from God’, St. Paul says, ‘so that we may
understand the gifts bestowed on us by God’ (1 Cor 2:12). Moreover, by this gift
we are drawn into an understanding even of God himself, because ‘the Spirit
searches everything, even the depths of God’. By teaching that we have the mind
of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), St. Paul implies that by God’s grace we have a certain
participation even in Christ’s own knowledge of his Father, and thereby in God’s
own self-knowledge. 132
The Holy Spirit, rûah in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, a breath, “He breathed on them and said to
them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (RSV, Jn 20:22). 133 A mighty wind, “and suddenly a sound
came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were
sitting” (RSV, Acts 2:2). As fire, “when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the
daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of
132
International Theological Commission: Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_doc_20111129_teologia-
oggi_en.html, accessed 6/8/2016. n.16.
133
Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Trans. David Smith, (NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2015), 3.