Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 56

judgment and by a spirit of burning” (RSV, Is 4:4). The holy Spirit gives strength as he animates
the human soul to live out God’s plan. 134 The Cathars contrastingly taught that human bodies
were animated by “evil spirits whom the devil created.” 135 St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in a
commentary on the Song of Songs, the holy Spirit is the “supreme kiss…that breath of the Lord
that he is understood to proceed from him equally as from the Father truly the kiss that is
common both to him who kisses and to him who is kissed.” 136 A kiss, mouth to mouth, the most
intimate in nature, received by God’s people from him, this intimacy expresses his great love
which brings unity with Him. 137 He is the giver of life, “who proceeds from the Father and the
Son” (DeV, n. 2), sent into creation to guide God’s people to Him, “’another Counselor,’
permanently ensuring the transmission and spreading of the Good News revealed by Jesus of
Nazareth” (DeV, n.7).
Thus the ‘Holy Spirit…proceeds from the Father’ and the Father ‘gives’ the
Spirit. The Father ‘sends’ the Spirit in the name of the Son, the Spirit ‘bears
witness’ to the Son. The Son asks the Father to send the Spirit-Counselor, but
likewise affirms and promises, in relation to his own ‘departure’ through the
Cross: ‘If I go, I will send him to you,’ Thus, the Father sends the Holy Spirit in
the power of his Fatherhood, as he has sent the Son; but at the same time he sends
him in the power of the Redemption accomplished by Christ-and in this sense
Holy Spirit is sent also by the Son: ‘I will send him to you.’ (DV, n. 8.
God’s people are called to intimacy, to seek a personal relationship with God, the creator,
to raise “one’s mind and heart to God” through prayer. 138 To communicate with God is to raise
one’s mind to him, to be intimate with him, to be in love with him, “love is intimacy, and
134
Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Trans. David Smith, (NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2015), 3.
Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Laquedoc in the High Middle Ages, (UK: Pearson Education
Limited, 2000), 7.
136
St. Bernard Clairvaux, Commentary on the Song of Songs,
https://archive.org/stream/StBernardsCommentaryOnTheSongOfSongs/StBernardOnTheSongOfSongsall_djvu.txt,
accessed June 21, 2016. n.2.
137
Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Trans. David Smith, (NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2015), 16.
138
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no.2559. See St. John Damascene, De fide ortho. 3, 24:PG 94, `089 C.
135