The Proceeding Of The Holy Spirit

[pippo buono]

I need help understanding how Thomas Aquinas explains how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. I understand as well as one can how the Son, the Word, proceeds from God's perfect understanding of Himself. It's harder for me to understand how this occurs with the Holy Spirit from the both of them as a movement of the will in love. All details and clarifications possible would be greatly appreciated.

[CatherineM]

I visualize it this way. If you think of the Holy Spirit as love itself, then it is easy to see how it could proceed from the Father and the Son.

[Theologian in Training]

The Holy Spirit is God and the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity

The Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son, a theologian by the name of Frank Sheed explains it as “the sigh that lovers breathe.”

The Holy Spirit thus “proceeds” from the Father and the Son. To proceed implies a continuation, so that the Holy Spirit is the “continuation” of the perfect love of the Father and Son, equally infinite, eternal, and living. 

Therefore, there is no proper name for the Holy Spirit as there is for the “Son” or the “Father” because the Father and the Son breathe or spirate the Holy Spirit.

Given this, there is also the difficulty of time, because we are speaking about eternal realities bound by the constraints of time. In other words, as Frank Sheed puts it: “The trouble is we have no language for what we are trying to say. We cannot make any statement at all without tenses, past or present or future, but God’s actions have no tense.” (Theology and Sanity, 108-109)

Edited April 8, 2015 by Theologian in Training