Stanley M. Burgess - Holy Spirit: Medieval Roman Catholic and Reformation Traditions, The

1997 by Stanley M. Burgess

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ISBN 978-1-4412-4236-5

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The Spirit filled a boy who played upon a harp and made him a psalmist (1 Sam 16:18), a shepherd and herdsman who pruned sycamore trees and made him a prophet (Amos 7:1415), a boy given to abstinence (Dan 1:8) and made him a judge of mature men, a fisherman and made him a preacher (Matt 4:19), a persecutor and made him the teacher of Gentiles (Acts 9:120), a tax collector and made him an evangelist (Luke 5:2728). What a skillful workman this Spirit is! The Spirits very touch is teaching. It changes a human mind in a moment to enlighten it; suddenly what it was it no longer is, suddenly it is what it was not.

Gregory the Great

Holy Spirit, making life alive,

moving in all things, root of all creative being,

cleansing the cosmos of every impurity,

effacing guilt, anointing wounds.

You are lustrous and praiseworthy life,

you waken and re-awaken everything that is.

Holy Spirit,

through you clouds billow, breezes blow,

stones drip with trickling streams,

streams that are the source of earths lush greening.

Likewise you are the source of human understanding,

you bless with the breath of wisdom.

Thus all of our praise is yours,

you who are the melody itself of praise,

the joy of life, the mighty honor,

the hope of those to whom you give the gifts of the light.

Hildegard of Bingen

The Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and preserves it in union with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.

Martin Luther

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my appreciation to Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri, for support in providing summer faculty fellowships, reduced teaching loads, and a 1993 sabbatical leave. I also am indebted to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funds to study in the Vatican Film Library at the Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University. Again, I highly value the time spent at St. Johns University in Collegeville, Minnesota, studying manuscripts housed in the Hill Manuscript Library. I am appreciative to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, for providing housing while I was working in the libraries of the Boston Theological Institute.

Special thanks to the many friends and professional colleagues who have encouraged and assisted me in preparing this work. I am especially grateful to my wife, Ruth, for her patience and spirit of enthusiasm, which inspired me to complete this trilogy.

Introduction

Completion of a Trilogy

This is the final volume in a trilogy on the concept of the Holy Spirit in the history of Christianity. Volume one treats the ancient church, volume two Eastern Christian traditions. This third volume is devoted exclusively to Western Christianity from the beginning of the Middle Ages in the sixth century through the sixteenth-century Reformation.

Because this work covers eleven centuries, it has been necessary to be highly selective rather than comprehensive. Those Christian thinkers or groups which have been included represent theological emphases of their times, although most of them also helped to shape those times and a few, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola, were dominant forces. Naturally, all of them had something significant to say about the divine Third Person. In the process, I have excluded such prominent individuals as Albert the Great, Alcuin, Angela of Foligno, Balthasar Hubmaier, Robert Bellarmine, Benedict of Nursia, Boethius, Dionysius (Denis) the Carthusian, Dorothy of Montau, Hans Denk, Hugh of St. Victor, Kaspar von Schwenckfeld, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Heinrich Suso, John Tauler, Teresa of Avila, and John Wycliffeeach of whom spoke or wrote about the Holy Spirit.

From one perspective, it can be argued that the Holy Spirit was a central concern for each of the individuals featured in this work. For one thing, all were concerned with issues relating to the Trinity, and, as a consequence, the Holy Spirit was featured in many of their writings. On the other hand, it would be dishonest to suggest that the divine Third Person was as important an issue as the Second Person. Western Christians usually were strongly Christocentric.

Those who did treat the Holy Spirit as their primary theme often came from two groups. The first were those who argued the Roman Catholic case for the Filioque against Eastern Christians, insisting that the Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son.

The second included a variety of fringe elements, each of whom believed that the Holy Spirit in some ways intervened in human affairs, superseding established Roman practices and beliefs. Among the most interesting were the dispensationalists, who predicted a coming age of the Spirit in which all would be perfected. Especially troubling to the Roman church were the radical dualists who viewed the Holy Spirit as an active agent among true Christians, representing forces of good in their cosmic struggle with evil. Finally, certain of the spiritualists and mystics claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke directly to them, revealing the divine will.

Our study opens with Pope Gregory the Great (540?604), who bridges the ancient and medieval periods in church history. While theologically orthodox, he also reminds us that many Western Christians in his troubled time had a deep belief in the intervention of the Holy Spirit in everyday life. The Venerable Bede (ca. 673735), an English historian writing a century later, is also a witness to the faith of his age and the strong belief of his contemporaries in the supernatural.