The New Life
“Now then, why are you putting God to the test by placing on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? No, we believe it is through the grace of the Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” (Acts 15:10–11)
The Second Conversion, i.e. the passage from the third mansions to the fourth is a relief compared to a “closed”, heavy, arduous life. It is the “relief of a yoke” that one struggled to bear. The action of the Holy Spirit is a deliverance, a new horizon, an interaction with the Lord who is present through the Holy Spirit, and also a swiftness of growth. God takes over. Life with the action of the Holy Spirit is more bearable for all the reasons mentioned.
The divine Blood, the Divine Life, the Holy Spirit begins to animate the human being. He animates the soul and the spirit. He brings them back to life, resurrects them. This is too often forgotten. It is miraculous. Another world. A new life is literally given. God begins to animate the human being with His Spirit.
Of course, it is very gradual. Initially the Spirit begins with a human modality; he adapts to our level and to our language. (see here)
When one thinks about it, it is a marvel. It is like irrigating arid land. A new city begins; God slowly begins to animate the human being. It is necessary to understand how the Lord operates. Phase by phase.
God’s New Law: the Holy Spirit in Our Heart
“It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to lay upon you any greater burden than these necessary things […]” (Acts 15:28)
When we read the content of this letter from the first Council of the Church held in Jerusalem, we think that there is virtually no obligation, no commandments at all for non-Jewish Christians. It is an extraordinary light that the gathered Church receives. St Paul, as a Jew who became a Christian, will reflect deeply on this question of what God asks of us (Letters to the Romans and to the Galatians). He will do this for both Jews and Gentiles together. In fact, the answer is the same as in Acts: the New Law is the Holy Spirit in us. It is a Law that is both interior and living. He will invite us to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
St Thomas Aquinas will show the same boldness as St Paul when he tells us that Scripture in its written form is not in itself the substance of the New Law, but that the New Law is the Holy Spirit in us. Scripture is just the written expression of it. What light, what audacity, and what power in this affirmation…! (see below the note on St. Thomas Aquinas)
St Paul will summarise the New Law, the Christian life, by telling the faithful that they must be guided by the Holy Spirit: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).
The great question remains: how are we supposed to be guided by the Holy Spirit? This is the real question.
Scripture is certainly the Word of God, written by the Holy Spirit; it guides us and nourishes us through the Holy Spirit. We must never neglect it. It is the life-giving Spirit who makes it alive and active in us. They are inseparable. The Word is the expression of what the Spirit wants to say to us. He speaks it into our intellect and into our will. Yet the great question remains:
How does the Holy Spirit act in us?
Are there different phases in His action?
How do we cooperate with Him?
How do we discern the next phase?
I- He seeks to enliven our intellect—He who is Light—through His first four gifts: Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and the gift that transitions towards the will: Counsel. And He seeks to enliven our will -He who is dynamism, act, love- through His next three gifts: Piety, which gathers all our forces and channels them according to what Counsel indicates; Fortitude, which enables the act itself; and finally, Fear of the Lord, the filial fear of stepping outside the shadow of His action—He who is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son.
He vivifies our soul—intellect and will—becoming the soul of our soul. This vivification takes place through the listening to the Word of the Son, recalled and penetrated by the Spirit. It is a profound transformation, an interior resurrection, and a new joy that teaches us day by day, from within, divine Charity—that is, how Jesus loves our neighbour. A marvel of newness. The human being stands up and walks by the Spirit.
These are not brief inspirations, nor sudden impulses. It is a whole programme of transformation that brings about, Word received and lived after Word, the birth of Christ in us, and causes Him to grow until we can say with St Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). He loves through me, and I am united with Him.
II- We must not forget another action of the Holy Spirit—more discreet but real and fundamental—mentioned by St Paul: the action of the Holy Spirit in our spirit. “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). Our spirit, too, is half-dead at the beginning of the journey of the Spirit’s transforming action. We need this action of the Spirit in our spirit—an action that purifies it, transforms it into God, and unites it with Him. This action truly makes us partakers of the divine nature: “…so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
We come to share more and more in the operations of the Trinity and in its invisible external missions.
First Operation: the Father begets the Son from all Eternity
Second Operation: the Father and the Son love each other: spirate the Holy Spirit, the Person of love in the Trinity.
First invisible mission: the Father sends His Son to us.
Second invisible mission: the Father sends the Holy Spirit.
The spirit transformed by the Fire of the Spirit now has the capacity to give the Spirit—who is God—back to God the Father, finally quenching our thirst to love in return with equality, since the Spirit is God, Love, the Gift made Present. The spirit, too, inflamed with divine Charity, is empowered to give God to whomever it wills, as St John of the Cross also says.
As we see, when the apostles free the converted Gentiles from all obligations of the Mosaic Law, it is done by a common decision with the Holy Spirit, knowing that the New Law already exists—the Holy Spirit in us, who should animate us. It is an entire path of growth, transformation, purification: learning to be docile to Him, to listen to His Word, and to be enflamed with His love.
It is not a liberation from the Old Law of Moses into a vacuum, a wild liberation. On the contrary, the fact that the New Law is the action and life of the Spirit in us is, paradoxically, far more demanding. We do not simply apply a list of commandments, but we are pushed to our very limits in the presence of a Living Friend. It is certainly interior. It is more demanding. We escape the mesh of the net of Commandments. But when we are face to face with a Living Friend, constantly present, this implies real love, a true going out of self.
Who then could be content either with occasional brief inspirations or with a list of commandments?
The liberation spoken of by St Paul and by the Acts of the Apostles is in fact a departure from external things -a liberation from an external yoke- for an interior yoke; from external purity and circumcision toward a purity brought about by the Spirit, the circumcision of the heart: “…circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal” (Romans 2:29).
Note: Referring to the Lord’s words—“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt 11:29–30)—Saint Anthony the Great, the father of all monks, teaches in one of his letters that this “yoke” is, in truth, the Holy Spirit Himself.
Let us appreciate this real revolution brought about by God, who becomes more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, and which is expressed by St Paul to the Romans and by the First Council held in Jerusalem.
Saint John, in the first conclusion of his Gospel, writes: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30–31, RSV-CE) This “life” is the Holy Spirit, who is the very life of our body, soul, and spirit. He is the one who gives us divine life and makes us truly alive. The Holy Spirit is meant to animate our whole being– He is our Life, our Breath, our Source. From the beginning of creation, the Spirit was intimately present in us. We were made to live by God’s own breath. As Genesis tells us: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7, RSV-CE) That “breath of life” is the Holy Spirit, given intimately and directly to Adam. Humanity was created to live in the Spirit, breathing with God’s own breath, sharing in His divine life. This is why, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the man left on the side of the road—representing fallen Adam—is described as being “half-dead” (Luke 10:30). He is physically alive but has lost the divine life, the Holy Spirit. And this is what we proclaim in the Creed when we say of the Holy Spirit: “Dominum et vivificantem” — “the Lord, the Giver of Life.” He is not only the Creator-Spirit but also the One who brings the dead back to life, who breathes again into our dust the life of God. Without Him, we are only half-alive. With Him, we live fully—body, soul, and spirit.
Long live God and His incredible Love!
Read Also
– The Five Modes of Activity of the Holy Spirit
– The Holy Spirit in Saint John of the Cross
– The Aim in Spiritual Life: the Act of Charity
Note on St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas makes a striking theological claim in the Summa Theologiae when he says that the New Law (lex nova) is primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit given to believers—and that the written law (including the Scriptures of the New Testament) is secondary or accidental (per accidens). Here is the key text: “The New Law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Spirit, which is given to those who believe in Christ. But this grace is shown by faith which works through love. Hence the written law of the Gospel is called the New Law secondarily (per accidens).” — Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 106, a.1, corpus [Source (English): New Advent]
And again, in the same article: “The New Law consists chiefly in the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is given to those who believe in Christ. Hence Augustine says (De Spir. et Lit. xxiv) that ‘as the Law was given to the Jews in tables of stone, so has the New Law been written in our hearts by the finger of God’—i.e., by the Holy Spirit.”
Summary of Aquinas’s Teaching on the New Law:
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| Essence (principaliter) | The grace of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul |
| Effect | Interior transformation: faith working through charity (fides quae per caritatem operatur) |
| Written form (per accidens) | The Gospel teachings, written Scriptures, and external precepts |
| Comparison to Old Law | The Old Law imposed commands externally; the New Law empowers from within by grace |
Theological Implications:
- For Aquinas, the New Law is not primarily a written code (even of the New Testament), but an interior law inscribed by the Holy Spirit (cf. Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 3:3).
- The Scriptures and moral teachings of Jesus are essential as instruments or guides, but they are not the essenceof the New Law.
- This view is deeply Pauline and Augustinian in origin (cf. Romans 8:2, Galatians 5:18, De Spiritu et Littera by Augustine).
Saint Augustine (Charity, the Heart of the Bible)
St. Augustine finds that the whole of the Bible speaks of one single thing: love; to love, to love with a pure heart… according to the heart of God. He summarises all of Scripture in one thing: “From all the divine pages, nothing else emerges but charity.” (Inerr. in Psalmos Ps 140). Augustine teaches that the Bible leads to charity; but not just any kind. This recalls the explanation given by Saint John of the Cross regarding the summits of the spiritual life: fire, blazing flame. One understands that the Bible fades before this reality to which it leads: God in the soul, loving Himself, through mysterious groanings.
“For anyone who wishes to speak of charity, there is no need to choose a specific page to read: every page you open resounds with it. The Master Himself bears witness to this, and the Gospel tells us that when questioned about which were the greatest commandments of the Law, He replied: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.’ and: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mt 22:36,39).
To prevent anyone from seeking anything else in the holy pages, He added: ‘On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets’ (Mt 22:40). If this is already true of ‘all the Law and the Prophets’, how much more so of the Gospel.”
“From all that we have dealt with thus far, the essential point is to grasp well that ‘love is the fulfilment’ and the end ‘of the Law’ and of all the Scriptures (Rm 13:10), the love of the Being whom we must enjoy and who can enjoy with us. For as regards loving oneself, there is no need for a commandment.”
“The man who relies on faith, hope, and charity and resolutely keeps them, needs the Scriptures only to teach others. There are many who live by these three virtues, in solitude, without any book. In them is fulfilled, it seems to me, what is written: ‘Prophecies? They shall be abolished. Tongues? They shall cease. Knowledge? It shall pass away’ (1 Co 13:8). On such foundations has been raised an edifice of faith, hope, and charity. Possessing the fullness, they have no need of partial goods. Fullness, that is, accessible in this life, for when compared to the life to come, the life of no just or holy man is perfect.” (De Doctrina Christiana, I,39-40)
In fact, everything found in the Bible can be summarised in the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. “To these three, the understanding of the divine Scriptures will relate everything.” The whole of the Middle Ages would adopt this principle of Biblical interpretation (cf. Exégèse médiévale by De Lubac).
Origen
What one seeks and finds in the Bible is the Logos Himself. (History and Spirit by De Lubac, chapter VIII §§ 3 and 4.) And the Bible, like the Body of Christ, are transitory realities (again in History and Spirit, towards the end).
Read Also
– Dionysius the Areopagite and Scripture