True to his intense devotion to the Incarnation and the divine economy flowing from that great Mystery, Saint Francis of Assisi gave the Church the first living Nativity scene, in order to show, in a vivid and very present manner, the reality of the Birth of God in time. That same Seraphic Friar had a title of Our Lady that he particularly loved: Spouse of the Holy Ghost.
I would like to tie these two “Franciscan” realities together — Christmas and the intense union of the Virgin Mary with the Divine Paraclete — by drawing both from Saint Thomas Aquinas on the doctrine of the “divine missions,” and on that radiant son of Saint Francis, Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe, on the relationship of Our Lady to the Holy Ghost.
Divine Missions
Let us begin by defining a “divine mission.” It is “The procession of one divine Person from another with respect to a particular effect produced in a creature, in which the Person becomes present in a certain new manner. Divine mission includes two essential characteristics: (a) that the Person sent proceed from the Person sending Him; (b) that a new effect be produced in the creature. The mission may be visible or invisible” (Parente, Pietro; Piolanti, Antonio; and Garofalo, Salvatore, Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology, translated by Emmanuel Doronzo, O.M.I., S.T.D., Ph.D. [Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1951]).
The visible mission of the Son in time is His taking on flesh at the Incarnation: “When the fulness of the time was come, God [the Father] sent his Son” (Gal 4:4). While the Holy Ghost was not hypostatically united to a human nature as was Our Lord, He was visibly sent on a divine mission when He descended in the form of a dove at the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and, more dramatically, when He descended upon Our Lady and the Apostles in the form of fiery tongues at Pentecost.
The invisible mission of the Son, and that of the Holy Ghost are, as Saint Thomas says, “according to sanctifying grace,” which means that these Persons — who, as God, are always omnipresent — are now present in the creature “in a new mode,” namely, “as the object known is in the knower, and the beloved in the lover” (ST, Ia, Q. 43, A. 3).
There is a unity to the divine missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. As Saint Thomas tells us, “it is manifest that one mission cannot be without the other, because neither takes place without sanctifying grace, nor is one person separated from the other” (ST, Ia, Q. 43, A. 5, ad. 3)
Regarding the distinction of the internal missions of the Son and the Holy Ghost by grace, Saint Thomas links their procession in eternity to their temporal effect upon man: Because the Son proceeds as thought from the Father and the Holy Ghost proceeds as love from the Father and the Son, their missions, “are distinguished in the effects of grace, which consist in the illumination of the intellect [the Son] and the kindling of the affection [the Holy Ghost]” (ibid.).
For more on the divine missions, please consult a paper on our site or the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas.
What is the Mission of the Holy Ghost?
Now, Saint Thomas calls the Holy Ghost “Subsisting Love,” which means “Love in Person.” This is because the Divine Spirit is, in His eternal procession, a spiration or “breath” of love between the Father and the Son.
Given this eternal reality — and given also the truth that the temporal missions reflect the eternal processions in the Trinity — we find that the mission of the Holy Ghost in time is one that is supremely loving: it is the sanctification of souls; hence, He is called “the Sanctifier.” Building on the mission of the Son, by whom we know the Father, the Holy Ghost infuses divine love into our souls: “the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us” (Rom. 5:5).
Pentecost, which is perhaps the most manifest mission of the Holy Ghost, shows us the Third Person continuing the work of the Second Person in time: building on the work of Jesus, confirming the work of the Apostles, and adding to the Body of Christ. That is what the Holy Ghost does. But, less than half a century before that time an invisible mission of the Holy Ghost prepared the way for the visible mission of the Son.
‘Uncreated’ and ‘Created’ Immaculate Conception
In the Immaculate Conception, the Father prepared Our Lady to be the Mother of His Son. At the same time, according to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Holy Spirit took Our Lady for His own Spouse:
In the union of the Holy Spirit with Her, love unites not only two beings, but one that is the entire love of the Trinity, the other the entire love of a creature, and in this union heaven and earth are united — the height of love is achieved.
It is as if the Love of God, in the Person of the Holy Ghost, descends to earth, which rises up to reciprocate, in the person of Mary Immaculate: the holiest, the most perfect human person ever (Jesus, recall, is not a human person, but a Divine Person with a human nature). All of this is founded on Mary’s unique prerogative of Her Immaculate Conception by which She is truly “All Holy” (Panagia, as our Eastern brethren call Her), and this prerogative is in view of Her predestination from all eternity to be the Mother of God.
In his excellent 1985 study, “The Mariology of Maximilian Kolbe” (from which comes the above quote of Saint Maximilian Maria), Father James McCurry writes,
On the level of the Immaculate’s personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, Kolbe’s fertile mind was at work almost until the very hour of his final arrest by the Nazis on the 17th of February 1941. Early that morning he arose, summoned his secretary, and began dictating a new theological insight that appears only this one time in the whole corpus of his writings: the identification of the Holy Spirit as “uncreated Immaculate Conception” uniquely bonded to Mary as “created Immaculate Conception.” Kolbe’s insight here stakes out new territory in delineating the intimate nature of the union between Mary and the Holy Spirit.
Father McCurry goes on to quote the Polish martyr:
And who is the Holy Spirit? The flowering of the love of the Father and the Son. If the fruit of created love is a created conception, then the fruit of divine Love, that prototype of all created love, is necessarily a divine “conception.” The Holy Spirit is, therefore, the “uncreated, eternal conception,” the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the whole universe.
I cannot help but thinking that Saint Maximilian, when writing that bit about “conceptions that multiply life…” had in mind what the Nicene Creed says of the Holy Ghost, namely, that he is “the Lord, the giver of life.” Of course, “life,” here is principally supernatural life — the life of Grace. Just as the title “Advocate” is proper to the Holy Ghost but applied to Our Lady, so is the title “Dispenser of Grace,” because that is what the Sanctifier does: He dispenses those graces won by the merits of Christ’s Passion. And His Spouse does this with Him.
Eternal, Maternal Fecundity
Father McCurry provides the following passage from Saint Maximilian, beautifully rhapsodizing the union of Our Lady with the Holy Ghost:
United to the Holy Spirit as his spouse, she [the Immaculate] is one with God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be predicated of any other creature. What sort of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the “essence” of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.
In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves himself, the very love of the Most Holy Trinity. He is a fruitful Love, a “Conception.” Among creatures made in God’s image the union brought about through married love is the most intimate of all (cf. Mt. 19, 6). In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the very depths of her being. He makes her fruitful, from the very first instant of her existence, all during her life, and for all eternity.
This eternal “Immaculate Conception” (which is the Holy Spirit) produces in an immaculate manner divine life itself in the womb (or depths) of Mary’s soul, making her the Immaculate Conception, the human Immaculate Conception….
If among human beings the wife takes the name of her husband because she belongs to him, is one with him, becomes equal to him and is, with him, the source of new life, with how much greater reason should the name of the Holy Spirit, who is the Divine Immaculate Conception, be used as the name of her in whom he lives as uncreated Love, the principle of life in the whole supernatural order of grace?
At the very moment when Saints Joachim and Anna provided the body of Mary in their marital union, the Holy Trinity breathed a rational soul into that body, as happens with all the sons and daughters of Adam; but something else happened, too, something quite singular: the Holy Ghost prevented that the corrupt seed should taint the Child and, instead, in the words of Bl. Pope Pius IX, “the soul of the Blessed Virgin, in its creation and infusion into the body, was endowed with the grace of the Holy Spirit and preserved from original sin.” At that moment, the Holy Ghost uniquely took Her as His own and impressed upon Her an image of Himself. He, “Substantial Love” — Love-in-Person — makes Her the most loved and lovable human person in history. And, to follow the logic of Saint Maximilian, He, the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception” gives Her His name, making Her “the Created Immaculate Conception.”
The passage that I have emboldened, above, gives the Kolbean logic for why Mary is the Mediatrix of All Grace. Mary’s spiritual fecundity in the first instance is Her Immaculate Conception, a gift from Her Divine Spouse, which prepared Her for the Annunciation, when She will become the Mother of God the Son, whose blessed Passion merited those graces that She will, with Her Sanctifier-Spouse, dispense to mankind. This is Her everlasting fecundity, made possible by Her espousals to Love-in-Person.
Saint Maximilian, in attempting to express the closeness of Our Lady to the Holy Spirit, goes so far as to call Her, the “quasi-Incarnation” of the Third Person. Yet, he is clear that this is not the same as the unique union of Divine and Human natures in Our Lord:
The Holy Spirit is in the Immaculate as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity is in Jesus, but with this difference: There are in Jesus two natures, the divine and the human, and one sole person, the divine. The nature and person of the Immaculate are distinct from the nature and person of the Holy Spirit.
Reflecting on this, Father McCurry asks,
Why would Kolbe get into such linguistic gymnastics? Not simply, I suspect, to accentuate the personal intimacy between Mary and the Spirit, though that is certainly part of the picture, as we have just seen. More significantly, Kolbe’s overriding Franciscan objective — the divinization of the world in and through the Immaculate — would be illumined by these new insights. Kolbe came to realize that in the Divine Economy the Mission of the Holy Spirit and the commission given by God to the Immaculate were inseparable. The Immaculate would be the tangible terminus which the Divine Person of the Holy Spirit would make his base of operations. As the immediate term of the Mission of the Spirit, Mary Immaculate would become the locus for the Spirit’s sanctifying/divinizing operation among creatures-akin to the way in which Jesus’s humanity had served as term of the Mission of the Son and consequently locus of the Son’s saving work. It is in this light that Kolbe states: “The Holy Spirit acts solely through the Immaculate; consequently she is the Mediatrix of all the graces of the Holy Spirit.”
In calling Our Lady the “tangible terminus” of the operations of the Holy Spirit, Saint Maximilian Maria gives us to understand that Mary makes the Holy Ghost visible — moreso, I dare say than the image of the dove or the tongues of fire, as rich as those Biblical images are in symbolism. She also makes the Holy Ghost more approachable than those images do.
Mary Christ-Mass
Christmas is a celebration of the Fruit of Mary’s womb issuing forth on the day fixed in eternity (which I believe to be 25 Kislev in the Hebrew Calendar, the year 3761; a date which, that year, coincided with the winter solstice). Our Advent preparation for the coming of Our Lord has been Marian in character. She is present in the liturgical offices of the season, and She will remain so during Christmastide — especially on the Octave Day, which, long before the mid-twentieth-century liturgical revolution, was a Marian observance. The placement of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the middle of Advent is a happy concurrence, for it allows us, with Saint Maximilian Kolbe, to reflect on the Nuptials, if you will, of Mary and the Holy Ghost — which prepared the way for the Nuptials of Christ and His Church that commenced in the womb of the Virgin, where humanity and divinity were joined in Person.
It was the special vocation of Saint Francis of Assisi, at a time when the charity of many was growing cold, to renew in Christendom the love of God made approachable in the very tangibility of the mysteries of our Faith. Hence the crib. Hence the stigmata. Hence also his intense devotion to the frail little Jewish girl from Palestine, who became the great Mother of God and fruitful Spouse of the Holy Ghost. I believe that his twentieth-century son, Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe, has continued that special Franciscan vocation into the modern age.
May we all grow in the love of Holy Ghost and His Spouse this Christmas so they can reproduce Jesus more perfectly in our souls. That is how the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart will come into a world very much in need of it.
