Yves CONGAR, O.P., The Spirit of God: Short Writings on the Holy Spirit, translated by Susan Mader Brown, Mark E. Gunter, Joseph G. Mueller, SJ, and Catherine E. Clifford. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 298. $42.25 (hardcover) ISBN 9780813229935. Reviewed by Joseph A. BRACKEN, S.J. Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH 45207.

            Spirit of God contains eight articles on the theme of pneumatology that were previously unpublished in English.  The book is divided into four parts.  In the first part, a single article is published “The Human Spirit and the Spirit of God,” published by Herder in 1983 and intended for a general audience as a summary of Congar’s book I Believe in the Holy Spirit. It summarizes Church teaching on the Holy Spirit and sets forth the thesis that the Holy Spirit “is present and active in our lives by a non-coercive Power” (16).  Part Two is likewise a single article entitled “A Theology of the Holy Spirit” published in 1982 and meant for use in seminary classrooms. His basic claim is that “the missions of the Holy Spirit and of Christ may operate somewhat differently . . .[but] are dependent upon one another and ultimately have the same aim” (72). In terms of efficient causality vis-à-vis creatures, the divine persons act as one; yet this simultaneous action is brought about “according to their order and their hypostatic particularity”(88). That is, God’s gift of self comes from the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, but in our return to God we are made like the Son through the power of the Spirit.  Likewise, the Spirit “is the sovereign principle of the absolute future of humanity and of the creation with which humanity is connected” (117). Part Three entitled “The Promise of the Father” is composed of three short articles: “Theology of the Holy Spirit” (1971), “The Holy Spirit in the Thomistic theology of moral action”  (1974), “Pneumatology or Christomonism in the Latin Tradition?” (1969).  In the last of these essays, Congar claims that while Christology dominated Scholastic thought through the centuries, “Vatican II has reintroduced the pneumatology that always been integral to Tradition” (129).  Congar himself, of course, played a key role in that return to pneumatology at Vatican II. Part Four likewise consists of three short articles: “Pneumatology Today” (1982), “Christological and Pneumatological Implications of Vatican II’s Ecclesiology” (1980), and “The Third Article of the Creed: The Impact of Pneumatology on the Life of the Church” (1985). Especially in this third article. Congar emphasizes that the Holy Spirit is the eschatological gift that carries this world into the life of the world to come, bringing Christ’s work to completion (201).Yet in this world, the Church as a hierarchically ordered institution still remains. Hence, the clergy from Pope to bishops and local pastors together act in persona Christi, albeit in and through the invisible activity of the Spirit.

            By way of personal comment, I would certainly acknowledge and applaud Congar’s key role in reshaping the traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church at Vatican II.  I especially appreciate his emphasis on the Church as a “communion,” a shared life, as well as a “society,” a historical institution with a fixed structure of authority (217).  But what Congar in my view fails to emphasize sufficiently is that the Trinity itself is a communion or shared life among the three divine persons. Rather, in line with the traditional understanding of the Trinity, he continues to emphasize the different roles that the divine persons individually play in the history of salvation. But Jesus himself says “He who sees me sees the Father” (John 14/9).I myself would add “and feels the presence of the empowering Spirit at the same time.”All three divine persons are concomitantly involved in the work of creation, redemption and sanctification of the world of creation. After all, the world of creation came forth from the primordial field of activity proper to the divine life and will eventually be reincorporated into the divine life, albeit in a transformed state, at the end of the world.  In brief, then Congar’s focus on pneumatology as counter-point to classical Christology needs itself to be incorporated into a new socially organized world view in which all the participants in their own way share in co-constituting a hierarchy of communities rather than a hierarchy of individual entities.