“Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” John 17:3

Why is the Holy Ghost vivificantem, bringer of Life? As discussed (Trinity: the Lover, the Loved One and the Love), the Holy Ghost is the Perfect Love, Knowledge and Identification between the Father and the Son (i.e. between God and Himself). The Holy Ghost is hence one of three parts of the Inner Life of God, and the Inner Life of God is so rich that each of the three parts that form it is a Person. The Holy Ghost is, as the Son says, “the love [the Holy Ghost] wherewith thou [the Father] hast loved me [the Son]” (John 17:26).

But the Holy Ghost is also given to us so as to bring us Life. But are we not already alive? What is this Life that the Holy Ghost is to give us?

It is the same Life, adapted to our finite nature, than the Inner Life of God. It is given to us so that we love, know and identify with ourselves, that is to say to make us sinless, as sin is that which makes us hate ourselves, that which makes us unknown to ourselves, that which out of us strangers to ourselves. Sin is Inner Death. What do Adam and Eve do as soon as they have sinned for the first time? “And the eyes of them both were opened: and when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7): the effect of sin is that it creates a disgust of one for one’s self, a need to hide from one’s self what one is, a perversion of the identification, of the equality and of the love that made Man in the likeness of God.

God could not have given us the Father or the Son, as both the Father and the Son are infinite per se, and we could not hold them in our finite nature. But he can give us the Holy Ghost, which is infinite as a Divine Person because He is the identity between two infinite Divine Persons. If the Holy Ghost can be the identity between two infinite persons, how could he not be the identity between one and one’s self, which are both finite? This is why the Holy Ghost is “the spirit of truth” (John 14:17): the truth that is brought to us by the Holy Ghost is the truthful relationship with our selves; truth is, in its simplest expression, an equality between two apparently different things.

The Holy Ghost hence brings reconciliation in our own Inner Life, and receiving him as a gift makes us sinless, makes us in the likeness of God once again so that, as the Son says, we “all may be one, as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee” (John 17:21) and enjoy an Inner Life like the Inner Life of God. The gift of the Holy Ghost allows us to find, inside of us, the Symbol that God gave us of his own existence, our resemblance to Him. Through the healing that the Holy Ghost operates inside of our own fallen natures, we experience an inner miracle that is the way for us to know the Father and the Son.