The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 159 he refuses to grant the Donatists a share in the Spirit's fullness because they have willingly broken true unity and have thereby broken the communion which only the communion of the Spirit's love [compago caritatis] can achieve.55 At the personal level, divine union and holiness and love must also accompany one another. Let us therefore now turn to the Spirit as spiritual holiness, as these are inseparable for Augustine: as the bond of love and the gift of self between the Father and the Son, the Spirit manifests himself as a union realized as holiness in the lives of the elect.
The Holy Spirit as Spiritual Holiness
The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who most particularly represents the holiness and the spiritual nature of divinity.56 The Spirit of God is the Spirit of holiness and Augustine finds no more fitting name for him than spiritus sanctus because this epithet alone connotes the essential commonality between Father and Son: spirit and sanctity. Augustine suggests that whereas both union and love cannot help but predicate a bond between two others, the names "holiness" and "spirit" are not as easily identifiable with the Spirit individually as a nexus. In order to defend why "Holy Spirit" is in fact a fitting name, therefore, he shrewdly sees how these names actually do represent a commonality in that they are essentially what both Father and Son are, similar to what we saw earlier at Sermon 217:
So the Holy Spirit is a kind of inexpressible communion or fellowship of Father and Son, and perhaps he is given this name just because the same name can be applied to the Father and the Son. He is properly called what they are in common, seeing that both Father and Son are holy and both Father and Son are spirit. So to signify the
55. s. 137.1; PL 38.754. 56. Cf. Trin. 5.11.12.