Yves Congar's theology of the Holy Spirit

This dissertation argues that Dominican Yves Congar (1904--1995) significantly advanced contemporary pneumatology through his elaboration of a theology of the Holy Spirit that is at once a theology of the church and a theological anthropology. The early twentieth-century Roman Catholic pneumatology that Congar inherited consisted primarily of a spiritual anthropology---a theology of the Spirit's indwelling of the human person and the consequent bestowal of divine filiation, the infused virtues, and spiritual gifts and fruits. At the same time, theologians produced ecclesiological treatises that either failed to mention the Spirit at all or simply appealed to the Spirit as the guarantor of the church's infallibility and authority. It was commonly presumed that the indwelling of the Spirit in the human person had little or no bearing on ecclesiology. These were "years of famine," Congar decried, in which "spiritual anthropology now seems to have been drawn off from ecclesiology: the legal structure is all-sufficient with its guaranteed administrative charisms." Congar believed that this divorce of spiritual anthropology and ecclesiology betrayed Roman Catholicism's biblical, patristic and Thomistic heritage. His own theology included both what he termed a "pneumatological anthropology" and also a "pneumatological ecclesiology." He developed a theology of the Spirit's indwelling in the human person that was inseparable from an account of the Spirit as co-institutor and life principle of the church, and his theology of the Holy Spirit makes an important contribution to contemporary systematic theology. Congar's pneumatology can enrich various ongoing discussions in this field including reflection as to whether the church should be a "hierarchy" or a "democracy," consideration of "persons in communion" as a framework for contemporary theological anthropology and ecclesiology, and deliberations about the personhood of the Holy Spirit and the theology of appropriations.