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Gifts of the Holy Spirit

Gifts-of-the-holy-spirit Gifts-of-the-holy-spirit

The qualities of the holy spirit are perfections, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," Matthew 5:48. Some qualities of the spirit are proper to God as eternity and omnipotence, these are called divine attributes. Other qualities are instead transmissible these are called gifts, supernatural virtues, infused or perfect virtues. The list of spiritual gifts is very extensive, we are going to study the gifts that are perfect virtues and that define the holiness and life in common (communion). The gifts of the spirit of wisdom enumerated by Thomas Aquinas that define  the integral man are 7: mercy, piety, gift of work, counsel or righteousness, gift of discernment, gift of knowledge, gift of wisdom.
Mercy is: amability, affability, benedicence, compassion.
Piety or Fear of God: constancy, firmness, devotion, equanimity, stability.
Gift of Work: known as Progressive Work or Continuous Improvement.
Gift of Counsel: listen, perceive with attention, meditate with intuition and inspiration, decide with creativity. This gift of counsel is known as the art of listening or emulation of God.
Gift of Wisdom: is the love for the truth and the virtue.
Gift of Knowledge or Understanding: it is the reason that loves the good, is the same intelligence of God, the pursuit of the gift of knowledge are the eternal and immutable truths.
Gift of Discernment: is the ability to separate correctly the good and the evil.
These 7 gifts are the gifts received in Pentecost, Acts of the Apostles 2. These seven gifts are then perfected with the eternal life, which is contemplative activity and perseverance, which is the daily determination to do good, avoiding evil, to reach the fruits of the spirit that are the ultimate pursuits of life. These are the gifts that define holiness, or to say, 7 gifts definethe  integrity and then two more to the sanctity.
The spiritual gifts have as a common characteristic that they are "the precise and the exact". In spirituality we hit or fail. Thence the concept of heresy which means teaching of the error. Heresy is a work of the flesh. This is resume in the teaching in the gospel:

"The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, the Lord has done this", Matthew 21:42

We edify and build on the correct, on the precise and exact. We cannot build on the error, the gifts are path because we grow. This is why the gifts are also complete, that is, they can not be improved or overcome. For example, justice is a natural virtue, justice is not "complete", not all justice is good, justice is completed in equity, judges when a law does not allow a resolution they recurr to equity, that is, jurisprudence . The same happens with prudence, with the rect reason according to Aristotle. The gifts of counsel and mercy instead can not be completed, from there, they are gifts. God is the perfection in the highest degree, God does not commune with the error, we can not ascribe imperfections to God. In the Bible concepts like "the wrath of God", "the justice of God" are metaphors. We can not associate virtues or passions with God, that is, forms of error.

 

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