The Two Hands of God

In his hugely influential work, Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses), St. Irenaeus of Lyons employs a striking image. Irenaeus speaks of the Trinity’s action in creating and redeeming as the Father employing his “two hands: the Son and the Spirit.” This active engagement of the whole Trinity in the “economy” of salvation—the oikonomia that is God’s loving “management of his household”—has as its goal theosis, the divinization of God’s beloved creatures whereby many may be brought to glory.

Though written around the year 180 as a refutation of a Gnosticism whose disdain for the flesh perverts the gospel of Incarnation, the book has continued to inspire Catholic and Orthodox theologians to the present. Indeed, in the face of a contemporary drive toward “excarnation” (well documented by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age), Irenaeus’s theological vision has a renewed relevance and importance.

One theologian highly indebted to Irenaeus was the influential French Dominican Yves Congar. He called Irenaeus “that great and beloved writer” and, on several occasions, drew upon Irenaeus’s “very fine image” of “the glorified Lord Jesus together with his Spirit” as “the two hands of God.”

In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, at which he played a significant role, Congar sought to remedy what he and many considered a pneumatological deficit in Latin Christianity. The relative lack of a theology of the Holy Spirit in Western Christian liturgical and theological settings had been criticized at the Council by Eastern Rite Catholics and Orthodox observers alike. They charged that the Christian West’s almost exclusive focus on Christology might even amount to a “Christomonism.”

Thus, in the late 1970s, Congar wrote his important three-volume study of the theology of the Holy Spirit: I Believe in the Holy Spirit. This was followed in 1984 by a presentation of his mature view of the relation of Christology and pneumatology: The Word and the Spirit. Here, Congar laid the foundation for an integrated and balanced approach whereby justice is done to “the two hands of God” in the Trinity’s one salvific plan. As he stated, “The Spirit displays something that is new, in the novelty of history and the variety of cultures, but it is a new thing that comes from the fulness that has been given once and for all by God in Christ.”¹ Put quite succinctly: “no Christology without pneumatology and no pneumatology without Christology.”²

If the years prior to Vatican II were somewhat lean pneumatologically, in the years since the Council, there has been a veritable explosion of appeals to the Spirit, often not only thin in their theology, but also indeterminate in their reference. Indeed, it sometimes appears that we have fallen from an often merely notional Trinitarianism into a rather vapid Unitarianism of the Spirit. When I asked one proponent of a “Spirit theology” why he did not give more sustained attention to Christology, he responded with refreshing candor: “Focus on the Spirit gives more wiggle room.” Of course, the pressing danger is that we may manage thereby to wiggle ourselves right out of orthodox Christian faith.

In a wonderful display of theological humility, Yves Congar himself admits that his own effort to rectify a Christological imbalance may have inadvertently contributed instead to a pneumatological imbalance. So, in the second volume of his I Believe in the Holy Spirit, entitled “Lord and Giver of Life,” he articulates a guiding rule for theological reflection. “The Spirit… is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. He does no other work than that of Jesus Christ.”³

Congar thus explicitly distances himself from the view of Joachim of Fiore who seems to have postulated a “third age of the Spirit” that goes beyond what was accomplished in Jesus Christ. In contrast, Congar professes, “The catholicity of the Church is the catholicity of Christ. The soundness of any pneumatology is its reference to Christ.”⁴ In this Congar can count himself a faithful student of Saint Irenaeus who famously wrote: “Christ brought all newness in bringing himself!”⁵ Thus, as Congar contends “there is only one body which the Spirit builds up and quickens and that is the body of Christ.”⁶

However, as suggestive as the image of the two hands of God is, it has, of course, inevitable limitations. One of these is that we inevitably picture “two hands” as being somewhat commensurate in size, shape, and function. But here is where we can be led astray in our Trinitarian experience and reflection. Catholic Trinitarian theology posits that “person” in the Trinity signifies precisely what is different among the Three, what distinguishes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even as they share a common divine nature.

Hence, the Son and the Spirit differ in their personhood in a way that the two hands image fails to bring into relief.

Seeking to obtain some purchase upon the distinctive personhood of the Spirit and the conjoined yet different actions of Son and Spirit, I find a rich resource in the ending of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is liturgically familiar as one of the opening greetings at the Eucharistic celebration. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God (the Father) and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor 13:13).

It is koinonia/communion that Paul singles out as proper to the Spirit and the Spirit’s mission. Congar’s assertion (which I quoted above) fully coheres with Saint Paul’s teaching. “There is only one body which the Spirit builds up and quickens, and that is the body of Christ.” The Spirit’s mission is to bring about communion by the up-building of the Body of Christ.

Thus, the full manifestation of the Spirit’s distinctive mission occurs on the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit descends upon the Apostles in the form of tongues of fire. The Spirit thereby gives birth to the Church, the redeemed people of God, heralding the new creation.

It is thus completely congruent with the New Testament witness that the dogmatic development of the Creed of the Council of Nicaea (325) at the First Council of Constantinople (381) professes belief in “the Holy Spirit who is Lord and Giver of Life” who births and sustains “one holy Catholic and apostolic Church.”

The Creed we profess at the Eucharist each Sunday is Trinitarian both in form and content. And it is precisely in the liturgy that the experience of the Father shaping his beloved people with his two hands finds privileged expression. In more conceptual terms: in the liturgy Christology and pneumatology come together inseparably in lived synthesis.

No book I know better expounds this liturgical-theological synthesis than Jean Corbon’s The Wellspring of Worship. Corbon, who taught liturgy and theology for many years in Lebanon, was a priest of the Greek Melkite rite and hence his writing is imbued with Eastern Catholic sensibilities and insights.

Chapter five of Wellspring is entitled “Pentecost: The Coming of the Church.” There he writes: “The Church is themanifestation of the Spirit of Christ in a new community of men and women who have entered into life because the Spirit has brought them into communion with the living body of the Son of God. We know of no other Spirit of the living God except the One who poured out from the side of Christ when Christ gave his life for us and who raised this same Jesus from the depths of death.”⁷

Significantly, Corbon was the principal author of “Part Four” of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “Christian Prayer.” However, in addition to “Part Four” of the Catechism, Corbon reportedly had a leading role in “Part Two” on “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery,” especially the section: “The Liturgy – Work of the Holy Trinity.” Here, he treats of the involvement of each of the divine persons in the Church’s liturgical celebrations. It is noteworthy that the longest of the three sections is devoted to “The Holy Spirit and the Church in the Liturgy” (nos. 1091–1109). I warmly recommend reading and meditating upon these rich reflections.

The section concludes with this summary statement. “In every liturgical action the Holy Spirit is sent in order to bring us into communion with Christ and so to form his body…. Communion with the Holy Trinity and fraternal communion are inseparably the fruit of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy” (CCC 1108). We might extend his insight and relate it to the current discussion regarding “synodality” in the Church and affirm: “sun-hodos”—as, together in the Spirit, we walk the one Way who is Jesus Christ. For, in the words of Pope Leo’s motto, “In Illo Uno Unum” (in him who is one, we are one).

If, as I have been suggesting, communion is the distinctive character and task of the Spirit, then perhaps our experience of and reflection upon the Spirit in our Western tradition has been too individualistic. To put it boldly: rather than first focusing upon the spirit “in me,” whether as illuminator, counselor, or consoler, our optic should be “we in the Spirit.” The Spirit is “in me” for the sake of “we in the Spirit.” The new self which the Holy Spirit reveals and enables is one constituted by its relations to both the living and the dead.

In this, I am but recalling and advocating Saint Paul’s radical pedagogy, as he schools his converts in the transvaluing of values that constitutes existence in the body of Christ and new life in the Spirit. “We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (Rom 12:5). Consequently, “if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor 12:26). For, “if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:7).

Pope Leo stands firmly in line with Paul’s apostolic exhortations when he urged Catholic Digital Ministers: “Be agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization, of individualism and egocentrism. Center yourselves on Christ, so as to overcome the logic of the world, of fake news, of frivolity, with the beauty and light of Truth.”⁸

I proposed earlier that the goal of the Trinity’s economy of salvation is the “deification” of creatures, their participation in the life of the Triune God. The thrust of this reflection has been to suggest that the Creed’s confession of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come will be the perfection of that communion which has already been initiated through the Son in the Holy Spirit.

The “two hands” of God work our deification, synchronizing and aligning us with the very rhythms of Trinitarian life. And just as there is one God in infinite relational fecundity, so there will be one deified humanity in the perfection of transfigured personhood. There will be but one Bride who in the Spirit cries: “Amen. Come Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20).

What we need now is a more fully articulated and appropriated Trinitarian theology as together we journey to the Father through the Son in the communion of their Holy Spirit. And as we continue to seek further understanding of our Trinitarian profession of faith, we might consider the distinctive personhood of the Holy Spirit as beyond the “I-Thou” relation of Father and Son. The Holy Spirit is, rather, the “We” in the Godhead. Hence, the Spirit is the Ground of our own communion and deification, our participation in the very life of the Most Blessed Trinity.

(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on the “What We Need Now” site, in slightly different form, and is republished here with kind permission.)

Endnotes:

¹ The Word and the Spirit, p. 71.

² Ibid., p. 1.

³ I Believe in the Holy Spirit, II, p. 35.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Adversus Haereses IV, 34, 1.

⁶ The Word and the Spirit, p. 6.

⁷ The Wellspring of Worship, pp. 47–8.

⁸ Pope Leo XIV, Address to Catholic Digital Missionaries and Influencers, July 29, 2025.