Advent Meditation
“Thy Seven-fold gifts impart”
Isaiah is the most ‘evangelical’ of all the Prophets as Anthony Sparrow, a seventeenth century Anglican divine, wisely notes. It is not by accident that in the Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, used in Advent in 1918, just after the horrible and soul-destroying ravages of World War I, three of the great lessons are from Isaiah. Isaiah 11. 1-3a, 4a, 6-9 is particularly instructive about Advent both as an important doctrine and season in its own right and as anticipating the mystery of Christmas.
The passage emphasizes the so-called seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the theme of Paradise restored. They go together and help to illuminate the darkness of our minds and our world. The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols is a pageant of the strong Word of God coming to us as light and life. The Seven gifts of the Spirit speak to heart and mind in relation to properties or qualities identified with the Messiah “which is being interpreted the Christ”, as the Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent reminds us. Yet the Hebrew text, as we have it from a much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint and from which the Latin Vulgate translation derives, names six gifts though the Septuagint names seven gifts of the Spirit. That has come to define a whole tradition of spirituality in the Church Catholic expressed for instance in the Veni Creator Spiritus used at ordinations: “thou the anointing Spirit art, / who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart” in John Cosin’s lovely translation (BCP, 653).
But what are these gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord”. The Septuagint, probably influenced by the rhetorical features of Greek poetry, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to a sense of the awe and wonder of God whom we honour and worship.
They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts understood as having come from God. They speak to heart and mind, to character. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God, particularly in terms of the idea of the integration of heart and mind as distinct from their separation and antagonism, what T.S. Eliot famously termed “the dissociation of intellect and sensibility” which defines our modern dystopia in many of its confusions. The seven gifts of the Spirit suggest the mutual co-inherence and inter-dependency of heart and mind, of intellect and sensibility. That they are associated with the Messiah is also significant; they derive from the Word and the Spirit of God and as uniting us with God. As such they offer a profound vision about the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as grounded in God.
