Annotation XIII

”He saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove.” — Matthew 3:16

Whether the dove sitting upon Christ was a real animal.

Chrysostom, homily 12 on Matthew — refuting the Arians, who twist this passage toward an inequality of the Son and the Holy Spirit — seems to assert that the dove in which the Holy Spirit was seen did not have the nature of a dove, but only its figure and appearance, in these words: “I hear some saying: As great as is the difference between a man and a dove, so great is the distance between Christ and the Holy Spirit — because the one was seen in our very nature, the other in the appearance of a dove. What, then, can be answered to such things? — except that the Son of God assumed the nature of man, but the Holy Spirit did not assume the nature of a dove. Therefore the Evangelist said ‘like a dove’ — not in the nature, but in the appearance, of a dove; for then only was he seen in this figure.” Agreeing with him, Ambrose, in the first book On the Sacraments, chapter five, says: “And behold, [it was] as a dove [that] the Holy Spirit — not a dove — descended, but as if a dove. Remember what I have said: Christ took on flesh, not as [apparent] flesh, but the reality of that flesh; but the Holy Spirit descended from heaven not in the reality of a dove, but in the appearance of a dove.” With both agrees Procopius of Gaza, in his commentaries on Genesis, chapter 18, saying: “God, in the Old Testament, was beheld in a bodily form; yet that body did not have the property of a mortal body, for it consisted of neither flesh nor blood. In the same way the Holy Spirit came into our sight in the appearance of a dove; yet it was not a dove, because it did not have the property which a dove has.” The same thing Thomas Cajetan held, in his explanation of this chapter. But against this opinion Augustine protests, in the book On the Christian Combat, chapter 22, writing thus: “Nor do we say this in such a way as to say that the Lord Jesus Christ alone had a true body, but that the Holy Spirit [Augustine: nor that] the Holy Spirit appeared deceptively to the eyes of men; rather, we believe that both those bodies [Christ’s flesh and the dove] were real. Almost all the scholastic theologians follow Augustine’s opinion — especially St. Thomas, in the third volume of the Theological Summa, question 39, article 7.