What Makes a Holy Ghost?

By Emma Restuccia,

The months of October and November can feel a bit eerie, both culturally and liturgically. Halloween decorations deck store aisles early on. In the Catholic realm, November is the month dedicated to the Holy Souls in purgatory, a beautiful yet other-worldly commemoration, and the Solemnity of All Saints Day kicks off November. With saints, spirits, souls, and specters on the brain, the time is apt to think of the Holy Ghost. 

While typically referred to in recent times as the Holy Spirit, the title of Holy Ghost has always had an eerie ring. In modern ages, the word “ghost” has a scary, paranormal connotation, and often refers to death. But early English prayers and biblical translations primarily used this word choice when referring to the Third Person of the Trinity.  

Fr. Edward McNamara attributes the change in usage of these words to how words evolve over time. While the earliest English-language versions of the Bible used both Spirit and Ghost, they mainly used the latter in describing the Third Person of the Godhead. The Geneva Bible (1560), the Tyndale Bible (1526), and the Wycliff Bible (1382) all opt for the word “Ghost” to title the Third Person of the Trinity. The later Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible and the King James Protestant Bible also used Ghost for their translations.

The words “Spirit” and “Ghost” are English translations of the original Greek and Hebrew, and later of the Latin Vulgate. This word is Pneuma in Greek, Ruah in Hebrew. and, in Latin, Spiritus. But from there, in Old English, the word is Gast. 

“The word ghost is of Germanic origin and comes from Old English gast, meaning soul, life, breath, good or bad spirit, angel or demon. Christian texts in Old English use gast to translate the Latin Spiritus, from where we get Holy Ghost,” Fr. McNamara writes. 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church also has much to say on the Holy Spirit. “The term ‘Spirit’ translates the Hebrew word ruah, which, in its primary sense, means breath, air, wind,” section 691 notes. “Jesus indeed uses the sensory image of the wind to suggest to Nicodemus the transcendent newness of him who is personally God's breath, the divine Spirit.” 

The change began to come about as “ghost” took on a more sinister and spooky association. Probably by the beginning of the 20th century, many translations had completely interchanged “Spirit” for “Ghost.” But the “Holy Ghost” title continues to be used in more traditional liturgies. And Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI uses the word Geist while celebrating Mass in his native German. 

While Catholics and Christians indeed must shun the evil and demonic, they understand these realities do truly exist, and spiritual warfare must be fought with virtue and prayer (hello, daily St. Michael prayer!). Our divine defense consists of souls, saints, angels, and the Holy Ghost. The spiritual life is full of, well, the spiritual. 

One of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, is the author of the odd and eerie.  Her stories, written in the mid 1900s in her signature Southern Gothic style, are full of freaks and oddities, but always evoke a kind of reckoning, haunting grace. “It is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted,” O’Connor wrote.

One of my favorite O'Connor short stories is the “Temple of the Holy Ghost”––a curious and somewhat grotesque piece about girls who encounter a hermaphrodite at the fair. The hermaphrodite is repeating words adapted from 1 Corinthians 6:19: “‘A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God's temple, don't you know? Don't you know?... I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.’" 

The whole strangeness of the idea––a hermaphrodite, speaking of its body as a dwelling of the Holy Ghost ––is worth more thought, and the story is well worth the read. But O’Connor fittingly uses the Ghost title to layer on the grotesqueness and to build in a way for grace to be understood. The Holy Ghost can work and make His dwelling even in the complicated, grittiness of human sinfulness. The Christian soul, if it is willing, can and must become a haunt for the Holy Ghost.

Though now largely antiquated, the title of the Holy Ghost can provide a rich opportunity for meditation on the workings of grace, the promptings of the divine Ghost, and His gifts and fruits in our lives and world. 

So like the Southern author, let us use this spooky time to see the grace in the grotesque and to be Holy Ghost-haunted.