The Gifts and the Fruits

The New Testament speaks of charismata given for the building of the Church and of fruit borne in the person who has the Spirit, and the two are not the same thing. This file sets out both, corrects the widespread assumption that the “seven gifts of the Holy Spirit” are a biblical enumeration, gives the Church’s ordering of gifts — love and humility above wonders — and states why the fruits, not the gifts, are the criterion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Two Vocabularies

St. Paul uses two quite different sets of words for what the Spirit produces, and reading them as synonyms is the source of most confusion on the subject.

Charismata (χαρίσματα) are gifts of grace given to particular members for the benefit of the whole: “the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal” (1 Corinthians 12:7). The lists are not identical and are evidently not meant to be exhaustive — 1 Corinthians 12:8–10 gives word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, kinds of tongues, interpretation of tongues; 12:28 adds apostles, teachers, helps, governments; Romans 12:6–8 gives prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, ruling, showing mercy; Ephesians 4:11 gives apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Some of these are spectacular and some are administrative, and Paul puts them in the same list on purpose.

Fruit (καρπός) is what the Spirit produces in the person who has him: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23). The noun is singular. The nine words name one thing seen from nine sides, not nine separable endowments — a point the Greek makes and most English translations preserve, and which matters, because it means the fruit cannot be had piecemeal. There is no one who has the Spirit’s love and lacks his patience.

The difference between the two is functional. A charism is given for others and may be present in someone whose own life is a wreck; the fruit is the transformation of the one who bears it. Paul says both things bluntly. Gifts without love are nothing — “though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2). And the Lord says the same in the plainest possible terms: many will say “have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?” and will be told, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23).

The “Seven Gifts”: A Correction Worth Making

The sevenfold enumeration — wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord — is familiar from Western catechesis and appears in Orthodox devotional writing under Western influence. Its basis is Isaiah 11:2, and the basis is more interesting than the scheme.

The Hebrew text names six things — wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord — with “the fear of the Lord” then repeated in verse 3. The Septuagint renders the first occurrence of the fear of the Lord as πνεῦμα εὐσεβείας, “spirit of godliness” or piety, and retains the fear of the Lord after it; the Vulgate follows with pietas. The count of seven is therefore a product of the Greek and Latin versions, not of the Hebrew, and the scheme built on it is a Western scholastic development that received its classical elaboration in the medieval West.

Nothing turns on the arithmetic, and nothing here is a criticism of the underlying text: Isaiah 11 describes the Spirit resting upon the Messiah, and the Church reads it so. What is worth correcting is the impression that Scripture supplies a fixed catalogue of seven gifts. It does not; the East has never adopted the septenary as a doctrinal scheme; and the various New Testament lists are open and unmatched. The Spirit “divides to every man severally as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11), which is not the language of a fixed inventory.

The Order of Value

The Church’s tradition has a consistent ranking of the Spirit’s gifts, and it is close to the inverse of the ranking that comes naturally.

St. Paul’s own order. He places tongues last in his list (1 Corinthians 12:28, 30), prefers prophecy to tongues because prophecy edifies the assembly and tongues without interpretation edify only the speaker (14:1–5), demands intelligibility — “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue” (14:19) — and subordinates the whole subject to love (ch. 13) and to order (14:33, 40).

St. John Chrysostom adds the historical observation that the extraordinary gifts of the apostolic age were no longer to be seen in his own, and treats their withdrawal not as a calamity but as a sign of maturity: they were given to a Church that needed visible authentication, and the Church that has the Scriptures and the faith needs it less (Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29; trans. NPNF I/12). This is not a doctrine of cessation — the Orthodox Church has never taught that the charisms ceased, and her hagiography is full of prophecy, healing, and clairvoyance — but it is a warning against treating their frequency as a measure of the Church’s health.

The ascetic tradition goes further and ranks discernment above wonderworking, and humility above discernment. The Desert Fathers’ judgment is settled: the sayings put discretion (diakrisis) at the head of the virtues, and treat the ability to work signs as a danger to the one who has it. St. Isaac the Syrian and St. John Climacus say the same. The machinery of that judgment — the stages of thought, the marks of delusion, the safeguards — belongs to the ascetic vocabulary and is not restated here (see Discernment and the Measure; The Discernment of Spirits).

And the liturgical tradition ranks by what it asks for. The Church’s daily prayer to the Spirit asks for cleansing and salvation, not for powers: “come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls” (see The Liturgical Witness). The prayer of St. Ephrem, said throughout Lent, asks for chastity, humility, patience, and love, and for the sight of one’s own sins. This is the Church telling her children, several times a day, what to want.

The Fruits as Criterion

“By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20) is not a moralizing aside; in context it is a rule for identifying false prophets, and the Church has used it as such.

The fruit of the Spirit is the criterion because it cannot be counterfeited by the same means as the gifts. Ecstatic speech, visions, and even genuine healings can be produced or simulated by causes other than the Holy Spirit — the ascetic tradition says so explicitly, and so does Scripture (Matthew 24:24; 2 Thessalonians 2:9). Longsuffering, meekness, and love of enemies cannot be produced by delusion, because delusion feeds on the opposite. This is the practical reason the Fathers’ test for authentic grace is humility and compunction rather than intensity of feeling, and the reason a claim to the Spirit that arrives with exaltation is suspected on sight (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits).

Three consequences follow for ordinary practice.

The gifts are not sought. The tradition’s counsel is uniform: pray for salvation, and do not ask for extraordinary gifts. St. Isaac the Syrian’s rule — neither to seek nor to reject what is given — is the standing Orthodox posture toward spiritual experience.

The gifts are given to the unworthy. Chrysostom presses this against the Corinthians’ pride in their endowments: the gift is God’s and its bearer’s condition does not authenticate it (Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29–30). The Church took the same position against the Donatists about the sacraments. It follows that possession of a charism proves nothing about the possessor, which is exactly what the Corinthians did not want to hear.

And the ordinary gifts are the important ones. Paul’s lists include helps, governments, giving, showing mercy, exhortation, and teaching. These are charisms in the same sense as prophecy, given by the same Spirit, and they are the ones by which a parish actually lives. A pneumatology that becomes interesting only when something unusual happens has already lost the thread.

What the Spirit Is For

The end of the whole subject is not a list. St. Basil states it as the reversal of every consequence of the fall: “Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to Paradise, our ascension into the Kingdom of Heaven, our return to the adoption of sons, our liberty to call God our Father, our becoming partakers of the grace of Christ, being called children of light, sharing in eternal glory” (On the Holy Spirit 15.36; trans. NPNF II/8). St. Athanasius states it as the condition of deification: it is by partaking of the Spirit that we are made partakers of the divine nature, which the Spirit could not give were he a creature (Letters to Serapion I.24).

The gifts serve that; the fruits are the beginning of it; and what is actually acquired is not an endowment but a person (see The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit; The Mysteries and Theosis).

References

Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 15.36. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion I.22–27. Trans. DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, Popular Patristics 43. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29–32. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 12.
Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Luibheid and Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. 4 vols. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–1995.
Scripture (LXX noted where it differs): Isaiah 11:2–3 (MT and LXX); Matthew 7:20–23; 24:24; Romans 12:6–8; 1 Corinthians 12:7–11, 28–30; 13:1–3; 14:1–5, 19, 33, 40; Galatians 5:22–23; Ephesians 4:11; 2 Thessalonians 2:9.