INABILITY. - An impediment to the valid performance of certain specific acts. To safeguard the common good of society, whether civil or religious, it is sometimes necessary for the legislator to enact, among the laws regulating the juridical validity of human acts, some that render juridically invalid acts which, by their nature, would be valid.
From this, however, it must not be inferred that positive law prevails over natural law, for in some cases it is natural law itself that, for the common good, requires that certain juridical acts not be absolutely valid but be valid only conditionally upon a positive disposition of human legislation. The legislator, however, cannot do this arbitrarily but only when the general interest of the community so demands, e.g., to prevent fraud and other kinds of harm, to protect good morals, to safeguard the interests of minors who may be at risk in aleatory contracts, to suppress clandestine marriages, to punish the crime of simony in contracts, and so forth.
It is commonly admitted, both in practice and in doctrine, that both the Church and the State have the power to enact such laws. With regard to the Church, this is explicitly recognized in a declaration of the Council of Trent (Sess. XXIV, *de Sacramento Matrimonii*, can. 4). The laws in question regulate especially matters concerning contracts, wills, marriage, the conferral of benefices, adoption, vows, religious profession, and oaths. Ecclesiastical law (cf. CIC, can. 11) renders a human act invalid in two ways: either by directly and fundamentally striking at its validity, in which case it is called *irritating*, or by declaring the subject incapable of performing it, in which case it is called *inabilitating*.
**Inability** is therefore that juridical status in which a person finds himself as a result of an inabilitating law, which renders the acts performed by him invalid and thus devoid of any efficacy; for example, according to cann. 1072 and 1073, clerics in sacred orders and religious with solemn vows or those equivalent to them cannot contract a valid marriage; can. 1076 establishes that in the direct line of legitimate or natural consanguinity and in the collateral line up to the third degree, marriage is always null; can. 1075 states that one does not validly contract marriage who, during a previous marriage, committed adultery with a promise of marriage or even violated its civil form, those who committed adultery followed by marriage, and those who together, physically or morally, procured the death of the spouse of one of them; can. 1067 stipulates that a man before completing his sixteenth year and a woman before completing her fourteenth year cannot contract a valid marriage; and can. 157 states that an office vacant due to renunciation or deprivation following a sentence cannot be conferred by the same Ordinary who accepted the renunciation or pronounced the sentence upon relatives, kin, or in-laws up to the second degree, whether his own or those of the one who renounced; according to can. 36 § 2, those excommunicated, suspended, or personally interdicted after a sentence are incapable of validly obtaining pontifical rescripts; according to can. 2204 § 1, those struck by *infamia iuris* cannot obtain ecclesiastical benefices, pensions, offices, or dignities, which also applies, according to can. 2345, to Pietro Palazzini.
The doctrine of the indwelling of God in the soul advanced with equal, if not greater, prominence from the apostolic age into the patristic period. Indeed, it took a further step forward: from the simple affirmations of the Epistle of Barnabas, which opposed the material temple of the Israelites to the true temple in which God truly dwells, namely, the soul freed from sin (Epist. Barn., 16; PG 2, 774), or of Ignatius of Antioch, who coined the expressive terms ἑσφόροι, ναφόροι, χριστόφοροι, ἀγώφοι (Eph., 9: PG 5, 652), one arrived even at using the universally known fact of the indwelling to prove against heretics certain fundamental truths of the faith: the resurrection of the bodies that were temples of God (Hermas, Pastor, III, simil. 5, 6: PG 2, 962; Irenaeus, Adv. haeres., V, cap. 6, 2: ibid. 7, 1139; Novatian, De Trin., 29: PL 3, 973), the incorporeality of the Holy Spirit (Origen, Περὶ ἀρχῶν, I, cap. 1, 3: PG 11, 122), His divinity (Athanasius, I Epist. ad Serap., 24: ibid. 26, 586; Didymus of Alexandria, De Spiritu, 6: ibid. 39, 1037; Cyril of Alexandria, In Io. Evang., I [cap. 1, 13]: ibid. 73, 158; cf. also IX: ibid. 74, 258; X: ibid. 291; other texts in Petavius, De Trin., I, VIII, cap. 5, nn. VIII-XVI), and the divinity of the Word (Athanasius, De synodis, 51: ibid. 26, 783; cf. 53: ibid. 787). Tatian even went so far as to subordinate the very immortality of the soul to the indwelling of the Spirit of God (Oratio adv. Graecos, 13: ibid. 6, 834). This demonstrates that a substantial presence was in view and attests to the great importance and wide diffusion that this unchallenged certainty enjoyed in the patristic age. As in the apostolic age, so too in the patristic age one habitually speaks of the Holy Spirit. But through a simple process of inference, one easily passed to the presence in us of the three divine Persons, on account of their inseparability (Hilary, De Trinit., VIII, 27: PL 10, 256; Didymus, De Trinit., II, 7: PG 39, 530; John Chrysostom, Hom. XII, in Epist. ad Romanos, 8: ibid. 60, 519; Augustine, Epist. ad Dardanum [Epist. 187 alias 57], 16: PL 33, 837). Moreover, it sufficed to recall Jesus’ explicit promise of the coming of the Father and the Son (Origen, Περὶ ἀρχῶν, I, cap. 1, 2: PG 11, 122; Cyril of Alexandria, In Io. Evang., X [cap. 14, 23]: ibid. 74, 290). The purpose and task of this indwelling, which the patristic literature insisted upon above all, is to sanctify us, to transform us into the temple of God, and to prepare us for eternal beatitude. Hence this presence of God is reserved for those who fulfill its conditions and cannot be confused with God’s presence in all things. This will be expressly stated, among others, by St. Augustine in his Letter to Dardanus (loc. cit.).
Thus, to the investigation of theologians this doctrine presents itself as strongly and clearly affirmed both in Sacred Scripture and in tradition. It will be their task to define the concept and to study its nature. A preliminary question is whether the indwelling belongs to all three divine Persons or is proper to the Holy Spirit. Jesus clearly promised the coming of the Father and the Son to those who love Him; yet the insistence with which He promised the Holy Spirit and the prominence that the action of the Holy Spirit has always held both in the early Church and in patristic literature has led some theologians—among them the two founders of positive theology, Petavius and Thomassin, and not a few moderns—to attribute to the Holy Spirit proper functions regarding the indwelling and the sanctifying action in souls. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of theologians have appealed to the principle according to which, among the three divine Persons, all is one and indivisible, except for the relations of origin. Hence it is held that the indwelling is equally of all three divine Persons, and the insistence of the documents on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is explained by the theological doctrine of appropriation, that is, the attribution to one divine Person of a predicate common to all, on account of a particular analogy with His personal property. In this sense Leo XIII expressed himself in the encyclical Divinum illud of May 9, 1897, and Pius XII in the Mystici Corporis of June 29, 1943. More debated is the other question: how to conceive this special presence. According to the explanations that have most interested theologians up to now, the following are indicated:
