St. Thomas Aquinas & Grace Perfecting Nature
Today is the Feast Day of the St. Thomas Aquinas. If one's size reflected one's influence, St. Thomas is just about right. Known as the Angelic Doctor and the Universal Doctor, his importance to philosophy, theology and ethics reigns supreme. He's pretty awesome. And a super-smart brainiac. And mondo pious. He'd crush you if he sat on you. He'd crush your high hopes of dissent with his logic and make you feel silly. He was so saintly and humble, he was gifted a glimpse of the Beatific Vision. He was the most reasonable guy out there, and at the same time was a mystic. He believed in miracles, and when he saw them, he didn't think it was out of the ordinary. Why should it be? He was the intellectual genius that lived in elfland and believed that "a tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree" as another man of considerable intellect and girth once noted.
Although talking about his body of work would and does take many lifetimes, I'd like to focus on one point, and that is the connection between Grace and Nature. Most people tend to pit one thing against the other saying "this or that". But that is not always the only option. Who isn't annoyed by those web polls that say "How well do you feel the president is doing his job?" And then you have to choose between "Excellent" and "Terrible". Things are never that easy. Even Socrates succumbs to this: "Is a thing good because the gods will it, or do they will it because it is good? You have to choose between an arbitrarily "just" god or one that has to examine his conscience at night before he goes to bed. Christian Tradition says this ignores the third option of goodness being from the nature of God himself, and can never be in contradiction to him (although the reformers rejected this and promoted the Divine Command Theory).
So it is with nature and grace. I will explain the two opposing options first and then the third way, which in reality was always the first way. Let's give a little rundown.
Pelagius
Boom goes the dynamite! This heretic entered the scene at the end of the 4th century and was a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church and a chief opponent Saint Augustine. Big bad Pelagianism teaches that your nature, via your free will, can merit eternal life on its own. No grace needed. Original Sin did not blight our nature. There might be grace out there but whatever, we lead the charge. Jesus was just a moral example of how it's done right. Nature does everything apart from grace.
St. Augustine and the Catholic Church were too much for Pelagius, and his teaching was condemned as heresy. It's kid brother semi-pelagianism, which said we need grace, but we initiate it, was also ousted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Orange in 529 and reaffirmed at Trent.
Martin Luther
Huzzah! In the early 16th century, this Reformer, as well as Calvin and most of Protestantism, believed that original sin has ruined our natures, made them evil and whatever we do in our will always leads to a mortal sin. Grace does everything apart from nature. We can only do good passively, and well, let me just quote the man:
"I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want 'free will' to be given to me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavor after salvation... Whatever work I had done, there would still be a nagging doubt as to whether it pleased God, or whether He required something more." – Bondage of the Will
Luther taught that man's will is only "free" when he chooses sin. The good that we do comes from God taking over our wills, so, as he said, we work passively. This is pretty much the opposing extreme of Pelagianism. On the otherhand, Reformation theology also teaches that man's nature was, before the fall, capable of maintaining the full vision of God, without the aid of Divine Grace. Hmm, encroachment foul on the Reformers: bumped into a Pelagian.
St. Thomas Aquinas
"Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it." – Summa Theologica, Part 1, 1:8.
The third way. Choosing between grace and nature is a false dichotomy. We have fallen. We no longer enjoy the grace of Original Justice before God, and we are reverted to our baser instincts. But our nature is not bad, nor is incapable of doing any good thing. Man's chief problem is not that he cannot do a good thing, it is atonement that he is incapable of and without it, his good deeds are like filthy rags, as the Apostle says. Atonement had to come from the God-Man, Jesus Christ. He won for us the merits of eternal salvation and bestows his grace to us through the Sacraments and extraordinary means. (Baptism!) Only when we've received the Holy Spirit do our works of love merit anything.
St. Thomas teaches that as a result of Original Sin, our wills are not directed towards God, but everything else. Concupiscence, or the inclination to sin, is not Original Sin itself, but a material effect of it. We need the grace for God to work in us to will, and when we do will, we cooperate with that grace. St. Thomas also said, as he did somewhere in his Summa, that "God does not justify us without ourselves, because while we are being justified we consent to God's justification by a movement of our free will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace."
1) God operates through grace to move us. The First Cause.
2) Man actively receives the grace of God.
3) Through grace God strengthens man to will to perform meritorious works. Co-operation.
As St. Augustine says: "He operates that we may will; and when we will, He co-operates that we may be perfect." – De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, 33.
Although talking about his body of work would and does take many lifetimes, I'd like to focus on one point, and that is the connection between Grace and Nature. Most people tend to pit one thing against the other saying "this or that". But that is not always the only option. Who isn't annoyed by those web polls that say "How well do you feel the president is doing his job?" And then you have to choose between "Excellent" and "Terrible". Things are never that easy. Even Socrates succumbs to this: "Is a thing good because the gods will it, or do they will it because it is good? You have to choose between an arbitrarily "just" god or one that has to examine his conscience at night before he goes to bed. Christian Tradition says this ignores the third option of goodness being from the nature of God himself, and can never be in contradiction to him (although the reformers rejected this and promoted the Divine Command Theory).
So it is with nature and grace. I will explain the two opposing options first and then the third way, which in reality was always the first way. Let's give a little rundown.
Pelagius
Boom goes the dynamite! This heretic entered the scene at the end of the 4th century and was a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church and a chief opponent Saint Augustine. Big bad Pelagianism teaches that your nature, via your free will, can merit eternal life on its own. No grace needed. Original Sin did not blight our nature. There might be grace out there but whatever, we lead the charge. Jesus was just a moral example of how it's done right. Nature does everything apart from grace.
St. Augustine and the Catholic Church were too much for Pelagius, and his teaching was condemned as heresy. It's kid brother semi-pelagianism, which said we need grace, but we initiate it, was also ousted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Orange in 529 and reaffirmed at Trent.
Martin Luther
Huzzah! In the early 16th century, this Reformer, as well as Calvin and most of Protestantism, believed that original sin has ruined our natures, made them evil and whatever we do in our will always leads to a mortal sin. Grace does everything apart from nature. We can only do good passively, and well, let me just quote the man:
"I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want 'free will' to be given to me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavor after salvation... Whatever work I had done, there would still be a nagging doubt as to whether it pleased God, or whether He required something more." – Bondage of the Will
Luther taught that man's will is only "free" when he chooses sin. The good that we do comes from God taking over our wills, so, as he said, we work passively. This is pretty much the opposing extreme of Pelagianism. On the otherhand, Reformation theology also teaches that man's nature was, before the fall, capable of maintaining the full vision of God, without the aid of Divine Grace. Hmm, encroachment foul on the Reformers: bumped into a Pelagian.
St. Thomas Aquinas
"Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it." – Summa Theologica, Part 1, 1:8.
The third way. Choosing between grace and nature is a false dichotomy. We have fallen. We no longer enjoy the grace of Original Justice before God, and we are reverted to our baser instincts. But our nature is not bad, nor is incapable of doing any good thing. Man's chief problem is not that he cannot do a good thing, it is atonement that he is incapable of and without it, his good deeds are like filthy rags, as the Apostle says. Atonement had to come from the God-Man, Jesus Christ. He won for us the merits of eternal salvation and bestows his grace to us through the Sacraments and extraordinary means. (Baptism!) Only when we've received the Holy Spirit do our works of love merit anything.
St. Thomas teaches that as a result of Original Sin, our wills are not directed towards God, but everything else. Concupiscence, or the inclination to sin, is not Original Sin itself, but a material effect of it. We need the grace for God to work in us to will, and when we do will, we cooperate with that grace. St. Thomas also said, as he did somewhere in his Summa, that "God does not justify us without ourselves, because while we are being justified we consent to God's justification by a movement of our free will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace."
1) God operates through grace to move us. The First Cause.
2) Man actively receives the grace of God.
3) Through grace God strengthens man to will to perform meritorious works. Co-operation.
As St. Augustine says: "He operates that we may will; and when we will, He co-operates that we may be perfect." – De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, 33.
So in the end it is not grace outside of nature, but nature cooperating with grace. Grace and Nature should not be disconnected. They should be ever joined at the hip. Catholic Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor, commenting on the splitting of grace and nature, said: " the average Catholic reader... [is] more of a Manichean than the Church permits. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to the pious cliché."
In the end, grace is not an escape from or rival of nature. It brings about the fulfillment of nature. In fact, it established our nature. It is everything one has hoped for. God, the author of our nature, condescended to assume our nature to bring it to perfect completion. In the Incarnation, all aspects of nature, which includes human nature, are joined to the divine nature of God. With the Resurrection of Jesus, he opened up to us the way to eternal life with God and our final evolution as humans. With the Ascension of Jesus, that nature, that human nature, is introduced and incorporated into the Holy Trinity. If we are part of the Mystical Body of Christ, we too will become, as St. Peter says, "partakers of the Divine Nature".
In the words of St. Thomas while pounding a large wooden table, "That will settle the Manichees!"
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
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