Aquinas on the Necessity of Grace (ST I-II q.109 a.4–7): Keeping the Law, Earning Eternal Life, Preparing for Grace and Rising from Sin

Orientation #

He says he remarked “last time” that for Thomas Plato and Aristotle are the chief philosophers, and adds his own: Augustine and Thomas are the chief theologians. The class runs straight through the objections and bodies of q.109 aa.4–7. The previous class treated whether man by nature can will the good and love God above all things, and the next continues with aa.8–10.

The class, in order #

1. Opening prayer and the granddaughter’s phrase (“it was heaven singing on earth”) #

Before the text: his six-year-old granddaughter Claire (soccer, ballet, first grade, a new bike) heard Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and told her mother, “Mama, it was heaven singing on earth.” He is struck by the phrase; John Paul II called the Ave Verum Corpus incomparable, and he had it at his own wedding and Warren Murray at his.

2. Article 4, objections: can man keep all the precepts without grace? (“they do naturally those things which are of the law”) #

Three objections with Thomas’s replies, taken first:

1. Romans: the Gentiles without the law do naturally the things of the law; what man does naturally he can do by himself. Reply (Augustine, De spiritu et littera): it is the Spirit of grace that repairs in us the image of God in which we were naturally made.
2. Jerome, Exposition of the Catholic Faith: those are to be cursed who say God commanded the impossible; but man cannot do what he cannot do by himself. Reply: what we can do with God’s help is not altogether impossible for us — per Aristotle, Ethics III, what we can do through our friends we can in a way do through ourselves; and charity is a kind of friendship with God. Jerome himself confesses free judgment while saying we always need God’s help.
3. The greatest precept is to love God with the whole heart, and that man can fulfil by natural powers alone (as said above). Reply: he can fulfil it as the part naturally loves the whole and subordinates itself to it, God being the natural source of things; but not as it is fulfilled from charity, loving him as the source of eternal life.

Aside: at Mass that morning the reader looked hesitant even to pronounce “cursed is the man who puts his trust in man.”

3. Article 4, sed contra and body: two ways of fulfilling, two states (“the heresy of the Pelagians”) #

Sed contra: Augustine, De haeresibus — it belongs to the Pelagian heresy to hold that without grace man can do all the divine commands. He notes Thomas here proceeds mainly by authority, not by reason; the edition carries the condemnations of Pius V, so there is no question of authority.

The body’s distinctions:

• As regards the substance of the deeds (doing just and brave works): in the state of integral nature man could fulfil them all — otherwise he could not sin in that state, since sin is nothing but transgressing the divine commands. In corrupt nature he cannot, without grace healing him. He notes Thomas gives no reason here for that last claim.
• As regards the manner, that they come about from charity: neither in integral nor in corrupt nature can man do it without grace. Augustine, De correptione: grace not only shows what should be done but gives that we do with love what we know.
• In both states man further needs God moving him to fulfil the commands — and this, he stresses, even Aristotle knew (the citation from the Eudemian Ethics).

4. Article 5: merit of eternal life (“man is able to merit eternal life without grace”) #

Objections and replies:

1. “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt 19) puts it in man’s will, and what is in our will we can do ourselves. Reply: man by his own will does works meritorious of eternal life, but (Augustine) the will must be prepared by God through grace — not your will alone.
2. Eternal life is a reward rendered according to works (Matt 5; Ps 61), and man is lord of his works. Reply (gloss on Rom 6:23, “the grace of God, eternal life”): eternal life is indeed rendered for good works, but those works pertain to the grace of God, since fulfilling the law in the meritorious manner requires grace.
3. Every natural thing reaches its end by its natural powers; much more man. Reply: that argument holds of man’s natural end; because human nature is nobler it can be led to a higher end, by grace, to which lower natures cannot be led at all — as the man more disposed to health is the one who can reach it with the aids of medicine, against one who cannot at all (Aristotle, De caelo II, a passage Thomas often quotes).

Body’s argument: (1) acts leading to an end must be proportioned to that end; (2) no act exceeds the proportion of its active source — in natural things nothing produces an effect exceeding its active power; (3) eternal life exceeds the proportion of human nature; therefore man by natural powers cannot produce works proportioned to eternal life, and needs the higher power of grace. He can, however, do good human things — labour in the field, eat, drink, have a friend (Augustine, third response against the Pelagians).

5. Article 6, objections: can man prepare himself for grace? (“Be converted to me, and I will convert to you”) #

1. Nothing impossible is commanded; Zechariah 1:3 commands conversion, which is to prepare oneself for grace. Reply: conversion is through free will, and so is commanded; but free will cannot be converted to God except by God converting it — “convert me and I shall be converted” (Jer 31), “convert us, Lord” (Lam). Sin is cast out of the soul not by our will but by grace. And the tag from Augustine: God who created us without us will not [save us without us].
2. If man does what is in him, God does not deny grace; God gives the good Spirit to those asking (Matt 7:11); what is in our power is in us. Reply: man can do nothing unless moved by God — “without me you can do nothing” (John 15) — so “to do what is in oneself” is said of man as moved by God.
3. “I like this third objection”: if grace is needed to prepare for grace, then grace is needed to prepare for that, and so to infinity. Reply: the objection proceeds about habitual grace, which does require a preparation, since every form requires a suitably disposed subject; but that man is moved by God presupposes no other motion, since God is the first mover — so no infinite regress.
4. Proverbs 16: it belongs to man to prepare his soul. Reply: yes, through free will, but not without God’s aid moving him and drawing him.

Sed contra: John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father draw him” — which a student had anticipated aloud. He notes the drawing of us to God is an act common to the Trinity, one power.

Asides: on John 13 and Judas — Chrysostom’s rebuke: Judas heard Christ and saw the miracles and was still trapped by money, so we who neither see nor hear him must be more careful; a student recalls an exorcism account in which Judas was said to be involved, with the caution that demons lie. A running joke about Velcro sanding pads.

6. Article 6, body: two preparations of the will, and the order of movers and ends (“twofold is the preparation of the will”) #

He flags the distinction as one he had not seen himself — “because the light isn’t strong enough.”

1. Preparation for doing well and enjoying God: cannot come about without the gift of habitual grace, the source of meritorious doing.
2. Preparation for receiving habitual grace: needs no prior habitual gift (else the infinite regress), but does need a gratuitous aid of God inwardly moving the soul and inspiring the good proposal.

Why the divine motion is needed: every agent acts for an end, so every cause turns its effects to its own end; the order of ends follows the order of agents/movers; so to the last end man is turned by the motion of the first mover, to nearer ends by inferior movers. Example: the soldier’s soul is turned to seeking victory by the motion of the army’s leader, but to following the standard by the motion of the tribune (he pauses over what the standard-bearing unit is; a student supplies “battle line”). Since God is the first mover without qualification, all things are turned to him under the common intention of the good; the just he turns to himself as to a special end (Ps 72, “it is good for me to adhere to God”); Dionysius, De divinis nominibus: God converts all to himself. Image: the eye turned away from the sun prepares itself to receive the light by turning toward the sun.

He adds: Thomas often argues back and forth between the order of movers and the order of ends — if God is the first mover he must be the first end — and cites Aristotle on this order at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics; Bonaventure puts it the other way: if God is the end of all things, he is the first, since if he does anything there is no other reason but himself. Football asides: the one player who has the end of the play in mind while the rest are secondary; the game won by seven lateral passes after the clock ran out; the man in his father’s factory who figured out each new procedure and taught it to the others.

7. Article 7, objections: can man rise from sin by himself? (“Rise up from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you”) #

1. What is presupposed to grace comes about without grace; Ephesians puts rising before illumination. Reply: what is enjoined is the act of free will required for rising; the whole rising does not precede illumination — when man, moved by God, attempts by free will to rise from sin, then he receives the light of justifying grace. He compares confession: a man trying to confess his sins receives grace in the sacrament to go all the way.
2. Sin is to virtue as sickness to health, and man can recover from sickness by nature without exterior medicine, since a source of life remains in him. (Put sarcastically: so grace only makes it easier, like oil in a machine.) Reply: natural reason is not a sufficient beginning of the health that is in man through justifying grace; the source of that health is grace itself, which sin takes away — so man must have the light of grace newly poured in, as a dead body needs a soul newly poured in, which it cannot do of itself.
3. Any natural thing returns to an act suitable to its nature — heated water returns of itself to cold, a stone thrown up returns to its natural motion — and sin is against nature (Damascene II). Reply: integral nature can repair itself to what is proportioned to it, not to what exceeds its proportion; human nature corrupted by sin cannot repair itself even to its connatural good, much less to the good of supernatural justice.

Sed contra: Galatians — if a law were given that could justify, Christ died in vain.

8. Digression: Paul, grace, and Thomas’s division of the New Testament (“the nature of grace itself”) #

Prompted by Augustine’s debt to Paul on grace (more explicit in Paul than in the Gospels): Thomas divides the New Testament by grace into three — the Gospels, the origin of grace, which is Christ; the Pauline epistles, the nature of grace itself; and Acts, the canonical epistles and the Apocalypse, the effect of grace, which in one word is the Church — its beginning in Acts, its progress in the canonical epistles, its consummation in the Apocalypse. He adds that Thomas divides Paul’s own epistles by grace as it is in the Church, in the principal members of the Church, and in the sacraments. (Joke: he has a granddaughter named Grace, so he must ask “the graceful one” what grace is.)

9. Article 7, body: the threefold detriment of sin and its threefold repair (“a man runs into a threefold detriment”) #

Rising from sin is not the same as ceasing from the act of sin: the act passes, but guilt remains — “that would make it kind of nice: commit adultery and then it’s gone.” Rising is to repair man in what he lost by sinning. The three losses (a distinction he says he did not know):

1. Stain — deprivation of the beauty (decor) of grace through the deformity of sin; sin makes the soul an ugly thing. (Student aside: Judas’s bloodied mouth in The Passion of the Christ.)
2. Corruption of the good of nature — nature disordered because man’s will is not subject to God; that order removed, the whole nature of the sinner remains disordered. (Augustine, somewhere: a disordered soul is its own punishment. Asides on drugs and the local rehab centre; “in vino veritas.”)
3. Debt of punishment — by sinning mortally man merits eternal damnation.

Digression on three: Aristotle in the De caelo on the three dimensions takes up the popular saying that three is the first number of which we say “all” — two of us are “both,” three are “all” — and Aristotle says we use “three” in praising God; hence the proverb about the Trinity. Complete and perfect mean nearly the same. Illustrations: three acts; concerti and early quartets settling on three movements; Mozart’s symphonies mostly four but some three, all complete; Schubert’s “Unfinished” the only famous two-movement symphony, and something is missing; Baroque music needing three instruments to exhaust the possibilities.

Each of the three, Thomas shows, can be repaired only by God:

• Since the decor of grace comes from the illumination of the divine light (a student’s translation: “the lustre of grace”), it cannot be restored except by God newly enlightening — so a habitual gift is required, the light of grace. Here he brings in Dionysius on beauty: one aspect of beauty is light, hence you need bright light to have beauty; and order too is an aspect of beauty.
• The order of nature cannot be repaired so that the will is subject to God unless God draws the will to himself (as in the previous article).
• The punishment cannot be remitted except by God, against whom the offence was committed and who is man’s judge.

Therefore grace is needed for rising from sin, both as habitual gift and as interior motion of God. His prayer from this: “Grant, most merciful God, that I might love you above all other things, and all other things for the sake of you — even myself.”

Note on the text: in these editions Thomas skips a line at each point, a sign that something entirely new, a main point not to be run together with the last, is beginning.

10. Closing asides (“Mozart is above all the masters”) #

Wagner on Mozart: above all the masters in all the arts and in all the ages — which he likens to forcing the demons to confess God, since the money-counter at the church prefers Wagner. Suggestion from the room: print that blurb, and Claire’s line, on the back of Mozart CDs.

His words #

• Substance of the deed vs. way/manner of doing it — doing the just or brave act, vs. doing it from charity.
• State of integral nature vs. state of corrupt nature — before and after sin; the first could keep the precepts in substance, the second cannot without healing grace.
• Free judgment [ed.: liberum arbitrium, free will] — Jerome’s word in the second objection.
• Habitual grace vs. the interior motion of God / gratuitous aid — a gift needing disposition, vs. a moving that presupposes no prior motion.
• Proportioned to the end — acts must not exceed the proportion of their active source.
• Decor — the beauty or “lustre” of grace, from the divine light.
• Stain, corruption of natural good, debt of punishment — the threefold detriment of mortal sin.

Texts #

Read in class: Summa Theologiae I-II q.109 aa.4, 5, 6, 7, objections, replies, sed contra and bodies (verified against the text). Mentioned: Augustine, De spiritu et littera; De haeresibus; De correptione et gratia; third response against the Pelagians; Jerome, Exposition of the Catholic Faith; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III and its opening, Eudemian Ethics, De caelo II; Dionysius, De divinis nominibus; John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa II; Bonaventure (no locus); the gloss on Romans 6:23; Scripture as listed in the front matter; Chrysostom on Judas (no locus); Thomas’s divisions of the New Testament and of the Pauline epistles.

His questions #

• Can man fulfil all the precepts of the law without grace? Not in corrupt nature even as to the substance of the deeds, and in no state as to the manner, from charity.
• Can man merit eternal life by his natural powers? No: the act must be proportioned to the end, and eternal life exceeds the proportion of human nature.
• If grace is needed to prepare for grace, do we not go to infinity? No: the regress would hold of habitual grace, but God’s motion presupposes no prior motion, since he is first mover.
• Can man prepare himself for grace without exterior aid of grace? No; he prepares by free will, but only as moved and drawn inwardly by God.
• Why must the first mover turn man to his last end? Because the order of ends follows the order of movers, as the general turns the soldier to victory and the tribune to the standard.
• Is rising from sin the same as ceasing from the act of sin? No: the act passes but the guilt remains, and rising is repairing what was lost.
• What is the effect of sinning mortally? Three things: deformity (the stain), disorder of nature, and liability to eternal punishment.
• Can any of the three be repaired by man? None: each requires God — the light of habitual grace, God drawing the will, and remission by the judge offended.