Aquinas on the Necessity of Grace (ST I-II q.109 a.8–10): Avoiding Sin, Help for Those Already in Grace, Perseverance, and a Preview of q.110

Orientation #

He picks up at Article 8 of the question on grace and works straight through Articles 9 and 10, then reads the prologue of Question 110 before stopping. At the end he asks the class whether to go on or wait for next class, and reads the four things to be asked in q. 110.

The previous class treated Articles 4 through 7 of the same question.

The class, in order #

1. Article 8, objections: sin, rebuke, and “life and death before man” (“it seems that man, without grace, is able to not sin”) #

The objections that a man without grace can avoid sin, with Thomas’s replies given immediately after each (he reads reply with objection):

1. No one sins in what he cannot avoid (Augustine, On the Two Souls, On Free Will). If a man in mortal sin cannot avoid sin, he did not sin by sinning — inconvenient. Reply: he can avoid individual acts, not all, except through grace; and since it is by his own defect that he does not prepare himself for grace, he is not excused. He adds: Alphonsus says that going a month without thinking about the business of one’s soul is by itself a grave sin, because he neglects what is most important.
2. Rebuke would be in vain if he cannot not sin. Reply: the use of rebuke is that from the sadness of the rebuke the will of regeneration arises, if the one corrected is a son of the promise — God sounding extrinsically and whipping him, while operating intrinsically by hidden inspiration (Augustine, On Correction and Grace). So rebuke is necessary, but not sufficient without God’s aid: “consider the works of God, that no one can be corrected whom he despises” (Eccl. 7:14). Aside: “tough words, tough love” — Augustine in the Confessions says God loves us so much and threatens eternal war if we don’t obey.
3. “Before man is life and death; what pleases him will be given him” — a sinner is still a man, so the choice is still in his power. Reply (Augustine, Hypognosticon): that is said of man in the status of integral nature, not yet the slave of sin, able to sin and not to sin. Now what a man wishes is still given him, but that he wishes the good he has from the help of grace.

Sed contra (Augustine, On Perfect Justice): whoever denies that we ought to pray “lest we enter into temptation” — holding grace unnecessary and only law taken in human philosophies — this should be removed from all ears and mouths, anathematized. His comment: hard words; you have to pray “lead us not into temptation”; that prayer is essential.

2. Article 8, body: integral nature vs. corrupt nature (“we can speak of man in two ways”) #

• Integral nature: without habitual grace a man can avoid sin, mortal and venial, since to sin is nothing but to recede from what is according to nature, which he can avoid in nature’s integrity — but not without God conserving him in the good; that taken away, nature itself would fall to nothing.
• Corrupt nature: he needs habitual grace healing nature in order to abstain from sin entirely. The healing is first in the mind (he notes “mental means the will too”), the fleshly desire not yet wholly repaired — Romans 7, “in my mind I serve the law of God, but in my flesh the law of sin.”
• Consequences: he can abstain from mortal sin, which is in reason; he cannot abstain from every venial sin (St. John — he corrects himself from “St. Paul” — “we all have some sin”), because of the corrupt lower appetite: reason can repress individual motions but not all, since while it resists one another arises, and reason cannot always be vigilant.
• As to mortal sin: he can avoid individual mortal sins and for some time — “it is not necessary that he continually sin in act, that’s good to know” — but he cannot long remain without mortal sin. Gregory on Ezekiel: the sin not at once wiped out by penance draws by its weight into another.
• The reason: as lower appetite ought to be subject to reason, so reason ought to be subject to God and make Him the end of its will; the end rules all human acts as reason’s judgment rules the lower appetite. So as an appetite not wholly subject to reason must yield disordered movements, so reason not subject to God yields many disorders. Since a man does not have his heart firmly fixed in God, for the sake of gaining some good or escaping some evil he recedes from God by despising His precepts — and sins mortally.
• Especially in sudden things, a man acts according to his preconceived end and pre-existing habit (Aristotle, Ethics III); by premeditation he can act outside that order, but he cannot be always premeditating.
• He then quotes Contra Gentiles to the same effect: an inclined mind does not stand equally to both opposites; in sudden matters the sign of the interior habit is best taken; the mind cannot be continually in that vigilance; so if inclined to sin it cannot stand long but that it sin, giving an impediment to grace, unless reduced to rectitude.

3. Article 9, objections: does grace received suffice by itself? (“without another aid of grace”) #

1. Grace would be given in vain or be imperfect if by it a man still cannot do good and avoid sin. He says: “well, I’m convinced by that argument.” Reply: habitual grace is not given so that we would need no further divine aid — every creature needs to be conserved by God in the good it has received. Aside: even your being requires God’s help to continue; this is one of the articles taken up in the discussion of creation — whether God can give a creature a being that no longer requires God; He cannot, because being depends on God. (A student: “Can you make another God?”) Even in the state of glory, where grace is altogether perfect, man will need divine assistance. Yet grace is in a way imperfect, insofar as man is not entirely healed.
2. The Holy Spirit dwells in us (1 Cor., “you are the temple of God”) and being omnipotent suffices to lead us to good and guard us from sin. His aside: “he gets kind of annoyed at all this dependence.” Reply: the Spirit’s operation of moving and protecting is not circumscribed by the effect of the habitual gift He causes in us; besides that effect He moves and protects us together with Father and Son.
3. Infinite regress: if grace needs another aid, that aid needs another, forever — inconvenient. Reply: that argument only concludes that man does not need another habitual grace.

Sed contra (Augustine, On Nature and Grace): as the wholly healthy bodily eye cannot discern without being aided by the brightness of light, so the most perfectly justified man cannot live rightly unless aided by the eternal light of divine justice. He notes: grace is being used here unequivocally here — “later on I think we’ll have that distinction between habitual grace and this motion.”

4. Article 9, body: two aids, and the difference between mover and maker (“man needs for living rightly in two ways”) #

The two ways God’s aid is needed: (1) a habitual gift healing corrupt nature and elevating it to works meritorious of eternal life, beyond nature’s proportion; (2) being moved by God to doing something. As to the first, a man in grace needs no further infused habit (“that habit is more in the line of a form than of a doing”); as to the second he does need grace, to be moved by God to act rightly.

Digression he offers to illuminate this: Aristotle’s four causes — matter, form, mover, and he also puts in the maker; and there is a difference between the causality of maker and mover, since the mover is responsible for the motion of the moved, the maker for the form of the made. He connects this to Thomas: Contra Gentiles II treats God making heaven and earth, giving things their form and nature; Contra Gentiles III treats God as end of all things, moving everything He has made toward Himself. “That distinction is similar to the distinction being made here.”

Two reasons for needing the motion: (a) general — no created thing can go forth into any act except by the power of the divine motion; (b) special — the condition of the state of human nature: healed as to the higher powers, still infected as to the flesh (Rom. 7), and there remains an obscurity of ignorance in the understanding — “what we ought to pray for as we ought, we don’t know” (Rom. 8) — because we do not know ourselves perfectly nor what is expedient: “the thoughts of mortals are timid, and uncertain are our providences” (Wis. 9). Hence it befits those born sons of God by grace to say et ne nos inducas in tentationem and “thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” He notes: he is reasoning from the prayer.

5. Article 10 set up as a live question (“Can I choose that?”) #

Before reading, he puts it to the class: can I choose to continue doing good works and nothing bad for the rest of my life? I might want it — but can I choose it? Is it in my power?

6. Article 10, objections on perseverance (“does not need the aid of grace to persevere”) #

1. Perseverance is something less than virtue, as continence is (Aristotle, Ethics VII) — he notes Aristotle speaks there of continence, not perseverance: the continent man resists temptation but has a fierce temptation to resist, whereas the virtuous man’s emotions are quieted. And if a man needs no further aid to have the virtues by which he is justified, much less for perseverance. He says one must wait for the body of the article to see the reply. Aside: some saints had this trouble even with anger — Father Hardon told of a Jesuit professor with a volcanic temper who might throw a book at you in class and then kneel and ask forgiveness afterward; all his life he burst out and then humbled himself.
2. All virtues are infused together, and perseverance is laid down as a virtue; so it is infused with the rest. Again: wait for the body.
3. More is restored through Christ’s gift than was lost by Adam (Romans); Adam received that by which he could persevere, so much more do we.

Sed contra (Augustine, On Perseverance — “he’s got a book on everything, has Augustine”): why is perseverance asked from God if not given by God? It would be a laughable petition to ask of one known not to be the giver, if it were in man’s own power. And it is asked by those already sanctified by grace — understood in “hallowed be thy name,” as Augustine confirms through the words of Cyprian (he recalls Cyprian’s famous little work on the Our Father).

7. Article 10, body and replies: three senses of perseverance (“perseverance is said in three ways”) #

1. A habit of mind by which a man stands firm lest he be removed from what is according to virtue through sadnesses — as continence stands to desires and pleasures (Ethics VII compares them).
2. A habit by which a man has the proposal of persevering in good usque in finem.
3. The continuation of good all the way to the end of life.

In the first two ways perseverance is infused together with grace, like continence and the other virtues. For the third, a man in grace needs no further habitual grace but the divine aid directing and protecting him against the impulse of temptations, as in the preceding article. Therefore after justification he must ask God for perseverance, to be guarded from evil to the end of life — “to many is given grace to whom it is not given to persevere in grace, so you’ve got to ask God.”

Replies: the first objection proceeds about the first sense, the second about the second. To the third (Augustine, On Nature and Grace): man in his first state received a gift by which he could persevere, not that he would; now through Christ’s grace many receive the gift by which they can persevere, and further it is given them that they will in fact persevere — so Christ’s gift is greater than Adam’s defect. Nevertheless a man perseveres more easily in the state of innocence, where there is no rebellion of flesh against spirit; the operation of Christ’s grace, begun as to the mind, is not yet consummated as to the flesh — which will be in the fatherland, where man not only can persevere but cannot do otherwise (in eternal life one can’t stop loving God).

8. Aside: perpetuation of the species (“can I be responsible for that?”) #

He compares the need for a higher directing cause: no one animal can secure the perseverance of its kind. He has grandchildren but did not really generate them — he generated his son and daughter, who generated more; he will not be here, so he cannot be responsible for whether the line of Berquist dies out. Nor can all of us together, since we are not all together. So some higher power must direct this continuation. He notes lines of kings die out in the history books (to Kevin, who reads history) — and remarks that for Henry VIII it wasn’t really a big worry, “that was just an excuse.”

9. Opening Question 110 (“Let’s look at the prologue”) #

He asks whether to go on or wait for next class, and reads the prologue: now to consider the grace of God as regards its essence; four things are asked — (1) whether grace places something in the soul; (2) whether grace is a quality (“now we’re back to the categories, right? Goes around, comes around”); (3) whether grace differs from infused virtue; (4) the subject of grace. He sums it up: “What is grace?”

His words #

• “status of integral nature” — man not yet the slave of sin, able to sin and not to sin.
• “status of corrupt nature” — needs habitual grace healing nature.
• “mental means the will too” — his gloss on the healing being first in the mind/spiritual side.
• “rebuke” / “correction” — his rendering for Augustine’s correptio; God sounding extrinsically while operating intrinsically by hidden inspiration.
• “another aid of grace” — divine motion as distinct from the habitual gift; he notes “grace” is used unequivocally in the sed contra.
• “more in the line of a form than of a doing” — of habitual grace as against being moved.
• “maker” vs. “mover” — the maker responsible for the form of the made, the mover for the motion of the moved.
• usque in finem — “all the way to the end,” in the second sense of perseverance.
• et ne nos inducas in tentationem — “and lead us not into temptation.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 109, aa. 8, 9, 10 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, prologue
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles — passage on the inclined mind and sudden things (book not stated)
• Ecclesiastes 7:14; Romans 3, 7, 8; Wisdom 9; 1 Corinthians (“you are the temple of God”); 1 John (“we all have some sin”, attributed by him after a self-correction)

Mentioned

• Augustine: On the Two Souls, On Free Will, On Correction and Grace, Hypognosticon, On Perfect Justice, On Nature and Grace, On Perseverance, Confessions
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III (sudden things, preconceived end and habit) and VII (continence less than virtue; comparison with perseverance)
• Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel
• Cyprian, on the Our Father
• Summa Contra Gentiles II and III (God as maker; God as end and mover)
• Alphonsus, on neglecting the business of one’s soul
• Father Hardon’s story of the Jesuit with the volcanic temper

His questions #

• If a man in mortal sin cannot avoid sin, did he sin by sinning? He can avoid individual sins but not all without grace, and it is by his own defect that he fails to prepare for grace — so he is not excused.
• Can a man in corrupt nature abstain from every venial sin? No — while reason represses one motion another arises, and reason cannot always be vigilant.
• Can he remain long without mortal sin? He can avoid individual mortal sins and for some time, but not for long, since reason not subject to God falls into disorder, especially in sudden things.
• Can God give a creature a being such that it no longer requires God for its being? No — being depends on God, so conservation is always needed; likewise grace does not remove the need for further aid.
• If grace needs another aid, does that not go on forever? No: the argument only concludes that no further habitual grace is needed, not that no divine motion is needed.
• Can I choose to do good works the rest of my life and nothing bad — is it in my power? No: for perseverance in the third sense one needs God’s directing and protecting aid, and must ask for it.
• Why is perseverance asked from God in prayer? Because it is given by God; asking it of one who cannot give would be a laughable petition.
• Is Christ’s gift greater than Adam’s defect as regards perseverance? Yes — Adam received the power to persevere, but to many under Christ’s grace it is further given that they actually do persevere.
• Can any one animal, or all together, secure the perseverance of the species? No — some higher power must direct the continuation.