Summa III q.7 a.10–11: Is Fullness of Grace Christ's Alone? Mary, Envy in Heaven, and Whether Christ's Grace Is Infinite

Orientation #

He begins in the objections of article 10 and, after “I guess we’re through with article ten,” says “Do one more article here,” reading article 11 to the end. He refers back to “when we did some of the stuff on friendship” with quotes from novelists on envy, and to having quoted Thomas’s prayer (una stilla) “the other day”. The previous class treated aa. 7-9 and previewed this question of whether fullness of grace is unique to Christ; the next treats a. 12 on whether Christ’s grace could increase.

The class, in order #

1. Article 10, the objections (“Hail, full of grace”) #

The question: is fullness of grace proprium to Christ, which he renders “private” rather than “proper” (what belongs to it alone).

1. Obj. 1: fullness is attributed to others. Luke 1:28, the angel to Mary, “Hail, full of grace”; Acts 6, Stephen “full of grace and fortitude.” He notes Mary is again the first objection, “but even Stephen.”
2. Obj. 2: what can be communicated to others through Christ is not private to him; Paul (Eph 3) prays that we be “filled in all the fullness of God.” Aside: he and Peter are “the princes of the apostles.”
3. Obj. 3: the state of the way is proportioned to the state of the fatherland; in the fatherland there is fullness of every good, and “although to some is given more excellently, nothing is possessed in a singular way” (Gregory, homily on the hundred sheep). So on the way fullness is had by individuals.

2. Sed contra (“only begotten from the Father”) #

John 1:14: full of grace and truth as the only begotten (unigenitum a patre). Since being the only one generated by the Father is proper to Christ, being full of grace and truth is proper to him.

• Aside before the answer: a book on the quantum physicists (Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Kramers) and their disordered lives; Pauli’s family, drink; Heisenberg unsure whether Pauli died of physical causes or of not solving the problem.

3. Respondeo: fullness in two ways (“on the side of the grace itself”) #

1. On the side of grace itself: fullness is reaching the summit of grace, both as to its essence (the greatest excellence in which it can be had) and as to its power (the greatest extension to all the effects of grace). This fullness is private to Christ.
2. On the side of the subject: someone has grace fully according to his condition, either
   • in intensity, up to the limit fixed for him beforehand by God (Eph 4:7, “to each of us is given grace according to the measure of the giving of Christ”). Bucket image: the soul as a bucket for grace, one bucket bigger than another, a measure to which you are brought;
   • or in power (virtus), having the “faculty of grace” for all that pertains to his status or office (Eph 3, “to me the least of the saints is given this grace, to illuminate men”). This fullness is not private to Christ but communicated to others through him.

• “So in heaven, if you get there, you’ll be full of grace, according to the limit set for you… that’s your slot right there.”
• Aside: Pius X’s encyclicals on Gregory the Great, Anselm, Charles Borromeo: each had a fullness of grace for what he was called to in this life.

4. The three replies (“sufficient to the state to which she was chosen”) #

• Ad 1. Mary is full of grace not on the side of grace itself (she had neither its highest excellence nor all its effects) but in comparison to the subject: grace sufficient to the state she was chosen for, mother of God — and apart from Christ no higher state exists. Stephen: grace sufficient to be a suitable minister and witness, the first martyr. One fullness is more than another according as one is preordained to a higher or lower state.
• Ad 2. Paul speaks of subject-side fullness, in comparison to what a man is preordained to: either something common to all the saints (grace sufficient to merit eternal life, the full enjoyment of God — the fullness Paul wishes for those he writes to) or something special pertaining to the excellence of some. He thinks that after Mary the apostles are called to the highest state; a student says “Saint Joseph”; he replies that in Scripture “you find the apostles mentioned.”
• Ad 3. The common gifts of the fatherland (vision, comprehension, enjoyment) have corresponding common gifts on the way; but there are prerogatives, in the fatherland and on the way, not had by all. “So you should ask God to get you to the place you’re called to.”

5. Digression: envy (“envy is one of the capital vices”) #

Launched from ad 3: how can there be different degrees in heaven without envy?

• Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: all the conspirators acted from envy except Brutus, who thought Caesar would make himself dictator — shows how common envy is. A novelist’s saying: hard for a man to bear his own good fortune, harder for his friends to bear it.
• Gospels: the Pharisees’ enmity to Christ is tied to envy, named there; the epistles, the devil’s envy as origin of sin. Commentary on Job: “pride kills the great ones and envy the little ones.” Aristocracies subject to pride, democracies to envy — all striving to get ahead, not all can win (sociologists’ books on envy in democratic times).
• Cases: Warren Murray on the envy shown to De Koninck after his death; older sisters envious of Thérèse de Lisieux; his college examples (roommate with the job lined up; the girl whose friend has the good boyfriend; the girl no one asks to dance — his handsome friend always took the ugly girl, “give her a little thrill”).
• Definition: envy is sadness over the good fortune of another, hence opposed to loving your friend for his own sake; its prevalence is a sign of the defect of our friendships.
• Student: why no envy in heaven? Another: “because there’s hell”; another asks the opposite virtue, suggesting generosity. His answer: Thomas treats envy in the secunda secundae treatise on charity, as the vice opposed to charity, since charity is a kind of friendship. That is where he first got thinking that envy has a twofold use even for human friendship: (1) opposites side by side are clearer, so envy illumines friendship; (2) its prevalence shows a defect we often find in our friendships and must fight in ourselves. The question of heaven is left there.
• Kramers, close to Bohr, always bettered by a younger physicist — like the older nun and Thérèse. Counter-example: a publishing colleague who told friends of each new publication expecting them to rejoice, “a real appreciation of friendship” — Dan Mahoney of Assumption College, books on Solzhenitsyn (the Solzhenitsyn family said he first understood him), de Gaulle; the Weigel anecdote.

6. Article 11, objections and sed contra (“everything immense is infinite”) #

Question: is the grace of Christ infinite?

1. Obj. 1: everything immense (immensum, etymologically immeasurable — he notes Shakespeare pairs it with infinite, and the councils call the divine nature immensus) is infinite; John 3, God does not give the Spirit ad mensuram to Christ.
2. Obj. 2: an infinite effect shows infinite power founded only in infinite essence; Christ’s grace saves the whole human race, propitiation for the sins of the whole world — “even if there were more sinners,” one drop of his blood (Thomas’s prayer).
3. Obj. 3: anything finite can by addition reach any finite quantity (“if I could keep on getting taller, I could get as tall as the Empire State Building”); so another’s grace could equal Christ’s, against Job 28 (no gold or crystal equal to him, as Gregory expounds).

• Sed contra: Christ’s grace is something created in the soul, not the divine nature; everything created is finite (Wis 11, “in number, weight and measure”).

7. Respondeo: two graces, habitual grace in two ways (“according to the proper notion of grace”) #

1. Grace of union: being personally united to the Son of God, granted gratuitously to a human nature that does not deserve it; infinite, as the person of the Word is infinite. (Infinity is one of the five attributes of the divine substance in the prima pars; the last chapter on God’s substance in the Summa contra Gentiles is on infinity.)
2. Habitual grace in Christ’s soul:
   • as a certain being or thing, necessarily limited: it is in a subject, the soul of Christ, a creature of finite capacity, and the being of grace cannot exceed its subject;
   • according to the proper notion of grace, infinite: it has whatever can belong to the notion of grace, not given by some measure, since grace is conferred on Christ’s soul as on a universal principle of causing grace in human nature (Eph 1, “he gratified us in his beloved Son”). Comparison: the sun’s light is infinite not in being but according to the notion of light.

8. Student question and the simply / in some way distinction (“simply and in some way”) #

Student: can the grace in his soul be infinite being like God? He: No. Student: but Aristotle says the soul is in a certain sense all things, an infinite capacity? He: Thomas’s usual distinction, simply vs. in some way.

• Feuerbach: the human mind is infinite; the infinite is God; therefore the human mind is God — read by Marx and Engels as boys; Marx’s doctoral thesis preface rejects anything that does not make human mind and consciousness the highest divinity. What is wrong: confusing simply and in some way. The mind is infinite in some way — it can always learn more — which means it is always imperfect, potency unactualized; God’s infinity is completely actual, infinite simply.
• Aristotle, “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]: perfect in its kind (everything of that kind) vs. universally perfect; Averroes says the latter is God. Hence in the SCG chapter on God’s goodness, God is “the good of every good”: a thing’s good is its perfection and the divine perfection comprehends all perfections. Homer, the perfect poet: plot (Poetics: Homer taught the Greeks the plot), character (Hegel: his characters diamonds with many facets vs. the narrow personified passions of French tragedy), words (the lively lance “striving” to reach you; similes restoring calm in the battle scenes, cf. Hamlet’s “whirlwind of your passion”). But Homer lacks the perfection of Euclid, Aristotle, Thomas, Mozart; Mozart lacks Homer’s. God is universally perfect.
• His classroom example of the fallacy (one of the main mistakes in the “physical refutations” [ed.: Sophistical Refutations]): “do you know my brother Mark?” — No; do you know what a brother is, what a man is? — Yes; then you know him. In some way she knows every brother; simply she does not.
• Applied: Christ’s grace is not an infinite thing like the divine substance, but not limited to one kind of grace. “One star differs from another star” — popes apply it to the saints, one excelling in this virtue, another in that; Christ is not limited to any one. Also: some have enough grace to save themselves “by the skin of their teeth,” some enough for another (Thérèse’s prayer for the unrepentant criminal who embraced the cross); only Christ and Mary have enough for the whole human race, however many more there were. Una stilla salvum facere totum mundum ab omni scelere. So his grace is infinite in some way; and Mary’s too “in some way,” though not in as full a sense as Christ’s.
• “Those things are hard to see.”

9. The replies (“does not give the Spirit ad mensuram”) #

• Ad 1. John 3 expounded three ways: (a) the eternal gift of the divine nature to the Son, infinite — the gloss (his footnote: Augustine), “as much as the Father is, so much the Son”; (b) the gift to human nature united to the divine person, infinite — gloss: as the Father generated a full and perfect Word, so the full and perfect is united to human nature; (c) habitual grace, extending to everything that pertains to the nature of grace — Augustine: measure is a division of gifts, to one the speech of wisdom, to another of knowledge, but Christ who gives is not confined to some particular one. Pius X’s encyclicals again: Gregory and Anselm as bishop/pope, examples more proportioned to us than Christ, with graces for a particular function; Christ’s grace is limited to no function.
• Ad 2. The infinite effect is on account of the foresaid infinity and the unity of the divine person to which the soul is united. Student: an English translation suggests infinitatem for unitatem — why does unitatem make sense? He: unless it were a unity, it would not be attached to the infinity of the divine nature.
• Ad 3. The lesser can grow to the greater’s quantity only in things of one definition; another’s grace is to Christ’s as particular power to universal — “the old example,” fire however much it grows never equals the sun.
• Closing aside: helping at the parish tonight labelling letters against FOCA, still in Congress.

His words #

• proprium: “private” rather than “proper” — what belongs to something alone.
• fatherland / homeland: the state of the blessed [ed.: patria], vs. the state of the way.
• summit of grace: the highest point, in essence and in power.
• faculty of grace: subject-side fullness in virtus, for all that pertains to one’s status or office.
• grace of union: being personally united to the Son of God; hypostatic union.
• immensum: immeasurable, near-synonym of infinite; the councils’ immensus of the divine nature.
• ad mensuram: “in a measured way.”
• simply vs. in some way [ed.: simpliciter / secundum quid]: the distinction he relies on for the soul’s and Christ’s grace’s infinity.
• universally perfect: God, whose perfection is not limited to any kind, vs. perfect in its kind.
• “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]; “physical refutations” [ed.: Sophistical Refutations].
• una stilla salvum facere totum mundum ab omni scelere: one drop of Christ’s blood saves the whole world from all sin.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST III q. 7 a. 10 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, ad 1-3)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST III q. 7 a. 11 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, ad 1-3)
• Scripture quoted within them: Luke 1:28; Acts 6; Eph 3; Eph 4:7; Eph 1; John 1:14; John 3; Job 28; Wisdom 11

Mentioned

• Gregory, homily on the hundred sheep; Gregory on Job 28
• Augustine, glosses on John 3
• Thomas, commentary on Job (“pride kills the great ones and envy the little ones”); Summa contra Gentiles, last chapter on the divine substance (infinity) and chapter on the goodness of God; ST prima pars on God’s infinity; ST secunda secundae, treatise on charity (envy)
• Thomas, prayer with una stilla [ed.: Adoro te devote (inferred)]
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (perfect); Poetics (Homer and plot); Sophistical Refutations; De anima on the soul as all things (inferred)
• Averroes on universally perfect
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; Hamlet (“whirlwind of your passion”)
• Hegel on Homer’s characters vs. French tragedy
• Feuerbach; Marx’s doctoral thesis preface
• Pius X, encyclicals on Gregory the Great, Anselm, Charles Borromeo
• Dan Mahoney, books on Solzhenitsyn and de Gaulle

His questions #

• Now how’s Thomas going to resolve all these difficulties? By distinguishing fullness on the side of grace itself (proper to Christ) from fullness on the side of the subject (shared).
• Apart from Christ, is there a higher state than mother of God? No; so Mary is full of grace according to her state.
• After the Blessed Virgin, who is called to the highest state? He says the apostles; a student adds St Joseph; he notes the apostles are the ones mentioned.
• Why can’t there be envy in heaven? left open (students offer “because there’s hell” and “generosity”; he redirects to envy as opposed to charity).
• Can the grace in Christ’s soul be infinite being like God is infinite being? No; as a being in a finite subject it is finite, infinite only by the notion of grace.
• What’s wrong with Feuerbach’s argument that the human mind is God? It confuses infinite in some way (can always learn more) with infinite simply (completely actual).
• Do you know my brother Mark? In some way, in knowing what a brother and a man is; simply, no.
• Why does it make sense to say unitatem rather than infinitatem in ad 2? Without the unity of person, Christ’s grace would not be attached to the infinity of the divine nature.