PART ONE: GRACE IN ITS ESSENCE

I. HABITUAL GRACE AND THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY GHOST

I should like to speak to you first of the essence of grace, according to St. Thomas's treatise on grace; then of its existential states, for which I shall make use of data drawn from other sources, notably Aquinas' treatises on Christ and the sacraments.

1. The very first thing, one which must never be forgotten, which we shall never adequately grasp, is that the Judaeo-Christian revelation is the revelation of the love of God for us, of a love which will never cease to astonish us here below because it surpasses all we could possibly conceive, and of which we can never plumb the depths. To know the depths of God's love for us, we should have to be God. And the effects of this love are disconcerting and surprising to us, precisely because we are unable to comprehend its Source. They are disconcerting to the purely rationalistic reason, even to reason pure and simple.

2. The first act in which God's love pours itself out is creation. God is the Infinite, the Absolute. He possesses being, intelligence, love, beauty to an infinite degree. We should not say he has being, intelligence, love; rather, that he is Being itself, Intelligence itself, Love and Beauty themselves. He dwells in himself; he is lacking in absolutely nothing. Why, then, did he create the world?

When man acts, it is always to procure for himself some benefit; but God could gain no benefit from creation. So then we are compelled to say that, if he created the world, it was through pure superabundance, pure desire to communicate his riches, pure disinterestedness, through love. Here we border on the mystery of his presence in creation. This is a presence at once of causality and conservation; the same divine omnipotence that makes the universe emerge from nothingness keeps it above nothingness; just as I exercise the same force to lift a weight and to keep it at the height to which I have raised it. The divine presence envelops and penetrates all creatures. It is a knowing presence, which pierces the secrets of hearts; a powerful presence, which gives beings their activity, gives to the rose-bush for example the power to produce a rose; a presence of essence, which also gives the rose-bush the power to 'be' what it is. These are the three aspects of his presence in creation. It is intimate to creatures. Strictly speaking, God is more present to things than they are to themselves. 'God who art in my heaven more my heaven than heaven,' said Pere Chardon; he is in me more me than myself. And if for one instant he were to forget the world, it would fall immediately into nothingness.

Yet God who is so mysteriously present to the world is not immersed in the world; he is not dissolved in things. He keeps his absolute transcendence. If, then, he fills all things, it is as the infinite Cause of an effect that is imperfect and limited: 'Do not I fill heaven and earth?' (Jer. xxiii. 24), he asks, and the psalmist says, 'If I ascend into heaven, thou art there; if I descend into hell, thou art present' (Ps. cxxxviii. .

There is a second act of God that is still more overwhelming. It is a little like the act of a mother who feels the child she has brought into the world is too remote, and takes and presses him to her heart. God unites himself in a new way to the souls who open themselves to his grace and his love. This is a presence still more mysterious, more hidden, the presence of indwelling. We read in the Book of Proverbs (viii. 31): 'My delight is to be with the children of men', and in Ecclesiasticus (xxiv. 11-13): '. . . I sought rest, and I shall abide in the inheritance of the Lord. Then the Creator of all things commanded and said to me, and he that made me rested in my tabernacle. And he said to me: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel.'

That God desires thus to come down secretly into our universe to find his dwelling in it is a truth already perceived dimly in the Old Testament. But the fulness of this revelation is to be found in the New Testament. Consider, for example, the opening verses of chaper xxi of the Apocalypse: 'I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . .And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men; and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people, and God himself with them shall be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Nor mouning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more; for the former things are passed away.'

In this second way, God cannot dwell in material things; but where there is a spirit, he is able to come down and hold converse with that spirit. And this presence of indwelling is conditioned by the descent, in that spirit, of grace in its fullest meaning. You see the importance of grace: it transforms the soul and fits it for the immediate indwelling of the divine Persons.

3. The word 'grace' has three interdependent senses. The first is that of well-wishing. We say of someone: he has the favor, the grace, of the king. So it is an act of love that comes down to make contact with some being. The second sense is that of something given to a person to signify or symbolize this well-wishing. So it is a gift. And the third sense is that of gratitude on the part of the person who has been favored: he is grateful, he gives thanks. You see the interdependence: the favor precedes the gift which, when it is received by someone worthy of it, calls forth the act of thanksgiving.

The uncreated divine Grace, the uncreated divine favour, causes in us created graces, created gifts and benefits, for which we render acts of thanksgiving.

We shall leave aside this third meaning and consider the first two.

There is one great difference between God's love and man's, between God's favour or grace and that of a man: God's love is creative, it pours out being and goodness into things, whereas man's love presupposes the goodness, the beauty of things. It is because a thing is, because it is good or beautiful that it draws me to love it. When it is fully good, it ravishes me; when it is only partly good, it invites me: I can love a human creature in spite of all it lacks, because there is some good in it, because I think of it as willed by God, redeemed by the blood of Christ. Someone may be uncongenial to me, but if I remember the words of St John of the Cross: 'Put love where there is none, and you will reap love', my love will go out to meet him in the attempt to provoke response. But I am not able by my love alone to produce or create the goodness or beauty of any thing; not even a mother, by her act of loving, can change the heart of her son who is a sinner. It is otherwise with God's love, which is prior to the being and goodness of things. That is easy to grasp: before the creation, there was nothing; God could not look on the world and be in love with its beauty. God first willed the world—willing and loving are the same with him—and the world budded forth and grew, as the outcome of his act of love. The world exists because God loved it; it continues because God continues to love it. There is, therefore, an inversion to make when we go from man's love to God's: man's love follows upon the goodness of things, God's is creative of the goodness of things.

4. We must now observe that God's love is of two kinds:

(a) a love which St. Thomas calls common, by which God loves the blade of grass, the star, the pebble of which the film "La Strada" speaks.... All these beings are, and they are by an act of divine love and volition. Even the sinner has his being, even the devil, and this being would not subsist did not God continue to will it. What is evil in the devil is his perverted will, the act by which he annuls the love offered to him; but his being itself is a richness; being is always a splendour, a participation in the divine Source. In this sense we can say that the common love of God extends to all that exists, in so far as it exists;

(b) a special love by which God elevates the rational creature above the conditions of his nature, clothes him as if with a new nature, brings him into a new universe. He makes him a sharer in the divine life by pouring into him created grace. Created grace is a reality, a quality, a light that enables the soul to receive worthily the indwelling of the three divine Persons. St Thomas says of this second love that it is absolute, because God wills to pour into the soul by its means the absolute eternal Good, in so far as it can contain it, in faith here below, in the beatific vision hereafter. Along with itself grace brings its very source, the Trinity in its entirety, just as the sun itself is given to us in one of its rays. Once there is the state of grace, there is the indwelling of the divine Persons; and once there is this indwelling, it produces itself in the soul that which makes it possible, namely grace. Of course, we bear this treasure in weak vessels, as St Paul says (II Cor. iv. 7): our heart is weakened by the original wound and the accumulated wounds of our past sins. Nevertheless, we are certain that if God's love falls upon us it cannot fail to purify us.

You know that the Lutheran, protestant teaching is quite different. It denies the existence of created grace. It holds that God can love his friends without endowing them with a new reality. It acknowledges only uncreated grace. God's love for his friends falls on them without creating or changing anything in them. Man, since the first sin, remains wholly corrupted. If he believes, that is if he has confidence in Christ, God regards him as just on account of Christ's death, but this man is not interiorly illuminated and sanctified; he remains intrinsically a sinner, polluted. He is, according to Luther, 'at once sinner and just'.

5. There are, then, two universes. First of all, the universe of natures: the nature of a mineral, of a plant, of an animal, of a man—animated body, incarnate soul—and also of the angels. God could have created a universe composed solely of natures, but in this hypothesis what would have been our relations with God? We should know the world by reason and from the world we should ascend to God as to its source. We would know God only through a glass, darkly. What we would see first would be the universe, its riches, its beauty, its being, and doubtless that is something! It is something, but it is being which is weak, limited, fugitive; philosophers call it contingent being. The universe is solid enough to be more than nothingness and to demand a cause, a justification; but not sufficiently so to be its own justification. It is borrowed being, dependent on the Being per se, the Absolute. Then, in the order of natures, we would know God as the great X on whom the world depends. He would be the Master, the Creator, but we could not enter into a relationship with him as friend to friend. Aristotle said we cannot speak of friendship with the immortal gods, because friendship supposes a certain equality.

But God does not leave us in that condition. He comes out to meet us, and his desire is to set up in us a new universe of life, light and love, so that we may be able to make our way towards the depth of his being and intimacy with him, to speak to him as our friend. That is the mystery of the elevation of our nature by grace, and that is why we call this new life supernatural. It transforms, imbues our whole being to make it proportionate to an end hitherto unknown to it, one which goes beyond our nature. God raises us up, rather as the artist uses an instrument to make it produce what by itself it would be incapable of—joy, sadness, prayer. Something beyond its own power acts through the instrument: it is a human heart that touches the instrument and the effect produced, being on the plane of its cause, is a human effect. If divine grace comes down into me, I shall no longer be in community only with the things of earth and with men, but with the divine Persons, with all that is deepest and most hidden in the heart of God.

The saints have been wrapt in contemplation before these two immense mysteries of God's love: the presence of creation and conservation, the presence of immensity; and above all the presence of indwelling, by which man is not only a child of men but child of God. St Thomas observes that, even in the natural order, we find something that, if we carry it to the extreme, enables us as though by a leap to understand this elevation of man above his own condition and his entry upon intimacy with the divine life. The physico-chemical activities of the mineral world function, in their natural state, on the mineral plane alone; but they are utilized by life at the biological stage. The vegetative life, for instance, lifts up a plant or a tree towards the sky, instead of abandoning it to the law of gravity. When sensitivity comes, it utilizes biological laws: the eye must be moistened (vegetative life) so that it can see (sense-life). And when we come to reason, we see it using sensitivity and the passions for a work of human reason. You see, then, how a lower order whose laws remain in force is, as it were, assumed into the orbit of a higher order, and this still within the sphere of nature. Can God, then, not take over man too, with his reason, to make him gravitate round him? We have to admit that he can. He remains man, but attracted and invited to enter the orbit of a superhuman life.

6. Are we to conceive of this light of grace as coming to us like a ray shining through a pane of glass from which the light fades once the ray has gone? Is it simply a movement on God's part raising us towards him in a transient way, passing through us only to let us fall back afterwards into our solitude? That was the idea of one medieval theologian, Peter Lombard. Or should we envisage grace as a divine movement which, at the moment it touches us, permanently enriches us with living roots enabling us to make acts of love every time we wish to? Yes, that is the true view. That is the thought of St Thomas summing up the traditional teaching. Consider, he says, the world of natures: God does not use the rose tree as an opportunity for producing the rose! God puts in the rose tree a certain permanent quality which causes it to bear roses. This seed has an innate aptitude which makes it produce this flower and this fruit. Likewise in the animal kingdom: this egg gives this kind of bird. Every being acts according to its bent. There exists in it a permanent determining principle which lies at the source of its way of acting. This is what is called its nature. The occasionalist philosophers say that each time God acts he uses beings as occasions, but without having endowed them with particular natures. And Malebranche, in particular, 'If I want to move my finger or hand, it is necessary for my act of will to act on my imagination, and thence on my muscles. But I do not know, in reality, what has to be done for the movement to be completed. Since I know nothing at all about that, it is not I who move my hand.' According to this view, God would use beings as immediate occasions for his acts and they would then be like phantoms. No! God has created a universe of natures and has endowed beings on every level, and they are as it were permanent sources of activity.

Well then, asks St Thomas, will God act in the supernatural order with less love than in the natural order? No, God will not be less condescending and beneficent; he puts in us a permanent quality we call habitual grace. 'Habitual' comes from the Latin word "habere," to have. Grace is a habitus, a having, an endowment we possess continuously and which is the source in us of activity. The divine action, when it takes hold of me—say that I am in a state of sin—and if I open myself to it, places me in the state of grace, that is to say in a stable condition of grace. If I sleep, I am still in the state of grace; when I wake up, I make an act of faith or love in virtue of this permanent root which remains in me ready to act.

You know that man has certain faculties—intellect, will, sensitivity— which are rooted in the soul. The intellect is the power of the soul to know the universe, to receive in itself the impression of things and then to penetrate within them by contemplating them; the will is the faculty which, unlike the intellect, does not receive the world into itself to view it in a disinterested way, but leads us out to make contact with things. The soul is like a tree-trunk, with the faculties as its principal branches. Grace comes into the essence of the soul, and then diffuses into our faculties the infused theological virtues: faith into the intellect, raising it up, placing in it a ray of the light by which God knows himself; hope and charity into the will: God places in it a ray of the love with which he loves himself, and I am able to love God in some degree as he loves himself. Grace also brings the moral virtues to the faculties. It is like a graft which, added onto the soul and its faculties, makes it act in a divine manner.

7. Grace is, as it were, a participation in the divine nature. That is the definition always quoted by theologians. It is to be found in the second Epistle of St Peter (i. 3-4): 'As all things of his divine power which appertain to life and godliness are given us through the knowledge of him who hath called us by his own proper glory and virtue. By whom he hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature....' For us to be able to know and love God in the most hidden depths of his mystery and as he is in himself, the principle of knowing and loving, which is in God in an infinite degree, has to be, as it were, carried over into us; that is what grace does. It is—and this is a mystery—at one and the same time finite and infinite. It is finite because it is in my soul which is finite. If I am able to grow in grace, if it can be more intense in another soul than in mine, that is a proof that it is finite. But if it makes us enter into the divine intimacy, it must be at the same time infinite. How are we to understand this paradox? Let me give you an image: the eye, if you take it in itself as an organ, is finite (in its structure); but if you consider its tendency and the scope of its field of vision, it is infinite (tendentially, intentionally). We may therefore say that the eye is finite constitutively and infinite intentionally or tendentially. Well then, something of the sort, but much more profoundly mysterious, happens with grace. Its source is God. God sees himself, not by a ray of his light, but by his whole light; he is wholly transparent to himself, and he loves himself by his love which is infinite. In me there is a ray of his life and his love, that is to say a finite participation in the divine nature; but grace in me is directed immediately on to the infinite depths of God. You see the mystery, simultaneously finite and infinite in character.

When death comes, grace will lead me to God immediately seen and possessed, and my soul will be filled to overflowing. But even now, in the night of faith, my soul takes hold of God, and that is what is called the indwelling of the divine Persons.

8. This profound mystery is revealed in several places in Scripture, which speaks of God's indwelling in us, or of the indwelling of the divine Persons or of the Holy Spirit who represents the whole Trinity, for where one of the divine Persons dwells there dwell inseparably the two others. 'Know you not,' says St Paul to the Corinthians, 'that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? But if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which you are' (I Cor. iii. 16-17). God comes as a guest asking us to admit him, and he converses with us if we really desire it. It is no longer a simple relation of creature and Creator, servant and master, but of friend with friend. St Paul says again: 'Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price' (I Cor. vi. 19-20). We do not belong to ourselves, we belong to God and his infinite love. From time to time, man questions himself: What am I? Is this life in time something of real value, if I am of such slight account? Yes, this life has a great value, since I belong to God who wishes to take possession of my whole being. The being and soul of a man are more precious than we can imagine: 'We are the temples of the living God' (II Cor. vi. 16).

St Paul goes on to say, in the Epistle to the Romans (viii. 9): 'You are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.' For it is certainly possible to refuse the descent of God's love into us. But if we do not refuse, he takes the initiative himself. 'The Spirit of him who raised up Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you.' The infinite God will immortalize in heaven these poor habitations he has borrowed from us for a moment at one point of time and space.

We have the great text of St John (xiv. 23): 'If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and will come to him and take up our abode with him.'You see: if anyone loves me. If there is created love, that is to say created grace with all that goes with it, with its virtues of faith, hope and charity, then 'my Father will love him, we will take up our abode with him.' We have a guest with us, we are never alone; and who is our companion? No other than the Trinity in its entirety.

In the Apocalypse, Chapter iii, 20, we read: 'Behold I stand at the gate and knock. If any man shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.' It is like an evening meal, when we venture to speak of the most intimate and profound matters which we would not mention in the daytime. And he will come, not only to speak to us, but to give us the power to reply to him ourselves: 'and he with me.' When anyone is in the state of grace, then there is a dialogue, conversation of friend with friend. So we see that the dissipation of mind which so prevails in the world today is a form of madness. We need times of silence: 'Be silent, and see that I am thy God in thy heart.' In times of difficulty or sadness, in times of suffering, if you frequently call to mind that God is in you to give you his love, you will not be alone, you will find the Guest within you, and he will answer you.

9. The indwelling of the divine Persons is, then, always the accompaniment of grace. The two mysteries are co-relative. Grace is like a net we throw over the Trinity to hold it in captivity. Or here is another way to visualize it: when you bring into a room a source of light, it illuminates the walls; so, when the divine Persons come to us (here we have the source, uncreated grace), they illuminate the walls of the soul (here we have the effect, created grace). And if you possess grace, then the source of grace, the three divine Persons, is there too. In the very gift of sanctifying grace, says St Thomas, the Holy Spirit himself is sent and given to man to dwell in him. The uncreated Spirit is given in created grace, as the sun is given in its rays. The uncreated Gift of the Spirit and the created gift of grace are simultaneous. There are differences of degree in the life of individual souls; but in each of them the intensity of grace and the intensity of the indwelling increase with the same movement.

The saints come to such a vivid awareness of these riches that at times they feel as if their heart would burst. Admittedly, God may lead them by desert paths, and St John of the Cross says that, at times, God seems to be asleep in the soul. But all at once he arouses himself, and the impact he makes is so violent that, if it lasted, it would be mortal: the soul, as yet unfortified by the light of glory, seems then to be unable to support the power of the divine Persons.

Each Holy Communion should intensify in us this grace and this indwelling. We should come away from it, our souls more open to, and more deeply penetrated by, the Trinity.

Such are the gifts God makes to the least of souls that rises from a state of mortal sin. A man who has made only a poor confession, with a love still weak, and who has received absolution, already possesses grace and is dwelt in by God. Both the grace and the indwelling desire to grow stronger in him.

10. If grace, in the words of St Peter, makes us 'participators in the divine nature' and communicates to us, in some measure, the divine nature, it makes us children of God, sons of God. The child has the nature of its parents; what is born of a bird is a bird, what is born of man is a man, what is born of God is God. 'The light', says St John, 'came into the world, and to as many as received it, to them he gave power to be the sons of God, to them that believe in his name, who are born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God' (John i. 13). And again: 'Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called, and should be, the sons of God.... We are now the sons of God (I John iii. 1-2). And St Paul: 'The Spirit himself giveth testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of God' (Rom. viii. 16).

Jesus, also, is Son of God. We are, therefore, brothers of Jesus. God has predestined us to reproduce the image of his Son, 'that he might be the first-born among many brethren' (Rom. viii. 29). Those he sanctifies, Jesus 'is not ashamed to call brethren when he says: I will declare thy name to my brethren' (Heb. ii. 11).

And if Jesus is heir, we, as brothers, shall be his co-heirs: 'If we are sons, we are also heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ: yet so if we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him' (Rom. viii. 29). See, then, the ways in which we resemble Jesus.

Consider now the differences. Jesus is Son 'by nature,' he possesses necessarily the divine nature, by reason of the identity of his being and nature with the being and nature of the Father. We are sons of God 'by adoption,' we possess the divine nature by a free effect of the divine goodness, by a finite participation in the being and infinite nature of God.

Jesus is Son of the Father by eternal generation; we are sons of the three Persons of the Trinity by creation and adoption. There is an impassable distance between the first-born who is above all creation (Col. i. 15) and the multitude of his brethren, between his fraternity which is source and ours which is derivation. This is the meaning of the words of Jesus to Mary of Magdala, the morning of Easter: 'Go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God' (John xx. 17).

Jesus is heir by 'identification' of his glory with that of the Father: we are his co-heirs by 'participation' in this destiny. There is again an abyss between being heir of the divine glory by right of nature and being heir by right of merit, like the servant to whom it will one day be said, 'Well done, good and faithful servant . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord' (Mt. xxv. 21).

It is necessary to insist on the reciprocal relation between the finite gift of grace and the infinite gift of indwelling. This view is alone capable of bringing out the full dimensions of grace. Our catechism speaks of sanctifying grace, but scarcely at all of the fact of indwelling, which is of greater value, being the source of which grace is the effect.








     

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