Sanctifying grace

Front matter

“SANCTIFY ING. A

GRACE

| REV. ne POWERS

I. The State Of Grace

TEMPLES OF GOD... .

THROUGH JESUS CHRIST .

SUPERNATURAL ACTIVITIES .

GROWTH IN GRACE .. .

GRACE AND MERIT .. .

LOSS AND REGAIN... .

EPILOGUE, HOPE AND FEAR

PAGE

Chapter I

Sanctifying Grace a positive reality—Protestant error explained and refuted—Grace wholly supernatural—Grace makes us share God’s nature and life,

In one of the most beautiful of the Psalms the royal singer gives expression to the wonder which filled his mind when he looked out upon the glories of God’s visible creation. “O Lord our Lord: how admirable is thy name in the whole earth! For thy magnificence is elevated above the heavens. . . . I will behold thy heavens, the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast founded.” And then he marvels that a God of such magnificence and power should have any care for feeble man. “What is man that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little less than the angels: thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of thy hands. ...O I

Lord our Lord: how admirable is thy name in all the earth!” }

With still greater reason can we proclaim the glory and the magnificence and the condescension of the Lord our God when we consider, in the light of Catholic theology, the wonders of a soul which God has beautified by the gift of sanctifying grace. “All the glory of the king’s — daughter is within,” ? and it is in a soul which is in the state of grace rather than in the starry heavens or in the wonders of the human mind that we are to find the masterpiece of God’s handicraft in this world of ours. The sanctifying grace with which the souls of God’s servants are endowed is far grander, far more glorious than anything which we can behold in the heavens above us or on the earth at our feet. This is a truth which we have often heard—so often, perhaps, that it has become a commonplace which we accept without appreciating its significance. But the more we study it the more we shall marvel, until we can make our own the words with which the Blessed Virgin expressed her realization of the favour which had been granted her: “the that is mighty hath done great things to me: and holy is his name.” ®

The state of grace is not merely the absence of mortal sin, as many people seem to imagine.

1 Ps, viii. * Ps, xliv, 14. * Luke i, 49.

They look upon the soul as being in itself a very beautiful thing—a spirit, glorious in its various ‘natural qualities, and far grander than any material object; mortal sin can defile it and make it hideous; but if there is no such sin it remains resplendent in all the glory of its spiritual nature and is thus (so it is thought) in the state of grace.

Such a view of the matter, however, falls far short of the truth. The state of grace is thus made to be a mere negative thing—namely, the absence of the defiling element of mortal sin. But the fact which we have to remember is that grace’ is a positive reality superadded to the glorious natural endowments of the soul. These endowments are not left in all their natural beauty; they receive an additional glory which surpasses what they are in themselves far more than they themselves surpass the glories of the world around us; and it is the possession of this additional glory, rather than the mere absence of mortal sin, which constitutes the state of grace.

1In the course of this work whenever we use the term *sorace” we shall understand by it “sanctifying grace” as opposed to “actual grace.” Sanctifying grace, as we shall explain, is a permanent quality in the soul; actual grace, of course, is a passing help given by God for the performance of some act. See volume 17 of the present series.

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The Catholic doctrine on this point is in direct opposition to the strange theories of Protestantism. Faced by his failure to control his violent and sensuous character, Luther evolved a theory which is a combination of pessimism and easy optimism. Through the fall of Adam, he maintained, our nature has become essentially evil and must ever remain evil; it is a mass of corruption, and even the redeeming blood of our Saviour does not cleanse or heal it; and he pressed his theory so far as to draw the conclusion that all our actions are sinful, not excluding those which we look upon as virtuous. Here we have the pessimism of the system: but now comes its easy optimism. For Luther taught that if only we will have complete confidence that the merits of Christ are actually applied to us, our sins are ignored, as it were, by God; our souls remain indeed hideous in themselves, but God covers them over with the merits of Christ so that these are looked upon by him as being ours; our sins are not “imputed” to us, but the merits of Christ are.

This is the famous doctrine of Justification by Faith. For the Lutheran, then, Justification does not mean (as it means for a Catholic) an inner change by which the soul becomes a sacred thing, but a mere external non-imputation of sins; and Faith means, not an assent to truths divinely revealed, but a personal persuasion that the merits of Christ have been applied - to us. This Faith, in the Lutheran system, is the only thing which counts: good works are of no avail—indeed, they are impossible, since all our actions are made evil by the evil source from which they spring. A further conclusion from Luther’s principles is that there can be no such thing as Merit, a point with which we shall deal later on.

In what follows there will be frequent reference to the Protestant theory of Justification. This is inevitable, for, although our chief concern is with the positive statement of Catholic truth, the official statement of this truth by the Council of Trent was drawn up with direct reference to the errors of the sixteenth century.

In the first place, then, the Council lays it down that we become just before God not through a non-imputation of sin but by an interior renovation which blots out sin. This is effected by sanctifying grace, which is explained as a reality poured forth upon us and inhering in us.

Beyond any doubt, this is the teaching of Scripture and of the great leaders of Christian thought from the beginning. Within the compass of a small book like the present it is not possible to give an adequate exposition of scrip- - tural texts, still less to set out the teaching of Christian writers through the ages, but there readily come to the mind a number of expressions used in the Scriptures which show most clearly that the state of grace involves a real interior change in the soul. Consider such expressions as “born again,” “regeneration,” “renovation,” “new creature.” Here, surely, we have the idea of an inner change and not of a mere non-imputation of sin. Similarly when St Paul speaks of the “new man” who is “created in justice and holiness of truth,”’* he is alluding to a marvellous change which is produced in us. Very striking, too, is the parallel which he draws between the results of Adam’s sin and the restoration which has been accomplished by Christ. ““As by the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one many shall be made just.’* But the disobedience of Adam certainly brought about a real change in the souls of men, as Luther must be the first to admit: therefore Christ produces an inner change when through his grace many are made just.

The early teachers of Christian truth proclaimed the same doctrine in many striking ways. Thus in’ explaining the effects of Baptism they frequently compared the water of the font to a mother: as the mother forms and fashions her

_ ‘child, so does the baptismal water form and fashion a new creature for God. Or as God in the work of creation produced living things out of the waters, so does he bring the soul to a new life in the waters of baptism. So insistent on this inner change are the early writers, and such a high ideal did they form of it, that they did - not hesitate to say that we are deified; in fact they took this to be an admitted principle amongst Christians, for they made it a basis of argument against those who denied the divinity of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost, they argued, deifies us: therefore he is God, since none but God can deify the soul.

It would be easy to quote many striking and beautiful passages from the writings of the Fathers of the Church extolling the glory of the soul which Christ has washed in his blood. All this is directly contrary to the awful teaching of Protestantism which would make the soul even of the just man a sinful thing, essentially corrupt and loathsome. There can, then, be no doubt about what is the correct view of the matter: sanctifying grace is a real quality, of surpassing beauty, infused by God into the soul and making that soul worthy of the Creator who fashioned it and the Redeemer who won it from the thraldom of sin.’

This, then, must be our first point: grace is a positive reality superadded to the soul. But what is the nature of this positive reality? Here we are faced by the inability of the human mind to grasp the magnificence of the glorious truth. We may use metaphors and comparisons; we may liken grace to the brightness of whitehot steel or to the brilliance of a diamond that sparkles in the light; but all such modes of speaking fall far short of the truth. They fail in various ways, but principally in one most important point which is necessary for a right understanding of what grace is. In all such figures of speech we compare sanctifying grace with something which is natural to the object to which it belongs; thus the brilliance of the diamond is natural to the diamond and is in the same order of being. But sanctifying grace is not natural to the soul; it belongs to a higher order of things. It is a supernatural quality which no created cause could possibly produce. It belongs to a new and an altogether higher world. This is an aspect of the matter which calls for careful consideration, and we beg the reader’s attention

1 Here no criticism is made of the Lutheran theory of Faith, but the point will be dealt with later on when we consider faith in Christ as the fundamental element in preparation for justification.

to what follows. The explanation shall be given with as little technicality as possible.

As the very form of the word indicates, the supernatural is something which is above, or higher than, that which is natural. But what are we to understand by the term “natural”? In ordinary usage it has various meanings, but in Catholic Philosophy and Theology it has a very precise meaning which must be rigorously adhered to. The natural, then, is something which _ belongs to the very essence or nature of a thing (as the power of reasoning belongs to man), or flows from its nature (as the skill of a workman flows from his nature), or is necessary or suitable for the existence and development of a thing (as air is necessary for man). Thus “natural” is not to be contrasted with “artificial,” and if we are to keep to the strict meaning of the words we ought not to say, for example, that it is not natural for a diamond to sparkle since in its original (or, as we say, in its natural) condition it is a dull stone. In the technical sense of the term it is quite natural for a diamond to sparkle since this follows from its very nature.

Of course what is natural for one thing may be above the nature of another thing. Thus it is natural for a man to reason, but not for a dog;

natural for wood to float in water, but not for a bar of iron. |

In the light of these explanations it will be | seen that the supernatural is something which is above, or higher than, what belongs “naturally” | to things; if this something is above that which | belongs naturally to any creature, it is said to be — “absolutely” supernatural; if it is above that | which belongs naturally to some creatures but | not to all, it is “relatively” supernatural. Thus, | if a brute beast were to speak, this would be relatively, not absolutely, supernatural; but for a man to enjoy the Beatific Vision of God, face to face, is absolutely supernatural, since to see God by direct and immediate vision is above the natural order of all created beings, angelic as well as human. |

To the reader who desires no more than to | have unfolded before him something of the. glories of sanctifying grace these explanations — may appear wearisome: but they are necessary not only for the avoiding of positive error but also for the gaining of a clearer and grander idea of what this wonderful gift is. Another point must be explained before we pass on—a point of great importance. A distinction has to_ be made between that which is supernatural considered in itself (supernaturale in se), and that which is supernatural because of the way

~in which it has been brought about (supernaturale quoad modum). Thus the restoration of a dead man to life is clearly supernatural: is “it supernatural in itself or only supernatural in the manner of its production? The answer is that it is supernatural not in the first way but in the second: for the thing produced (namely, life) is not in itself supernatural, though it has been produced in a supernatural way. And the same is to be said of all miracles. On the other hand, whatever belongs to God himself, or involves some sharing of what is proper to God, is supernatural in itself, transcending the order not only of what creatures do but also of what they are.

The application of all this to the question of sanctifying grace will be seen more and more as we proceed, but for the present we simply assert the magnificent truth that grace is not only a positive reality in the soul, not only a reality which no created being could produce, but a reality which in itself is higher than the whole order of natural things (even angelic) and is truly divine. This brings us at once to a wonderful phrase of St Peter, who says that we are made “‘partakers of the divine nature.” Catholic theology has ever clung to the belief that here we have no mere figure of speech but the

+2 Pet. i, 4.

If declaration of a definite fact. We really are made to be partakers of the divine nature. It is not merely that our spiritual faculties of intellect and will establish a special likeness to God in our souls; that is true enough, but over and above this natural likeness to God a wholly supernatural quality is given to us which makes us to be of the same nature as God. In this connection we may recall the principle used by early writers in arguing the divinity of the Holy Ghost: the Holy Ghost deifies us; in other words makes us partakers of the divine nature. St Augustine puts the matter thus: “He descended that we might ascend, and whilst retaining his own divine nature he partook of our human nature, that we, whilst keeping our own nature, might become partakers of his.” St Thomas Aquinas, echoing the constant teaching of the past, declares in a passage which the Church uses for the feast of Corpus Christi: ‘“‘the onlybegotten Son of God, wishing to make us partakers of his own divinity, took upon himself our human nature that having become man he might make men to be gods.” And we know how the Church has enshrined this wonderful truth in one of the most beautiful of the prayers at Mass. ““O God, who in creating human nature, didst marvellously ennoble it, and hast still more marvellously renewed it, grant that by the mys- 12 tery of this water and wine we may be made partakers of his Godhead, who vouchsafed to become partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.”

God, then, has deigned to touch us with his finger, and in touching us has transformed us into something like himself. We shall never understand in our present life in what this partaking of the Godhead consists: how could we understand it, seeing that the nature of the Godhead is itself above our understanding? We can, indeed, speak of it as the divine Light which shines in our souls, or as the divine Beauty which is bestowed upon us; or we may use illustrations such as that of St Thomas Aquinas, who says that we share the very nature of God as metal in the fire shares the nature of the fire. Such ways of speaking and such illustrations are all helpful, and the Christian soul, seeking to get some faint idea of the glory of sanctifying grace, will dwell upon them with joy. But a higher and truer way of viewing the matter is to think of grace as.a communication to us of the divine Life itself. For God is a living being, not a lifeless thing like the shining metal or the glistening jewel, and they who share his nature must necessarily share his very life. A wonderful thought, truly, and one which leads us far in our search for a less inadequate idea of tT} what grace is. Let us dwell upon it for a moment.

We are familiar with the grades of life in the world around us. There is the life of the plant which separates it by an immense ocean of reality from all non-living things; there is the life of the animal with those wonderful powers of sensation and instinct which the plant does not possess; and there is the life of a rational being whose intellect and will raise him far above the brutes. Higher, indeed, than man there are the angels, but their life does not differ in order from the rational life of man; it is more perfect in many ways and is not bound up with the animal life which is part of man’s nature; but it is a life of intellect and will. But there is yet a higher life, the incomprehensible, unutterable life of God, who, as the Scripture says, dwells in light inaccessible. This life of God is the fountain whence all life flows and, could we understand it, is the explanation of how and why there are three Persons in him. To share this life is clearly the grandest thing that can be imagined. It would seem, indeed, to be impossible; and impossible it certainly would be if we were limited to the natural order of things. Nothing in the world of created things could have brought it about and no human mind could have guessed it. Yet in this life God has made us share—a greater work than when he called the world out of nothingness.

In the next chapter something more will be said about the nature of this partaking of the divine life, and we shall then see how it is a preparation for the Beatific Vision, and the basis of our claim to be in very truth the sons of God.

There are also other wonderful aspects of the state of grace which remain to be explained, but already we can see something of the grandeur of the Catholic doctrine, which asserts for man, even in the days of his earthly pilgrimage, a glory which raises him up to the Godhead and makes him most beautiful in the sight of the angels.

And so we make our own the words of David, “What is man that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little less than the angels; thou hast crowned him with glory and honour... .

O Lord our Lord: how admirable is thy name in all the earth.” *

1Sanctifying Grace is regarded by theologians as a “Habit.” The term may be misleading, for by a Habit we usually understand a customary mode of acting, and this does not seem to fit in with the idea of Sanctifying Grace. But Habits may be either “operative” (which dispose one towards a particular way of acting) or “entitative” (which give a particular disposition to the thing itself, like beauty). Sanctifying Grace is an ‘“‘entitative’ Habit. For an explanation of “Habits,” see The Supernatural Virtues, p. 1 seq.

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Chapter II

Divine Sonship—More than legal adoption—Actual kinship— Heirs—Intrinsic connection between Grace and Glory— Sharing Divine Life.

In this second chapter we are to consider two special aspects of the life of grace which God bestows upon us; the first is the sonship which comes with sanctifying grace, and the second is the fact that, in a fuller sense than at first sight would seem possible, we are made heirs of God and have already within us the beginnings of eternal glory.

St John bids us see ‘“‘what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God.”’! In his infinite condescension God has made us his children. We know how sometimes a poor child is adopted, taken into a home, made one of the family, treated as a son or daughter, and even given a right to inherit all that belongs to those who have thus bestowed their love. God has done this for us and much more. Through the

* John iii, 1.

fall of our first parents we were cut off from him and came into existence bearing the dread heritage of original sin. But God ever wanted to bring us back, and to re-establish between himself and us the sweet relationship of father and child. For that purpose the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became man and gave us “power to be made the sons of God.” * Both St John and St Paul exult in proclaiming this act of divine condescension. “Dearly beloved,” the first writes, with all the earnestness of the disciple of love, “‘we are now the sons of God: and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when he shall appear we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is. And everyone that hath this hope in him sanctifieth himself.’?* To cherish the belief that we are really and truly the sons of God, and to cling to the hope that as sons we shall one day be allowed to gaze on the beauty and majesty of our heavenly Father, is to sanctify ourselves. St John himself has written few more consoling words than these. And St Paul announces the same great truth in sonorous terms that ring through the ages: there is no mistaking their emphasis. At the beginning of that wonderful little epistle to the Ephesians, in which he expounds so beautifully the mystery of Jesus, he + John i, 12. 21. John iii, 2-3. 17 cries out: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with spiritual blessings in heavenly places, in Christ: as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in his sight in charity. Who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself: according to the purpose of his will: unto the praise of the glory of his grace, in which he hath graced us in his beloved Son.” Nothing, surely, could be finer than this assertion of God’s condescension in making us his sons through Jesus. And to the Galatians, who were being led astray by the errors of Jewish formalism which crushed all loving sense of sonship, he writes to remind them that “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his son. . . that he might redeem them that were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father.” * This same idea of the liberty which belongs to us as sons dwelling, as it were, in our father’s house, is expressed also in the epistle to the Romans. “You have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear: but you have received the spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry: Abba, Father. For the Spirit *Gal. iv, 4-6. 18 himself giveth testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of God.” *

In the light of such luminous teaching it is clear that it is in a very special sense that we are the children of God. St Paul, more particularly, assigns to us a sort of legal position in the house of God, in virtue of which we have both the freedom and the rights of sons: for, as he goes on to say at the end of the passage just quoted: “And if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ.”? We fail to do justice to a great and fundamental truth if we think of our sonship in terms of some vague favour which God has shown to us in virtue of which the term son could be used metaphorically. We must at least assign to our sonship the meaning which adoption had under the ancient Roman law. Amongst the Romans an adopted son lost his legal position in the family to which he belonged by blood, and became legally a member of the family into which he had been adopted, acquiring all the dignities and rights which would have been his if he had been a son by blood. In such a sense at least we must be the sons of God. But the truth carries us further than that. Our sonship raises us much higher, for God does for us what no Roman could do for the child whom he had adopted:

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He makes us, in a very true and wonderful way, children “by blood.” To appreciate this fact we have only to apply what has already been explained about the nature of Grace.

Sanctifying grace, as we have seen, is a positive reality infused into the soul by which we are made to share the divine life. At once we see the difference between our sonship and the sonship of those who are sons only by legal adoption. This legal adoption may be an act of wonderful love and condescension, and it may bring untold blessings with it; but the adopted son remains of foreign blood, with the physical characteristics which he inherited from his real parents. It is their blood that flows in his veins, their features that are copied in his face and form. But with the sons of God all is different. By sanctifying grace the very life of God is imparted unto them; they are grafted on to him, as it were; nay, they have been “born again,’ as our Saviour teaches us; they are a “new creature’; they have been “born of God” —‘“born again not of corruptible seed but incorruptible.” *

This is what God has done for us when he gave us the gift of sanctifying grace, so that we may well repeat, with that deeper gratitude which comes with greater knowledge, the words of St John which have been already quoted: “Behold what manner of charity the Father hath

__° bestowed upon us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God.”

“And if sons, heirs also: heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ.” + The Church ends that magnificent profession of faith which we call the Nicene Creed with the words: “And I expect the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” The Christian looks forward to heaven as his home, not simply as a place of happiness which he may reach if he is fortunate. Incorporated in Christ who reigns in glory, a true son of God, made already a sharer in the life of God, he may look upon eternal happiness as the completion of God’s loving plan for him; and so in a calm spirit of hope and love he awaits the day of the Lord, not as a day of wrath and vengeance but as a day of homecoming. He must for a time fight the good fight and keep the faith and accept the sufferings which may be laid upon him, for he knows the truth of the words which St Paul added to his declaration of our heirship with Christ: “Yet so, if we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him”; but his whole attitude is essentially one of gladness and hope “in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

*Rom. viii, 17. a

It is well that we should stress the fact—and rejoice in it—that grace makes us truly sons and heirs, and that consequently we can look upon heaven as truly our home. But there is something more than the fact that grace gives us a right to an eternal inheritance. Grace is already the beginning of glory; the second grows out of the first, much as the blossom grows out of the seed. How this is, the following explanations will show.