It's a foundational principle and thought
of St. Thomas Aquinas that God's love is the cause of all that is good.
Now in contrast, human love is called forth by the goodness we find in the things that
we love, but God's love is not called forth by goodness existing in a thing.
Rather, God's love is the cause of the thing existing at all and so it's also the cause
of all the goodness of a thing.
This principle is also powerfully at work
in Aquinas's theology of grace.
God does not love us or give us grace because we are good.
Rather he loves us because he is good and it's his love received in us that makes us
good.
In fact, God loves rational creatures, human beings and angels, so much that he wants to
draw us into his very divine life.
He wants us to share in the divine nature itself and this vastly surpasses what any
created nature is capable of on its own.
Now, God doesn't do this because we deserve
it in any way.
It's purely because of his love because he wants to share his goodness with us.
What then is grace, genuinely speaking, there are two important senses of this word in Christian
theology and in the thought of Aquinas.
It can refer to God's unmerited favor or love towards us as when we say that God is gracious
to us.
Grace can also refer to the gift or to the good that God brings about in us as a result
of this undeserved favor.
Grace in this sense is the effect in us of God's love or of his graciousness to us
and St. Thomas mostly speaks about grace in this second sense.
To understand the gratuity or the unmerited quality of grace, we need to distinguish it
from nature.
As we've discussed in earlier videos, Aquinas speaks about all things that we find in nature.
Stones, plants, animals, human beings as having
essences or natures.
The nature of a thing is a dynamic principle in it according to which it acts and by which
it is ordered to an end proportion to it.
Understanding nature is important for the theology of grace because it helps us see
the difference between on the one hand, the things that are built into or owed to the
human creature simply because of what God has created it to be.
And on the other hand, the gifts that God gives that are in no way included in our nature
or owed to it, and that God could withhold without any injustice at all and without causing
any incoherence or absurdity in the creature.
It also helps us distinguish between the goal or end of man that is proportion to our nature
and the much higher supernatural end or destiny to which God calls us by grace.
Of course, God didn't have to create human
beings at all.
And so in a certain sense, the existence of human nature itself is a gift from God.
But given that God has created human beings, it follows that there are certain things that
human beings are capable of doing by nature simply in virtue of being human.
We can know some truths about the world around us.
We can know truths about right and wrong.
We can make friendships, we can form families, we can build houses, plant fields, we can
even strive to build cities and societies that aim at the common good.
In saying this, we're not saying that human beings can do those things entirely on their
own, independently from God or apart from him.
Even for our natural activities.
We need the help of God who sustains us in being, bestows on us the light of natural
reason and naturally activates our wills so that we freely engage in our actions.
And in a sense all of these helps from God are due to our nature as it moves towards
its natural end.
And so Aquinas doesn't call these things graces.
Unfortunately, we inherit a wounded nature.
This is an effect of the sin of our first parents.
Now, this material was covered in an earlier video on original sin.
To summarize our first parents were created in a state of grace, in friendship with God
and endowed with special gifts that made them immune from sickness and pain, death, ignorance
and unruly or disordered passions, but by their sin they lost friendship with God and
they lost those special gifts too.
What is more human nature then became disordered and wounded.
Our first parents chose to love a created
good more than God and as a result, their souls became disordered and darkened just
like their sinful choice was.
Through this sin, they became subject to death and slaves to sin.
We inherit this disorder and this state of slavery to sin.
Even though we still have a true human nature, now it exists in a fallen state.
Our natural powers are intact.
We still have the light of natural reason, but we find it difficult to know what is good
and even more difficult to choose to do it.
We're also afflicted with concupiscence.
We have unruly passions and disordered desires for lower goods.
All of this means that after the fall, our
nature when left to itself cannot reliably accomplish the naturally good things it was
meant to do.
What is more left without grace, we may be able to resist some particular sin, but Aquinas
thinks that we won't be able to resist all sins and that we'll eventually fall into mortal
sin.
This is the first major reason why we stand
in need of God's grace to heal at least some of the wounds of original sin so that we can
do what is right and achieve what is truly good, but even more than this, we need God's
grace if we're to be raised up to friendship with God and share in his love and in his
divine life.
We need God's grace if we're to know and love him as he knows and loves himself.
This is a toweringly high good.
A destiny so far above us that it's impossible for any creative nature to achieve it on its
own.
It's an end above our nature, which is why we call it supernatural.
At the same time, irrational nature like ours does have a kind of openness upwards to this
supernatural vocation, but this openness must be activated by God's offer of grace to us.
Aquinas holds that properly speaking.
We cannot even begin to desire this kind of personal communion with God, that is sharing
in the divine nature, unless God awakens us to this supernatural possibility of grace.
And we can only get to that supernatural end if we have supernatural helps from God to
get there, helps that surpass what is proper to our nature and which we don't deserve.
St. Thomas, when he uses the word grace most typically means to designate these kinds of
helps.
Notice how different Aquinas' mindset is,
really his mindset is just the classical Christian mindset, from the typical views of our contemporary
culture.
Aquinas doesn't think that you can get to heaven by doing your best on your own to be
a good person.
In fact, a view like this is closer to the ancient heresy called Pelagianism, which taught
that we can please God and avoid sin by our own unaided efforts.
St. Augustine was the great opponent of Pelagius
and he taught that we absolutely stand in need of God's grace healing and elevating
our nature in order to be saved.
There's a more subtle version of Pelagianism.
Often it's called semi-Pelagianism that admits that we need grace to be saved, but thinks
that God will give that grace to those who do a good job preparing for it.
St Augustine fought against this view too, and the Church condemned it because it makes
salvation begin from our willing rather than placing God's unmerited love as the absolute
origin and first principle of salvation.
According to Catholic teaching even the preparation in us for the reception of grace is itself
a work of grace.
There are further distinctions and divisions
that Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition makes between different kinds of graces.
We'll discuss those in the next video, and we'll also talk about how human beings can
refuse God's offer of grace.
For readings, podcasts, and more videos like this, go to Aquinas101.com.
While you're there, be sure to sign up for one of our free video courses on Aquinas.
And don't forget to like and share with your friends, because it matters what you think.