God works in human souls in a variety of ways,
and it's very helpful for understanding the spiritual life to understand how this works.
St. Thomas Aquinas speaks about this under the rubric of different kinds of graces.
That's the theme of this video, along with the possibility that we could refuse God's
offer of grace.
As we discussed in a previous video, the word
grace, first of all, means God's favor or his graciousness to us.
The origin of grace is therefore God's love.
By imparting that love to us, God makes us good, and this gives rise to the second sense
of the word grace, and that's the one we're focusing on now, the effect in us of God's
favor or love.
The three most important types of graces are
traditionally labeled actual graces, habitual graces, and charismatic graces.
Actual graces are graces of divine motion.
Think of someone burdened with troubles who doesn't believe in God, who finds herself
passing by a Catholic Church.
Something moves her to step inside and she finds herself kneeling in the back saying,
"God, if you hear this, please help me."
Many conversion stories start with moments like this.
That's an example of an actual grace, a supernatural impulse or motion.
These moving graces are called actual graces because God activates our will so that it
goes from potency to act freely to perform some good action.
To avoid misunderstanding what Aquinas means
here, we need to recall a number of important truths covered in earlier videos.
Recall the video on primary causality and secondary causality and the points we discussed
in the videos on freedom and on predestination.
God creates our will as a faculty of freely desiring the good, and so, he's able to act
as a first cause within our will, turning it towards and activating its desire for our
true good in such a way that the action that results is perfectly free and in no way coerced
or necessitated.
No other creature can produce this kind of effect on the will.
In short, by grace, God moves us to act freely for the good.
Think also of the metaphysics of potency and
act.
Something that's in potency can only be put into act by something already in act.
So, to perform a supernatural action like making a prayer in faith, the intellect and
the will need to be activated by God's supernatural grace.
Now, actual grace is most dramatic in the
case of a conversion because it's clear there that God's impulse is an absolute first beginning.
But even long after someone is in a state of grace, God continues to give many actual
graces that inspire and move us to do good things, to do some act of kindness, to pray,
to go to mass.
The next major category of grace is habitual
grace.
In this category, Aquinas is referring to the stable and lasting effects in our soul
that grace can produce.
For example, when someone turns away from sin and is baptized, God infuses sanctifying
grace into his soul.
His soul receives a new spiritual mode of being as it were.
St. Paul tells us that by grace, we're made adopted sons and daughters of God.
Aquinas links this to what we read in the Second Letter of Peter, that grace makes us
sharers in the divine nature.
This is a wonderful and high truth.
By habitual grace, our souls begin to participate in the infinitely higher divine nature of
God himself.
In fact, Aquinas teaches that in the gift of habitual grace, the three divine Persons
of the Holy Trinity come to dwell in the soul in person.
Unlike the momentary impulse given to us by
actual graces, habitual grace becomes a stable quality of the soul that really transforms
the person from within and makes him capable of living his life in a new and supernatural
way.
Habitual grace thus brings with it infused supernatural virtues that perfect the person's
powers.
So by grace, the intellect is perfected by the supernatural virtue of faith, which is
a new and higher light of the mind by which the person believes and clings to God who
reveals himself.
And likewise, the will is inflamed with a supernatural love of God, which we call the
virtue of charity.
Grace belongs to the supernatural order, and
so, it escapes our experience.
We can't rely on our feelings or our works to be sure that we have habitual grace.
Usually, we'll only have probable knowledge of this if we do things like making acts of
faith and charity, or trusting in God, or rejoicing in the things of God.
The third major category is charismatic grace.
These don't necessarily sanctify the person who receives them, but they're given for the
spiritual good of others.
For example, the grace of preaching or the grace of prophecy, the grace of healing, these
are all charismatic graces.
This brings us to the question of how it's
possible for a human being to refuse God's offer of salvation.
Here, we find the dark mystery of evil because such a refusal is always a failure, a defect
of the creature.
Aquinas, and the Catholic church more generally, affirm what we read in the First Letter to
Timothy.
God desires all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Whenever a creature chooses to sin or to refuse God's offer of grace, the fault then is on
the side of the creature.
God is never the cause of our sin or of our refusal, and he predestines no one to evil
or to damnation even though God does foresee and permit some to refuse him.
In fact, Christ's cross is sufficient.
It's more than sufficient to save the whole world, and God offers to all a grace sufficient
for salvation.
So if some are not in fact saved, it's due to their culpable refusal of God's
grace.
Aquinas likes to use an analogy, grace is
like the light of the sun.
We can't cause the sun to shine just as we can't cause God to give us grace, but in fact,
the sun does shine on the whole world, and this is like God's offer of salvation to all.
Even so, if the sun is shining, it remains possible to go for a walk with your eyes shut
and then you'll probably fall into a ditch.
This isn't the sun's fault, it's your fault for having blocked the light of the sun by
closing your eyes.
How can we block the light of grace?
As we discussed in the video on evil, when we turn away from God, we focus our minds
and our wills on some created good that is less than him.
It's like we've closed our eyes to the sunlight of God so that we can focus our attention
on the much lesser light that we have in our own imaginations.
Effectively, this erects an obstacle to the graces that God otherwise would give us.
God doesn't abandon us, we abandon God.
In the end, he's not being unfair to us if he leaves us in the darkness that we have
chosen for ourselves.
Now, God is a God of mercy and of love.
Aquinas things that God very often does give us special graces to change the evil wills
of sinners and to turn them back to himself, to open our eyes again to his light.
But this is not anything that we deserve, it's solely due to his mercy and his love for us.
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