Grace, Actual and Habitual: A Dogmatic TreatisePohle, Joseph
Religion
Grace, Actual and Habitual: A Dogmatic Treatise
Pohle, Joseph
Grace (Theology)
Peter Lombard(982) identified sanctifying grace with the _gratia
increata_, _i.e._ the Person of the Holy Ghost. This notion was combatted
by St. Thomas(983) and implicitly rejected by the Tridentine Council when
it declared that sanctifying grace inheres in the soul and may be
increased by good works.(984) To say that the Holy Ghost is poured forth
in the hearts of men, or that He may be increased by good works, would
evidently savor of Pantheism. The Holy Ghost pours forth sanctifying grace
and is consequently not the formal but the efficient cause of
justification.(985)
b) The _gratia inhaerens permanens_ is not a mere relation or _denominatio
extrinseca_, but a positive entity productive of real effects,(986) and
must consequently be conceived either as a substance or as an accident. We
have shown that it is not identical with the uncreated substance of the
Holy Ghost. Neither can it be a created substance. The idea of an
intrinsically supernatural created substance involves a
contradiction.(987) Moreover, sanctifying grace in its nature and purpose
is not an entity independently co-existing with the soul but something
physically inherent in it. Now, a thing which has its existence by
inhering in some other thing is in philosophic parlance an “accident.” St.
Thomas expressly teaches that, “since it transcends human nature, grace
cannot be a substance nor a substantial form, but is an accidental form of
the soul itself.”(988) Agreeable to this conception is the further
Thomistic teaching that sanctifying grace is not directly created by God,
but drawn (_educta_) from the _potentia obedientialis_ of the soul.(989)
Not even the Scotists, though they held grace to be created out of
nothing(990) claimed that it was a new substance.
An accident that inheres in a substance permanently and physically is
called a quality (_qualitas_, ποιότης). Consequently, sanctifying grace
must be defined as a supernatural quality of the soul. This is the express
teaching of the Roman Catechism: “Grace ... is a divine quality inherent
in the soul, and, as it were, a certain splendor and light that effaces
all the stains of our souls and renders the souls themselves brighter and
more beautiful.”(991)
2. SANCTIFYING GRACE AN INFUSED HABIT.—Sanctifying grace may more
specifically, though with a lesser degree of certainty, be described as a
habit (_habitus_). Being entitatively supernatural, this habit must be
infused or “drawn out” by the Holy Ghost.
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