Reflections on the mystery and the life of the Church
If everything is grace there is no longer grace
The distinctions are essential especially in a time in which Gnosticism is the evident alternative to the reality of faith
by Cardinal Georges Cottier, OP
Above Jesus and Peter, detail of The washing of the feet, by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
In fact, if one re-reads the Declaration and the texts of clarification that accompanied it, one finds clear and effective expressions of how the Christian faith is communicated in the world. A phrase of Saint Thomas Aquinas, contained in the Annex, thus sums up the whole heart of Christian life: “Grace creates faith not only when faith is born in a person, but for as long as faith lasts” (“Gratia facit fidem non solum quando fides de novo incipit esse in homine, sed etiam quamdiu fides durat”, Summa Theologiae II-II q. 4 a. 4 ad 3).
Today, the absolute necessity of grace for every moment of the Christian experience, and the dynamics of its action, seem to have disappeared from theological debate and preaching. On this point, even in the ordinary pastoral, one notes confusions, ambiguities, misconstruction, misunderstandings, which are indications of a general obfuscation regarding the terms and basic criteria of Christian doctrine and the life of faith, and they risk misleading the people of God.
A first level of confusion is to be seen in the widespread conception that divine grace is a given acquired a priori by every person, to the point of identifying it outright with the inner light of the human creature. Widespread expressions of a similar conception also appear when equal salvific value is attributed to all good deeds and all the religious paths of mankind, as if all that is religious could be attributed unequivocally to the Holy Spirit. Or when the character of a Christian people or nation is taken for granted, as if the Christian faith were a kind of religious substratum already implicit in a determined ethnic, tribal or national identity.
Some identifications are to be proposed with discernment and without forcing. Because one is born Jewish, one is born Muslim, but one is not born Christian. One becomes Christian, through baptism and the faith, as already recognized by Tertullian. One does not make Christians, as members of other religions can be made, by merely generating them. Many parents today realize this, and perhaps suffer from it: it is not assumed that their children even when they receive a good Christian education, have the gift of faith. The environment, catechesis, can help. But no sociological condition can replace the attraction of grace, which calls to itself the personal freedom of everyone. Personal commitment is required for the life of faith.
The generalizations and clichés that take the gift of grace for granted are symptoms of the general misconception of some essential distinctions, always recognized and taken into account in the teaching and pastoral of the Church, such as that between the natural order (or order of creation) and the supernatural one of grace. For Saint Thomas, every created being has a nature that impels it toward its goal, and also the capacity to achieve this goal. This also applied to human nature, before it was wounded by original sin. After the fall of sin, God with redemption has not only healed from sin, but brought about the adoption of men as sons through the sacrifice of His only Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. As Saint Paul writes to the Galatians, “when the completion of the time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive adoption as sons. As you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son crying, ‘Abba, Father’; and so you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir, by God’s own act” (Gal 4, 4-7). It means that in the freedom of redemption brought about through Christ there is a second gratuity of God, more admirable than the gratuity of creation. In the creaturely condition, wounded by original sin, man experiences his own failure in striving for the accomplishment of his natural goal. The aspiration to accomplishment marks the entire human condition. The very nature of man, marked by original sin, is in itself an open question, that does not know its own answer. And the answer that God has brought about through His Son Jesus Christ was not imaginable, it is superabundant, it could not be demanded out of the claims inherent in the nature of man. As Saint Paul writes in the first Epistle to the Corinthians,the things that the Lord has prepared for those who love Him did not arise from the heart of man (cf. 1Cor 2, 9).
Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, frescoes by Giotto
The misuse of terms and expressions relating to grace can also bring about consequences far from harmless. Recently, in the Italian debate on the moral behavior of politicians, someone went as far as to write (quoting a non-existent phrase of Augustine) that “everything is grace, even sin”. The Bishop of Hippo, in reality, wrote that “for those who love God all things work together for good, even sins”. In relation to our wounded nature, grace has a threefold effect: it heals, it strengthens, it elevates. It is not sin as such that is grace, but sin, through repentance and conversion, can be an occasion of God’s forgiveness. When one tells one’s sin and asks forgiveness, one recognizes one’s wretchedness and is not tempted to become proud.
Whereas to identify grace with sin is totally alien to the Christian faith, a perverse concept that one rather finds in Gnosticism and Gnostic parodies of Christianity. All the doctrines, even the modern hey are the aberrant theories whereby one must drink from the poisoned chalice of evil to overcome death, because the light comes from the darkness, the way to heaven passes through hell, grace comes through sin, redemption is achieved through perversion, and the world is saved through mistake. The basic idea is that God is the unity of opposites. Good and evil are both in God and from God, because without opposites there is no progress. Without Lucifer there is no liberation, there is no salvation.
It is no accident that, referring to Gnosticism, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote: “It – and not atheism, which nullifies God because it must reject the images of Him made so far – is the true antagonist of the reality of faith”.