A Universalist Appropriation of Franciscan Justification, Sanctification & Glorification

Justification & Sanctification

Concerning concepts like justification & sanctification, the early OFMs worked on an ontological account or the quiddity of grace.

Beyond introducing the forma transformans/forma transformata distinction, they were also inquiring as to whether created grace was: a substance or an accident; a virtue, gift, fruit or beatitude; belonged to esse primum or secundum; as power of esse secundum, whether always in act or as a habit not always in act, etc

But way more than engaging just ir/resistable grace motivations, in their various accounts, the OFMs were blocking ontological inferences like monism & monergism as well as preserving anthropological realities like liberum arbitrium contra necessitating grace.

They were especially blocking any inference that the ends of human divinization could ever be an hypostatic union.

In the end, the early OFMs concluded that grace belonged to esse secundum, was an accident, always in act so not a habit or virtue.

Once specifying all that, still left open would be the chicken & egg question regarding whether it was an infused disposition towards one’s reception of uncreated grace or the result of one’s reception of the Holy Spirit.

So, this initial OFM formulation could still have let in the twin spectres of a super/nature & a reification of created grace as a “thing.” Those inferences were blocked, however by threading an onto-needle, where extrinsic grace, as the Source, gifts effects that are dispositions, which are intrinsic to the soul.

Later OFMs, like Scotus, insisted that divine grace precedes a disposition & isn’t posterior to or contingent upon same.

Additionally, some OFMs invoked additional distinctions like prevenient grace & dispositions toward justification merited de congruo.

Same Source, though, different manifestations.

Once Scotus established that dispositions are effects not prerequisites, all that early OFM work re the ontology of grace, while it was important for other inference blocks, logically got backburnered re any disputes pertaining to justification (w/Luther).

To delve more deeply into the Franciscan influences on competing speculative accounts regarding nature, grace & freedom, two excellent resources are Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification by Alister McGrath [1] and especially the chapter entitled The Ontology of Grace of Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle by Vincent L. Strand, SJ from the volume The Summa Halensis, Doctrines and Debates edited by Lydia Schumacher [2].

Addendum: The most thorough treatment of the un/created grace distinction as developed by the early Franciscans may be H. Daniel Monsour’s dissertation – The relation between uncreated and created grace in the Halesian Summa, a Lonergan reading

Glorification

In considering any putative dis/continuities (Bavinck emphasized continuities [3]) of ante-mortem versus post-mortem contemplation,

believing that to some extent the former anticipates the latter & that eternal life can begin in us now as our portion here even via mystical epistemic goods and

further stipulating to the beatific vision as the ultimate human telos,

what types of changes, ante- vs post- mortem, would account for any discontinuities?

Since the telos of the beatific vision is constitutively inherent to being human (as consistent with Scotus’ absolute primacy of Christ sans felix culpa [4] & as inhering in terms of our acts & potencies, cf. Hjort), we’re already epistemically equipped for the beatific vision by our primary nature.

Any post-mortem changes would pertain, therefore, to our secondary nature, where grace operates & where divine presences,

because they are to the intellect as form is to matter (e.g. consistent with Bonaventure’s illuminationist epistemology [5]),

will gift us new epistemic – not equipment for processing (e.g. as in Marcel’s epistemology of mysticism [6]), but – goods to be processed (e.g. as in Stump’s ontology of divine presence [7]).

While divine presencings can vary, both ante- & post-mortem, by kinds & per intensities, and while they are ordinarily divinely calibrated in terms of both manners & degrees of presencings, as will be commensurate with our levels of intrasubjective authenticity via conversion & intersubjective unity via theosis, at the same time, we mustn’t a priori rule out extraordinary presencings that might be gifted independent of our levels of soul maturation!

There simply are no character-based, disposition-based or indwelling-based beatific contingencies. This is not to deny a role for any otherwise indispensable purgative processes, as called for.

Furthermore, consistent with my belief in a radical theoanthropological continuity between our protological, historical & eschatological experiences of divine presencings, we mustn’t a priori rule out transitory ante-mortem beatific visions in addition to perpetual post-mortem beatific visions. For that matter, transitory beatific visions could very well play various roles in post-mortem purgative realities, too. (I have a logical defense vis a vis the problem of evil that justifies these gratuitous extraordinary presencings, but it’s beyond the scope of this musing).

We might conceive the beatific vision in terms of both a unitive harmony & enjoyment of the perpetually novel expressions of the divine energies (e.g. Nyssen [8]) as well as a noetic identity & enjoyment of the perpetually novel illuminations of the divine incomprehensibility (e.g. Aquinas [8]).

With both Cajetan & de Lubac we might agree that, finally, “‘this end is hidden from us because it is the supernatural end of our soul.”

With de Lubac, we must insist that “but for us, unlike Cajetan, it is not the absence of any desire that is the reason for ignorance: rather it is the depth of our desire.” [9]

Hence, we’ll enjoy, in eternal epectasy, the perpetually novel expressions of the divine energies as well as the perpetually novel illuminations of the divine incomprehensibility. It’s already begun!

THEREFORE be it resolved that it would be a prima facie disproportionate punishment to absolutely & everlastingly foreclose on the potential fulfillment of any finite rational creature’s inherent teloi, i.e. penultimately, apokatastenai or the restoration of our essential abundance via faith, and ultimately, apokatastasis or the beatific vision of our superabundance via vision.

1 – Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification by Alister McGrath pdf link

2- The Summa Halensis, Doctrines and Debates, Edited by Lydia Schumacher

3 – Revisiting Bavinck and the Beatific Vision by Cory C. Brock pdf link

4 – Writings of the Subtle Doctor on the absolute primacy of Jesus Christ by Fr. Maximilian Mary Dean, Hermit

God freely creates all rational creatures to share in His glory and to be glorified in Him in varying degrees

5 – Bonaventure’s Critique of Thomas Aquinas by Brendan Case

6 – Toward an epistemology of mysticism: Knowing God as mystery by Theresa Tobin pdf link

7 – Omnipresence, Indwelling, and the Second-Personal by E. Stump pdf link

8 – Face to face, the beatific vision according to Gregory of Nyssa and Thomas Aquinas by Victor Hjort pdf link

there is an inherent telos for all humanity pointing to its fulfillment in the beatific vision

9 – Henri de Lubac on Nature and Grace by NJ Healy pdf link

Supplement

To delve more deeply into various Franciscan contributions to the competing speculative accounts regarding nature, grace & freedom, among the best resources I’ve been able to access are

1) Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification by Alister McGrath

2) The Summa Halensis, Doctrines and Debates edited by Lydia Schumacher, especially Vincent L. Strand, SJ’s contributuon entitled The Ontology of Grace of Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle

3) H. Daniel Monsour’s dissertation – The relation between uncreated and created grace in the Halesian Summa, a Lonergan reading

To more quickly focus on the points most salient to our universalist concerns, I would direct those interested in Monsour’s dissertation (re uncreated and created grace in the Halesian Summa) to his repeated use (13 times) of the phrase “already wholly present God.” He invokes it as a reference to “the just” in the context of how uncreated grace, the Holy Spirit, precedes transformata, i.e. the habitus of Godlikeness, and isn’t, rather, posterior to or contingent upon same.

While Monsour’s Halesian account of sanctification is integral to my own universalist account, a question yet begs regarding how anyone comes to a state of justification, e.g. by cooperation with baptismal grace.

So, we must inquire further to ask to whom are the channels of grace open & how might they variously access its assistance to finally attain their inherent human teloi, including both the penultimate apokatastenai & ultimate apokatastasis?

Often, the best strategy for cutting to the chase in matters of great theoanthropological moment is to put forward such questions in limit cases, which can more quickly & most sharply expose the theological tensions that are in play, e.g. How many angels can …?

One limit case that well suits the needs of my universalist approach in this particular Franciscan context is the one discussed by the International Theological Commission in its publication – The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized.

To more quickly turn our focus to the points most salient to our immediate concerns, I’ll repeat the strategy that I employed for Monsour’s dissertation, wherein I pointed to repeated occurrences of the phrase “already wholly present God.” [Use your browser’s in-page “search” feature.]

In the ITC’s document regarding “The Hope of Salvation,” I would direct all to those 13 paragraphs therein which cite “GS 22,” which is a reference to Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution On the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes.

Below is a sampling of those paragraphs in the ITC document. They speak for themselves (not that they aren’t susceptible to weasel wording sophistries). They are too important to my central concerns – to whom are the channels of grace open & how might they variously access its assistance vis a vis our already wholly present God – to leave the work of looking them up with the reader. And, to those who’d invoke a distinction of a mere divine omnipresencing over against an indwelling, still, whatever distinctions are in play vis a vis divine presencings, there’s no coherently defensible way to invoke them to support a concrete natura pura.

Excerpts that cite Gaudium et Spes from the International Theological Commission in its publication regarding infants who die without being baptized

It is important to recognise a “double gratuity” which calls us into being and simultaneously calls us to eternal life. Though a purely natural order is conceivable, no human life is actually lived in such an order. The actual order is supernatural; channels of grace are open from the very beginning of each human life. All are born with that humanity which was assumed by Christ himself and all live in some kind of relation to him, with different degrees of explicitness (cf. LG 16) and acceptance, at every moment.

Because, by his Incarnation, the Son of God “in a certain way united himself” with every human being, and because Christ died for all and all are in fact “called to one and the same destiny, which is divine”, the Church believes that “the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery.

The Second Vatican Council teaches that God does not deny “the assistance necessary for salvation” to those who, without any fault of their own, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, but who, with the help of grace, “strive to lead a good life”. God enlightens all people “that they may at length have life” (cf. LG 16). Again it teaches that grace is “active invisibly” in the hearts of all people of good will.

The following words, in particular, seem truly universal in their scope. “For since Christ died for all, and since all are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine [cumque vocatio hominis ultima revera una sit, scilicet divina], we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery” (GS 22). This profound sentence of Vatican II takes us into the heart of the loving purpose of the blessed Trinity and stresses that God’s purpose exceeds our understanding.

His Resurrection is the source of humanity’s hope (cf.1 Cor 15:20); in him alone is there life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10); and the Holy Spirit offers to all a participation in his paschal mystery.

There is a fundamental unity and solidarity between Christ and the whole human race. By his Incarnation, the Son of God has united himself, in some way (“quodammodo”), with every human being (GS 22).[119] There is, therefore, no one who is untouched by the mystery of the Word made flesh. Humanity, and indeed all creation, has been objectively changed by the very fact of the Incarnation and objectively saved by the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ.[120] However, that objective salvation must be subjectively appropriated (cf. Acts 2:37-38; 3:19), ordinarily by the personal exercise of free will in favour of grace …

The teaching of St Paul would urge us to redress the balance and to centre humanity on Christ the saviour, to whom all, in some way, are united.[124] “He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’[125] is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare” (GS 22). We wish to stress that humanity’s solidarity with Christ (or, more properly, Christ’s solidarity with all of humanity) must have priority over the solidarity of human beings with Adam …

Because all people live in some kind of relation to Christ (cf. GS 22), and the Church is the body of Christ, all people live also in some kind of relation to the Church at every moment. The Church has a profound solidarity or communion with the whole of humanity …

Questions about nature, grace & freedom were raised, but not explicitly answered, in Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) and its Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate), as well as in the International Theological Commission’s publication, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized. The same questions would pertain to the presence of Christ’s grace outside the formal bounds of the church as asserted by Pope John Paul II.

To grapple with these unanswered questions, anthropologically & metaphysically, I have mostly turned to the personalist, existential & critical realist neo-Thomisms of Clarke, Maritain & Lonergan, respectively.

Other theologians who’ve most inspired me – but whom I approach using more of contemplative & phenomenological heuristic, such as in the context of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises – include those from the nouvelle & certain transcendental Thomists, whose accounts don’t seem rigorously metaphysical to me, e.g. nouvelle – Maréchal & de Lubac and transcendental – Rahner.

For his part, Lonergan, anthropologically, observed our cognitional structures. His cognitional theory grounded his metaphysics and pneumatology. It dovetails quite well with my Charismatic sensibilities & Gelpi’s theoanthropology of conversions. Gelpi’s social relational metaphysic of experience also fits well with Bracken’s metaphysic of intersubjectivity (both Peircean influenced).

For his part, Rahner’s epistemology was vague, his cognitional account grounded in his metaphysics. What I most appreciate about his take is that, theologically, he offered a divine self-communication account, where created graces are constitutively related to uncreated grace via quasi-formal causality. That account squares quite well with Lonergan’s theology of the divine missions.

A caveat, though, from Burrell:

So we can see that what is needed is a theoretical grasp of these matters which does not purport to be an explanation, in the sense of attempting to show “how it works.” For there is no mechanism at work — the act of creation is not itself a motion, so we must move beyond recourse to imaging the forces at work. The name I like to give such a strategy is “grammatical,” without thereby conceding that “it is all a matter of language,” but rather insisting that one needs to be guided by the entailments (positive and negative) of the assertions one can make, and that is all. In short, one needs to know where questioning here comes to an end, and the proper sort of knowing in such matters will involve an “unknowing” which acknowledges that one simply cannot go on. While both Maritain and Lonergan display a keen awareness of this feature of theological inquiry, one cannot help but recognize that Lonergan has translated that constraint into the grammar of his own treatment better than Maritain was able to do. I have already offered my hypothesis to locate the source of this difference: in Maritain’s continued dependence on a commentary tradition which failed to understand such matters, while his mentor and Lonergan’s understood them exquisitely.

Jacques Maritain and Bernard Lonergan on Divine and Human Freedom by David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

Regarding Rahner’s divine self-communication account, where created graces are constitutively related to uncreated grace via quasi-formal causality, as married to Lonergan’s theology of the divine missions, taken together, those Trinitarian theologies of Being in love can serve as the basis for our formulations of psychological analogies, which can help us better understand the Trinity.

Per Kujan, Lonergan’s 4 point hypothesis “identifies four created supernatural realities through which human beings participate in the four relations among the three divine persons. These four created supernatural realities are the human existence of Jesus (i.e., the esse secundarium), sanctifying grace, the habit of charity, and the light of glory (i.e., the lumen gloriae) whereby the saints in heaven see God. Through
these four, people participate, respectively, in the four divine relations of paternity, active
spiration, passive spiration, and filiation. Paternity, filiation, and passive spiration constitute the three divine persons, respectively, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Active spiration is really identical to paternity and filiation considered together.

Participation in the Triune God: Engaging Karl Rahner’s Trinitarian Theology with Bernard Lonergan’s Four-Point Hypothesis, as Developed by Robert Doran by Michael Kujan, Ph.D.

Regarding those questions about nature, grace & freedom that were raised in Vatican II and in its wake, I commend Robert M. Doran’s Actual Grace and the Elevation of the Secular and also Doran’s Invisible Missions: The Grace that Heals Disjunctions.