Grace Refers to Persons as they intersubjectively communicate in various ways & to different extents

Below is my attempt to over-answer Tom Belt’s inquiry at Fr Kimel’s Eclectic Orthodoxy, by apologizing for the un/created grace distinction introduced by my co-religionists. There’s nothing in it over against Tom’s characterization of the dynamism.

I haven’t studied what was going on historically so can’t address what motivated the un/created distinction. I think some may have been distinguishing between sanctifying grace & charity with Scotus suggesting, contra mostly Thomists but consistent perhaps with Thomas the Belt, that it’s all charity. People argue to this day, even, what Aquinas really meant (but don’t they always?).

I do suspect they were grappling with real questions having to do with a question like:

How is it that a divine indwelling wouldn’t cause a beatific vision in everyone or even a hypostatic union?

In some sense, that would seem to be asking: What keeps grace from being, respectively, both entirely monergistic & efficacious as well as causally monistic?

These questions involve, in my assessment, our proper understanding of a third type of perichoresis, which involves the mutual coinherence of differently natured persons.

My analogical perichoreses include the trinitological re: same nature, different persons; hypostatic re: same person, different natures; cosmotheandric re: differently natured creatures, e.g. shadows & vestiges, same universal omnipresence; and theotic re: differently natured persons, both images & likenesses, same eternal personal relation of love or mutual indwelling.

So, istm that the un/created distinction had to be motivated, in part, by the same questions that gave rise to Palamite-distinctions. If so, then, what’s under consideration are divine-human intersubjective mutual communications.

Generally, it suffices, dogmatically, re: any of these analogous perichoreses, to merely assert THAT there are such communications & coinherences and to include some apophatic guardrails as inference blockers to avoid such extremes as modalism, tritheism, monophysitism and pantheism.

It’s only when we speculatively attempt to further explain HOW those intersubjective mutual communications occur, using this or that metaphysical idiom, that theologoumenal distinctions like un/created grace get introduced, some more idiomatically felicitous, rhetorically persuasive & evidentially plausible than others.

Regarding intersubjective mutual communications, then, some will inquire:

What causes are acting efficiently or formally or even quasi-formally (something like a formal cause).

Which causes might affect or even effect our primary nature & being (constitutive whatness) or, instead, our secondary nature & becoming (expressive howness)?

Which gracings act habitually or actually, sufficiently or efficaciously, in justification, sanctification or glorification, in spiritual or charismatic gifts or in acquired or infused contemplation?

If we stipulate that all grace is non-neccessitating, then we’re insisting that our theotic journeys are inescapably synergistic. If we further stipulate that all communications are mutual & intersubjective, then we’re insisting that grace refers to persons as acting subjects and not to any created objects.

We would also stipulate that we as subjects progressively mature in actualizing our essential potencies as Christ-images, intrasubjectively, and we also grow in realizing our theotic-potencies as Christ-likenesses, intersubjectively.

If we finally stipulate that, like our intrasubjective & intersubjective growth processes, which are mutually reinforcing & transmuting (in that our every intersubjective advance will foster further intrasubjective maturation and vice versa), so, too, are the divine indwelling & sanctifying grace mutually reinforcing, then we can say that –

per the gratuity of creation, divine communications ever effect us (via efficient-like causes), sustaining us via creatio continua, gifting us miracles, signs & wonders, and also say that –

per the gratuity of grace, divine communications (via formal-like causes) can invite & assist us in becoming ever more Christ-like.

Grace thus ever meets us where we are in both our personal & interpersonal development.

So, there’s nothing monistic going on & we’re not headed toward any hypostatic union. That’s because we remain finite creatures who are ever-becoming and in no sense, ergo, infinite & noncomposite. So, there’s no Christological monophysitism or cosmological pantheism in play. And since no grace given to rational creatures is monergistic & not every grace is given efficaciously, a divine indwelling won’t necessarily effect a beatific vision.

What we have, rather, theoanthropologically, is an intersubjective mutual self-communication.

This synergistic dynamism refers — never to objects, but only — to inter-acting persons or, in Damascene terms, to operating operators (entities in act via energeia), whose essences are analogously operative, all of them working together toward the end of identical operated effects, which will be nothing less than the intersubjective unitive doings of the mutually constituted Totus Christus.

The un/created distinction, then, refers to the above-described synergistic mirror images, where variously in/finite persons act together, our every synergistic theotic act co-constituted pneumato-Christologically by each particular indwelling by the Holy Spirit.

Even our very act of ongoing existence is co-constituted Christo-pneumatologically by the universally omnipresencing by the multiply-incarnate Christ. (That’s just my formulation. The un/created distinction also had implications for parsing out the ad extra divine missions.)

The takeaway is that it’s ALL gratuitous.

So, I’m suggesting that however infelicitous, unpersuasive or implausible the un/created grace distinction may seem, properly appropriated, it’s not as problematic as it might first appear.

As has so often been the case, it’s not the original scholastic distinction that’s problematic, it’s some neo-scholastic misappropriation or popularized misconception that can lead to some rather repugnant implications.

To wit: Rahner & Lonergan both saw how some treated sanctifying grace as the primary basis — rather than the initial & ongoing effect — of the prior indwelling. It’s easy to see how such an inverted misreading could arise out of how the indwelling & sanctifying graces both ratchet up in a mutually reinforcing & reciprocally transmuting way (analogous to how we grow commensurately & in a reciprocally reinforcing way in our intrasubjective authenticity via conversions & in our intersubjective unity via theosis). But this is truly a mistake grounded in ignoring that it’s the Divine Indwelling Chicken, Who intially lays the sanctified eggs of our maturing authenticity & ever-deepening unity. It often also appears to be a rather ad hoc maneuver in defense of a concrete natura pura. That nature sans grace conception often appears to be, itself, further motivated by an additional ad hoc appeal to an indwelling-based beatific contingency, as it can be indispensable to certain defenses of perditionism, e.g. Thomistic Autonomy Defense.

The other rather prominent infelicity of the un/created grace bifurcation is that it has fostered too much objectivizing of the divine presence. Grace refers to persons and not creaturely things. Created grace can only truly refer to our personal act of returning as gift – the very person one’s received of oneself as was/is divinely gifted. We kenotically surrender our fully authentic self, i.e. as per soul- maturation, along with the person we’ve become as divinely gifted, i.e. as our epectatically unitive theotic self.

I refer, indirectly & analogously, to this Chicken & egg dynamism in my Recruiting Norris Clarke for My Cosmotheandric Universalism:

“This is to say that our personal maturation as individual subjects is inextricably intertwined with & mutually conditioned by our interpersonal growth in intersubjective unity. Ours is a freedom for unitive excellence.”

So, too, does the indwelling first gift sanctifying grace, prior to their ongoing synergistic, mutually reinforcing cycling, which then continues to ratchet them up together.

Grace to me thus refers, ever intersubjectively, to different kinds & degrees of a divine presence, hence, to a person, the Holy Spirit, Whose gratuitous communications serve co-constitutively & synergistically, in a manner that’s somewhat like a formal cause (Palamite energeia works for me), as indispensable elements of our every act of becoming Christ-like, as ordered to our communion in our final cause, the Totus Christus, in Whom we’ll eternally & epectatically journey on our way to Our Father.

Created grace refers to the virtuous aspects of our secondary natures, all divinely Authored & gratuitously gifted. It refers to each rational creature’s holy habits in action, which are essentially each person’s loving dispositions to be present to God & others. It refers to each person in the act of communicating in a synergistic dynamism, where the Holy Spirit co-constitutively gifts indispensable elements of our every personal act of becoming Christ, etc