Reflections on Efficacious Grace
The following musings were evoked by Fr Kimel’s reflections & others’ responses at Eclectic Orthodoxy: Kronen & Reitan: Is Efficacious Grace Immoral?
Consider those who are proficient at sports like swimming & skydiving. Once they’ve deliberately leapt, while they’re now wholly determined by gravity, because of their athletic virtuosity, they freely consent to the fall.
Even if there was friendly horseplay involved and they were unwittingly shoved into the pool or out of the plane, they might freely consent to both of these forms of physical coercion, neither which would’ve involved a deliberation.
In the above example, however, those free consents were made possible by their athletic virtuosity, which was freely acquired. The athletes self-constructed, through practices & disciplines, their own habitual inclinations, which made swimming & skydiving become more natural to them. There were synergistic elements involved.
Other free consents are possible, as would arise consistent with those natural inclinations, that have been divinely & wholly determined for us, where monergistic dynamics are in play. I won’t elaborate further with concrete examples but suggest we could draw from our real life experiences of the things others have done to “make us happy” while “surprising us” at the same time.
We can also think of the things we’ve done to “make” our children & grandchildren happy, often helping them to discover delights that, while novel to them, we’ll have already known to be consistent with their natural inclinations.
If I were only able to choose from among different kinds of temporal & eternal well-being in an exclusively monergistic dynamic, that wouldn’t offend my sensibilities in the least. One thing I’ve never suffered is any libertarian neuralgia from imagining that, in the end, we’ll all be denied the ‘freedom’ to deliberate & choose between being & nonbeing or that we won’t be able to ‘enjoy’ the freedom to follow or ignore our natural wills. I won’t complain if, in the end, we will only be free to choose, epectatically, from among various states of eternal wellbeing.
I do believe that our temporal epistemic distancing can foster a growth in our freedom & a deeper depth to our intimacies. I believe that we will realize those gifts by ‘virtue’ of our synergistic instantiations of divine relative perfections in our secondary natures.
In gifting us the ability to go beyond those relative perfections, as were wholly determined for us in our primary natures, God runs the risk that we might opt for ill-being & even nonbeing. Because I trust Jesus, I trust we’ll understand why in a by & by that’s sweet. I imagine it has something to do with various enhanced rewards than might come from our theotic co-creative soul-crafting.
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I believe that epistemic distancing can deepen our experience of divine intimacy and grow our original freedom, hence our love, in a superabundant way.
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A logical defense of evil still holds without infernalism, although I personally let God out of the dock without either logical defenses or evidential theodicies, the latter seeming repugnant to me.
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It’s all purposed on going beyond the merely abundant to the superabundant for us, while from a God’s eye view it involves equipoised divine optimalities.
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The first thing I do is to set aside the absolutist notions of both freedom & determination as, in my view, seem to be implicit in the misguided back & forth of libertarian & compatibilist definitions. Those have always struck me as mere rationalistic abstractions & competing tautologies.
Rather, I’d appeal to a more empirical anthropology. A common sense inquiry into our concrete quotidian experiences can suffice, here.
Humans are, partly, autopoietic & free as well as, partly, determined & bounded. Our experiences of all of these realities present in degrees. We are, in my take, sufficiently free to realize many values, and adequately determined to both realize those values & to avoid certain disvalues. Concrete examples abound but I’ll skip them for now, except for one.
I think of children between the ages of newborn & seven, which is, as they say, the age of reason. Whatever age one imagines different thresholds are attained – intellectually, affectively, morally, socially, religiously as per Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler inter alia – there can be no doubt that those little images of God are sufficiently free to deeply realize profound human values, all as existentially oriented to transcendental imperatives of the truth, beauty, goodness, freedom & unity of divine-human being. They were gifted, in their primary nature, an allotment of logoi per their essential potencies. While they are certainly co-creative in many invaluable ways, by imputing moral exculpability to them for almost everything, that’s tantamount to saying that they don’t morally deliberate or will gnomically?
But does that mean that they don’t give & receive love, beauty, goodness & truth? along with inchoate forms of consent & valuable types of freedom & self-determination, even if in lesser degrees?
Even if all that has been monergistically determined for them, still, in them we routinely see the face of God. They aren’t mere shadows or vestiges — but undeniably imagoes Dei. It’s pure abundance.
Any synergistic cooperations involve the growth of our virtuous secondary natures to realize deeper degrees of freedom, excess meaning, superfluous beauty, supersufficient goodness, superabundant unity, and so on. That’s our growth in likeness.
Sometimes that growth can be monergistically gifted.
From my example, we can see that vis a vis the “age of reason,” it’s not that six year olds don’t will deliberatively, even morally so. It’s only that we reasonably impute moral exculpability to them, because their knowledge is insufficient.
There can be no definitive rejection of God by anyone with insufficient knowledge of Him, i.e. lacking a vision beatific. With a beatific vision, our intellects & wills would irresistibly follow our natural inclinations, so, in a way that’s not the least repugnant to our free will.
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Insightful Thomisms reject character-based beatific contingencies. Highly insightful theologians reject any beatific contingencies.
About efficacious grace, though –
From tradition, it does seem that we can recognize that many aspects of formative spirituality reveal that there can be differences in degrees of sanctity, degrees of humility, degrees of contemplation, degrees of conversion, degrees of secondary beatitudes & degrees of all kinds of temporal well being.
I do believe that such differences can come about due to either sufficient or efficacious grace. I also believe that grace could well operate via both physical premotion & efficient causes as well as via the intellect & formal causes.
Even if synergistic dynamics account for how grace is ordinarily mediated, that needn’t rule out any monergistic dynamics, whether for justification, sanctification or glorification, whether for infused contemplation, elections to sainthood or all manner of miracles.
It matters not one whit to human freedom, properly conceived, whether such differences were synergistic or monergistic; in both accounts we exercise our free consent, whether the invitation reads BYOC or Consent Provided.
I don’t see, therefore, why the gifts of efficacious or irresistible or infused graces couldn’t offer some a superabundance beyond mere abundance, or even gift some expanded scopes of temporal &/or eternal well being.
Eternally, some may even be gifted beyond any essential & universal enjoyment of the beatific vision to, for example, sit on His left or right or even become Theotokos!
Realities like divinely determined election, predestination, efficacious grace are therefore behovely. They can even reinforce our understanding of divine providence & sovereignty.
There are those who deny the universal enjoyment of the beatific vision and, in so doing, discuss efficacious grace in such contexts as double predestination & preterition, for example. That strikes me as theologically incoherent & morally unintelligible in all sorts of ways.
But the thought of efficacious grace per se consoles me!
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As expanded on elsewhere in this thread, I believe it involves a deepening of intimacy that’s on offer to us. God went beyond monergistic to synergistic dynamics to allow us to realize a superabundance beyond abundance. That difference doesn’t involve a move from imperfection to perfection. It’s like epectatic dynamics which involve only relative perfections. The possibility of imperfection is permitted but not intended and not exposed to a moral modal collapse.
Do you believe in impeccability? Given the beatific vision?
If so, how do you frame it in monergistic – synergistic terms?
I’ve a decidedly monergistic take on THAT we are determinedly destined (per our primary nature) for the beatific vision, THAT we are inviolably images of Christ and THAT we shall theophanically manifest Christ (as mutually constituted).
I’ve a decidedly synergistic take on HOW we shall manifest Christ vis a vis soul crafting, vocations, charisms, missions and such per our secondary natures, which, to the extent they’re vicious, need purgative graces. This involves the tropic dynamic of growing in likeness and deepening intimacy (through expansions of aesthetic scopes & secondary beatitude, iow, persons, places & things where we look & find Him, epectatically, forever!).
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My preferred definitions over against any spiritual immaterialism, angel immutabiity & such:
To be embodied is to be an entity in act. Angelic & human persons are embodied and in
Infinite potency to the divine.
The acts of embodied entities have both material (efficiently causal, e.g. the will) and immaterial (formally causal, e.g. the intellect) aspects (integrally intertwined).
Both angelic & incorporeal human persons have material & immaterial aspects.
To be corporeal (e.g. a live human person) is to be an embodied entity acting physically.
Using my preferred definitions, that gives God a rather lot to work with both pre- & post-mortem.
Specifically, He might close any given person’s epistemic distance, elect them to sainthood & gift them impeccability even in our earthly dwelling, I believe.
Tom: “Can God simply – poof (apart from any measure of deliberative contemplation or trust) – make it the case that *we* see God so? I’m suggesting this is not possible.
The relational logic of loving union involving the maturing of finitude into such final union with God, metaphysically requires finitude to ‘entrust’ itself. I confess, there’s too much Kierkegaard in me at this point.”
John: I resonate with the way you qualify the deliberative in contemplative & personal – trust relational terms.
Specifically, I find it helpful to distinguish between deliberative aspects in terms of whether or not they can be reduced to rational discourse.
In our intellect’s semeiotic activities, if – as per Peirce – aesthetics precede ethics which precede logic, then, as an epistemic complement to and evidential ground for all that’s reducible to rational discourse, and for all that’s gnoseological, propositional, reflective, discursive & meditative and for all that’s logically inferred, there can be knowledges that are non-linguistic, that are operative, participatory, relatively immediate & intuitional vis a vis reality’s meanings, that are nondiscursive & contemplative, knowledges that access aspects of reality that we experience in terms of both the aesthetically qualitative & the ethically felt.
The knowledge of God that will be gifted the intellect by the beatific vision will also be immediate & intuitive, so very much analogous to the contemplative category of knowledge (as I inventoried in my second list above). But our heavenly knowledge of God that will be gifted the intellect by the beatific vision will also differ, even, from our earthly, loving contemplations because it will be directly communicated rather than merely indirectly intelligible.
So, the beatific vision will involve, rather, our direct & super-intelligible participation in the very same enjoyments that belong to the divine persons as they delight in loving – not only each other, but – their very own selves and all of their creatures.
Still, certain analogies to mediated intelligibility should hold. Our intellect & wills would still be distinct but inseparable. Our wills would still be radically free. What’s different in the beatific vision is that our intellects will be unable to provide our wills any apparent reason to look the other way. So, we will freely fix our gaze.
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Tom: “What then happens to the deeper/wider aspects of intimacy you said God wants but which can only be achieved synergistically? Elsewhere you seemed to say synergism is integral, even indispensable, to those aspects.”
John: Persons will freely & eternally co-self-determine both the kinds & numbers of secondary beatitudes they’ll enjoy. We will move from one relative perfection to the next and instantiate one type of eternal well being after another, all this beyond our primary beatitude. To some extent, I feel like I abide a kind of quietism vis a vis epectasis.
Tom: “Does God just ‘settle for less’ in the case of the damned who are forever deprived of that intimacy which synergism makes possible because they did not arrive synergistically?”
John: My universalism doesn’t accept the premise behind that question because the word “damned” doesn’t refer.
Some will have trustfully surrendered prior to any full epistemic closure. None will desist from trustful surrender after – not because the nature of their wills will have been tweaked, but – because their intellects will offer their wills no apparent reason to avert their gazes.
There need be no voluntarist peril in a primacy of the will outlook, for, as BenedictXVI observed, that primacy comes precisely from the will following the intellect.
We will never be denied real alternatives, as we’ll be eternally poised to choose among an infinite array of eternal well beings, finitely manifesting now this, & then that, relative perfection.
“Real” alternatives are key, here. Those would not include nonbeing &, after epistemic closure, ill being, which is – not only parasitic on the good & nonsubstantial, but – can only be sustained in ignorance. Those alternatives are un-real.
A beatific vision would be non-necessitating vis a vis the will, which would be moved, as informed by the intellect, infallibly.
So, we can parse volition in terms of the will, which is never moved in-voluntarily, and the intellect, which can inform the will in-fallibly.
The Roles of Efficacious Grace in a Hell-Free Reality
For starters, this is not a defense framed up using the Báñezian – Molinist conception. I’m working with Maritain & Lonergan’s insights, which are over against Báñez in ways far more congenial to common sense, while not inconsistent with predestination. I depart from them, too, in that I’m talking about elections to sainthood & other theophanic breadth expansions and not vis a vis hell, which doesn’t even refer.
In the context of a divine economy, which is ordered toward the expansion of theophanic breadth, where soteriology’s about beauty & anthropology’s ordered toward theosis, the distinction between sufficient & efficacious grace would be cashed out, practically, in the arena of formative spirituality, so including ascetical – mystical theology. Or, as William Johnston calls it – the Science of Love.
As such, many of the classical distinctions between acquired & infused contemplation come to mind. Those are distinctions of degree and not kind.
And, because love’s got everything to do with it, such distinctions as between active & passive won’t refer absolutely because the interactivity is inherently dialogical.
The distinction between sufficient & efficacious would be meaningful in terms of our theophanic breadth expansions. They might differentiate, for example, in terms of what are ordinarily gentle invitations, polite coaxings & quiet nudges versus what are extraordinarily overwhelming initiations, like Taboric illuminations, Damascene conversions & angelic Annunciations.
There’s nothing interrelationally passive, nothing not fitted to our natural inclinations, nothing in the least repugnant to our freedom. But God’s Word will have accomplished what it was sent to do, including purgations, whether slowly & progressively or instantaneously & precipitously.
Post-mortem purgation’s a state – not a place. The snap – crackle – pop you hear & the sparks you see flying are the result of the impurities of our vicious natures burning off in response to the beatific vision, which, precipitously & instantaneously, imparts the purgative graces as are concommitant with that divine epistemic closure, which illumines the intellect & robs the will of reasons to reject God.
The thought of purgatory as a place where one could possibly stay everlastingly due to some intractable character disposition seems a punishment all out of proportion to anyone’s transient earthly offenses. That notion fails the moral modal collapse test for me.
Consider Bernard Haring: “The dialogical character of prayer is most fully realized in the so-called passive or mystical prayer, in which the divine motion is in the foreground of consciousness and divine love stirs the heart, and the loving majesty of God manifests itself in infused contemplation. Though the prayer is called passive, man is not purely passive in it. On the contrary, one is never so completely and utterly active as when God moves him by the graces of mystical prayer. But in this mystical experience the “divine partner in the dialogue” is in the foreground rather than the human response.
The Báñezian – Molinist paradigm for predestination & efficacious grace introduces more problems than it solves. Those theo-anthropo realities have been better engaged & that paradigm well critiqued by Maritain & Lonergan. Their takes are not uncontroversial but they get the questions right. I don’t have the time to recite them here but they’re cyber-accessible.
Efficacious grace, then, as imparted by the beatific vision, itself, springs one from purgatory. Pre- & post-mortem it can also instantaneously & precipitously expand any given person’s theophanic breadth, electing folks to different degrees of secondary beatitude & of epectatic instantiations of relative perfections.
I explicitly hold that all volition integrates will & intellect as they’re inseparable and that the intellect is inalterably deliberative, even going to great length to parse diverse deliberative modes.
My stance makes no reference to such a category as “the damned,” so that can confuse things for me a bit. But I do recognize a category for those who have rather intractably vicious secondary natures, which will fittingly be purged.
Some seem to suggest that God won’t go the full beatific monty on us without some particular fallibly-informed prior free consent by us? That would be distinct from my stance in that I believe that God takes the gratuitous initiative and unconditionally gifts the beatific vision, which then serves as – not only our end, but also – the very means of our purgation, which is nonetheless wholly deliberative, requiring the free consent of our wills. It also seems further distinct from my stance, which entails that purgation gifts impeccability, i.e. one cannot sin in purgatory (conceived as a place) or when freely consenting to purgative graces (more properly conceived as a state).
The only difference, then, would be effected in our passive intellect, which has been dispossessed of false reasonings re Who & how God acts. That’s why I couch some views in terms of character – disposition based beatific contingencies, which I can’t make intelligible.
I find the distinction between our primary & secondary natures helpful.
Our primary nature = imago Dei. It is inviolable. It is a finished product. It is untouched by original sin or however one conceives finitude. It is not on a journey away from imperfection to perfection but from its predetermined allotment of relative perfections to the co-self-determined realizations of even more, ever more, relative perfections.
Such a modal co-self-determination (tropic) of one’s secondary nature doesn’t entail a journey from privation to fullness, from evil to goodness, from ill being to well being. Its a journey, rather, from an historical well being to eschatological well being.
The above describes what’s going on both ontologically & modally (eu-tropic) vis a vis protology & divine intent.
Alas, superimposed on those essential – personal divine dynamisms comes the interruption of sin. Our essential nature gets obscured – not diminished – by a vicious secondary nature as our personal tropoi get dys-tropic. That’s privative.
Without sin, formative spirituality would involve only the illuminative & unitive ways, a theotic journey from abundance as an image to superabundance as a likeness.
Alas, we need, also, the purgative. It’s a provisional necessity.