To Whom Does Nature Order Us & How Does Grace Equip Us?
I commend Fr. Aidan’s article Kronen & Reitan: Naturally Ordered to Beatific Vision and his exchanges with Fr. JD, which are very clarifying.
Fr. JD wrote: “The Catholic/Orthodox position is that original sin wounds human nature and grace was never constitutive of humanity, otherwise we would cease to be human after the Fall.”
Fr. Aidan had written: “Nor are Orthodox theologians likely to agree with the relevant Protestant positions, despite their own emphatic rejection of two-tier Thomism. For the Orthodox, humanity’s creation in the imago dei is ineradicable; it was not lost at the Fall.”
In my stance, while the imago Dei is emphatically ineradicable, I do recognize an abstract distinction between nature & grace.
Some use that distinction, however, to draw incoherent theoanthropological implications, e.g. otherwise ignoring our concrete experiences of the universal divine omnipresence & particular divine indwellings.
Grace, then, does refer – not naturally, but – personally & perichoretically, where our identities are, indeed, mutually constituted with Christ in a unitive doing (not unitary being).
With that in mind, there is much in my theoanthropology that reflects many of the stances articulated by both Frs Aidan & JD.
To wit:
Compatibilism & libertarianism, in their radical conceptions, both reduce to a deism. They are but obverse sides of the same Pelagian coin.
Being ordered toward and equipped for a beatific vision are two different things.
Both the beatific vision & impeccability are qualitatively – not quantitatively – different from our mediated knowledge of God & finite virtuous habits (lesser degrees of peccability).
So, our finite knowledge of God remains clearly distinct from the immediacy of the beatific vision, which is our primary beatitude.
We are, however, even in our radical finitude, able to move toward God without ever refusing His grace. In so doing, we grow in our mediated knowledge of Who God is, both operatively & gnoseologically, and can enjoy a broader range of enjoyment of divine secondary beatitudes.
As we virtuously grow in our finite knowledge, we also advance from greater to lesser degrees of habitual peccability.
So, our finite, fallible probabilitistic volitions (“intellect-will“s), for reasons analogous to Gödelian incompleteness & Turing’s halting problem, are capable of only one infinite activity – an infinite loop error.
Thus neither ante- nor post-mortem could we, as finite creatures, be moving naturally from fallibility to infallibility, peccability to impeccability, in our knowledge of God, as if we could ever just eventually exhaust our apparent reasons to turn away from God.
The above would all seem to argue against a mathematical certainty that all will be saved. It can’t be a matter of running out the clock or inevitably exhausting our finite ignorance based only on our universal gracing per ex nihilo & continua.
Many distinctions, then, between the gratuities of nature & grace do hold.
For a vision beatific & impeccability, which are qualitatively different for creatures, by definition & for all sorts of reasons, e.g. analogia, in/finite, noncompositeness, it’s therefore an extraordinary grace that will gift us a superintelligible & superabundant operative knowledge of just how the persons of the Trinity delight in us, one another & each’s very own Self.
These above qualifying “supers” refer perichoretically, personally, apophatically & qualitatively to an infinte beyondness of Truth, itself, Beauty, itself & Goodness, itself, & not participatorily, naturally, kataphatically & quantitatively to a whole lot more of what’s true, beautiful & good.
Questions may arise as to when, where, how & whether or not to whom such an extraordinary grace will be gifted, e.g. whether contingently based on character dispositions, divine indwellings, divine causes acting efficiently or formally on human wills or intellects, etc
However we may variously answer them, which is what I’ve been about in these recent conversations, I think we can all agree that we should avoid stances that reduce to deism. I’ve seen it to the right of me. I’ve seen it to the left of me. On into the valley …
We are ordered by nature & equipped by ordinary grace to mediated knowledge & secondary beatitude of God. We are ordered by our mutual constitution in Christ & equipped by extraordinary grace to immediate knowledge & primary beatitude of God.
free will is not made void through grace, but is established ~ St Augustine
Expanded Remarks – playing off of Tom Belt’s excellent comments
I like to imagine all of creation as transcendentally oriented toward God and that our telos just is God graciously present in nature, including the universal divine omnipresence in every shadow, vestige, image & likeness of God as well as the particular divine indwelling in every rational creature (image & likeness).
And the distinction between omnipresence & indwelling is precisely that the latter refers to a relational mutuality, i.e. deliberative synergy.
Those divine presences can gift us both operative & gnoseological knowledges of God, which can further be distinguished in terms of whether or not those presences & knowledges are mediated (Eucharistic foretastes) or immediate (Beatific Vision).
The above distinctions are meaningful to me, irrespective of whether or not any gratuitously gifted donum superadditum would be necessary.
All of these above distinctions could also be operative in accordance with our God-given ‘natural’ mode of choice from our beginning, i.e. deliberative synergy. This natural volitional capacity would operate by our wills with their efficient acts & intellects via formal causes. This capacity could conceivably operate in the same manner when gifted with any divine presence, whether mediated or immediate.
Even if a donum superadditum would need to be gifted to accommodate an immediate divine presence, conceivably, it would only need to augment our sensory, perceptual & cognitive capacities, while leaving our will wholly intact, i.e. without violating our deliberative synergy with the divine. We would also be free in our followings of natural inclinations.
We should acknowledge, however, that our mediated & immediate experiences of God are qualitatively different, that no number of mediated experiences could ever be quantitatively multiplied to, for example, even asymptotically close the type of epistemic distancing that we now experience as relative to our future enjoyment of the beatific vision.
Both types of divine presence are gifted all, sooner or later.
A mediated presence gifts one’s intellect with a knowledge of God, imparting such an unsurpassing gnoseological clarity & overwhelming operative love, that no rational creature could possibly come up with an apparent reason to reject God. The will COULD but it never WOULD!
See: https://biblehub.com/library/augustine/anti-pelagian_writings/chapter_52_xxx_grace_establishes_free.htm
Especially see: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/irresistible-grace-is-sergius-bulgakov-an-augustinian/
The Immaculate Conception
I like to imagine all of creation as transcendentally oriented toward God and that our telos just is God graciously present in nature, including the universal divine omnipresence in every shadow, vestige, image & likeness of God as well as the particular divine indwelling in every rational creature (image & likeness).
And the distinction between omnipresence & indwelling is precisely that the latter refers to a relational mutuality, i.e. deliberative synergy.
Those divine presences can gift us both operative & gnoseological knowledges of God, which can further be distinguished in terms of whether or not those presences & knowledges are mediated (Eucharistic foretastes) or immediate (Beatific Vision).
All of these above distinctions could also be operative in accordance with our God-given ‘natural’ mode of choice from our beginning, i.e. deliberative synergy. This natural volitional capacity would operate by our wills with their efficient acts & intellects via formal causes.
This capacity could conceivably operate in the same manner when gifted with any divine presence, whether mediated or immediate.
It does seem to me that – Only the establishment (& not any subsequent operation) of natural inclinations, dispositions & wills is ever monergic, as per creatio ex nihilo & continua, i.e. thereby both moving a person to be, existentially, & what to be, essentially.
Regarding what we are in our relationship to God, among other things, we are most definitely synergic deliberators, inviolably so, including not-bypass-ably so.
We manifest the divine image whenever what we are (Christ-images) gets divinely established by a (monergic) reduction of essential human potencies by some person’s (divinely determined) existential act. We thus signify the humanity of Christ.
We also manifest the divine image whenever how we are (Christ-likenesses) gets co-self-determinedly instantiated by a (synergic) reduction of final human potencies by each person’s formal acts. We thereby exemplify the humanity of Christ.
Mary was the first to exemplify Christ’s humanity through her theotic realizations, which were a gift for us all, who share the fruits of – not only her Magnificat, but – her Fiat, which was history’s singular paragon of synergy.
Mary’s impeccability would not refer to “essential” perfections of human “nature,” where our will is located. It would refer to a virtuous disposition of Mary’s secondary nature, which she synergically formed, when she freely & willingly cooperated with the graces that were gifted her in the communications of an immediate divine presence.
Her volitional faculties thus operated in accordance with our God-given ‘natural’ mode of choice from our beginning, i.e. deliberative synergy. As Mary operated her natural volitional capacity, as per all human volition, her Fiat comprised an efficient act of her will, which was integrated with the formal dynamics of her intellect. This is the same manner our volition operates when gifted with any divine presence, whether mediated or immediate.
The Immaculate Conception’s exceptionality refers to differences – not in her human nature, in general, much less to the operation of her will, in particular, but – in how God variously manifests the Divine Presence, mediately or immediately. It is thus akin in exceptionality to infused contemplation, apparitions, healings, miracles, elections to sainthood, mercies of conversion, special vocational calls, and other signs in the heavens above & wonders on the earth below.