Our Lord told the Apostles that they were given the power to understand the mysteries of God’s Kingdom. For the rest of the people, He relied on the power of parables to teach them about these same mysteries. To explain one of the most central mysteries of our Faith, grace, Our Lord repeatedly relied on the image of a seed. Just as there is a hidden cooperation between soil and seed, there is a mysterious cooperation between human freedom and Divine power.
While this action remains in the realm of theological mystery, this does not mean that we need to remain fully ignorant or passive to how grace works on and in us. If that was true, then Our Lord would not have bothered using natural things to describe these supernatural realities. Understanding the “mechanics” of grace turns out to be vital (in the truest sense of the word) to our sanctification and personal redemption.
Shedding Light on the Mystery
The problem is that most of us labor under a vague understanding of grace as a concept. As the Latin term gratis implies it involves a gift given freely. But we must take the term also in the sense of being pleasing to someone—as in “I am in his good graces.” Fully understood then grace is a free gift that makes us truly pleasing to God. This bestowing of “pleasing-ness” happens in two ways that have been traditionally categorized as Actual Grace and Sanctifying Grace.
Just as in the natural life, God must both bestow existence and continue to sustain that existence, it is also in the supernatural life. God bestows supernatural life through Sanctifying Grace and continues that life through the power of Actual Grace. This distinction is clearly laid out in Chapter 3 of the Book of Revelation when Our Lord says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me” (Rev 3:20). Our Lord’s knocking and our opening is the action of Actual Grace while the dining together that is the sign of a shared life is Sanctifying Grace. In order to be brief, we will limit our discussion to Actual Grace here and will cover Sanctifying Grace another time.
“Without Me You Can Do Nothing”
Men and women, even in their fallen state, are still capable of morally good actions naturally. What they are not capable of are supernaturally good (i.e. meritorious) actions. For this, they must both have supernatural life (Sanctifying Grace) and the sustained supernatural power that we call Actual Grace. When Our Lord says “without Me you can do nothing” He is primarily referring to the supernaturally good actions we are moved to do by actual grace.
As an aside, some of the Doctors of Prayer in the Church say that at a certain point actual graces are no longer needed in the person in the Unitive Way because the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are fully operative. This makes sense, but because all of us must journey through the Purgative and Illuminative Way first, we can assume that every supernatural act that we perform must first be motivated by actual grace.
By “nothing” then Our Lord means “nothing that will last for eternity”. This includes not just our supernaturally good actions, but conversion itself. This leads to a further distinction between two kinds of Actual Grace: operative and cooperative.
Operative Grace
The sinner finds himself in a literal “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. Under his own power, he can never turn or return to God. Justification and sanctification requires Divine intervention. This intervention however must be done in such a way that it is still an act of the person’s will to repent. Put in more theological terms, actual grace must prompt the sinner to return to God. This “knocking at the door” is what is called operative grace. Operative grace, according to the Council of Trent’s Decree on Justification, is the grace that moves that touches the person and movies them towards a desire to conversion. More specifically it tackles the catch-22 so “that in adults the beginning of that justification must proceed from the predisposing grace of God …whereby, without any merits on their part, they are called; that they who by sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through His quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace.”
The whole purpose of this operating grace is to pave the way for the second “type” of actual grace, cooperating grace. Once that operative grace is consented to, once the person decides that “yes, I desire conversion” they must still move to “open the door.” This movement towards conversion is the work of cooperating grace. This grace too, requires the consent of free will and can be rejected.
Two Saintly Examples
Two famous conversion stories will help to shed light on how these two graces work. The first is St. Paul’s Road to Damascus encounter with Our Lord. The story is well known, but we can couch it in terms of actual grace to make the distinction between the two kinds clearer. The powerful operative grace comes specifically when Our Lord invades Saul’s life saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” St. Paul acknowledges a desire for conversion by asking, “Who are you, sir?” Now Our Lord offers St. Paul a cooperating grace: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.” St. Paul consents and the actual grace moves him to go to Damascus.
From that moment forward, cooperating grace becomes the motivating force for all the supernaturally good actions in St. Paul’s life. It sustains the supernatural movement in his life always with his free will consent. So powerful is this force that it prompts him to tell the Corinthians “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
A second famous example shows how operative grace might be accepted but how we can run from cooperative grace. St. Augustine in his Confessions tells how he “had prayed, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid lest thou shouldst hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my disease of lust which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished” (Book 9, Ch. 7). Consent to the operative grace occurs (he prays), but there is no will to accept the cooperative grace. This is instructive because it shows how operating grace does not come just once, but many times. In Augustine’s case the frequency of the invitation was greatly increased because of the prayer of his saintly mother, Monica. This ought to prompt us to ask God very specifically and repeatedly to send operative graces to those whom we know personally to convert.
To summarize, we can once again turn to Augustine. Like St. Paul, St. Augustine understood the operations of actual grace from experience earning him the title Doctor of Grace. There is no better summary of the action of actual grace then his:
“For He who first works in us the power to will is the same who cooperates in bringing this work to perfection in those who will it. Accordingly, the Apostle says: ‘I am convinced of this, that he who has begun a good work in you will bring it to perfection until the day of Christ Jesus’ (Phil 1:6). God, then, works in us, without our cooperation, the power to will, but once we begin to will, and do so in a way that brings us to act, then it is that He cooperates with us. But if He does not work in us the power to will or does not cooperate in our act of willing, we are powerless to perform good works of a salutary nature.”
Free Will and Grace, 17.33