Tag Archives: Sanctifying Grace

What is Actual Grace?

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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

Confronting the Mass Identity Crisis

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When Our Lord and His Apostles came to the great rock of Caesarea Philippi, He asked a poignant question about His personality: “Who do you say that I am?”.  Only Simon, enlightened by Divine grace, saw Our Lord for Who He really was: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).  Once Peter identified Our Lord, Our Lord in turn gave him his true identity as the Great Rock upon which the Church herself would be identified.  Peter was not alone in this regard.  Our Lord came to bestow our identity upon each one of us.  He identified with us in order that we might come to share in His identity as “sons in the Son.”  Modern man, perhaps more than any other ailment, suffers from a great identity crisis that makes this moment in Our Lord’s Life particularly important. 

The First Identity Crisis

Lucifer had the greatest natural endowment of all creatures.  In this way he was entirely unique and, created in a state of grace, he was the most like God.  This was his true identity. Rather than receive this identity as a gift, he instead chose to create his own.  Lucifer became Satan and lost his true identity forever.  He became, in the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger an “Un-person”, corrupted beyond any personal recognition.  Out of envy, Scripture says, Satan then became an Identity Thief attempting to steal everyone else’s identity.  He began by coaxing a third of the angels to follow him in asserting their own identity.

Misery loves company and so Satan set his sights upon mankind.  Ultimately his temptation of Eve amounts to questioning her true identity as a beloved daughter of God.  He tells her that she will become like God.  The problem, of course, is that she already was like God.  God had gifted her with sanctifying grace which already made her “like God”.  Satan tempts her to see her identity as something she must grasp, rather than receive and so simultaneously attacks her femininity.  Likewise, with Adam, both his identity as being like God and being a man.  It was the man who was commanded to protect and till the Garden. 

Our identity crisis has its roots in the Fall then.  Original Sin removed sanctifying grace, which forms our true identity, our God-likeness if you will.  But it also wounded us in our sexual identity, the manner in which we individually image God.  Not only does the distinctly feminine power of childbirth become labor for the woman, but, because man will be tempted to lord over her, she will be tempted to seize masculinity.  Likewise, for man, the uniquely masculine way of working also becomes labor and he will be tempted to seize the feminine.  Not only was God-likeness lost, both forgot what it meant to image God in their masculinity and femininity.

The crisis would grow until the New Adam and his suitable helpmate, the New Eve came. Satan could not steal either of their identities.  He tried to steal Our Lord’s when He went into the desert.  The enmity between him and Our Lady made her immune to Satan’s wiles.  Our Lord and Our Lady then, each in their proper way, cooperated in restoring us not just as children of God, but sons and daughters. 

Our Identity Crisis

Satan may have lost the war, but he is still engaging in the Battle across the centuries, trying to keep us from our true identity.  He has had varying degrees of success but has been particularly successful in our own age.   His battle plan remains the same as always by destroying the image and suppressing our desire for the true likeness of God that lies at the root of our real identity.

Rather than accepting God-likeness as a free gift that comes only through Baptism, we chase immortality through technology.  The Covid crisis has been particularly eye-opening in this regard in that we are all expecting a technocratic Messiah to save us.  Technology can make us like gods.

The Church has not been immune to this attack either, putting bodily health before spiritual health.  One soul, dying in a state of grace, is far greater than 1000 people “safely” locked in their houses without any access to the gift of true God-likeness in the Sacraments.  Christ instituted the Church, so that, throughout all-time, His unique power to bestow our true identity might be made available to all.  When the Church forgets her true identity, then a mass identity crisis is sure to follow.    

While technology is the weapon of choice to suppress our desire for true God-likeness, intersectionality, rooted in identity politics, is the weapon of choice to suppress our identity as being made in the image of God.  Intersectionality attempts to root our identity in victimhood.  Christ became a victim so that we could overcome this temptation and clear the way for our real identity.  Sex, masquerading as gender, rather than being a way in which we individually image God, is simply a social construct made malleable (through technology) according to personal whims.  This Great Lie destroys our identity rather than restoring it.  It sits at the heart of today’s mass identity crisis and is nothing more than a ploy of the Evil One. 

Genesis tells us that the Serpent, in attacking Adam and Eve’s identity was the most subtle of all the wild animals (Gn 3:1).  What makes our age unique is that he has thrown subtlety out the window and has chosen to unmask himself.  That is why we must be prepared to fight the identity crisis by refusing to be a party to any of the lies that have enabled the crisis to become so deep.  Too often we simply go along to get along.  The Devil has been hard at work stealing people’s identities, we need to be equally hard at work helping them find their true one.

Lead Us Not into Temptation?

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In his personal memoirs, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung described how he finally broke from Christianity because of Jesus’ apparently inconsistent portrait of God as simultaneously “love and goodness” and “tempter and destroyer.”  It is reasonable to think that Jung might not be alone in his conclusion, especially considering that each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask that God “lead us not into temptation.”  The implication is that He has the power to either tempt us or lead us away from it.  Whether we recognize it or not, there is a certain mistrust of God that cannot be totally put away until we deal with what seems like a messy contradiction.  Putting temptation within the proper framework will not only help us to address the intellectual difficulty surrounding the issue of temptation, but, more importantly, help us to see why they are a constituent element in our quest for holiness.

What God Desires

In constructing the frame, we must first start with a proper understanding of what God wants for each one of us.  God is not content with merely bestowing the divine life upon us.  He does not merely want to give us grace so we can go to heaven and be with Him.  No, if you can imagine it, He wants so much more.  He is not looking for test subjects for some cosmic social experiment, but sons and daughters who can stand on their own two feet and run towards Him.  He wants His glory to shine from every pore of our being but He also wants to bestow upon us the dignity of having worked for it.  Eternal life is a free gift, but He won’t cheapen it by asking for nothing in return.

Rather than getting bogged down in an explication of the mystery of man’s free will and God’s grace, we will accept as a given that they are cooperative powers.  When God plants the seed of eternal life (i.e. sanctifying grace) in our souls, He also implants the supernatural virtue of charity.  Now each of our natural virtues as well as the two theological virtues of faith and hope has charity as its center of gravity.  As the virtues increase, our capacity to harness the Supreme Goodness that is God’s life increase with it.  It is, to borrow a principle from St. Thomas, grace perfecting nature.

Grace and Nature

It seems that a digression is in order regarding this important Thomistic principle because it is relevant to a proper understanding of all that I just said.  Often it is paraphrased as “grace builds upon nature.”  This is more than just “saying the same thing.”  If you tell me “grace builds upon nature” I think, “I just need to try harder to be good” and God will give me grace.  It is as if I can achieve a certain amount of natural goodness and then God will give me grace.  In other words it is my hard work that comes first then grace.  Grace becomes essentially a superfluous add-on.  This is just a subtle form of the old heresy called (semi-)Pelagianism which denied original sin and taught that holiness was ours for the taking.

What I have proposed is not “becoming the best version of yourself”, that is a good natural life, but instead a path to an abundant supernatural life.  It is grace that comes first.  No amount of work on our part can change that.  Without the initial installment (ordinarily through Baptism) or a re-installment (through Sacramental Confession), we can never get there no matter how good we are.  Heaven is not the natural result of a good life, it is the supernatural consequence of a holy life.  All holy people are good people, but not all good people are holy.  It is grace at the beginning and then grace all the way through.  Grace perfects nature, not builds upon it.

What we are talking about then is our cooperation with grace through a growth in the virtues and how this is achieved.  The classic definition of a virtue as the firm and habitual dispositions toward the good needs to be examined.  We instinctively get the habitual part, understanding that it requires more than solitary acts that look like virtue to actually be virtuous.  We mistakenly think then to grow in virtue we just need to keep repeating the act.  For an increase in virtue however the first part, that is the firmness, is what needs to be emphasized.  It is only an act done with greater vehemence that wins the increase in virtue.

Temptation from its Proper Perspective

Only when we grasp God’s desire for our personal perfection and what that perfection consists in, we can look at temptation in a proper light.  Temptation is not so much a push to do something bad, but an opportunity to love and do what is good all the more.  It is an indispensable means for a growth in virtue.  Lacking any resistance, we are content with feeble acts of virtue because they “get the job done.”  Virtue is often compared to a muscle with a “use it or lose it” mentality.  But God is calling us to be spiritual bodybuilders, becoming huge in our holiness.  Muscle grows with an increase in resistance and so it is with virtue.  It might not be the only way to increase the intensity of our virtuous acts, but it is the most effective.  “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is not just a mission statement from Jesus, Life Coach, but a command from the one Who always equips us to fulfill it.

Addressing Jung’s objection that I opened with will also help us to see how best to make use of temptations.  It is not God who tempts but instead He is the one Who allows temptations to occur for our own good.  If there is no opportunity for growth then He will not allow it.  This truth is so important to hold onto, especially in the midst of strong temptations.  What you shouldn’t hold onto is the hackneyed Christian maxim that “God does not give you more than you can handle.”  This is not only not true, but also counterproductive.  God absolutely gives us more than we can handle, but He never abandons us, spotting us in our spiritual workouts.  But like a good spotter, He only gives us enough help for us to keep the bar moving and does not pull it off of us.  Even in being overcome, we still have the opportunity to grow.  No saint was devoid of humility, a virtue that only grows with more intense acceptance of humiliations.

Before closing I should mention one thing that may not be clear from what I have said.  It seems that if God has allowed a temptation to occur for my good, then I must simply face it head on.  Fleeing from them means that I will have missed the opportunity for growth.  Fleeing in the face of temptation, especially those of the flesh, is one of the ways in which we grow in virtue.  The rapidity and vehemence in which we avoid what would be evil is exactly what causes our growth.

We can see why it is that God then never frees us from temptation wholly.  As Sirach says, “when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trial” (Sir 2:1).  “To be human,” Aquinas says, “is to be tempted, but to consent is to be devlish.”  We do not pray to be freed from temptation in the Lord’s Prayer, but instead that we may not be led into temptation, that is, to consent to it.    Unfortunately, Jung was wrong.  Temptations come from a loving Father, Who wants nothing more than our perfection.