On Grace
“There is one great difference between God’s love and man’s love, between God’s favor or grace and man’s: God’s love is creative, it pours out being and goodness into things, whereas man’s love presupposes the goodness, the beauty of things.”
- Charles Journet, The Meaning of Grace
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God’s love is a mysterious thing that envelopes all of mankind regardless of their differences. Charles Journet, a Swiss Catholic theologian, highlights this mystery and encapsulates the weight of Grace in his quote above. According to Journet, Grace is God’s love poured out on and into mankind, even though humans are undeserving. Oftentimes, when discussing theology, the word Grace is used improperly to describe a litany of different ideas. People can speak of Grace as something God gives as a substitute for forgiveness, or as a term for how mankind loves one another. However, the theological weight of Grace is too essential to be misunderstood.
God is the absolute. He exhibits love, beauty, intelligence, and being to an infinite degree. It is thus impossible to quantify him, but rather we claim that he is. God describes himself to Moses in the Bible as ‘I AM WHO I AM’” (Exodus 3:14), thus justifying his existence with his existence. Nothing about him is derived, composite, or dependent. Thus, Grace is not a composite of God but God himself. Therefore, when we receive Grace through the sacraments, we are receiving God directly into our lives. This Grace is ultimately what allows mankind to freely participate in the divine life and what enables a soul to be made greater than its nature.
When discussing Grace, it is imperative that we break the definition up into two subgroups: Habitual Grace and Actual Grace. The doctrines of Habitual and Actual grace were solidified at the Council of Trent in 1545. The differentiation was an attempt at confronting the doctrinal chaos that resulted from the Protestant Reformation. However, church fathers wrote extensively about the two graces even before the second century. The Council of Trent, therefore, merely confirmed the understanding Christians already had regarding the distinctions of the two graces and their vitality to a proper understanding of their faith.
Habitual Grace is the permanent disposition to act within the human nature God instilled in you. For example, God did not teach the grapevine how to produce grapes; however, God puts within the bush a permanent quality that produces grapes. The bush will bear grapes because of its innate natural tendency. Similarly, when we want to move a muscle, we have the innate aptitude to do so, even though we don’t really know how to do it. This determining factor is known as nature. If the nature of mankind is “...to fall short of the glory of God,” as Saint Paul says in Romans 3:23, does God, therefore, act with less love in the natural order than in the supernatural order, because man can fall and angels cannot? No, the Holy Scriptures make it clear that God shows no partiality towards one or another. Saint Peter the Apostle attests to this, stating, “Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, 'In truth, I see that God shows no partiality’” (Acts 10:34). God has therefore placed a similar disposition within man that the Holy Trinity may permanently be in the soul of him. This constant state of Grace is known as Habitual Grace. Habitual Grace enters the soul, and is diffused throughout all of our parts—our intellect, love, and physicality—to elevate man from his nature. Nothing can separate us from God’s Grace, as Saint Paul writes in Romans 8:38-39, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Therefore, Habitual Grace is infinite, and remains in the souls of man constantly.
Actual Grace, unlike Habitual Grace, is not constant. Actual Grace is the divine impulse that brings forth a free adherence, or consent, to God. God comes to man in order to bring man to him, but he gives man the option to accept his will or deny it. The holy Scriptures state in Deuteronomy 30:19, “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live…” Therefore, mankind has the option to halt the divine movement of Grace within his spirit, or allow God to take hold of his free will and raise it up, without violating it. God is always beckoning the human heart back to him, most especially when you fall into a state of sin. Of mankind's own will, we do not have the power to renew an ascent back up to God’s love, simply because of our fallen nature. However, a divine movement in the spirit can renew your soul above its own nature—this is the power of God’s Grace. However, so as not to interfere with our free will, we have the option to deny this movement. The choice to accept God’s Grace is what gives mankind our free will; we may accept the Actual Grace which God so graciously gives to us, or deny it. This is what distinguishes Actual Grace from Habitual Grace: free will.
Grace should be thought of as a gift, a very complex gift which seeks to bring Christ’s followers far beyond what their nature allows them. Without Grace, achieving anything more than sin would be impossible, and the Kingdom of God would be impossible to attain. With the Grace of God, however, mankind is able to rise above our state of sin. Thus, the word Grace, though commonly thrown around, should be properly understood as an inexpressible gift by which God attempts to reunite humanity to himself.