Is Grace a Gas?
“You're in a meeting with someone, who says that the sacraments are just part of a generally graced world. The world is full of grace and so are the sacraments. How would you respond to this person based on what you read in de Lubac?” (This post is one of a series of six assignments in fulfillment of a sacramental theology course at the University of Notre Dame.)
Our interlocutor is correct in one sense but incorrect in another.
He is correct that the world is indeed a grace-filled place, contra Calvinists, “cessationists,” and others who would deny the inherent goodness of humankind (as many Calvinists do in their doctrine of total depravity) or that God still works miracles in our own day and age (as some Protestants do, arguing that God’s miraculous activity or the gifts of the Holy Spirit “ceased” at the close of the apostolic age).
He is incorrect, though, in his implicit premise that God’s grace in the world must for some reason be monochromatic or perfectly evenly distributed. I would argue that in fact the opposite is true: that God, who had no need to create time and space, chose to create time and space so that He could be glorified in a unique way by each of its many and various facets—not, rather, by some pervasive invisible “grace cloud” that seeps throughout the cosmos until it reaches an equilibrium.
The Catholic view is that the seven sacraments of the Church (Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Confession, the Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony) are precisely the privileged loci in which (or, the very means by which) God has promised to pour out His graces upon humankind in a particular and uniquely profound way. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
In this age of the Church [that is, the Christian era, from Pentecost onward] Christ now lives and acts in and with his Church, in a new way appropriate to this new age. He acts through the sacraments in what the common Tradition of the East and the West calls "the sacramental economy"; this is the communication (or "dispensation") of the fruits of Christ's Paschal mystery in the celebration of the Church's "sacramental" liturgy…Sacraments are "powers that comes forth" from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving. They are actions of the Holy Spirit at work in his Body, the Church. They are "the masterworks of God" in the new and everlasting covenant…[They are] efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us. (1076, 1116, 1131)
To be sure, God could have created a blasé, lowest-common-denominator, perfectly egalitarian distribution of grace in the world—such an idea contains no logical contradiction, and thus is possible for Him to have done. But the real question must then be: is that what God, in fact, has chosen to do? And it would seem to me that the answer to that question is a definite “no”. Rather, "’adhering to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, to the apostolic traditions, and to the consensus . . . of the Fathers,’ we profess that ‘the sacraments of the new law were . . . all instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord’…to sanctify men, to build up the Body of Christ and, finally, to give worship to God” (CCC 1114, 1123).
These seven sacraments are thus those parts of the material world which God, in His perfect freedom, has chosen to sanctify for the sake of our sanctification—those things which, to edge closer to the language used in Fr. Henri de Lubac, SJ’s A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, God has chosen to “supernaturalize” in order that we may become, as 2 Peter 1:4 says, “partakers of the divine nature.” Fr. de Lubac writes (quoting Fr. Louis Bouyer, CO at the end):
The supernatural, one might say, is that divine element which man’s effort cannot reach (no self-divinization!) but which unites itself to man, “elevating” him as our classical theology used to put it, and as Vatican II still says (Lumen Gentium, 2), penetrating him in order to divinize him, and thus becoming as it were an attribute of the “new man” described by St. Paul. While it remains forever “un-naturalizable”, it profoundly penetrates the depths of man’s being. In short, it is what the old Scholastics and especially St. Thomas Aquinas called (using a word borrowed from Aristotle which has often been completely misunderstood)…an “accident” [in contrast to the substance in which the thing inheres]. Call it an accident, or call it a habitus, or “created grace”: these are all different ways of saying…that man becomes in truth a sharer in the divine nature…We do not need to conceive of it as a sort of entity separated from its Source, something like cooled lava—which man would appropriate to himself. On the contrary, we wish to affirm by these words that the influx of God’s spirit does not remain external to man; that without any comingling of natures it really leaves its mark on our nature and becomes in us a principle of [supernatural or divine] life. This Scholastic notion of created grace, so often belittled today, does express the incontrovertible fact that “it is we ourselves, and our creaturely being, which the active presence in us of the Spirit makes divine, without for that reason absorbing us and annihilating us in God.” (41-42)
Thanks be to God for the gift of the sacraments: for the gift of visible, tangible ways in which His invisible, intangible grace is communicated to creatures such as ourselves who are so often in need of the assurance, the proofs, of His tender and fatherly love!