I have pressed the idea for decades now, after being alerted to these things by my former historical theology seminary professor (and still mentor), Dr. Ron Frost, in regard to Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotelian categories with Christian [Augustinian] theology. I am referring to the Thomist thinking on created grace. There are many retrievers of scholastic Reformed theology these days, inclusive of Matthew Barrett, in his own idiosyncratic way. Richard Muller has identified the swath of Post Reformed orthodox theology as Christian Aristotelianism. This would be another way of simply saying (for the most part): Thomism or a neo-Thomism of sorts. This is why I have argued, along with others, that Tridentine Catholic theology, along with those who appropriated said theological categories, like the Reformed scholastic, have taken over a semi-Pelagian soteriology; or a cooperative theory of salvation vis-à-vis God and the human agent. Within the scholasticism Reformed frame, we see this type of cooperative model developed under the aegis of what is known as a Covenantal or Federal theology. The elect are provided with a created grace (distinct from the personal grace that is the Holy Spirit’s unction), by which, in the Federal scheme, they are able to cooperate with God in meeting the conditions of the promisso, or bilateral covenant betwixt God and man/woman, in regard to attesting to and appropriating their elect status.
There is more to be said about all of the aforementioned, but I wanted at least to provide a theological context or background for the points made by Gilles Emery, as created grace looked in the theology of Thomas Aquinas—as distinct and opposed to the personal grace of the Holy Spirit. The scholastics Reformed will often equate the personal grace of the Holy Spirit notion with created grace, with the point of downplaying the Thomistic/Aristotelian flare found in what can be called the habitus theology of Thomas Aquinas. Someone who doesn’t downplay these things though is indeed, Richard Muller. Emery writes,
Thomas actually emphasizes the necessity of a created grace. When the Holy Spirit is given to human beings, he does not enter into a synthesis with someone with whom he is ‘mixed’ or ‘fused’. Even in Christ, there is no mixture or conflation between the divine and the human nature. For a human being’s own nature to be raised into communion with God, it is necessary to recognize, from the moment of their participation in God onwards, a gift in her which will be the intrinsic principle of her sanctification, a reality which has a human size, and so is a created one, situated on the ontological plane of creatureliness: this is the grace which is called ‘created’. This gift comes from God alone, because it is God alone who divinizes, God alone who makes human beings participants in his own divine nature. But, even when he gives himself, God remains distinct from human beings. In the scholastic terminology, it is necessary to see that God is not the ‘formal cause’ of the life of grace, because he does not enter into formal composition with the human (both God’s simplicity and the created condition of human beings make this unthinkable, for we would then be faced with a conflation of the divine and human nature). In this light, grace is a created disposition which human beings receive from God. It is, so to speak, a gift from God which puts itself onto the ontological level of human nature, proportioning itself to the human in order to make it possible for men and women to be united to God from within their own human life. Such created grace disposes human beings to receiving the divine person. Thomas states,
the gift of sanctifying grace disposes the soul to possess the divine person; this is what the formula ‘the Holy Spirit is given through the gift of grace’ means. But the gift itself is the grace coming from the Holy Spirit; this is what Paul means when he says, The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
The insistence on the necessity for a created gift (habitual grace with its gifts of wisdom and charity) must not make us forget that its aim is to make human beings capable of receiving the Holy Spirit himself, and, beside the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son, who come to build their dwelling in the saints (‘to possess the divine person’). St Thomas is very clear on this:
through the gift of sanctifying grace, the reasonable creature is not only perfected in such a way as to be able to make use of the created gift, but also in such a way as to enjoy the divine person himself…. the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to human beings in such a way that the actual source of the grace is given, to wit, the Holy Spirit himself.[1]
It is important to understand what a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology is at this point (which I clumsily wrote about in a seminary paper back in 2002, my first real exposure to these things). Suffice it to say, when a theologian starts with an Augustinian conditioned doctrine of predestination and election—wherein the elect (and reprobate) is thought of in abstract and individualistic ways—it is possible to end up with the thinking we see evinced in the outworking of Thomas’ theology of anthropology/salvation. There is an utter need to think the human agent away from the divine, to the point that when the Christ comes as God enfleshed, we end up with a necessary rupture between God’s person and work; to the point that even Christ’s human nature would need a created grace to cooperate with God in the work of salvation. This, in a Thomistic frame, is why a created grace is constructed in the first place: i.e., in order to keep the pure nature of an independent humanity in tact vis-à-vis the Creator/creature distinction, distinct. But this move becomes unnecessary, that is, the move to think of God’s grace in dualistic ways; i.e., personal and created. It is unnecessary because God’s Grace is God’s being in becoming for us; God’s grace is an eternal act of triune felicity (relative to the Deus incarnandus ‘God to be incarnate’).
There are things that need further detailing in order to tie up the dangling definitional ends in this post. But as usual, this will have to suffice for a blog post. I haven’t strung all of the dots together for you, but that’s part of the fun; I’ll leave it to you to bring some of the implications of what I have been writing on together.
[1] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 253–54.