Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas

396 Pages·2015·3.03 MB·English

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Donum Habituale: Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of the

School of Theology and Religious Studies

Of The Catholic University of America

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

By

John M. Meinert

Washington, DC

2015
Donum Habituale: Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas

John M. Meinert, Ph.D.

Director: William C. Mattison III, Ph.D.

Three contemporary problems contextualize my research. First, there is a dispute among
Thomists over how often the gifts of the Holy Spirit are operative. Second, contemporary
Thomists see Aquinas’s Summa as an integral whole rather than disparate treatises, but this
vision has yet to be implemented fully in the exegesis of Aquinas concerning the gifts of the
Holy Spirit or grace. Indeed, it seems that these two topics must be read together since they are
both part of what Albert Patfoort calls Aquinas’s loci of pneumatology. Third, secondary
literature pays relatively little attention to the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Aquinas’s thought,
though Aquinas himself considers them central. In light of these contexts, I argue (1) that in
order to understand fully Aquinas’s thought on the gifts of the Holy Spirit or grace one must read
them in light of each other and (2) that by doing this one realizes that the spiritual life is
fundamentally pneumatological. The gifts are always operative in the supernatural life.
In the first chapter, I survey a selection of settled positions and ongoing debates
surrounding grace and the gifts in Thomism after Aeterni Patris. I find that much of the
secondary literature could benefit from a more unified conception of Aquinas’s corpus in which
the two topics are brought into dialogue with each other. In the second chapter, I interpret
Aquinas’s thought on the gifts in light of his thought on grace. In the third chapter, I elucidate
Aquinas’s thought on grace in light of his thought on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the final
chapter, I return to the ongoing debates and settled positions in light of the mutual reading
attempted in chapters two and three. I argue that the mutual contact of chapters two and three
makes a substantial contribution. In other words, in order to rightly interpret St. Thomas on
either grace or the gifts of the Holy Spirit one must have information from the other and in so
doing one can see that the spiritual life according to St. Thomas is fundamentally
pneumatological.
This dissertation by John M. Meinert fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree
in moral theology/ethics approved by William C. Mattison III, Ph.D., as Director and by John
Grabowski, Ph.D., and Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., S.T.D. as Readers.

William C. Mattison III, Ph.D., Director

John Grabowski, Ph.D., Reader

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., S.T.D., Reader

ii
To Katie, my wife

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“If you love me you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give
you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot
receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and
will be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world
will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will
know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
—John 14:16-20

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Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter I – Grace and the Gifts Post Aeterni Patris ..................................................................... 17
I. The Existence of Actual Grace .............................................................................................. 18
II. The Division of Actual Grace .............................................................................................. 24
IIa. Gifts and Actual Grace ................................................................................................... 45
III. The Division of Habitual Grace .......................................................................................... 50
IIIa. Natural Priority among the Immanent Principles of the Supernatural Life .................. 62
IV. The Necessity of Grace……………………………………………………………………69
V. Merit ..................................................................................................................................... 84
VI. The Distinction Between the Gifts and the Virtues ............................................................ 90
VII. The Necessity of the Gifts for Every Meritorious Action ................................................. 94
VIII. The Connectivity, Endurance, and Excellence of the Gifts ........................................... 102
IX. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 109
Chapter II – Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit .................................................................... 110
I. Grace and the Distinction between the Gifts and the Virtues .............................................. 112
II. Grace and the Instinctus of the Gifts .................................................................................. 124
IIa. Aquinas’s uses of the term Instinctus ........................................................................... 125
IIb. The Instinctus Spiritus Sancti and Grace as Motus ...................................................... 137
III. Grace and the Operational Necessity of the Gifts ............................................................. 157
IV. Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit as Habits .............................................................. 173
IVb. Are the Gifts Healing and Elevating? ......................................................................... 181
IVa. Are the Gifts Operative and Cooperative? .................................................................. 188
V. Further Implications of Grace for the Gifts ....................................................................... 192
Va. Grace and the connectivity of the gifts......................................................................... 192
Vb. Grace and the Endurance of the Gifts .......................................................................... 201
Vc. Grace and the Comparative Excellence of the Virtues and the Gifts ........................... 204
VI. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 209
Chapter III – The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Grace ................................................................. 210
I. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Existence of Actual Grace ......................................... 211
Ia. Natural Motion and Its Types in Aquinas ...................................................................... 211
Ib. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Actual Grace .............................................................. 221
Ic. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 233
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II. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Necessity of Grace for Perseverance ........................ 234
III. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Division of Grace .................................................... 248
IIIa. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Division of Motive Auxilium ............................. 249
IIIb. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Division of Habitual Grace ............................... 261
IV. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Merit ............................................................................. 275
V. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 285
Chapter IV – A Return to the Secondary Literature ................................................................... 286
I. The Existence of Actual Grace ............................................................................................ 290
II. The Division of Actual Grace ............................................................................................ 297
IIa. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Actual Grace ............................................................. 304
III. The Division of Habitual Grace ........................................................................................ 315
IIIa. The Natural Priority among the Supernatural Habits .................................................. 324
IV. The Necessity of Grace ..................................................................................................... 328
V. Merit ................................................................................................................................... 336
VI. The Distinction between the Gifts and the Virtues ........................................................... 343
VII. The Operational Necessity of the Gifts ........................................................................... 357
VIII. The Connectivity, Endurance, and Relative Excellence of the Gifts and Virtues ......... 366
IX - Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 373
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….... 377

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Introduction

According to the Thomistic tradition, the life of grace is profoundly Christological and
Pneumatological. The immanent processions of the Son and Spirit are not only causes of creation
but, and this in an even more exemplary way, causes of the life of grace.1 The spiritual life has a
certain character and form because of who God is in se.2 It is thus no mistake that Aquinas
claims the grace received by the believer is the very grace of Christ and that New Law dwells
interiorly in believers through the Holy Spirit.3 The manifold gifts of grace bring the the recipient
into a direct relation with the Trinitarian mystery.4 For all these reasons, Aquinas calls grace a
“participation in the divine nature.”5
In outlining the particular effects this graced participation has on the believer, Aquinas
integrates the grace of Christ and the Holy Spirit, the written law, the Church, the sacraments,
habitual grace, the theological virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the infused cardinal
virtues into a unified and Catholic conception of the good life. Since Aquinas’s death, Thomists

1Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 4–12, S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia Iussu
Leonis XIII P.M. (Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1888).This work will hereafter be
abbreviated ST. All translations, unless noted, are my own. ST II-II q. 23, a. 2; ST I-II q. 110, a. 1. For a good
exposition of this principle, see Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 349ff.

2 Romanus Cessario, “The Trinitarian Imprint on the Moral Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, eds.
Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 487-492.

3 ST III q. 8, a. 5; ST I-II q. 106, a. 1, co.

4 Emery, The Trinitarian Theology, 373.

5 ST I-II q. 110, a. 3, co.: “…participatio divinae naturae…”

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have probed the depths of Aquinas’s conception of of grace and the particular mechanisms by
which it is lived. I will make no pretense at covering all or even a substantial portion of this vast
body of literature. The topic of my research is much more circumscribed, the gifts of the Holy
Spirit.
As the written record of revelation, Scripture is the primary source of a doctrine
concerning the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As with many authentically Christian doctrines, the gifts
are not explicit in Scripture, but can only be found “in the latent implications of the New
Testament message as a whole, and in the experience of the Christian life…”6 In short, to
ultimately vindicate a doctrine of the gifts of the Holy Spirit requires a previous justification of
ecclesial hermeneutics. Hence, O’Connor argues that the gifts are not simply based on Isaiah 11,
the manifestations of the Spirit in Paul, the activity of the apostles post Pentecost in Acts, and the
Seven Spirits of the Apocalypse, but more surely on the central role of the Holy Spirit as the
paraclete.
Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and previous scholastics (among many others)
codified and systematized the latent implications of the New Testament regarding the gifts of the
Holy Spirit.7 Aquinas took up these traditional scriptural, patristic, and scholastic sources and
molded their teachings into a systematic doctrine of the gifts. It is this doctrine of the gifts that
Ulrich Horst calls the heart of Thomistic Moral Theology.8

6 Edward O’Connor C.S.C., “Appendix 1: The Scriptural Basis for the Doctrine of the Gifts,” in Summa Theologiae
Vol. 24 by St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 87.

7 O’Connor, 88-109.

8 Ulrich Horst, O.P., Die Gaben Des Heiligen Geistes Nach Thomas Von Aquin (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 1.