What is the relationship between nature and grace? You must believe that God’s grace is real, especially if the sacraments are valid and within our earthly economy. God’s grace is also something that is a free and total gift, which the Creator gratuitously grants in abundance to His creation. But, if it is gift, there must also be a point in time where creation, that is nature, did not have grace. Maybe this was after the Paschal Mystery where the sacrifice of Christ was and still is the point of man’s salvation and restoration. If God has so graced the world in this way with the Incarnation, what is the purpose of the sacraments from the rest of creation? So, let’s delve deeper into the linkage between nature and grace, which Henri De Lubac offers excellent insights in his work, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace.
Before probing the terminology and understanding of grace, De Lubac makes the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Oftentimes, in our modern day culture, we view the supernatural as something similar to the movie Ghostbusters – a strange ghost or alien-like creature waiting to be sucked into the proton pack – or maybe an envisioning of a mysterious force or spirit that overtakes a human person. The supernatural, in this way, is depicted as something completely ‘other’. However, De Lubac emphasizes that the supernatural is not simply just the ‘other’, but a raising of man for “it ‘dignifies’ man much more than these did; it raises him much higher still above the level of his own essence, since it is entirely out of proportion with that essence” (26). In the original state of our first parents, Adam and Eve, there was an original holiness and innocence possessed by these first humans that was inevitably lost through the Fall. Now, nature is seen as distorted, broken, lacking something that it doesn’t have since this moment in salvation history. If this is the case, then nature is living in a lack. In a particular relationship, nature is always pining for the supernatural to fill its infinite lack with the finite. So, is grace then synonymous with the supernatural?
Referring back to Henri De Lubac on the issue, he makes the specific distinction that the word ‘supernatural’ and ‘grace’ are not the same in restoring nature to fulfillment. The supernatural elevates nature to something greater than its essence but grace does something more as De Lubac notes something “much more radical” (119). With the consequences of the Fall, nature is not just simply different than before; it has been severed from its true telos in union with its Creator and with the rest of creation. Sin has now entered the scene and nature is no longer graced in sanctification as before. So, nature’s relationship with grace is one of metanoia: of total conversion to the divinity, which is violent and radical. As De Lubac expounds, “before [nature] can be ‘transfigured’, our sinful nature must first be ‘turned inside out’”, which is what sanctifying grace does (121). Living in a world that is increasingly complacent in selecting an objective truth, there has been a significant loss in the ‘wretchedness’ of the human condition. And if we recognize and remember that nature is sinful and in need of grace, the desire for a metanoia of body and soul will be inflamed. Within liturgical seasons of the Church, as the one present this spring, this flame is reignited with an understanding of our poverty and sinful nature to pine for God’s transformative, salvific love.
This type of grace described is what is termed ‘sanctifying grace’, different than what you understand to be ‘actual grace’. The grace within creation could be viewed as ‘actual grace’ because if there is an effortful pondering of God, this grace guides us to good activity as a gift of the Holy Spirit because God makes creation good and it is still pining towards its Creator. But, living the sacramental life, God grants the human person ‘sanctifying grace’. Previously, the recognition of sin in the world distorts the reality of a truly good and graced creation. The essence of sin is that which is a lack, a deprivation of the good. De Lubac simplifies that “sin is not only a relative imperfection, but a rupture; not just a mistake, but a breaking away from God that divides man against himself” (130). And if this is true, this is the whole purpose of Christ’s Incarnation and Paschal Mystery – to save creation from the disruption from its Creator, a forgiveness enveloped in love and unity. Nature has always been predisposed to grace because of its woundedness in the severing of relationship with the Creator. Christ’s extending presence and salvific action lies within the preservation of the sacraments, which sources from Christ but are entrusted to His Bride, the Church. Each sacrament is a re-entrance into sanctifying grace, only bridged through the Divine Mediator, Christ. This is totally radical and necessary to the salvation of the human condition.
Nature, through the disruption of sin, is not simply full of grace. And, we as the Church, cannot live in a partial understanding that God is just in the world and He loves us just the way we are. That is the partial truth that diminishes and clouds our full understanding of the sacraments. We only come to know the fullness of His love and grace through the depravity of our sinfulness, which the sacraments heal. Humans cannot just live in an indifference of divinization or in a determination of self-reliance to overthrow the sinful, flawed nature of man. Man embodies a desire for liberation, “which consists in getting rid of the limitations of the human condition” but “cannot be satisfied outside of achieving the status of the divinity” (172). The simple relationship between nature and grace can be defined in St. Athanasius’ simple explanation of the Incarnation: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”. The grace of the sacraments offer this divinization to the rest of creation, safeguarding the forgiveness and gratuity of God, who longs to be communion again with His creation.
Quotations from Henri De Lubac’s A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace