De gratia Redemptoris

The fact of a true internal renewal in the justification of the sinner being established, that renewal must now be further described. We affirm that in justification the sinner becomes a partaker of the divine nature and is constituted an adoptive son of God.

By the consortium of the divine nature is not understood that which is had by reason of the hypostatic union, nor that which is had by reason of the reception of the Eucharist; but how it is to be conceived positively cannot yet be explained in this thesis, but will become clearer and clearer in the following theses. One thing, however, must here be noted: there is no transformation into God, as appears from the condemned propositions of Eckhart and Molinos. Eckhart, prop. 10: “We are wholly transformed into God and converted into him; in like manner as in the sacrament the bread is converted into the body of Christ: so I am converted into him, because he works me into his own being, one, not like; by the living God it is true that there is no distinction there”. Prop. 11: “Whatever the Father gave to his only-begotten Son in human nature, all this he gave to me: here I except nothing, neither the union nor the sanctity, but he gave the whole to me as to himself”. Prop. 12: “Whatever Sacred Scripture says of Christ, all this is verified also of every good and divine man”. Prop. 13: “Whatever is proper to the divine nature, all this is proper to the just and divine man; on this account this man does whatever God does, and with God created heaven and earth, and is the begetter of the eternal Word, and God without such a man would not know how to do anything”¹. Molinos, prop. 5: “By doing nothing the soul annihilates itself and returns to its principle and to its origin, which is the essence of God, in which, transformed, it remains and is divinized, and God then remains in himself; for then there are no longer two things united, but one only, and in this way God lives and reigns in us, and the soul annihilates itself in operative being”².

Adoption³ is the assumption of a person outside the family to the rights of a natural son (specifically to the right of inheritance). A person outside is one who is not a natural son. Since of themselves these rights belong to no one but a natural son, adoptive assumption of itself says something not due to the adopted person, something gratuitous. In justification, therefore, there is gratuitously communicated by God to the sinner a right to the divine inheritance, so that that man is truly an adoptive son; but that son does not succeed to the goods of a Father who has died, but in his own time will share these goods with the Father. Since in adoption as it takes place among men the adopter and the adopted are already of the same nature, in divine adoption God the adopter communicates his own nature⁴. Yet formally “to communicate the divine nature” and “to adopt” do not say the same thing. That communication of the divine nature without adoption can be had, indeed in fact is had in Christ the man. But where divine adoption is had, there the divine nature is also communicated. To the question whether divine adoption without the communication of the divine nature can be found at least in another order, it can be answered that no repugnance appears in God's willing to confer on a wayfaring man the right to the heavenly inheritance without communicating to him even in this life the divine nature; in the other life, however, he must confer that without which man could not enter into the inheritance, that is, without which he could not see God intuitively.

The thesis, insofar as it affirms a special consortium of the divine nature and adoption itself, although no explicit definition of this matter is had in its own right, must be said to be taught so clearly in Sacred Scripture and Tradition that it is simply of faith.

THE DOCUMENTS OF THE CHURCH

CONC. TRID. ses. 6, cap. 4, justification is described as “the translation from that state in which man is born a son of the first Adam into the state of grace and of the adoption of sons”⁵. Ch. 7: “that he may be an heir according to the hope of eternal life”⁶. Sess. 5, can. 5: the reborn “have been made beloved sons of God, heirs indeed of God, but co-heirs of Christ”⁷.

Pius V condemned the error of Baius, 42: “The justice by which the ungodly is justified through faith... does not (consist) in any grace of the soul infused, by which man is adopted as a son of God and renewed according to the inner man and made a partaker of the divine nature...”⁸

SACRED SCRIPTURE

Adoptive filiation: the use of the word “sons” alone does not of itself prove the matter; indeed the very term “adoption of sons” in Rom 9, 4 is applied to the Israelite people, and must be explained there in a theocratic sense. But of individuals adoption is spoken only in the strict sense; for this adoption, according to St Paul, includes the right of inheritance together with the natural Son of God. Rom 8, 12-18: Christians have received “the spirit of adoption of sons, in whom we cry: Abba (Father)” (v. 15). Of this filiation the Spirit himself gives testimony to our spirit (v. 16).

“But if sons, also heirs: heirs indeed of God, but co-heirs of Christ” (v. 17). But the condition of actually acquiring this inheritance is: “if nevertheless we suffer with (Christ), that we may be glorified with (Christ)” (v. 17). To this glorification belongs in a special way the glory of the body to be communicated in the resurrection. The revelation of the sons of God is still awaited; so the sons of God themselves also still await what pertains to the perfect effect of this filiation, the glorification of the body. In this sense the Apostle says: “And we ourselves also, having the first-fruits of the Spirit: even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body” (v. 23). — In a similar way the same doctrine is set out in Gal 4, 4-7: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father. Therefore now he is not a servant but a son: and if a son, an heir also through God”. Cf. Eph 1, 5.

Generation: these sons are begotten, are born, of God. Io 1, 12. 13: “he gave them power to become the sons of God, to those... who were born of God”. This St John repeats several times in his first epistle: 1 Io 2, 29; 3, 9; 4, 7; 5, 1. 18. Similarly 1 Petr 1, 3. 23; Iac 1, 18; baptism is the laver of regeneration, Tit 3, 5; cf. Io 3, 5. The same is contained in the use of the phrase τέκνα θεοῦ, both in St John (Io 1, 12; 1 Io 3, 1. 2; 5, 2) and in St Paul (Rom 8, 16. 17. 21; 9, 8; Eph 5, 1). Thus Christ is the first-born among many brethren (Rom 8, 29). Therefore when God makes men his sons, he not only confers certain rights on them, but he begets the sons whom he adopts, that is, he communicates a new life to them, he confers his own nature on them in some special way (for this is to beget), so that they now lead a divine life.

Consortium of the divine nature: this communication of the divine nature is explicitly taught in 2 Petr 1, 4: “by whom he has given us the greatest and most precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature”. These things, if they are considered together with the rest of the doctrine of the New Testament, are easily understood of a communication of the divine nature already made to these wayfarers on earth (not of something still to come), and that physical and real, not merely moral in the sense that we should become conformed to God through good acts. And the text itself not only admits this explanation but altogether suggests and urges it.

THE FATHERS

Adoptive filiation⁹: CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: “Baptized, we are enlightened; enlightened, we are adopted as sons; adopted, we are perfected; perfected, we are made immortal: I, he says, said: you are gods and all sons of the Most High”¹⁰. ST ATHANASIUS: “This is the benignity of God, that those whose maker he is should afterwards become also their father by grace: which comes about when men, once created, as the Apostle says, receive in their hearts the Spirit of his Son crying: Abba, Father. These are they who, having received the Word, have received from him power to become sons of God. Nor can they become sons in any other way, since by their own nature they are creatures, unless they receive his Spirit who is the natural and true Son. That this might come about, the Word was made flesh, that he might make man fit to receive the divinity”¹¹.

ST CYRIL OF JERUSALEM: “If you too have sincere piety, the Holy Spirit descends also into you, and the paternal voice resounds to you from above: not ‘this is my Son’, but ‘this is now become my Son’. For to him alone ‘is’ befits, since in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word; to him ‘is’ befits, because he is always the Son of God; for you it has now become, because you have not the name of son by nature but receive it by adoption”¹². ST BASIL: “Through the Holy Spirit is given the restoration to paradise, the ascent to the kingdom of heaven, the return to the adoption of sons”¹³. ST JOHN CHRYSOSTOM: “The Son, the genuine Son of God, who exists without beginning, suffered to hear himself called the son of David, that he might make you a son of God; he suffered to have a servant for a father, that he might make the Lord a father to you, a servant. Do you see, from the very beginning, what the Gospels are? But if you doubt about your own affairs, be led to believe these things from those which pertain to him. For it is far more difficult, as far as pertains to the human intellect, that God should become man, than that man should be a son of God. When therefore you hear that the Son of God is the son of David and of Abraham, cease now to doubt that you, the son of Adam, are to be a son of God. Nor would he have humbled himself thus in vain and to no purpose, unless he was to exalt us. For he was born according to the flesh, that you might be born according to the spirit; he was born of a woman, that you might cease to be the son of a woman”¹⁴

ST AMBROSE: “Can men then be so loved by God as the Son, in whom the Father was well pleased? He is well pleasing through himself, we through him; for those in whom God beholds his Son according to his image, them he adopts through the Son into the grace of sons, so that, as through the image we are brought to the image, so through the generation of the Son we may be called to adoption. One love, then, is that of nature, eternal; another that of grace”¹⁵

ST AUGUSTINE: “This is the grace of the new testament, which lay hidden in the old, nor yet did it cease to be foretold and announced by shadowing figures, that the soul may know its God and be reborn to him by his grace. For this birth is spiritual, therefore not of bloods, not of the will of man, but of God. This is also called adoption. For we were something before we were sons of God, and we received the benefit of becoming what we were not: as he who is adopted was not yet, before he was adopted, the son of him by whom he is adopted, yet was already one who could be adopted. And from this generation of grace that Son is distinguished, who, when he was the Son of God, came that he might become the son of man, and might grant to us, who were sons of man, to become sons of God”¹⁶. “The only Son of God by nature was made, for us, by mercy the son of man, that we, sons of man by nature, might by him become sons of God by grace... For as through one man sinning we came into so grave an evil, so through one man, and him God, justifying, we shall come to that good so sublime”¹⁷. “It is clear, then, that he called men gods, deified by his grace, not born of his substance. For he justifies who is just through himself, not through another; and he deifies who is God through himself, not by participation in another. But he who justifies, he it is who deifies, because by justifying he makes sons of God. For he gave them power to become sons of God. If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods; but this is the work of grace adopting, not of nature begetting”¹⁸

ST CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA: “We ascend, then, to a supernatural dignity through Christ; but we shall not be sons of God as he is, without distinction, but by the grace by which we imitate him; for he is the genuine Son existing from the Father, but we are adopted sons by his benignity, receiving this as a grace: I said: you are gods and all sons of the Most High. For the created and servile creature is called to supernatural things by the mere nod and will of the Father; but the Son, God and Lord, has the ground of his being God and Son not by a decree of God and the Father, nor only because he willed it, but shining forth from the very substance of the Father, he receives by nature the good proper to his substance”¹⁹

Consortium of the divine nature. ST ATHANASIUS: “We are all said similarly to be partakers through the Spirit of God... If, then, by the communication of the Spirit we are made partakers of the divine nature, no one surely but a madman would say that the Spirit is not of God but of a created nature”²⁰. ST AMBROSE: “Who would dare to say that the Holy Spirit is separated from God the Father and from Christ, when through him we merit to be according to the image and likeness of God, and through him it comes about, as the Apostle Peter said, that we are partakers of the divine nature”²¹. ST CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA: “If (the Spirit) is neither God by nature, nor his own Spirit from God and therefore substantially existing in him, but is different from him and not remote from the nature of created things, how are we, who are born through him, said to be born of God? For either we shall confess that the evangelist plainly lied, or, if he is truthful and so it is and not otherwise, the Spirit will be God and from God according to nature; by participation in whom, being endowed through faith in Christ, we are both made partakers of the divine nature, and are said to be born of God, and are therefore called gods, not only raised by grace to supernal glory, but now having God dwelling and abiding in us, according to that word of the prophet: I will dwell in them and walk among them”²². ST LEO THE GREAT: “Acknowledge, O Christian, your dignity: and, made a partaker of the divine nature, do not return by a degenerate manner of life to your former vileness”²³.

There can be added from the liturgy: in the preface of the Holy Spirit: “he poured forth the promised Holy Spirit into the sons of adoption”. In the Mass, when water is mixed with the wine: “grant us, through the mystery of this water and wine, to be partakers of his divinity, who deigned to become a partaker of our humanity”.

THE THEOLOGIANS

That the theologians agree in the matter, which is contained so clearly in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, is clear. But in the further explanation of the consortium of the divine nature and of adoptive filiation not all think exactly the same; but these things, as has already been said above, must be set out later (in the third section). From what has been brought forward from Sacred Scripture and from the holy Fathers, it already appears that the communication of the divine nature cannot be reduced to a mere metaphor, or to a moral participation which would consist only in this, that the justified man ought to render himself conformed by good acts to God, who by his nature works only what is good and holy; but without doubt there must be asserted a physical participation of the divine nature, which consists at least in part in a certain special assimilation to God, or likeness with God. For this is an idea so frequent among the holy Fathers in this matter, and recurring again and again among the theologians, that it cannot be passed over in oblivion in explaining the participation of the divine nature. But what this likeness is, and whether the whole participation of the divine nature is contained in it alone, must be explained later.