De gratia Redemptoris

In justification, besides sanctifying grace, the virtues of faith, hope and charity are infused. These virtues are, like sanctifying grace, entities physically permanent, qualities, “infused habits”. Now since acquired natural habits presuppose a power and confer on the subject both an inclination to act and an easier power, the infused virtues, habits infused by God, give the very power together with some inclination to act¹. These habits are immediately seated in the powers of the soul: faith in the intellect, hope and charity in the will. Faith and hope can remain in a man after sin, in whom sanctifying grace is no longer present; whence it is clear that they are really distinct from sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace, however, and charity are either both present or both absent; they are never so separated that one is present in the soul without the other. Hence the question is rightly asked whether sanctifying grace and charity are really identical. On this matter there is controversy among theologians. The real distinction is denied by Scotus and the Scotists, Durandus, Catharinus, Lainez, Salmerón, Bellarmine, Lessius; it is affirmed by St Thomas, Suárez, Gregory of Valencia, Tanner, Ripalda, and this opinion is now altogether the more common. All, however, concede that their opinion does not exceed probability.

If grace and charity are identical, grace has the will for its immediate subject, and therefore perfects the will immediately, and is consequently a habit proximately operative. Those, however, who say that grace and charity are really distinct hold the very substance of the soul as the immediate subject of grace, and grace is not a habit immediately operative but, as is commonly said, an entitative habit, or substantial habit, immediately perfecting the very substance of the soul, the nature of the soul. Just as in the order of natural generation nature is communicated together with the powers by which the subject is apt to elicit acts in the order corresponding to that nature, so in this opinion, in regeneration, nature is communicated, namely sanctifying grace itself, together with the powers for acts corresponding to the order of this new nature, the infused virtues. From this it appears that this question can be raised not only by those who hold that the powers of the soul are really distinct from its substance, but also by those who would deny such a distinction. For if grace and charity are identical, they attribute the same perfection to the soul; but if they are really distinct, grace and charity confer one perfection and another.

The question cannot be decided from Sacred Scripture, nor from the Fathers, nor from the councils². But the reasoning of St Thomas³ makes the opinion affirming the real distinction altogether more probable, and it adds weight that this opinion is now the more common.

Pesch⁴ expounds this reasoning as follows: “Nature is prior to the habits perfecting nature; the principle by which a thing is constituted in being is prior to that by which it is proximately disposed to act. But charity is an operative habit disposing man to love God supernaturally. Therefore it presupposes a higher nature already given, which is given through sanctifying grace. It must not indeed be forgotten that the names of habits and of nature are to be applied to the natural and the supernatural order not univocally but analogically; for grace too, which gives the higher nature, is an accident perfecting the natural essence, and the supernatural habits are other accidents which give not facility but the power of acting supernaturally; whence it can even happen that operative accidents exist in a subject in which grace is lacking, as is clear of faith and hope, because they are not in sanctifying grace as in their subject but in the natural powers. Nor therefore is the argument to be conceived as though, from the physical nature of things, the supernatural habits no less presuppose grace than the natural powers and habits presuppose nature. The force of the argument is rather moral, because it does not befit the divine wisdom to infuse supernatural operative accidents before it has given man a supernatural nature, if one may so speak. For man ought to be a friend of God before he acts as a friend of God”.