The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

The Person of the Holy Spirit 253
him rightly. This is why only the rational creature can ‘possess’ a divine person. But
she cannot come to this by her own resources: so it must be given to her from above;
for we say that something is given to us that we have from someone else.137
This central analysis takes us to the heart of Trinitarian theology. We will
come back later to the ideas of the indwelling of the divine persons and the
image of the Trinity in human beings; their signiWcance is already clear. Along
with angels, human beings alone can know and love God. The capacity for
this knowledge and love is written into human nature at creation, as the
divine image: but it cannot achieve union with God himself, that is, true
knowledge and right love, without a gift. This gift is the grace through which a
human being, made to the image of the Triune God, is lifted right up to
objective participation in the procession of the Word and of Love.138 The
elevation in which grace consists can be explained by the gift of the divine
person himself, the giving of the Holy Spirit in person. The question of the
relationship between ‘created grace’ and ‘uncreated grace’ is centred here, at
the heart of the investigation of the person of the Holy Spirit.
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 conXation 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 sanctiWcation,
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.139 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 conXation of the
divine and the human nature).140 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
137 ST I, q. 38, a. 1.
138 Cf. ST I, q. 93: Thomas explains here the diVerent degrees taken by the image of God in
human beings.
139 ST I–II, q. 112, a. 1.
140 ‘God gives life to the soul, not as a formal cause but as an eYcient cause’ (De veritate, q. 27,
a. 1, ad 1).