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

384 Missions
and so forth. It is by living in human beings that God makes each of them
his dwelling place and temple. In his commentary on the Wrst letter to the
Corinthians, St Thomas sums up his teaching on this in a single, terse
formula: ‘God dwells in human beings through the faith which operates by
charity.’112 This is the conclusion the theologian was after. Only sanctifying
grace, as the source of faith and charity, aVects and explains the mission or
temporal procession of the divine persons. In human beings, grace is the root
or the condition of the possibility of receiving the divine persons. Commenting
on John 14.23, Thomas remarks that,
God is said to come to someone because he is there in a new way, in a way he had not
been before, that is, by the eVect of his grace. It is by this eVect of grace that he makes
us approach him.113
In his reXections on the general notion of ‘mission’, Thomas had underlined
that fact that the divine person is not only sent, but given, and given in
order to be possessed. Here again, only gifts of sanctifying grace make sense of
the donation of the divine person:
In the same way, one says that we ‘possess’ that which we can freely enjoy. And one can
only enjoy a divine person by reason of sanctifying grace.114
This brings us back to the explanation given in the Sentence commentary,
and which had already been formulated in Bonaventure’s own commentary
and in the Summa of Alexander of Hales.115 The recipient of the missions of
Son and Spirit ‘enjoys’ the divine persons themselves. And this ‘fruition’ is
Everyman’s blessedness: union with God. The theme of fruition showcases the
focal place of charity and of union with God as our beatifying end, for
‘fruition touches on the love or delectation which one experiences at the
ultimate term of his journey, which is his end’.116 Fruition will achieve its
perfection when the Wnal end has been achieved in its fullness. In their pilgrim
condition on earth, human beings only receive this fruition imperfectly,
‘because of the imperfect way in which the end is possessed’. But one can
properly speak of ‘fruition’, since the ultimate end is really possessed, in an
inchoate way.117 St Thomas clearly conceives this enjoyment in the light of the
divinizing acts of the knowledge and love of God.
112 In 1 Cor. 3.16 (no. 172).
113 In Ioan. 14.32 (no. 1944). 114 ST I, q. 43, a. 3.
115 Summa fratris Alexandri, Book I (ed. Quaracchi, vol. 1), nos. 511–512. Bonaventure,
I Sent. d. 14, a. 2, q. 1; d. 15, p. 2, a. un., q. 1.
116 ST II-II, q. 11, a. 1.
117 ST II-II, q. 11, a. 4; cf. ad 2.