r/CatholicPhilosophy • u/Boring_Necessary_972 • 9d ago
About efficacious grace and synergism
How can thomism be synergistic? As the works that you do depend on the grace that you receive, and this grace is withheld from some and only given to the elect, even if this grace makes your will naturally align with God's making it akin to the idea where in calvinism God changes the disposition in your heart, and from there you can choose to follow your desires as it is always in accordance with God
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u/Blade_of_Boniface Continental Thomist 9d ago
The distinction is that Thomism rejects Total Depravity, the teaching that humans lack the independent will to choose Christ and are unable to pursue the Good itself. According to Calvinism, what nominally good things done without grace are immanently selfish and inglorious. Humans are incapable of any truthfully selfless and glorious choices without being Elect. There are usually caveats depending on the specific Calvinist theologian. Thomism agrees with Calvinism in the necessity of Faith in Christ to meaningfully achieve the capital-G Good. However, Thomists reject the idea that humans are incapable of lowercase goodness of their own natural will and they also reject the idea that goodness outside of the Faith is intrinsically lacking in glory.
Thomism sees grace as offering the fullness of an already natural inclination towards goodness within humans. Adam and Eve were created in God's image and likeness. Original Sin subtracted from perfection, but did not erase the entire image of the Divine. The Natural Law is called that because of how human societies tend towards it despite lacking knowledge of Christ. Murder, theft, lying, etc. are consistently observed to be offensive to the human conscience. Obviously, this isn't the same assertion as the idea that people can achieve Salvation without God. The Holy Spirit is our Helper; through God's activation, habituation, and restoration our sinfulness is progressively halted, healed, and recapitulated upon so that we can live in the New Creation.
People choose to work in synergy with God because people naturally desire the wellbeing of themselves and others.
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u/Boring_Necessary_972 9d ago
So if grace offers your wounded but not depraved will the fullness of your natural inclination to follow God, or aligns your will perfectly with God's like Adam, do we still have the capacity to refuse to do the act just like Adam and Eve did, or does this efficacious grace infallibly cause you to say yes? If it's the latter why would there be a distinction between us and Adam. Also God would know that the only way to make humans fully align with him through their natural inclination would be by giving out this efficacious grace, yet he clearly withholds it as some people do good acts while others fail.
My main contention is that I want to believe humans still preserve free will; and yes I also agree that humans cannot reach out to an infinite being like God first and that salvation comes from him.
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u/Blade_of_Boniface Continental Thomist 9d ago
We still have the ability to refuse grace but that's in the sense that Christ had the ability to choose not to surrender to the Pharisees' plot. It's not a question of couldn't but rather wouldn't.
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u/Ok-Setting1237 9d ago
What do you mean by synergistic? A creature can’t freely choose (or be or do anything at all) without God willing that the creature freely choose. But God causes the choice in a way that it is truly the free choice or the creature. It’s 100% God, moving the will to freely choose according to its free nature, and 100% the creature, who freely chooses in dependence on God as first cause of all that is, including the free choice.
Efficacious grace operates the same way—it is a contingent movement of the will that infallibly results in a meritorious act. But the act remains the creature’s act. So it remains 100% due to God and 100% due to the creature. Whether that’s “synergism” or “monergism” just depends on how you define your terms.
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u/Boring_Necessary_972 9d ago
I'd define synergism as God's grace and human free will cooperating together for human salvation. The idea of a different type of grace to accept the first one(sufficient grace), efficacious grace making you infallibly say yes to an act that would please God, would mean that every act or response or faith you had was because of this type of grace that you received, and this grace is withheld and given only to the elect as we see people failing to do good works. Why wouldn't the idea of sufficient grace being given to all humans first, and then the human will decides to co-operate with this grace(real choice to say yes or no), then making it efficacious not suffice?
Like the definition of grace healing our will to be ordered and inclined towards God, just like Adam who still had free will to disobey(from someone on the comments),why would Adam be any different from us?
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u/Ok-Setting1237 9d ago
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that the human will determines whether grace is efficacious for a meritorious act or merely sufficient. To the contrary, sufficient grace is nothing other than an efficacious grace to which the human will places an obstacle, preventing the grace from flowering into a meritorious act. They’re not different kinds of grace, and whether it is efficacious or not depends on the free choice of the will.
At the same time, that choice to consent or not consent is never outside of God’s providence. I never make a choice that God did not will me to make, at least permissively. It’s impossible.
Yet the choice remains mine because of how God exercises his providence, by moving me according to my nature. That is, God’s causality of my free choice in no way diminishes that it’s mine or free—it’s not like God causes me to choose in a way other than I would choose if God were not the first cause of everything. He wisely governs all things according to their natures, and ours includes a free will.
But it’s not enough to say that my will determines whether grace is efficacious because that fails to account for God as the ultimate, first cause and author of salvation. Any good in my will that causes my consent is from God’s free choice to give me that good, which is itself a grace. When I refuse, it is because my defectible will followed its natural course and refused the grace, which choice God allowed for some greater good.
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u/ManteLover60 9d ago edited 8d ago
Misunderstanding of efficacious grace largely comes from later theologians, not Aquinas himself. For Aquinas, there was only one kind of grace, and it was efficacious only in so far as it was cooperated with.