A corrective on Aquinas worth heeding

We must now take the measure of and correct de Lubac’s understanding of Aquinas on grace. “in biblical poetry . . . the superabundance of God forbids us to restrict ourselves to the model of an anthropology of the open structure (‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord’), without subordinating this [open anthropology] to the pathetic vision of a God of surprise and rupture who puts the love of self to death”; who puts to death at least the hypothesis according to which prelapsarian Adam ‘was able not to sin’ [(qui en tue au moins l’hypothèse chez celui-là même que «a pu ne pas pécher»)] (to take up the formula of Augustine). “For, as we would maintain, the relation of divinization to creation isn’t just a dynamic relation in Thomas, and wouldn’t have been either, not even before the introduction of anthropological disorder and the economy of redemption. Even under the best of circumstances, when man has not [yet] fallen and, abiding still in grace, preserves his ordination to God, Thomistic divination stands in a pathetic relation to creation, a relation not of continuity but of rupture, not of proportion, but of the [infinite] abyss; a relation much sharper than that described by de Lubac, . . . who, in the Petite catéchèse sur nature et grâce, sets it over against the thought of Saint Augustine:

This is not the place to go into the lengthy debates on the history of the differing positions adopted by the two great Latin Doctors of grace, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. We might merely observe that the most usual difference between them, an essential difference but not a contradiction, arises because St. Thomas frequently begins by considering human nature as such in the abstract, independent of sin and its consequences; whereas St. Augustine takes as his starting pont the experience of sinful man. While fully recognizing the transcendence of the supernatural, St. Thomas (giving perhaps a somewhat too facile interpretation of the fecisti nos ad Te of St. Augustine) 'considers it as a completion [(achèvement)] bestowed on nature in the direction towards which its active inclinations already tended' [(trans. Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 122-123, quoting (there at the end) Guy de Broglie, S.J.)].

“Without contesting this reading of Saint Thomas in its every respect, we feel ourselves obliged to say that Thomistic reflection on the sin of the angel placed this completion [(achèvement)], considered in its formality--this fulfillment [(accomplissement)] of every spiritual creature--in the renunciation that it must make of considering itself its own end. Now, this renunciation, which refuses to countenance an unchecked pride [(un orgueil disponible)], is according to Thomas a moral act of tremendous severity, a decision as productive of complete disorientation as the God [(un décision vertigineuse autant que le Dieu)] who, by his irruption, instigates and determines it. Let us borrow from de Lubac here his own phraseology, used of Rupert of Deutz in his Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore: the history of salvation as Aquinas conceives of it is at every stage ‘not evolutionary but agonistic’. It may well be that humility in the free and intelligent creature produces acts that complete it ‘along the very lines sketched out already by its active inclinations’. . . . But not less than in Augustine, and in my opinion much more, . . . this act of renunciation is [in Saint Thomas] a death to one’s self.
“About [even] the very best of circumstances, the graced state of original justice, it is necessary to say that the meritorious renunciation of one’s own will and obedience to the precepts of God is the dynamic place where nature is itself, becomes itself, by being [completely] oblivious to [(s'ignorant)] itself. And this refusal to pay any heed [(ignorance)], this non-consideration, is crucifying. Similarly, the Annunciation is not the pacific scene that we tend to think. It is a pathetic scene over which there looms the shadow of an intimate death [to self]. . . .
“In brief, the supernatural object presented to the [open] structure of created spirit for either receipt-in-faith or rejection is an object that determines a theologal history, a history neither completely historienne nor completely natural, but a history [that is] very real [(ni tout à fait une histoire historienne et encore moins une histoire naturelle, mais une histoire bien réelle)]. This object set before the act of faith assisted by grace is therefore an opening structure, a structure that opens angelic and human nature up, in a manner analogous to the opening up of the earth by the plow, or the breaking up of ice by the bow of an icebreaker: ‘The only depths that are not at all deceitful, those that the Spirit himself hollows out in man, suppose the terrain of the faith common [to all]’, . . . for the objectivity of faith is the fit instrument under the action of which the intellect and will of man are turned up [like soil], aerated, reformed.”

Ph. Vallin, “Henri de Lubac et Saint Thomas d’Aquin: ouverture et structure en théologie,” Revue des sciences reigieuses 77, no. 2 (2003): 232-234, somewhat loosely rendered.

Profession a necessary (if hardly sufficient) condition

"when the Scripture speaks of Christian practice as the best evidence to others of the sincerity and truth of grace, a profession of Christianity is not excluded but supposed."

Jonathan Edwards, The religious affections, pt. 3, sec. 12.1 ((Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986 [1961]), 332), italics mine.