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.Thomas Aquinas.In speaking of grace as a form, a way has beenfound to speak of grace in relationship to nature that recognizesdivine activity without negating human freedom.In his early work Grace and Freedom, Lonergan traced the entranceof Aristotelian thought through the early scholastics, ultimatelyshowing both the advances that Thomas s synthesis representedover his medieval predecessors and the subtle recapitulation of theAugustinian nuptial relationship, which the saint translated fromhistory into nature.The nuptial relationship demands that twodistinct subjects engage the other.Lonergan credits Aquinas with asynthesis that doesn t allow the autonomy of the human subject to besubsumed by the activity of the divine.In the commentary on the Sentences, then, the problem of remedyinghuman deWciency is met by considering the alternatives of external inter-vention and internal change.Either the rule of rectitude, divine wisdom,intervenes whenever man is about to act; or else that rule somehow becomesthe inherent form of the potency to be regulated.But the former solution isunsatisfactory: interference is always a species of violence, and though, nodoubt, divine interference would make man s operation proper, it wouldleave man himself just as bad as he had been.Lonergan notes that Aquinas takes up the vocabulary of Aristotle,with all its emphasis upon nature, and yet manages to make of naturesomething which is responsive to historical activity, which is to say,to the actual entrance of the divine into the world:On the other hand, if one examines the nature of habits and dispositions,one Wnds that they constitute precisely the type of internal change required:they make the external rule of right action the internal form of the faculty soperation.A disposition is such a form in its incipient stages, when it is notwell established and may easily be lost.A habit is such a form brought toperfection and, as it were, grafted on nature.For habits cling to us as doesnature; they give operation the spontaneity and the delight characteristic of The Dynamic Personalism of Aquinas 91natural action; they make arts and skills as unimpeded and free as the use ofone s own possessions.(Lonergan 2000: 45)30When the formal causality of grace is eclipsed, one is left with aneYcient causality that seems repugnant on two levels.It inadequatelyrepresents human freedom, and it seems to make God an actorwithin the world, rather than a formal cause that orients the worldto itself.Stebbins argues that Lonergan correctly interprets Aquinason form in a manner that helps to clarify the causality of grace.AsLonergan reads him, Aquinas does not conceive of form as theeYcient cause of operation since form stands to operation as potencyto act; an operation as received perfection is, to use his shorthand, apati (an operation and eVect in the sense that it limits both operationand any consequent eVect to a given species).Thus, the Avicennistand Aristotelian modes of expression are compatible with one an-other: form is both a principle (but not an eYcient cause) of oper-ation and consequent eVect, and passive or receptive potency withrespect to operation. One might say that a form delineates an area ofoperation, a venue of being.A human being and a dog share a formthat involves the capacity to see.A rock, which lacks the same form,does not engage in the activity.Yet simply possessing the form doesnot mean that one is currently seeing anything.One might be asleep.For Aquinas the form must be moved into operation through theactivity of an agent.Thus in considering the formal causality of grace in the world, onecan assert that grace alone does nothing.Grace is our apperception ofa noetic unity, a unique form, a way of seeing elements within theworld as ordered toward the activity of God.And, as Lonerganinsists, one can always fail to perceive the form.One can, of course,speak of the eYcient causality of grace, and faith demands that onedoes so.Here one is, theologically speaking, stepping out of the world30 Thomas teaches that we only know the nature of the intellect through its acts.ST I q.87 a.1. [I]t is clear that the intellect, so far as it knows material things, doesnot know save what is in act: and hence it does not know primary matter except asproportionate to form.Therefore in its essence the human mind is potentiallyunderstanding.Hence it has in itself the power to understand, but not to beunderstood, except as it is made actual. One could say that Thomas constructs thestability of human nature upon its ability to unite the transitory, that which we callhistory. 92 The Dynamic Personalism of Aquinasto assert that this act of perception, and the virtuous acts that mayfollow in response to it, are the result of God s activity vis-à-vis theworld.Paradoxically, Luther, who so acutely perceived grace as activewithin his life, when it came to Aristotelian metaphysics, chose toemphasize the eYcient causality of grace in a manner that precludedhuman freedom.Either God is active or we are.Two diVerentlanguage games are in play; Luther championed one, formal causal-ity, but sought to explain it by way of the other, eYcient.Thedirection of eYcient causality moves from God to us, at least as thelanguage game allows us to envision that perspective, not actuallystanding on the divine side of the movement.The other, equally vitallanguage game of formal causality is our way of speaking of grace aswe experience it, in our noetic movement from a myriad of elementsto a form that draws them into itself.Emphasizing the formalcausality of grace, one grants that grace is itself, as least as it concernsus, an act of perception.We see a noetic pattern that reveals thepresence of God.Aquinas: Inasmuch as grace is a certain accidentalquality, it does not act upon the soul eYciently, but formally, aswhiteness makes a surface white (ST I II, q.111 a.1 c).It is after this act of perception that the fundamental option ofthe Western religious experience asserts itself.All of the activity thatwe call the world comes from the creative impulse of God.There-fore, religiously speaking, God is the eYcient cause of all that existsin its act of existence.One must then correctly insist that God isthe eYcient cause of grace within us, and Aquinas does. God doesnot justify us without ourselves, because whilst we are being jus-tiWed we consent to God s justiWcation by a movement of our free-will.Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, butthe eVect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace (ST I II,q.111 a.2 c)
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