Charism and Institution in Aquinas

CHARISM AND INSTITUTION IN AQUINAS IN THE YEARS approaching the Second Vatican Council the great Dominican Yves Cougar spoke of one of the difficulties of the generation as a false mystique among many Christians-" The notion of a complete identification of God's will with the institutional form of authority." 1 It is one of the blessings of the Catholic community that, in large part, it has moved away from that notion. Even some Protestants, anxious over the loosening of the social fabric, occasionally echo the misgivings of those Catholics who lament this change; they ask why so effective a theology of authority has been abandoned . The fact is, of course, that a new generation of Catholics has enlivened its awareness of a variously manifested charismatic presence of the Spirit in its midst. We measure our progress in the valuing of charisms only in terms of recent history because it would be enough to read St. Thomas Aquinas on the relation of charism to the institutional form of authority to become aware that, in some measure, our finest contemporary insights are matched in his vision. What differences there are can help us assess the strengths and the perils of today's ruling views. There are differences, of course. One searches in vain for Thomistic texts on the Church as institution. Discussions on law, obedience, grace, the Incarnation, or the Sacraments would be the appropriate contexts; but these do not yield the conception familiar to us as the institutional Church, such as gained currency in the De Ecclesia treatises which entered the literary tradition of theology as a reaction to the Gallicanism of the early fourteenth century: And yet, the mystery of the Church 1 " The Historical Development of Authority in the Church," Problems of Authority, ed. John M. Todd, (Baltimore: Helicon, 196:'!), pp. 119-56, at p. 14J. 2 Yves Cougar, Lay People in the Chmch (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1957), p. 37. 723 724 EMERO STIElGMAN is at the heart of Thomas's thought. Charism, too, is not a Thomistic term; we read, instead, of gratiae gratis datae (gratuitous graces) . Both authority in the Church and gratia gratis data are treated extensively in the Summa Theologiae in the final section of the Prima Secundae, qq. 90-114, devoted to consideration of the extrinsic principles of human acts. The extrinsic principle of good actions is God, who moves us to what is good in two ways: by law (qq. 90-108) which directs us and by grace (qq. 109-114) which assists us. We have, then, two treatises, on law and on grace. I. On law (institution) . Rather than envision the Church as a kind of society whose institution and structures are due to divine positive law (ius divinum), St. Thomas reflects upon the nature and exercise of law in general and sets what we call institutional elements in the Church into this context. His inspiration moves away from present-day controversies as to whether these institutional elements are simply developments in accord with a divine commission (ius ecclesiasticum) or whether they are specific posi.,. tive divine laws (ius divinum) .3 He seeks instead, wherever possible, points of convergence between reason and faith-between Aristotle and the Scriptures. Law, he tells us, is something pertaining to reason (I-II, q. 90, a. 1); it is always directed to the common good (a. 2); it is made either by the whole people or by a public personage who has care of the whole people (a. 3). However, besides the natural and the human law it was necessary for the directing of human conduct to have a divine law, for man's eternal end is beyond the proportions of his natural faculty (q. 91, aa. 1-4). The divine law is twofold, the Old Law and the New Law, and this precisely because priesthood has been translated -from the Ievitical priesthood to the priesthood of Christ 3 See, for example, Karl Rahner, " Reflections on the Concept of ' ius divinum ' in Catholic Thought," Theological Investigations, V (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), pp. 219-43. CHARISM AND INSTITUTION IN AQUINAS 725 (a. 5). This New Law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Spirit; as such...