The Glory of God's Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas by Daria Spezzano (review)

Recent scholarship on deification has been ecumenical. Far from being an exclusively Eastern doctrine, it arguably plays a central role in Western theology. Anna Williams argued, for example, that Thomas Aquinas was much closer to Gregory Palamas than traditionally supposed, even suggesting that his mature thought was moving toward the Eastern view that grace is fundamentally uncreated.¹ Daria Spezzano's new book, by contrast—originally her dissertation at Notre Dame directed by Joseph Wawrykow—focuses exclusively on Thomas's mature account of deification. Since, by Spezzano's lights, Thomas understands deification as salvation, the bulk of the book is spent summarizing sundry soteriological topics.

After the introduction, chapter 1 discusses the doctrine of God, covering participation, the divine ideas, predestination, the beatific vision, and the divine missions. Chapter 2 discusses the image of God in connection with the divine missions. Human action, grace and free will, and sanctifying grace are covered in chapter 3. Chapter 4 focuses on Christology, including the Incarnation and the grace of Christ. Chapter 5 summarizes Thomas's questions on charity, and chapter 6 summarizes his view of wisdom and charity in connection with Christ's Passion and priesthood, as well as our deification through the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Chapter 7 recapitulates the book, and two appendices briefly cover the history of deification and the question of created grace, respectively.

Chapter 1 begins with the basics of Thomas's view of nature and grace. Human beings are created for an end beyond their grasp. We must be transformed by grace and receive the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love to advance to eternal life, participation in God. At the most basic level, participation is when "something receives in a particular fashion what belongs to another in universal or total fashion" (24). All creatures participate in God to some extent, as God is being itself. Rational creatures participate according to intellect and reason and are thus capable of "true deification" (30), culminating in the beatific vision. In the vision—our ultimate deiformity—the essence of God becomes the intelligible form by which we know God, thus making us like God, who knows himself through himself.

Most of chapter 2 is a commentary on Summa Theologiae [ST] I, q. 93, on the image of God. All creatures bear at least a trace of God, but rational creatures are properly said to "image" God, as they share a specific likeness of God's intellectual nature. Thomas conceives the image in Trinitarian terms. The rational creature's intellectual production of the word and love represent the eternal generation of the Word and Spiration of the Holy Spirit. Spezzano concludes by linking the image to Thomas's treatment of the divine missions: the divine persons are sent to human beings to lead them to the beatific vision. To receive the persons in time, however, we must be transformed by grace.

Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of human action and the relation between grace and free will. All creatures have secondary causal powers and their actions are simultaneously caused by God, the primary cause; rational creatures have free will and are directed by providence. No creature has the power to reach beatitude unless God gives the grace of the Holy Spirit. Spezzano deftly explains Thomas's view of sanctifying grace in the second half of chapter 3 (129–51), which can be read in conjunction with appendix B, on created grace. These are two of the most helpful sections of the book. Spezzano's treatment of Thomas's views goes a long way toward dispelling the objection that, if grace is created, deification is impossible. Created grace, as the intermediary between creature and creator, blocks genuine union with God. Instead (so the objection goes), we should say with the Orthodox tradition that grace is uncreated. Spezzano shows that, pace Williams, the vocabulary of created grace is found in Thomas's...