Creation ad imaginem Dei: The Obediential Potency of the Human Person to Grace and Glory

Introduction

This essay attempts to show that three things often thought to be opposed—the dynamism, relationality, and teleology of the image of God in man toward grace and glory; a strict distinction between nature and grace; and the doctrine that man has an obediential potency to friendship with God and supernatural beatitude—are not only not opposed but are actually necessarily related elements of a coherent and true theological synthesis.

To do this requires, first, a few words about the immateriality of the rational soul. Second, I will consider St. Thomas’s teaching that the imago dei in man principally consists in the intellectual nature, describing and responding to criticism of this view as insufficiently relational and separated from grace. Third, I will argue that what constitutes the obediential potency for grace and glory in man is in fact what principally constitutes the imago dei—namely, the intellectual nature itself. Here too, I will offer brief responses to criticisms reducing obediential potency merely to miraculous transformation or asserting that intrinsically supernatural beatitude is already the natural end, that man has a strongly unconditional natural desire for supernatural beatitude and, so, there is no need for an obediential potency for grace and glory. Finally, I will conclude by observing that St. Thomas’s theological synthesis of nature and grace provides the strongest possible foundation for the relational dynamism of the imago dei in man and that this synthesis establishes simultaneously the initial dignity of man as capable of natural and supernatural good and the greater perfection of acquired dignity that consists in achieving such good.

This is a quick march through a vast territory, rather than a complete account of any one point, and so it is more like a cavalry ride around the field of battle than like a complete campaign. But I hope my remarks may at least indicate the elements that enter into Thomas’s account and how they are generally interrelated.

The Positive Immateriality of the Rational Soul

It has always been true that materialism as such constitutes one of the errors simply incompatible with Roman Catholic faith. It is defined Catholic teaching that the soul is spiritual and immortal and that God is pure spirit.

Likewise, it is progressively clearer throughout the modern epoch that the metaphysical reliance on material evolution as sufficient to explain the differentiated forms of being—and in particular to explain the cognitive and volitional aspects of human life—is incoherent. The argument against any type of thoroughgoing materialism certainly has a foundation in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, but it traces back to classical Greek philosophy and has been articulated in varied forms by modern authors such as C. S. Lewis (e.g., in Miracles) or contemporaries such as Thomas Nagel (in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False).

Were intellectual objectivity to be considered merely a material accident of evolution, we could have no sufficient warrant for holding the adequation of mind and reality that is required even for the truth of evolutionary theory. This is manifest in many ways. First, for example, is the commonplace argument that intellectual activity proceeds through universal concepts and applies to being as such universally, such that a wholly physicalist account must, by its very nature, somehow square the circle and reduce universality to physical particularity. What is at stake here is not only the universal mode of conceptual knowledge—already something irreducible to physical particularity and, so, irreducible to neurophysiology—but also, and even more critically, the adequation or conformability of mind to being.

As St. Thomas puts it, “as sound is the first audible, being is the first intelligible.”¹ Thus, any denial that being is universally intelligible leaves precisely nothing intelligible, since there is nothing outside of being. The very principle of non-contradiction in its chief and metaphysical formulation—that being is not nonbeing—is, according to St. Thomas, the basis for the logical principle of non-contradiction that one does not speak meaningfully in...