Grace Is the Emotion of Love of God

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2015): 63-88

Grace is the Emotion of Love of God

Edward Collins Vacek, S.J.

God is love…. God lives in us and his love is perfected in us. 1 John 4:8, 12

RACE IS CENTRAL IN CHRISTIANITY. Its meaning, however, is amorphous. In his fine book on grace, Roger Haight writes that grace “is probably the most slippery word in the G Christian vocabulary.”1 John Macquarrie described grace as “one of the most obscure… and confused concepts… in the realm of theology.”2 Not surprisingly, then, Richard McBrien observes that, “The relationship between nature and grace is as fundamental a problem as one will ever come upon in all of Christian theology.”3 Tragi- cally, Christian churches have excommunicated one another over the meaning of grace. As Charles Ryrie writes, the topic of grace is “the watershed that divides Catholicism from Protestantism.”4 Some theologies of grace wrestle primarily with human sinfulness, others empha- size divinization, still others focus on life after death, while more contemporary theologies aim at overcoming social injustice in this life.5

1 Roger Haight, S.J., Experience and Language of Grace (New York: Paulist, 1979), 6; also see Roger Haight, “Sin and Grace,” in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, ed. Francis Schüssler-Fiorenza and John Galvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 375-428; Roger Haight, S.J., Christian Spirituality for Seekers: Reflec- tions on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2012), 134. 2 John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bult- mann (London: SCM, 1965), 153. 3 Richard McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston, 1980), 158-9 (original all in italics). Similarly, James A. Carpenter concludes his book on grace with the comment, “The relation of nature and grace is one of the final mysteries of theology,” Nature and Grace: Toward an Integral Perspective (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 186; also Stephen J. Duffy, The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought (Collegeville: Michael Glazier, 1992), 12. 4 Charles Ryrie, The Grace of God (Chicago: Moody, 1963), 10-11; also Gloria L. Schaab, “Grace: The Strange Attractor in an Evolving Cosmos,” Theoform 43 (2012): 200-1. 5 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007), 548 and 722; Jack Mahoney, Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2011), 66; Robert M. Doran, Psychic Conversion and Theo- logical Foundations: Toward a Reorientation of the Human Sciences (Chico: Scholars Press, 1981), 139-43; Leonardo Boff, Liberating Grace (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), 26- 7; Haight, “Sin and Grace,” 375-428. 64 Edward Vacek

Grace is usually described through a plethora of metaphors. In one brief section, The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers thirty-six metaphors and descriptions of grace.6 By contrast, theologies of grace tend to be speculative exercises, and classical theologians have di- vided grace into over thirty categories.7 Still, even in such technical presentations, there is often little discussion of what grace itself is or how it does so much. In this essay, I will employ an experiential approach to the theology of grace. Diverse metaphors and contrary theological positions on grace each have some basis in experience. The differences and con- flicts are real, but a phenomenological approach suggests there may be more in common than the poetry and polemics admit. I will set aside (not reject) the ontic approach that holds grace is a “physical” reality, an accident of the soul, wholly unlike the affections that unite friends.8 Such theologies describe grace in reified ways. The sacraments automatically “dispense” grace. God “infuses” grace. Certain devotions are “sources” of grace. Twentieth century theologies often spoke of the “production” and “possession” of sanctifying grace.9 In

6 Grace does the following: cleanses; detaches from sin; frees from enslavement; pu- rifies hearts; heals wounds; converts; effects justification; moves toward God; sanctifies; renews; communicates righteousness; accepts righteousness; reconciles; infuses faith, hope, and love; grants obedience to God’s will; helps to die to sin; gives birth to new life; grafts into Christ; makes members of the Body of Christ; adopts as daughters and sons; gifts us; indwells in us; shares in divine life; gives birth to the inner man; sanctifies the whole being; partakes of the divine nature; participates in the life of God and in the grace of Christ and in the intimacy of the Trinity; is the gift of the Holy Spirit; merited by Christ’s passion; conferred in Baptism; imparted by the sacraments; conforms us to the righteousness of God; makes us inwardly just; and has the purpose of both glorifying God and gifting us with eternal life; in Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2000), nos. 1987-95. Simi- larly, in the daily lives of pious Christians, the word is used promiscuously, for example, in “saying grace before meals,” in “aging with grace,” in praying to Mary “full of grace,” in skating gracefully, in receiving the grace of a “vocation,” in asking for the grace of patience, or in being granted the grace of a happy death. Parish posters pro- claim that “Everything Is Grace.” 7 Grace is discussed in at least the following technical categories: sanctifying, actual, habitual, entitative, operative, elevating, indwelling, infused, created, uncreated, pre- venient, sufficient, efficacious, mediate, immediate, cooperative, irresistible, sustaining, justifying, physical, supernatural, natural, external, interior, illuminating, redemptive, saving, forgiving, medicinal, divinizing, and states. Leonardo Boff quotes Karl Barth, “One need hardly believe that Catholics in fact live with a grace so horri- bly fragmented as that of their dogmatic theology,” Boff, Liberating Grace, 5, 18-19, 138, 223; Haight, Experience and Language of Grace, 27-9. 8 Robert W. Gleason, S.J., Grace (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), 67-74. 9 New Advent, Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org/cathen/06701a.htm, 1; David Coffey, Grace: The Gift of the Holy Spirit (Sidney: Catholic Institute of Sidney, 1979), 54-5; James Keenan, S.J., “Virtue, Grace and the Early Revisionists of the Twentieth Century,” Studies in Christian Ethics 23 (2010): 365-8; Peter Fransen, Di- vine Grace and Man, rev. ed. (New York: Mentor-Omega, 1965), 115; Bernard Cooke, “Christian Marriage: Basic Sacrament,” Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 65 these theologies, grace seems to have an off/on quality since one mortal sin removes it, and one reception of the Sacrament of Reconcilia- tion restores it, whereupon further graces can be gained and accumu- lated. Such descriptions hardly suggest that grace is a personal relationship between God and ourselves.10 By experience of grace, I do not refer to esoteric “mystical” mo- ments. Rather, grace usually is present as an implicit part of our ordinary daily living. Grace is like familial love: It affects many of our activities, and it becomes focal in celebrations or in times of significant decisions. In such special times, we may have an “immediate ap- prehension of grace, as it operates in the depths of the human reality.”11 But normally it is the abiding motive for many of our actions. Put provocatively, I will argue that fundamentally grace is an emotion, the emotion of love: God’s love for us, our love for God, and the mutual union that results. I am not arguing the common thesis that out of love God gives us grace. Instead, the primary meaning of grace is love itself. When Christians use grace language, they most commonly refer not to God’s love but to various “gifts” or goods they receive from God. Left tacit in such references is the awareness that God gifts us out of love for us. Thus, my thesis is that this love of God for us is the primary meaning of grace. These other gifts are derivative from this emotion.12 With the great New England divine, Jonathan Edwards, I propose, “True religion in great part consists in holy affections.”13 That is, we

ed. Kieran Scott and Michael Warren, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2007), 72-3; G. H. Joyce, S.J., The Catholic Doctrine of Grace (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1950), 19-21. 10 Stephen J. Duffy, “Experience of Grace,” Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, ed. Declan Marmion and Mary Hines (New York: Cambridge University, 2005), 44; Stephen J. Duffy, “The Early Church Fathers and the Great Councils,” Jesus: One and Many: The Christological Concept of New Testament Authors, ed. Earl Richard and Stephen J. Duffy (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1988): 460; Vincent J. Genovesi, S.J., In Pursuit of Love: Catholic Morality and Human Sexuality, 2nd ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 96. 11 L. Matthew Petillo, “The Theological Problem of Grace and Experience: A Lon- erganian Perspective,” Theological Studies 71 (2010): 608; Taylor, Secular Age, 729- 30. Although the original intention of this essay was not to develop a Lonerganian approach, there is great similarity in my effort to understand and translate medieval metaphysical categories in terms of the experience of love; see, Christiaan Jacobs- Vandegeer, “Sanctifying Grace in a ‘Methodical Theology,’” Theological Studies 68 (2007): 52-6. 12 In ordinary discourse and in dictionaries, the terms “emotion,” “feeling,” “affection,” and sometimes even “affect” or “mood” are used interchangeably, though various authors insist on one term and oppose it to another; see “Emotion,” www.mer- riam-webster.com/medical/emotion. In this essay I am not distinguishing them. 13 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Religious Affections, Vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University, 2009), 95. In a similar vein, Thomas Aquinas wrote that the truth of moral living depends not directly on having one’s intellect apprehend 66 Edward Vacek are religious to the degree that we experience many and deep emotions towards God. We experience from God affirmation, forgiveness, and union. The implication of this point is that, if God’s love cannot in some way be experienced, grace will not transform our personal lives. Grace is received to the degree that it is affectively received. This thesis differs diametrically from the traditional ontological claim that grace enormously changes our lives, but this change cannot itself be experienced. Since grace is said to make no difference in our con- sciousness, it is not surprising that people have little interest in it or in how it makes a difference.14 In developing the thesis that grace is the emotion of love, I must clarify what I mean by love. Few theologies of grace articulate what they mean by love. I begin with a very abstract statement to which I have devoted an entire book: Love is an emotional, affirming participation in the dynamism of the beloved to realize its goodness.15 It would be much more poetic to describe love by saying, “My love is a red, red rose.” It is much more common to describe love in ethical terms, such as “Love means to put the other first.” But those kinds of statements lack generality. Sometimes our love is a cramped and clut- tered backyard, and often, out of self-love, we should put ourselves first. I hope to show that the more abstract definition of love illumi- nates the dynamics of grace.

GRACE/LOVE AS PARTICIPATION The strangeness of saying that grace is the emotion of love is due, for the most part, to inadequate ideas about emotions. Some Christians view emotions as obstacles to good living, while others see them as side-shows not deserving of the main stage. Still others restrict emotions to bodily matters and hence think it is impossible for God to have emotions. It may, strictly speaking, be theologically improper to say that God has emotions, but this is true in the sense that it is also improper to say that God speaks, knows, plans, decides, or wills. Still, we need to use such names to understand various aspects of God’s conceptual truths but on decisions in conformity with “right appetite,” Summa Theo- logica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1948), I-II q. 57, a. 5, ad. 3; Juan José Pérez-Soba, “The Truth of Love: A Light to Walk By: Experience, Metaphysics and the Foundation of Morality,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 18 (Summer/Fall 2011): 297-8. 14 Karl Rahner, S.J., Theological Investigations, Vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (Balti- more: Helicon, 1966), 166-8. 15 Edward Collins Vacek, Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC; Georgetown University, 1994). The word “love” is used in a great variety of often conflicting ways, see, e.g., William Mattison, III, “Movements of Love: A Thomistic Perspective on Eros and Agape,” Journal of Moral Theology 1, no. 2 (June 2012): 31-60; especially, Bernard Brady, “Review Essay: Love and Recent Developments in Moral Theology,” Journal of Moral Theology 1, no. 2 (June 2012): 147-76. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 67 involvement with us. In doing so, we imitate Scripture that readily de- picts God’s emotions. I cannot here go into an elaborate theory of emotions. The topic is ever growing among academic researchers.16 Let me make some brief points. Aquinas importantly observed that, while some emotions are primarily biological or psychological, other emotions are spiritual on a level with intellectual activity. We have spiritual emotions, for example, when we feel excitement at the elegance of a mathematical proof or admiration when contemplating some saint’s self-sacrificial commitment to justice.17 Further, emotions need not be momentary flashes. Many emotions such as anger at a past hurt perdure long after the inciting event. They remain in us, ready to be enacted, even when we are occupied with other activities. In addition, emotions are directed at an enormous variety of objects, from pleasure at the taste of water to delight in the smile of a child to awe at God’s grandeur. Some emotions refer to broad objects such as racial hatred or love for the church or despair at the meaninglessness of life. The point here is that we can have enduring spiritual emotions towards God. Like intellectual acts, emotions are ways that we participate in reality. We participate in its value, which can be value in itself or for ourselves or others. For example, we participate affectively when we cheer and scream with a passing Mardi Gras parade. If we were a truck driver trying to get across the parade, we might be bodily closer to the parade than many people, but we would not be affectively participating. The parade would be to us just an obstacle. However, if we get caught up in the excitement, we would affectively and perhaps even behaviorally join in. We would be affectively participating. We are in the parade, and the parade is in us. More than any set of beliefs and behaviors, what unites people and communities are sets of affections.18 The affections that are specifically religious are those that involve us

16 For example, Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2014); Robert C. Roberts, Emo- tions in the Moral Life (New York: Cambridge University, 2013); Ronald De Sousa, Emotional Truth (New York: Oxford University, 2011); Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer- sity, 2009); Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (New York: Cambridge, 2003); Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, Subtlety of Emotions (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000). 17 Summa Theologiae, I-II: 102.6 ad 8, also I-II 22.2; De Veritate, q. 22, a. 5, ad. 8, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer22.htm; Diana Fritz Cates, “Love: A Thomistic Analysis,” Journal of Moral Theology 1, no. 2 (June 2012): 7-25; Arthur Vella, S.J., Love is Acceptance: A Psychological and Theological Investigation of the Mind of St. Thomas Aquinas (Msida, Malta: Maltese Jesuit Province, 1969), 85; Pérez-Soba, “The Truth of Love,” 319, also 298-99, 326; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University, 2001), 59-60. 18 Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion (New York: Ox- ford, 2010); Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., “Orthodoxy Requires Orthopathy: Emotions in Theology,” Horizons 40 (2013): 218-41. 68 Edward Vacek with God, such as awe before the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum or the peaceful sense that “All shall be well.”19 Emotions are central among the ways for a person to participate in the lives of other persons. In addition to thinking their thoughts with them, being involved in how they make decisions, and sharing in their tasks, there is, most intimately, feeling what and how they feel. When Jesus says that he is in us and we are in him (John 14:23; 17:21-23), he is not saying that he is physically inside his disciples. In the interpretation I am offering, his affections are united with us, and ours are with him. In this affective sense, we form one mystical body with him (Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:27). To be one in spirit with God (1 Cor 6:17) does not refer to a fusion of substances; instead, as Aquinas observes, it is a union of affections between lover and beloved.20 To speak of grace as “a permanent created gift inhering in the soul”21 misleads if it is taken that this gift is some kind of “thing” implanted or infused in the soul. Using such ontic or thing-like categories might be permissi- ble, Karl Rahner notes, but only as a way of insisting on the reality of grace.22 Rather, the experience of grace is the experience of divine love for and in our self and the transformation that this love causes. God’s love for us means that God affectively unites with our life, and our act of love for God likewise means that we affectively unite with God. In this way, we are in God, and God is in us. In this vein, Aquinas wrote of the way in which one person may be in another “as the known is in the knower and the loved is in the lover.”23 In other words, we bring the beloved into our intellectual and affective life. At another point, however, Aquinas wrote that, while the known is in the knower, the lover instead is in the beloved.24 He changed his mind to point out how affectively we move into the beloved’s life. Thomas was right both times, and what he wrote fits, mu- tatis mutandis, God’s relation to us. This bilateral involvement or participation deserves further elaboration. Jules Toner uses a strange phrase from Dante to explain the movement: When I love you, I “in- you me”… and I also “in-me you.”25 The “in” is affective. Unlike the scholastic tradition, which spoke of grace as a physical or entitative

19 Rudolf Otto, Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1958), 12-40; Julian of Norwich, All Shall be Well: The Showings of Julian of Norwich (Vestal, NY: Anamchara, 2011), 122. 20 Thomas Aquinas, De Caritate, a.1, ad 3, no.10 http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVirtutibus2.htm; Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html. 21 Gleason, Grace, 67-73. 22 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 177. 23 ST, I-II q. 28, a. 2. 24 Coffey, Grace, 12-15. 25 Jules Toner, S.J., Love and Friendship (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette, 2005), 108-9. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 69 change that we could not experience, the change grace makes is personally felt.26 We may become aware that God positively affirms us, for example, when we experience God in a friend’s tender embrace. Or, we may experience God actively resisting our evil attachments, for example, when a passage from Scripture confronts our greed. On such occasions, we become aware that we are significant to God, and this awareness of God’s participation in our lives evokes a desire to participate in God’s life, in other words, to cohere, coordinate, and cooperate with God’s love (1 John 4:19). To grow in grace means affectively and affirmatively uniting with the dynamism of God’s action in us. The emotion of love tends to per- manence, but its process is progressive. The commonly used (and rarely explained) metaphors of going deeper, getting closer, entering more fully, becoming more intimate, and so forth each point to the way God’s love more and more pervades our affections and thoughts. To share in the life of persons involves many aspects, such as learning their narrative, culture, etc. To share God’s life means we listen to the biblical history of God’s involvement with Israel or with Jesus. It means that, through loving Christ, we take on God’s mind and heart. We do so in order to learn what is important to God. As Max Scheler observed, to grasp who persons are, we must grasp their ordo amoris, the structure of their loves and hates.27 This structure forms the core of their identity and is the wellspring out of which their thinking and actions flow. What distresses the beloved, as well as what delights, becomes known through this loving connaturality.28 We share God’s ordo amoris. This connaturality, however, does not mean exact replication. Love for another is union-in-difference. Even as love unites us with the beloved and thus brings about a unity in affections, it also individuates us. We develop our own distinctive capacities, and we become more fully aware how unique we are. If it is God we love, we become ever more aware that we are not God and God is not us, and that God and we each have our extremely different contributions to make to our union. We affirm God as God when we submissively pray, “Thy will be done.” But God, out of love for our own personhood, usually affirms

26 To the contrary, the tradition held that “Man is not merely changed or altered in his ethical or moral relationships to God, he is changed in the order of being itself;” see Gleason, Grace, 70; also, Petillo, “Theological Problem of Grace and Experience,” 603. This way of looking at grace fails to see that how our ethical/moral relationships are in the order of personal being; cf. Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 177; Karl Rahner, S.J., “Grace,” Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi, ed. Karl Rahner, S.J. (New York: Seabury, 1975), 592. 27 Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1973), 98-135; Edward Vacek, S.J., “Personal Growth and the ‘Ordo Amoris’,” Listening 21 (Fall 1986): 197-209. 28 José Noriega, “Eros and Agape in Conjugal Life: The Mystery of Conjugal Char- ity,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 18 (Summer/Fall 2011): 358-9. 70 Edward Vacek our own quasi-independent exercise of mind, heart, and will.29 In effect, God says, “I want you to choose.” In so doing we develop our own unique individuality. Thus, the language of participating in God, of having divine life in us, of sharing in God’s life, or of divinization does not mean that we are gods. A moment’s reflection on our finitude, not to mention our sinfulness, tells us that we are not divine. Divine indwelling means that God is attuned to and engaged in all that is going on in our lives. Who we are and how we live are concerns of God. When we respond, we are “divinized,” not in the sense that we exist in a supernatural entitative state beyond our humanity, but in the sense that we now have been transformed by receiving and participating in God’s own affections.30 Participation involves both unity and difference,31 and Je- sus exclaims, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5). He adds, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9) He then prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (John 17:21).

GRACE/LOVE AS SELF-GIFT Theologians often refer to grace as God’s “self-communication,” God’s “gift of self,” and similar expressions. Usually they do not say or say clearly what they mean by such phrases. Rahner writes: “Grace is God himself, the communication in which he gives himself to man as the divinizing favour which he is himself. Here his work is really himself, since it is he who is imparted.”32 What does it mean to give or communicate or impart a self? How is a work really a person? By giving ourselves to others, we might mean merely to put our body at their disposal, but such a view is too crude even in the sexual realm. We might mean doing a good deed, but such a view is too limited since we can do good for selfish reasons. We might mean servile submission to the will of another (1 Cor 7:22), but there may be no gift in such self-denial. Giving ourselves primarily points to the way we affectively unite with another person. In the love mothers have for their children, we see clear instances of how we live in the lives of those we love. In the first place, she does so by giving her son flesh of her flesh. She devotes considerable parts of her life to nourishing him. She gives him her life.

29 Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., “Discernment within a Mutual Love Relationship with God: A New Theological Foundation,” Theological Studies 74 (2013): 683-710. 30ST, I 8.3 31 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 21-7, 87-106. 32 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 177; Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978), 117-26; Stephen J. Duffy, “Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic Soteriologies,” Pro Ecclesia 9 (Fall 2004): 436; Richard G. Cote, Universal Grace: Myth or Reality? (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1977), 55-59; Rahner, “Grace,” 591. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 71

In the personal realm, she communicates to him her affections and values, her ideas and wisdom, her practices and prospects. That is, she communicates herself. The mother is affected by her son’s tumble down the steps or by his gleaming health report. Even if her son is oblivious or indifferent to her, what happens to him are matters of great concern to her. She gives her heart’s devotion to his well-being and flourishing. She lives in him. How, then, does God give God’s self to us? What experiences suggest this gift? Primarily and originally, God who is Being gives being to us.33 That is, God is the source of our existence. Creation is the initial and most basic meaning of God’s self-gift. Without God, we would literally be nothing. Most of the time we are only minimally aware of this creative and sustaining power of God. Still, we can feel this power when we become aware, sometimes in amazement, that “I exist” or “It is great to be alive.” We may experience this gift in a feeling of absolute dependence. Similarly, the impulse of gratitude we feel for the material and spiritual blessings in our lives points us to the benevolence of God. We experience God sustaining us by providing an enveloping environment that fosters our biological and cultural nourishment. Furthermore, we may feel personally affirmed when we do good, that our efforts to build a better life for ourselves and others seem to have lasting significance.34 As Haight writes, “The awesome infinity of God, which usually suggests the sheer power of being, becomes transformed into personal solicitude.”35 We are strengthened by God’s affective affirmation. We may have a sense that when we do good we are at bottom cooperating with God’s love of us and of creation. So, in the felt meaningfulness of our lives, we feel that we participate in ultimate mystery, which is God. Admittedly, some, perhaps many, people do not seem to have such experiences. They interpret their existence as due to some impersonal force or to just a cosmic anomaly. They interpret their sustaining environment as the product of evolutionary happenstance. They do good and avoid evil, and they acknowledge that it is right to do so, but they feel their actions have no lasting purpose. To those for whom the world seems finally pointless, no amount of positive experience proves that life flows from, with, and toward God. For religious persons, the experience is different. The prompting of our religious tradition urges us to look more deeply, to become gradually aware of our dependence on God for creation and its goods. God is not a distant, impersonal, deist creator. Rather, we experience

33 Roger Haight, S.J., Spirituality Seeking Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014), 48-51; Cates, “Love,” 20; Boff, Liberating Grace, 177. 34 Edward Vacek, S.J., “An Evolving Christian Morality: Eppur si muove,” in From Teilhard to Omega: Co-Creating an Unfinished Universe, ed. Ilia Delio, O.S.F. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014), 152-65. 35 Haight, Spirituality Seeking Theology, 96. 72 Edward Vacek these goods of creation in the context of our relationship with God as ways that God is involved in our lives. That is, we experience the source of these goods “in the mode of free personal intercourse.”36 Our tradition helps us to feel the religious dimension of life. It fosters in us affections that reveal how we belong to Mystery. We belong to the ultimate ground of being, and that ground affirms us. We are grateful not just to “our lucky stars,” but also to Someone who cares for us. We attribute the good we do and the evil we avoid not just to our own moral uprightness, but also to the inspiration that comes from God’s Spirit of love in us. When God communicates God’s self to us, the divine takes on a life in us. God’s self-communication is not a matter of passing on information about God’s self. “Revelation” is sometimes presented in theology as if it were trade-secrets which God shares with some people and not others: “Here are three truths you would otherwise never know.” Rather, revelation is self-revelation. It is a matter of offering to others who we are in a manner that makes us a presence in their life, a presence they can accept, affirm, abuse, or reject. God’s self-offering is an affective commitment through which God wills to be actively affected by and involved with us. God’s self-communication is different from mere self-expression. Sometimes creation or salvation is presented as if it simply was a matter of God expressing God’s goodness or God being faithful to God’s own self. In these theologies, God creates like an artist who wants to express some divine idea but is indifferent whether anyone sees or en- joys the landscape she has painted. If all that God does is express God’s goodness or remain true to God’s self, then God loves no one but God’s own self. We would then be incidental, mere accouterments. Instead, God’s self-communication means that God affectively and affirmatively participates in our lives. God gives us God’s heart. God cannot make us welcome this gift. As long as we exist, we receive the gift of being, but we can damage or destroy or neglect this gift. Or, we can affirm and nourish it. God’s self-communication as affective involvement in our lives can be resisted in far more ways. Here is the realm of spirituality, the realm of the personal relationship that is grace. We can remain oblivious or indifferent to God’s commitment. We can be too dull or too “hard-hearted” to be affected. We can receive God’s offer as mere information, perhaps as one more dogma to be believed. We can resist it because it would upset our cur- rent patterns of loves and hates. Or we can welcome God’s self-invest- ment in our lives and take on the mind and heart and practice of God.37 Grace includes not only God’s self-communication to us, but also our return of love. We give ourselves or communicate ourselves to

36 Rahner, “Grace,” 588; Coffey, Grace, 55-7. 37 Macquarrie, Existentialist Theology, 155-7. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 73

God. Again, what does it mean for us to give ourselves to God? Pri- marily it means that we take on a life outside ourselves in God. We affectively enter God’s life and attune ourselves with God’s affections. So vivified, we do our part to realize God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

GRACE AS RELIGIOUS LOVE The Catholic tradition distinctively proposes the view that “grace perfects nature.”38 This essay is committed to developing this view, with a significant modification. Grace perfects human nature not by adding a supernature, but by evoking and enabling our nature’s capacity for a personal love relationship with God.39 Before considering this position, we might consider two other long-standing Christian views. First, some theologies of grace suggest that grace must replace or be an alternative to nature, since nature is corrupt. The most obvious evidence for this position is the many evils that we humans do, from waging wars to cheating in business to abusing our children. On this evidence all can agree. But this first tradition points to something deeper, namely, godlessness, which is said to be the source of such evils. This is the most fundamental or original meaning of sin. A new form of this “godlessness” is becoming more prominent in our age. For the purposes of this essay, I will call it secularism.40 The secular person lives without any awareness of God. This world and its concerns are the only concerns. Human life is lived apart from a personal relationship with God. Contrary to transcendental Thomism or theologies of ultimate concern, it appears that some people can live without any sense of a transcendent realm or ultimate finality.41 Their secular attitude is: “You make this or that choice, you live well (or poorly), and then you die. That’s it.” Such secular persons live etsi Deus non daretur. They live solely in terms of this life. They are not religious. “Religion” here is used not in the sense of an organized sys- tem of beliefs but in the ancient sense of “bonds between humans and

38 ST, I 1.8 ad 2; Benjamin Peters, “‘Apocalyptic Sectarianism’: The Theology at Work in Catholic Radicals,” Horizons 39 (2012): 223; Stephen J. Duffy, The Dynam- ics of Grace: Perspectives in Theological Anthropology (Collegeville: Michael Gla- zier, 1993), 156; Duffy, Graced Horizon, 13; Duffy, “Experience of Grace,” 46-47; Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 167. 39 This approach is the other (and, I think, better) side of the coin of Karl Rahner’s position that “pure nature” is only a “remainder concept” since we live in an already supernaturalized world. In other words, in Rahner’s view all our experience is supernatural and we do not have any purely natural experience; Theological Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963), 313-14. 40 This meaning is not the same as that of Charles Taylor who focuses on public insti- tutions and practices; Secular Age, 1-4. 41 Jean Porter, “The Desire for Happiness and the Virtues of the Will,” Journal of Moral Theology 3, no. 1 (January 2014): 27-33. 74 Edward Vacek

God or the gods.”42 From a strictly religious viewpoint, this purely this-world living is “sinful.” In Bernard Lonergan’s terms, “Sinfulness… is distinct from moral evil.” Godlessness is not the same as immoral living. The latter refers to issues stressed in intraworldly living, while the former points to a failure to love God with our whole selves.43 We can happily admit that purely secular persons often adequately and even generously fulfill Jesus’s second great commandment. When morality refers to this- worldly goodness, they are often more “moral” than religious persons. To the degree that such purely secular persons exist, nevertheless, they are sinful in the most basic sense: They violate Jesus’s first great commandment. For them, there is no ultimate horizon or concern toward which they are transcending. The problem of secularism derives not from corrupt nature, but from what is missing, namely, the religious dimension of our being. Grace is necessary for that. Second, other theologies, including some standard Catholic authors, suggest that nature is good, but is salvifically impotent. For them, the spiritual life is imagined to be like a two-layer cake, only the bottom layer of which we can taste while only the top layer is nourishing. This tradition concedes that people can naturally do some good, although it tends to claim they cannot do so in a consistent or enduring way. But the acts that are naturally good, it goes on to add, are not salvific. They are just human. This position also has resonance in our lives today. In the experience of many who are trying to live a Christian life, there is daily living and then there are specifically religious activities. They tend to associate grace with the latter. Then, un- fortunately, they are tempted to say that these religious actions are beyond or above human nature, that is, they are supernatural. The logic of this position has led to a spirituality that urges Christians to despise or disregard our natural concerns.44 While I do not think that there is any experiential evidence that religious persons have some sort of separate supernature, the experiential insight underlying this approach is to recognize that there are different dimensions of human life, such as the material, the vegeta- tive, the biological, and so forth. The religious dimension of our lives is higher in value than these this-worldly dimensions. The Judeo- Christian tradition has symbolized this religious priority by encourag-

42 See, Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=religion. 43 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1973), 242-3, 289; Duffy, “Experience of Grace,” 50; Boff, Liberating Grace, 181; Pérez-Soba, “The Truth of Love,” 321-2; Stephen F. Brown, “The Theological Virtue of Faith: An Invitation to an Ecclesial Life of Truth (IIa IIae, qq. 1-16),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2002), 225. 44 ST, I-II q. 61, a. 5; Boff, Liberating Grace, 36, 44. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 75 ing various practices, e.g., animal sacrifices, self-denial, fasting, celi- bacy, and especially prayers and sacraments. Nevertheless, such activities are not above nature, especially since they are practiced by all sorts of human beings throughout the ages. People in all cultures have explicitly religious experience. That is, grace is not beyond human nature. Rather, grace perfects nature. It does not provide a supernature that “builds on nature.” The highest dimension of human nature is to be in a love relationship with God. As will be discussed below, it is necessary that God’s love evoke and enable this religious dimension of our being. If we consent, we experience life with a new horizon, the horizon of being in love with God.45 This horizon fulfills or perfects human nature, analogous to the way that food perfects our biological nature and culture perfects our rational nature. Being human incorporates and goes beyond the material, biological, and psychological capacities of our evolutionary forebearers. It needs to think thoughts. It needs to worship God. Put another way, our nature, as created by God, has the capacity to love God. In Christ’s death and resurrection, Christians discover that human love unto death in fidelity to God also leads to an unpredictably new fulfillment of their nature. Our natural desire either not to cease existing or to live forever is met by God’s eternal love, thereby giving rise to the hope that nature, which evolves into ever new forms, now has possibilities beyond the grave. Personal love for God belongs to the specifically religious dimension of human nature. Personal union with God, however, does not leave the pre-religious dimensions of our nature unaffected. Rather, this religious love sublates our creaturely oriented activities, at once affirming them, relativizing them, and giving them a profound significance. They have the added significance of being a real part of our relationship with God. In principle, they can be as religious as the more explicitly designated religious activities. Any meal can be a Eu- charist. We can find God in all things.46

GRACE/LOVE AND GOODNESS Emotions are important to life because they are our mode of expe- riencing good and evil. The cognitive appraisal role of emotions is a theme that has gained increasing acceptance among psychologists, philosophers, and theologians. Emotions tell us something about the world, neighbors, ourselves, and God. For example, fear tells us that

45 Richard Snyder, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 35; Duffy, “Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic Soteriologies,” 440; Jeremy D. Wilkins, “Grace and Growth: Aquinas, Lonergan, and the Problematic of Habitual Grace,” Theological Studies 72 (2011): 730-2. 46 Bonnie Kent, “Habits and Virtues (Ia Iiae, 11. 49-70),” in Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2002), 121-7; Boff, Lib- erating Grace, 88-89. 76 Edward Vacek something harmful may happen. When we read in the Bible of God’s anger towards idolatry, we feel/learn the evil of disloyalty. Emotions are directed to and thus reveal what is good and what is bad. With conceptual knowledge we participate in “what” an object is, whether this whatness is its essence, such as “human,” or only a conventional description, such as “table.” With emotions we participate in an object’s value or disvalue, whether in itself, for us, or for another.47 Blaise Pascal famously held that the heart has reasons that the reason does not know. The reasons of the head are directed to and depend on “what” things are and their intelligible connections. The reasons of the heart are directed to and depend on the values things have in them- selves or in relation to others. The obstetrician’s reason tells us that the baby is a girl, but a mother’s heart tells us she is precious and “mine.” Like much of our intellectual life, our emotions are highly tradi- tioned and socially constructed. This is why catechizing and evange- lizing are so important. Like other cognitions, our emotions may err. Contrary to a popular expression, there are right and wrong emotions as well as appropriate and inappropriate emotions. Again, this suggests the importance of preaching and teaching but especially of setting a good example.48 Once developed, our structures of loves and hates predetermine and codetermine our experience. They sensitize us to some evils and goods, and not to others.49 When we develop a relationship with God, we allow our mind and heart to be attuned to God’s mind and heart. We see good and evil through God’s own eyes. Doubt- less, we see through a glass darkly (1 Cor 13:12).50 But sensitized by union with God’s love, we are inclined to prize what God prizes and to reject what God rejects. Hence grace changes our experience of the world. Far from being blind, love is necessarily correlated with the good. That means that God cannot love us if we are not, in some sense, good,

47 Vacek, “Orthodoxy Requires Orthopathy,” 218-41; Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 22, a. 5, ad. 8, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer22.htm: “just as truth is proportioned to the understanding, so too is good proportioned to the affection.” Also, ST, I-II 3.8. Aquinas usually describes the will as both being proportioned to the good and electing or choosing the good. Still sometimes for him there is a difference between sheer willing and the kind of deep attachment characteristic of love; see Vella, Love is Acceptance, 124-30; Edward Vacek, S.J., “Passions and Principles,” Milltown Studies 52 (Winter 2003): 67-94. 48 Jean Porter, “Moral Passions: A Thomistic Interpretation of Moral Emotions in Nonhuman and Human Animals,” Journal of Moral Theology 3, no. 2 (June 2014): 7-8; Porter, “The Desire for Happiness,” 23. 49 Wilkins, “Grace and Growth,” 731-2. 50 Cates, “Love,” 10. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 77 whether actually or potentially.51 The primary point of grace is not sinfulness. However, given our sinfulness, God’s love takes the form of mercy, wanting us to be good again. Since God’s love is directed to the good, God’s grace is also social. It is directed to building the great good of relationships, above all with God, but also with groups such as friendships, families, nations, or church communities. This relational value is central to Christianity. We are those whom Christ now calls friends or members of his body. We are loved by God because we have the relational value of being members of Christ’s body. This might be called alien or imputed value, but since we are really related to Christ, it is best understood as part of our religious value. This friendship itself introduces another kind of value, a non-intrinsic value which sometimes is called bestowed value.52 Among the objects we affectively affirm as good, we allow or select some to become special to us. Over and above their intrinsic worth, they have a further value of being chosen. To understand bestowed value, it helps to imagine two identical cars, lockets, or twin persons, and then to imagine choosing one. That one, because of the choice and because of a subsequent, evolving, shared history, becomes special to us, more precious to us than its non-chosen counterpart. Parents, especially adoptive parents, typically try to communicate to each of their children this sense of bestowed value. Each child is affirmed as specially chosen. God establishes this kind of bestowed value through covenanting with us as individuals and as a group. Like Israel, which was least among the nations, God chooses us. We can then experience ourselves as specially chosen daughters or sons of God. Beyond our intrinsic value as human beings, we are adopted daughters and sons.53 What of those theologies of grace that propose that, beneath the muck and mire of our actual selves, there is no pearl of great price?54 Such positions argue that God sees no good in us. In these theologies, grace is said to be God’s willingness not to look at who we really are. In this view, grace is God’s imputation of an alien goodness in view of Christ’s sacrifice. It is alien because we are evil, not really good, and therefore not really loveable. I propose that so-called “alien goodness” is better understood as “bestowed value.” Because of Christ’s relationship with us, we have a goodness that enhances, not replaces, our intrinsic goodness. In short, God’s grace is God’s love for the good that we are and the

51 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 48-9; the opposite is asserted in the classic text by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 67-78 52 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 18-21. 53 Holly Taylor Coolman, “Adoption and the Goods of Birth,” Journal of Moral The- ology 1, no. 2 (2012): 102-5. 54 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 78, 99; Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: The Modern World, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 391. 78 Edward Vacek good we can become. God’s grace is not simply generic, for all human beings. God forms a “special relation” with us. God bestows on us the status of being children of God.

GRACE/LOVE AS EFFECTIVE Like all loves, God’s love is an affirmation of the beloved. It affirms the goodness of the beloved in the direction of its greater full- ness. As we have seen, this goodness may be actual, in which case we are affirmed for who we are. This goodness may be potential, that is, to be realized, in which case God affirms us toward the person we can and should become. Previously we considered what God’s giving of self means. This section considers what difference that affective self- gift makes in us as the beloved. God’s love affects us by changing our affections. For persons, a change in affections is how the deepest life changes occur. The experience of being loved affects us, and it brings change when we consent to unite with its affirming movement toward our own good. Grace/love does not of itself force or physically cause a change in the beloved. Like other emotions, it evokes, points a direction, strengthens, and the like. Emotions have power. When we say to someone “I love you” or “I am angry at you,” we are not merely com- municating information about ourselves. We are evoking or provoking a response. The power of another’s love for us vividly appears when, for example, we are uncertain and then another reassures us. Their confirmation literally strengthens our ability to act. They “en-courage” us. We can feel their affective participation in our own dynamic tendencies. At other times, their affirmation evokes in us an ability we may not realize we have. For example, if they invite us to join them in serving in a homeless shelter, we are inclined to cooperate with them and in so acting we discover the freedom that comes with being generous. Their affirmation works by engaging our own natural energies—energies that we may not of ourselves be able to call forth or call forth so strongly. Their affirmation imparts a feeling of “can-do.” Likewise, their resistance or disapproval of some activity of ours tends to deter us or to weaken our resolve, leading us to change our practice. God’s love for us has this empowering and disempowering effect. God’s love undergirds and amplifies our own sense of our goodness which itself in turn gives us energy to keep going in the pursuit of the good. The experience of God’s love “engenders a security and self- possession that frees a person” to risk new ways of being, particularly on behalf of others and for the world. Religious people are even able to give their lives to defend the faith.55 That is, God’s love affectively

55 See Angela McKay Knobel, “Can Aquinas’s Infused and Acquired Virtues Coexist in the Christian Life?” Studies in Christian Ethics 23 (2010): 385; Haight, Experience and Language of Grace, 153-4; Stephen J. Duffy, Yamauchi Lectures in Religion: The Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 79 unites with our own dynamism, thereby moving us to expand beyond our own this-worldly self-affirmation. Love is usually effective in less explicit ways. It is a mistake to identify emotions with dramatic “Upheavals of Thought,” Martha Nussbaum’s unfortunate title for a great book.56 From our earliest days, the variegated affirmations and negations of others form our emotional life. That emotional structure itself then provides a tone and a direction that is operative in all we do.57 The quiet and continuing presence and power of this structure becomes clear when violated, say, when we are betrayed by the one who loves us. The feeling of God’s love for us likewise is usually felt in myriad tacit ways. Confident in God’s affirmation, we feel supported in all we do. As Rahner writes, grace “manifests itself as the mysterious activation of individual and collective spiritual life in countless ways, which would not exist if this mysterious activation and dynamism were not at work.”58 This mysterious activation is the power of love to affirm and move us. Notably, when tragedy happens, people then begin to feel betrayed by God, which indicates that they had all along been trusting God’s support. They must return to the sources of affirmation in order to overcome that sense of betrayal and to restore a chastened awareness of God’s continuing love. A different and extremely difficult question arises when we ask whether our love relationship with God affects God. Much academic theology has insisted that this relationship cannot make a difference to God.59 We may be moved by God’s love. We may affectively love God, that is, unite with God’s affections. But God cannot welcome our love for God because God cannot be in any way contingent on something outside of God. As a consequence, whether we love God, are indifferent toward God, or actually hate God is said to make no difference to God. The basic reason for this conclusion is ontological: God is the unmoved mover. Our love for God is thought to be like our admiration for a museum painting. We treasure the beautiful landscape, but it is unmoved by our warm gaze. By contrast, the biblical picture severely challenges this ontological claim. It makes clear that the relationship between God and ourselves affects God. God becomes jealous when we turn to idols (Joel 2:18). The compassionate, covenanted God is moved by our miseries (Neh 9:32). The Incarnation upsets the ontological aseity of God (John

Quest for Freedom in a Culture of Choice (New Orleans: Loyola University, 2002), 34-6; Elizabeth Dreyer, Manifestations of Grace (Wilmington, DL: Michael Glazier, 1990), 175-6. 56 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. 57 Porter, “Desire for Happiness,” 32-6. 58 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 181. 59 Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011), 204-7; ST, I 6.2 ad 1. 80 Edward Vacek

1:14; Col 1:19). God so loved the world that God was moved to send the Son for its salvation (John 3:16). The humanity of Jesus, especially his suffering on the cross, and our own humanity, including our sinfulness, make a difference to God (Heb 10). When God communicates God’s self to other persons, God wants to be received by someone who may, indeed, often will refuse to receive God (Matt 23:37-39). In cur- rent parlance, God becomes vulnerable. God is like a mother whose two-year old son is hitting her leg. No physical harm is done, but her desire for good behavior and union is momentarily frustrated. Simi- larly, if God is affectively involved with us, God is shaped by how we live and act. As Boff writes, “Grace implies the alteration of both God and humans.”60 The upshot is that our love completes God’s love (1 John 4:12). A God who wants to redeem us does not succeed if we do not respond with love. (One reply to this problem has been the theology of predestination: God in fact never wanted some people to respond. Hence God is not frustrated; but also God does not love them.) Our love enables God’s love to be what it wants to be, an effective affective participation in our lives.

GRACE/LOVE AND MUTUALITY What kind of relationship does grace create? In the Bible, God covenants with Israel (Deut 11); God has a parent-child relationship with Jesus (John 5:19). The Johannine Jesus speaks of a mutually involving relationship with God and with us (John 14: 10, 20). Lonergan observed that a “mutual love is the intertwining of two lives. It trans- forms an ‘I’ and a ‘thou’ into a ‘we’.… [E]ach attends, imagines, thinks, plans, feels, speaks, acts in concern for both.”61 Grace aspires to a mutual relationship. Mutual love is more than Harry loves Mary and Mary receives Harry’s love, but does not love in return. It is more than Harry happens to love Mary and Mary happens to love Harry, which could take place without either of them knowing or caring about the other’s love. In a mutual love or friendship Harry loves Mary as someone involved with him in a shared union, and likewise with Mary. The responses of each other make a difference to them and to their friendship. Speaking of such friendships, Elizabeth Dreyer observes, “We pay attention to the person; we spend time with and listen to the person; we ask questions; we find out about the person’s history.… We may even consult other persons who know her well to get other insights and perspectives.”62 Similarly, to develop our friendship with God we happily turn to Scripture and tradition to tell us the story of

60 Boff, Liberating Grace, 15. 61 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 33; Paul J. Wadell, “An Itinerary to Glory: How Grace is Embodied in the Communio of Charity,” Studies in Christian Ethics 23 (2010): 439. 62 Dreyer, Manifestations of Grace, 167. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 81 our God. We not only learn God’s past story, but we join that story.63 Of course, a mutual relationship between ourselves and God is in no way a relationship among equals. Grace does not make us equal to God. Aristotle notwithstanding, we can and do have friendships among unequals. The phrase that “a dog is a man’s best friend” hints at real possibilities of mutual care and companionship among unequals. Friendship with God is highly analogous. Humans are com- pletely dependent on God for their existence and for everything they do and are. Still, once God has adopted us as daughters and sons, God assumes responsibilities for us. God need not do so, but does so “by the ‘necessity’ of freely-bestowed love.”64 Classically, theology has stressed that God gives us grace so that we eventually attain our own beatitude in heaven. The emphasis of this essay is different. Grace is a personal relationship with God, not a means to our happiness. It is an experience of “Lord, it is good to be with you” (Matt 17:4). This relationship is intrinsically good and appreciated as such, quite apart from any benefits it brings. Of course, as a relationship it includes development. Development is not a matter of accumulating or gaining more graces. Rather, relationships develop by relating. They develop through enacting the relationship itself. This process is internally self-correcting. It shies away from what causes separation, and it leans toward better ways of being together. Life within a mutual love relationship with God means that our whole lives, potentially, can be one of cooperation between ourselves and God. Over time this cooperation becomes habitual. Such a process has been obscured by the introduction in theology of infused virtues. Such virtues—faith, hope, and love—were imagined to be infused into the newly baptized infant in whom there are no acquired virtues.65 The result, in this ontological view, is that grace does not perfect nature but exists separate from it.66 In an experiential theology of grace, baptism acknowledges and welcomes the child as a member of the holy people that God has formed. The baby participates in the limited way that babies do. No more, no less. Babies who do mature and have a chance to develop their human capacities can and must develop acquired virtues. These moral virtues become “theological” or, better,

63 Margaret Farley, “The Meaning of Commitment,” in Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, ed. Kieran Scott and Michael Warren, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2007), 355. 64 Rahner, “Grace,” 588; cp. Wadell, “An Itinerary to Glory,” 438; Joseph Bracken, S.J., “The Challenge of Self-Giving Love,” Theological Studies 74 (2013), 861; Ny- gren, Agape and Eros, 92. 65 Knobel, “Can Aquinas’s Infused and Acquired Virtues Coexist in the Christian Life?” 381-96; also Kent, “Habits and Virtues (Ia IIae, qq. 49-70),” 116-30. 66 John Bowlin, “Elevating and Healing: Reflections on Summa Theologiae I II q. 109, a. 2,” Journal of Moral Theology 3, no. 1 (January 2014): 43. 82 Edward Vacek religious to the extent that they are part of an experienced, mutual relationship with God. Thus, Rahner says of supernatural grace:

That grace is not a second nature superimposed on natural nature; it is the opening out of the natural spiritual essential ground of man toward the immediate possession of God. The supernatural virtues are therefore not virtues side by side with the spiritual faculty or side by side with the natural virtues. They are the orientation of precisely those faculties and their natural virtues toward the life of God.67

When grace has become in us a mutual love with God, we act not alone but for and with God. This cooperation depends wholly on God and wholly on us. God’s contribution as Primary Cause is different from our secondary causality.68 In God we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Conversely, God acts not alone, but for us and with us and in us. By God’s choice, God depended on Jesus and now depends on us for activity in the world. Without God, we can do nothing. Our contribution is nonetheless essential. Without us, God cannot do what God wants to achieve through us. Oftentimes what God wants to do cannot be done by anyone other than us. Concretely, no one can love our children the way we do. Mutuality means that God has chosen to depend on our way of loving in the world. God’s own love is brought to perfection through us (1 John 4:12).

GRACE/LOVE AND FREEDOM Some of the most intractable theological debates have been over the relationship between grace and freedom. Understanding grace as love goes some ways towards resolving this controversy. It supports the experience that we are genuinely free, but it also confirms the anti- Pelagian insistence that we do not take the initiative to love God. The latter claim commonly has been based on the sovereignty of God or on the helplessness of human nature or on the stubborn recalcitrance of sinful human beings. Since, especially in the modern era, we human beings properly think of ourselves as regularly taking the initiative in our lives, it is not surprising that we constantly court Pelagian views. For example, even when we have gone astray, we imagine that, like the prodigal son, we take the initiative to return to “Our Father who art in heaven.” Understanding grace as love suggests an alternative reading: The son was attracted to return home because his father waited there. That is, his initiative depended on the already estab- lished, attractive familial setting.

67 Rahner, “Virtue,” Encyclopedia of Theology, 1795; Jacobs-Vandegeer, “Sanctify- ing Grace in a ‘Methodical Theology,’” 62; Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105-6. 68 See Edward Vacek, S.J., “Inquiring after God when Working,” Inquiring After God: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Ellen Charry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 89-107; Haight, Spirituality Seeking Theology, 46-47. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 83

The cardinal sin for some mainline theories of autonomy, especially Kantian, is to be moved by an inclination outside the will.69 Such theories deny or overlook the essential role of affections or inclinations in our free decisions. Emotions typically set us in motion. Our freedom is our ability to resist or yield to these movements. That is, human freedom is dependent on some prior affective movement. When we affectively perceive some good, we are moved to desire that good. We then may consent to that desire.70 Or, we may resist it, bracket it, or turn to other objects that attract or repel or depress our emotions. This consent, resistance, bracketing, or turning is how we exercise freedom. We can resist, bracket, or turn away from divine love when it interferes with some other love we prefer or with some hate we cling to. To the degree that we live a life of grace, we will instead be inclined to subordinate or turn away from these disordered inclinations.71 Understanding the nature of emotions clarifies why, as anti-Pela- gians insist, we cannot initiate love for God. One simple reason is that we are not able to just will ourselves to have any emotion. Emotions require a real or imagined object.72 Religious emotions arise only in an encounter with the divine. Just as we cannot have parental hope or love if we have no real (or imagined) children, so we cannot simply decide to have religious faith, hope, or love. There must be some affective awareness of God in our lives, who, moreover, must appear to us as good. Just as we cannot will ourselves to think that a circle is a triangle, so also we cannot will ourselves to feel grateful to a God who only threatens us. The consequence of these two points is that we cannot just decide to love God. We can will ourselves to obey, but we cannot “make” ourselves love God. We can make ourselves do “loving deeds” at God’s behest, but we cannot command ourselves to experience love for God. Thus, the fact that we cannot simply will ourselves to love God is a statement about human nature itself, not simply some fact either about the perversity of human nature or about the preroga- tives of God. We can, however, prepare ourselves or put ourselves in the position where a particular emotion likely will arise. Here freedom seems to be the initiator. We might open ourselves to appreciate some good in persons we dislike, and then we might be moved to love them. This ability

69 Duffy, Graced Horizon, 27-37; Duffy, “The Quest for Freedom in a Culture of Choice,” 11. 70 Cates, “Love,” 14-17. 71 Vacek, “Orthodoxy Requires Orthopathy,” 218-41; Vacek, “Discernment within a Mutual Love Relationship with God,” 705-10; Anne L. Geyer and Roy F. Baumeister, “Religion, Morality, and Self-Control: Values, Virtues, and Vices,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. Raymond F. Paloutizian and Crystal L. Park (New York: Guilford, 2005), 412-32. 72 Singer, Nature of Love, 3: 398. 84 Edward Vacek is one of the more important ethical tools we have for living a moral and religious life. The common exhortation by spiritual writers that we should each day offer prayers of thanksgiving is designed to help us to love God. We look for the day’s “gifts,” hoping to be moved to appreciate and love God as generous giver. Taking this approach, however, sounds at least semi-Pelagian. The anti-Pelagians rightly insist that grace creates even the very movement to look for gifts from God.73 Our claim to freedom vis à vis grace lies elsewhere. We all have some rudimentary capacity to experience being loved by others including by God. This potency is not at our disposal to actualize, but it can be evoked by another’s love. When evoked, it stimulates a responsive love. We might compare this process to the ability to speak. All of us have a capacity to understand words and to reply. But if no human had ever spoken to us, this very capacity would not have developed into language. We develop most of our human capacities only because someone else evokes or models that capacity for us. Thus, our ability to love God is natural, but not spontaneous. It depends greatly on co-feeling with other people who love God. At bottom, it depends on God’s inviting goodness. Thus, the anti-Pelagians are right, not because our nature is corrupt nor because God is sovereign, but because we cannot simply will to feel love for God. Rather, we can freely respond. Our life is then transformed by the very activity of responding.74 We are able to freely return love. We human persons tend to return love to one who loves us. This is not simply a matter of justice, returning tit for tat. The experience of another’s love for us evokes and influences our own response of love. We are spontaneously inclined to love those who love us in good part because their love is felt as interior to ourselves affirming our own capacities for an overflowing goodness. Similarly, God’s own love is active in our inclination to love God in return. Because love is a form of participation, God’s love for us already co-forms this response of love. Our response is not simply a response to the ultimate One outside of ourselves. It is also a response to the felt presence of God affirming us interiorly. The result of this response is to develop a mutual love relationship with God. Again, when grace is understood as this mutual love, it becomes further obvious why we cannot of our own selves create grace. A mutual relationship requires participation by all partners. We cannot be in a divine friendship without divine self-revelation.

73 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 118, 128. 74 Rahner, “Grace,” 590; Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 186; Duffy, “The Quest for Freedom in a Culture of Choice,” 36-38; Duffy, Graced Horizon, 15; Duffy, “Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic Soteriologies,” 441; for a contrary view that grace is a “physical cause,” see the early twentieth century Catholic Encyclopedia, under “Actual Grace,” 4, www.newadvent.org/cathen/06689x.htm; Wadell, “An Itin- erary to Glory,” 437. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 85

When we understand grace as love, we can readily understand what is misguided in works-righteousness. We cannot merit or earn anyone’s love simply by doing good deeds. Even God cannot cause us to love God by doing good for us, as the existence of sinners attests. Sim- ilarly, our own good deeds do not cause God’s love but rather flow from the goodness felt when involved in a divine friendship. The en- actment of this friendship is our righteousness.

ORIGINAL GRACE OVERCOMES ORIGINAL SIN Christianity, like many other religions, is a religion of redemption. Christianity not only aims at divine union, but it also aims to overcome personal and social sinfulness. Indeed, the problem of sin is often more prominent in grace theologies than theologies of sanctification. How does grace bring about fundamental redemption? The Catechism distinguishes two kinds of personal sin: mortal and venial. It portrays the first as destroying charity and the latter as wounding it.75 The focus is on what particular sins do to love. An alternative emphasis is to see the lack of love as itself the origin of our sins. Both positions reflect human experience. Sins, like virtuous acts or omissions, are symbols, embodying who we already are as well as modifying our self. The tradition of original sin manifested this dual theme. On the one hand, it depicted how the sin of Adam and Eve broke their relationship with God. On the other hand, the primary point of that doctrine has been to explain why we, the offspring of our first parents, are, from our birth, “sinful,” that is, lacking a personal relationship with God and, furthermore, inclined to evil. All people (except Mary and Jesus) begin life in a sinful state, deprived of grace. This “original sin” in- clines us to personal sins. Nevertheless, human nature that has the capacity to transcend our animal and secular selves.76 Grace theologians sometimes call this capacity potentia obedientalis or “existential possibility.”77 We have the capacity to have love for God evoked from us. We can transcend the world of creatures. This power is manifest in the saints, the covenants of the Old Testament, and in the religions of the world. Our most simple act of consent to the Ultimate Concern overcomes sin in its most fundamental religious sense. We accept that we are accepted.78 This is original grace. Since the discovery of evolution, the story of original sin, like the story of creation, has had to be greatly reinterpreted. Contrary to an

75 Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1854-6. 76 Vacek, “An Evolving Christian Morality,” 152-65. 77 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 186; Duffy, Dynamics of Grace, 293-7; Mac- quarrie, Existentialist Theology, 155. 78 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 153- 63; Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner, 1955), 152-60. 86 Edward Vacek oft-cited claim, there is little or no empirical evidence for an original sin that turned Eden’s bliss into a baleful earth. Nature, red in tooth and claw, abounded in evil long before the first humans. I propose that the basic meaning of original sin is our primal neglect of our divine relationship. The first objective sin transpired when the human psyche evolved from an animal’s moral innocence and began to make moral decisions that took no account of God’s presence in the garden that is the earth. Human beings learned to distinguish moral good and evil, apart from any relation to the divine. This godlessness is the fundamental sin, the violation of Jesus’s first great commandment. Original sin manifests itself whenever we live etsi Deus non daretur. From the first moment of our existence, we exhibit this neglect. Of course, we are not religiously responsible at that age, and this accords with traditional teaching that original sin is not something for which we are personally responsible. It comes with birth. Self-transcendence toward an ultimate horizon is a mature goal, not an always present feature of human life. In Jack Mahoney’s clever phrase, original “sin represents not paradise lost but paradise ungained.”79 Due to our incomplete evolutionary development, we are far from inclined to act consistently in a morally good way, let alone in a consistently religious way. From birth, we must be quite selfish in order to survive. Even later, we are hugely limited in ways that preclude acting as fully rational beings. In traditional Catholic language, we are “deprived” of full freedom and intelligence. We act with ignorant and fallible minds and with weak and tethered freedom. Traditionally these limits were said to be the result of some original sin. Instead, they are the givens of our animal heritage which we only gradually and to some degree outgrow. Our affective union with God inspires and thus frees us to act with greater sensitivity to wider and deeper ranges of values. Most importantly, it enables us to appreciate these values for their significance within our mutual love with the divine.80

ACTUAL GRACES When the term “grace” is used in pastoral, moral, and spirituality contexts, it often does not mean God’s personal union with us, i.e., sanctifying grace. Instead, it refers to all the conditions and helps we need to live a good life. Actual graces are natural interior movements and exterior events interpreted in light of our foundational relationship with God. We pray for the “grace” to do some difficult task, or we speak of a surprise visit from an old friend as a grace. These actual

79 Mahoney, Christianity in Evolution, 66-7. 80 Charles E. Curran, The Development of Moral Theology: Five Strands (Washing- ton, DC: Georgetown University, 2013), 40; Theo Kobusch, “Grace (Ia IIae, qq. 109- 114),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2002), 208-9. Grace is the Emotion of Love of God 87 graces are not divine interventions suspending the natural order. In- stead they are natural occurrences appreciated for how they fit within our primary religious relationship.81 This happens in at least three ways. First, we frequently interpret all external events in terms of our relationships. Most commonly, we evaluate events by whether they are good or bad for us. Often, we evaluate events by how they bear on others whom we love or hate. Similarly, when we are in love with God, we evaluate the world in terms of that relationship. Thus, if we feel moved to help a widow, we feel not only that she is a fellow human being in need, but also that she is a daughter of God. We give thanks when the red light turns to green, not because God changed the light but because the open road is part of the good life we share with the world’s Origin and Destiny. In other words, when we are in love with God, all goods are potentially felt to be not just good in them- selves or good for ourselves and others. They are also felt to be ways that our relationship with God makes a difference in our lives.82 Second, when we are in a divine friendship, we properly attribute to that relationship an influence on the inner workings of our minds and hearts.83 For example, when we feel an urge to reach out to a beg- gar, we account that urge itself as part of the way divine love works in us. Or we might experience an insight into how to deal with a nasty neighbor, and we accredit that insight to being in touch with the all- knowing God. In such cases, we feel inspired. Again, this influence is not a supernatural intervention in which God puts these thoughts and feelings in our minds. Instead, the causality is, to use Rahner’s terms, formal or quasi-formal.84 That is, when we unite our hearts with the Trinity, that relationship itself forms how we think and feel. Third, even evils can be understood as occasions of actual grace. On the one hand, we attribute to Providence the absence of particular evils. When, as secular persons, we escape some tragedy, we might

81 Denis Edwards, “Exploring How God Acts,” in God, Grace, and Creation, ed. Philip J. Rossi (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010), 124-46; Dreyer, Manifestations of Grace, 173, 181; Rahner, “Grace,” 593; Boff, Liberating Grace, 93; Petillo, “Theological Problem of Grace and Experience,” 600; Richard Gaillardetz, “The Groupe des Dombes Document ‘One Teacher’(2005): Toward a Postconciliar Catholic Recep- tion,” Theological Studies 74 (2013): 45; Taylor, Secular Age, 548. 82 Edward Vacek, S.J., “Gifts, God, Generosity, and Gratitude,” in Spirituality and Moral Theology: Essays from a Pastoral Perspective, ed. James Keating (New York: Paulist, 2000), 81-125; Edward Vacek, S.J., “God’s Gifts and Our Moral Lives,” Method and Catholic Moral Theology: The Ongoing Reconstruction, ed. Todd Salz- man (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1999), 103-24; Edwards, “Exploring How God Acts,” 137-8; Boff, Liberating Grace, 28. 83 Ben-Ze’ev, Subtlety of Emotions, 61. 84 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 120; Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4: 175. 88 Edward Vacek feel relieved, and nothing more. But as religious persons, we also experience these feelings as part of the blessings that are part of our divine friendship. Again, we need not say that God intervened to spare us from a devastating tornado (especially when our neighbor was not spared). Rather, we feel thankful to still be alive. On the other hand, when the green light turns red or when it is our house that has been destroyed, we turn this occasion into an opportunity to develop, say, the virtues of patience, resignation, or trust in Providence. The evil we experience is not itself a grace. It is a challenge to develop the requisite virtues or to overcome the world’s evils. When we meet that challenge, or even when we attempt to meet that challenge, we strengthen our divine friendship by facing life’s evils together. Jesus on the cross dies, but in the process of dying he hands himself even more deeply into Abba’s hands. Death itself, though a creaturely evil, becomes a religious victory.

CONCLUSION I have tried to develop an understanding of grace that puts emphasis on contemporary Christian experience. I have tried to show that it is also compatible with many of the claims and distinctions found in traditional theologies of grace. I have argued that, in its primary meaning, grace is the emotion of God’s love, offered, accepted, returned, and developed into a mutual love. This love is a form of participation, an emotional participation of love in the life of the beloved. God’s love for us evokes our responsive emotion of love for God. Ideally, this love pervades our whole life. By enacting this love, we further develop it. It leads us to interpret all of life’s events in terms of it. This grace is redemptive in the most fundamental sense: It overcomes personal separation between ourselves and God. This grace then moves us to challenge and rectify evils found in ourselves, in other human beings, in social structures, and in our world so as to make creation consonant with divine love. As a consequence, our affections, thoughts, activities, and relationships possess a different meaning; that is, they are transformed or elevated because they are part of our religious friendship with God. When we cooperate with this love in our lives and in the world about us, we join God’s love in transforming the world.