Scheeben On The Theological Principles Of The Assumption Of Mary Premised By The Sacred Scriptures

“Mary’s special participation with Christ in the resurrection and glorification of the body is guaranteed by a series of theological factors, based either directly or indirectly on her divine motherhood. Their meaning can be strengthened still further by the application of various general principles premised by the Sacred Scriptures:

1. In the Mother of God, precisely because she is such only through and in her body, a permanent separation of body and soul is unthinkable, just as in Christ the separation of His body and soul from His divinity would be inconceivable on account of the hypostatic union.

2. Mary’s quality as motherly bride of Christ requires a permanent and complete unity of life which could be dissolved only temporarily in view of the ends of that union. To this the teaching of St. Paul must be applied concerning the love of a man for his wife as his flesh, which was ideally realized in Christ’s love for His Church; and this the more so since Mary, in a singular way, is the flesh of Christ and the principal member of His Church. Accordingly, the power of Christ’s love for His Church had to be revealed in Mary in a specific and complete manner.

3. To this can be added the principles of the Sacred Scriptures concerning the honor due to father and mother, and also concerning the participation in Christ’s glory, promised to those who share in His sufferings and death. The honor of the mother requires the complete safeguarding of her entire existence. The material service performed by Mary, whereby she used the substance of her body for the formation and sustenance of Christ, demands the glorification of her body in a distinctive manner. Furthermore, Mary’s singular, intimate, and absolute union with Christ in His sufferings and death requires the perfect participation with Him in His life of glory.

4. As instrument and cooperator in the work of redemption, Mary must most perfectly experience in herself the fruits of that sublime work; and this fruit so much the more, since only in a risen and glorified body could she, in union with Christ, effectively continue her office as mediatrix, and be the perfect surety of the efficacy of the act of redemption for the rest of mankind. In this respect it may be said that, without Mary’s resurrection and glorification, there would have been not only a weakening of that union with Christ, in virtue of which as the new Eve, she belongs at the side of the heavenly Adam for the complete possession of life, but the guaranty for our redemption would also be lacking precisely where, apart from Christ, the evidence of the efficacy of redemption should be most sought and expected. Moreover, in the economy of redemption, the peculiar type of the indefectibility and eternal vitality of the Church would be lacking.”

-Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Mariology, vol. 2.

Who Is Matthias Scheeben?

I love that someone from Durham University put the phrase, "Who is Matthias Scheeben" into Ask Jeeves and it led them to my blog. The short answer is that Matthias Scheeben is the man! A little longer of an answer is that he was the greatest theologian of the nineteenth century and one of the greatest theologians the Church has ever known.

Here is the Catholic Encyclopedia's bio of him.

Below are some previous posts on Scheeben:
The Scheeben Renewal: The Primacy of Christ

Balthasar on Nature and Grace in the Thought of Matthias Scheeben

What Does Grace Do?

The Nature of Christian Justification

Partakers of the Divine Nature

The Two Sense of Nature in St. Augustine's Theology

If you are interested in reading some Scheeben, two of his masterpieces have been re-released at very affordable prices. I highly recommend them:
The Mysteries of Christianity

Nature and Grace

Oh, and for the person who found my blog by searching the phrase "grace destroys nature," well, it doesn't.

At Last!

Matthias Scheeben's The Mysteries of Christianity has been republished!

Sanctifying Grace

"Those who deny the eternal value of good works (i.e., Protestants) are correct with regard to works performed when a person is not in the state of grace, for without Sanctifying Grace in his soul, a person merits by his good works nothing at all for eternity. But when a person is in the state of grace (has Sanctifying Grace in his soul), that person does indeed merit by his good works an eternal reward, because he is now no longer a mere 'natural' human who performs these works, but a child of God who does them. Such deeds done while the life of God is in one's soul have merit for eternity, for they have been done by no mere natural man, but by an adopted son of God, by a living branch on the vine which is Christ."

-Thomas A. Nelson, in the preface to Matthias Scheeben's The Glories of Divine Grace.

What Does Grace Do?

“Grace joins the creature so closely to God that the soul, while it is in the state of grace, cannot be separated from God by any barrier of guilt. Grace, which bridges the infinite gap yawning between the creature and the divine nature, spans the still greater fissure caused by the upheaval of sin. By transforming man from a bondsman to a child of God, grace makes him also a friend of God, since God cannot but stand in a relation of friendship with His children as long as they remain His children. For this reason grace is called both gratia sanctificans (sanctifying grace) because it completely does away with all sinful disorder, and gratia gratum faciens (grace which renders one pleasing) because it makes the creature so pleasing in God’s sight that God myst deal with him as His friend and child.”

-Matthias Scheeben in The Mysteries of Christianity.

The Nature Of Christian Justification

“The mystery of the original state leads us on to the mystery of the state of grace characteristic of Christianity. But for that very reason Christian justification must be considered in terms of its opposition of the mystery of sin. However, the sin that Christian justification is meant to destroy cannot be regarded simply according to its natural side, as the derangement of the natural order. Sin must here be regarded according to the mysterious character it possesses in its opposition to the supernatural order of grace, particularly the grace of the original state. In this connection the state of sin is more than a disorder of the will. It is a complete estrangement and separation of man from God as his supernatural end, and is met with on God’s part not by a simple displeasure—involving disfavor in the moral sense—but by a forcible ejection from the state of the children of God, a stripping away of the supernatural raiment of grace. To join together again the severed strands of the supernatural bond with God, no mere change of the direction of man’s will can suffice. If man is to be reunited to God as his Father, God Himself must raise him up again to His side, and through the Holy Spirit must pour forth into man’s heart a filial love for Himself. If the sinner is to be freed from God’s disfavor, it will not at all suffice for God to cover up the sinful deed with the cloak of forgetfulness, and simply to remit the guilt in response to the sinner’s repentance. To forgive the sin fully, God must again confer on man that favor and grace which He had bestowed on him before he sinned. God must again draw man up to His bosom as His child, regenerate him to new divine life, and again clothe him with the garment of His children, the splendor of His own nature and glory. Only thus can justification completely and perfectly exterminate the sin as it exists concretely in its mysterious character. Therefore justification itself, which does away with so mysterious an evil, must be recognized as a supernatural mystery. Accordingly the mystery of sin, as also the mystery of original justice, looks to justification as a third mystery, which destroys the first and restores the second.”

-Matthias Scheeben in The Mysteries of Christianity.

The Nuptials Between Mary And The Holy Spirit: A Model For The Marriage Of Nature With Grace

“Is there not a remarkable similarity between the marriage of nature with grace and the nuptials of Mary, the Virgin Mother, with the Holy Spirit? No resemblance is more deeply grounded than this, and nothing is more significant for grasping the grandeur of Christianity. The Virgin Mother, as the Church says, poured forth the eternal Light into the world; she bore the Son of God in His human nature and conceived Him in her womb. Through grace the Son of God is to be born again in human nature, not in physical unity of person, but in a moral, personal union, by a real image of His divine light and a real sharing of His divine life. The hypostatic union is the ideal, as well as the principle and end of the union by grace. It is the principle, because by it the Godhead is brought close to all mankind in inseparable union; the fullness of divinity was united with one individual of human nature, to be communicated to all others by participation. It is the end, because the true God-man must be the Head and King of all men who have been made to share in the divine nature through Him, and they must all be associated with Him for the greater glorification of His majesty.

The manner in which the divine nature in the person of the Word was wedded with human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mother corresponds in all details with the manner in which God wishes to be united in grace with nature as it exists in every man. Human nature could have been imparted to the Son of God by creation. In that case no mother would have been needed. But because He wished to be born in human nature, the Holy Spirit had to be joined in a nuptial union with a human mother. She had to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in this work; God could not form a man who was to be born into the human race without her, and she could not give birth to the Godman without God. She was the immaculate soil that the Holy Spirit was to overshadow like a cloud and to make fruitful with the dew of His power.

From eternity He had chosen her to be His bride, and awaited with ardent love the time when He could give Himself to her. And she, on her side, illuminated and incited by His grace, yearned as no other creature could for the infinitely exalted union of God with mankind. But this yearning was joined with deepest humility, for she was well aware of the infinite distance between God and herself; she knew that she could not merit that stupendous favor, and she did not consider herself worthy to see the sublime mystery fulfilled in her.

Then the Holy Spirit sent word to her through an angel and invited her to be His spouse. Although her consent did not decide God to decree the mystery, God was pleased to await her consent, that the nuptials might be celebrated with free love on her part, too. ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord,’ she said, ‘be it done to me according to thy word’ (Luke 1:38). As an obedient, humble maid, she assented to the word that conveyed her Lord’s request to her to become His mother. With the same sense of lowliness, the same consciousness of her nothingness with which she regarded herself as unqualified and unworthy of so august a union with supreme Goodness, she humbly subjected herself to God’s precious love, and yielded herself to be raised to the highest pinnacle of dignity, to cooperate with God’s greatest work.

Thus is accomplished the chaste marriage of the purest and most responsive creature with the all-pure and all-holy God. The dew and the power of the Holy Spirit flow down upon this receptive soil, to impart to it a divine fruitfulness and to cause the heavenly blossom to spring forth from the root of Jesse. The divine light in undiminished fullness falls on her as on an untarnished mirror, to be born by her and to be poured out by her into all the world.

Mary was a virgin before the marriage, because she had received no other seed, had taken to herself no alien light. She is a virgin in the union, because she suffers no hurt in her own life by receiving the divine seed, but on the contrary flowers forth into a higher life; she is not stained by the heavenly light, but is purified and transfigured with celestial beauty. She remains a virgin after the nuptial union, because she, having born the most perfect fruit and having been flooded with the very source of light, nevermore can or may receive another seed, another light.

Can there be a greater similarity, can a more perfect parallel be drawn out, than between the marriage of the Virgin with the Holy Spirit and that of nature and grace? The resemblance is so striking and clear in all details that we do not have to pursue the comparison in its individual traits. On both sides the analogy is evident: the height and depth, the infinite and the finite, heaven and earth are joined in a most astonishing and intimate union. Both mysteries alike are sublime and wonderful: ‘Which is more tremendous, which is more amazing: that God gives Himself to earth, or that He gives you to heaven; that He Himself enters into association with flesh, or that He grants you fellowship with divinity?” (St. Peter Chrysologus) The two mysteries are closely related; because of this relationship, both are the starting point, the center, and the goal of the entire supernatural economy of Christianity.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

Partakers Of The Divine Nature

“But if we have truly been made partakers of the divine nature and have become closely akin to it by the fact that our supernature raises up to it, we have been taken into the ambit of its life; then God immediately and in His own nature, as He is in Himself, becomes the object of our activity. Then, illuminated by His light, we shall know Him by coming into His presence; we shall no longer be limited to seeing Him as He is mirrored in creation. Permeated by God’s fire and elevated to kinship with Him, we shall embrace Him directly with our love; for we shall love Him as God who communicates His nature to us, not merely as the Creator of our nature. Our confidence will be directed exclusively to God Himself as He is in His own divine might which transcends all creation, that might by which He leads us toward an end that no created power can attain or hinder, by which He wills to bring us to the possession of Him in His divine glory; and thus we shall repose on the heart of our Father. In a word, if we are made partakers of the divine nature, our lives and our activity must be specifically similar to God’s. Therefore our activity must have the same specific, formal object that characterizes the divine activity. The divine essence must be the immediate object and motive determining supernatural activity in our own lives.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace. (They really ought to republish this book!)

Obediential Potency

"Now it must be born in mind that in the human soul, as in every creature, there is a double passive power: one in comparison with a natural agent; --the other in comparison with the first agent, which can reduce any creature to a higher act than a natural agent can reduce it, and this is usually called the obediential power of a creature."

-St. Thomas Aquinas, IIIa, q. 11, a. 1.

"...nature, while not aspiring to the supernatural by its own forces, is capable of reaching the supernatural through the influence and operation of another, higher nature. This is obediential potency, which is actuated under the guidance of a higher being to which unreserved obedience is given."

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

The Essential Difference Between Mortal And Venial Sin

“….we arrive at a theological concept of mortal sin and of its essential difference from venial sin. A person commits a mortal sin when he abandons the divine order so as to give up God as his last end and withdraws from subjection to Him. He commits a venial sin when he does not carefully pursue the line of conduct leading to his goal, but at the same time does not abandon the goal itself and consequently his union with God. Venial sin is a violation of the order leading to the end, but not of the end itself. Therefore charity, as love of the end, and with it grace, is not extinguished by venial sin. Venial sin defiles grace in the way that gold is exteriorly tarnished without any interior decomposition. That is why charity and grace are not substantially diminished by venial sin. Only mortal sin can assail their substance, and when it does so, it not merely weakens but destroys.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

Balthasar On Nature And Grace In The Thought Of Matthias Scheeben

“If we survey his work as a whole we have to be thankful for the initial clarity of his conceptual distinctions [between the natural and the supernatural] which later allows him to proceed without the least danger to treat of the very profound interpenetration of both realms, a task on which he had already embarked at the conclusion of his book Nature and Grace and which from that point on becomes increasingly important. As soon as Scheeben passes from formal considerations to the content of the mysteries, we see that the creature’s ‘elevation’ into God occurs as a result of a prior descent and ingress on God’s part, an interpenetration to which, from the very beginning, Scheeben gives the name of ‘marriage.’ As he proceeds he introduces and develops the concept [of marriage] in every aspect of dogmatic theology. His theology thus becomes one great doctrine of eros, to an extent that far surpasses anything attained in this respect by past theology.”

-Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form.

The Actio Unitiva Ascribed To The Holy Ghost

“It is evident that there are important reasons for ascribing the actio unitiva to the Holy Ghost, and that is why this ascribing has a rich and deep meaning. We shall here summarize the most important reasons. The fact that the actio unitiva is ascribed to the Holy Ghost as its principle characterizes it as an action differing from that of creatures and from that of God Himself in the natural order as much as from the intrinsic action of God proper to His nature. Thus the actio unitiva appears in the first instance as an action of God, and indeed of a supernatural character, the aim of which arises above the natural order; in the second instance, as an actio which proceeds from God as an influence exerted because of a free and infinite love. The accomplishment of the union by the Holy Ghost, who proceeds from the very person who assumes humanity, shows that this person is absolutely complete in Himself and assumes the flesh, not because anything lacking to Him, but by virtue of the fullness of life and power, which reveals itself in the Holy Ghost. As the Holy Ghost is produced last of the persons in the Blessed Trinity, it is likewise He who appears as the natural author of the relations of God ad extra. And as He forms the crowning tie between the Father and the Son, so He effects the tie between the Son and His created nature.

The incarnation of the eternal Word considered as the actual ‘becoming flesh’ presents a further analogy with the embodiment of the interior word from the spirit of man into the spoken word of the mouth. As the spoken word becomes related to the interior word through the breath, which brings forth, so the flesh of the eternal Word is formed by this Word and is united with it through the breath of God. In its full essence the achieving of the union is an infusion and inbreathing of a principle of life by God, analogous to the natural and supernatural completion of the first man: an infusion and inbreathing into human nature, of the eternal Word according to His own subsistence. As such it appears most distinctly when represented as being effected through the effusion of God’s eternal breath of life, and this in a much deeper sense than the completion of the first man.

Lastly, we must understand the Incarnation as the highest form of God’s communication of Himself to the creature, and therefore of the deification, of the endowment with grace, and of the sanctification of the creature. All these effects now are such that they are naturally ascribed to the Holy Ghost and through that fact are strikingly elucidated in their essence.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Mariology, vol. 1

Bridal Maternity: The Key To All Mariology

“Some Protestants still believe in the divinity of Christ. Hence they acknowledge that ‘the fruit of Mary is the real Son of God.’ But they wish to consider little, or even nothing, about the exceptional dignity, perfection, and activity of the Mother of God in the order of grace. In this respect they can hardly be distinguished from those who deny the divinity of Christ. This idea can be reduced to this formula; Mary is the Mother of God, but not the bride of God. Expressed thus, such a view is evidently unnatural and contradictory.

Therefore as the expression, the divinely bridal motherhood, possesses a great polemical dogmatic value, so it has also a great constructive theological value for the scientific explanation of the privileges of Mary.

The motherhood, regarded as a relation of the mother to her fruit, or as bodily relationship with Christ, is not of itself enough for our considering the divine motherhood the constituting principle of the only excellence of Mary’s person. Theologians express this thought by distinguishing an adequate and an inadequate, or a moral-physical and a purely physical, motherhood, and intend only the first to be considered that principle. They usually explain the motherhood in an adequate and moral-physical sense as follows: It consists in the whole of those graces which are necessary for the worthy execution of the maternal activity, or which were obtained through this activity, or which achieve the worthy extension of the relation of the mother to her fruit.

Such a widening of the idea of the motherhood will, no doubt, be too vague and indefinite. It will not produce a more vivid concept nor is it a fruitful middle term leading to the individual privileges that belong to the divine motherhood.

On the contrary, the very expression, God’s bridal motherhood, gives not merely a more or less adequate, moral-physical concept of the divine motherhood; according to its formal and intrinsic essence, the motherhood is also thus properly defined through an easily susceptible and clearly indicated element which is not lost in a multiplicity of things necessary or desirable for the worthy extension of the mother’s relation to the fruit. It constitutes, as it were, the substantial form or soul of that relation and therefore is the root and focus of all other qualities of the mother.

Without this middle concept we can only gradually and with difficulty discover the various privileges pertaining to the Mother of God, such as domina omnium. Of certain other privileges we can get hardly any idea; for example, of the sanctification of Mary through the grace of the motherhood. Thus this concept is the key of the entire Mariology.

In reference to the original marriage, Peter Chrysologous says: ‘A speedy interpreter (Gabriel) flies to the bride to prevent and suspend a state of human betrothal in the bride of God, not to take the Virgin away from Joseph, but to give her to Christ to whom she is pledged in her womb, when it should happen.’ And again: ‘Although Mary His mother had been betrothed, she is His bride by virginity, and His mother by fecundity; His mother not known by a man, and conscious of His birth. And was she not mother before her conceiving, who, after His birth, was both mother and virgin? And how could she not be mother, who brought to birth the Author of all the years, the Giver of being to all things?’”

-Matthias Scheeben in Mariology, vol. 1.

The Soul's Mystic Union And Betrothal With The Bridegroom

“By grace the soul is made a child of the eternal Father, a bride of the Son, and a temple of the Holy Spirit. The soul becomes a bride of the Son by being made like to Him and by receiving His image, not by being begotten of Him, but because He takes the soul, which is already ennobled as the Father’s daughter, closely to Himself in holy love, to share His beauty and wealth with her in pure embrace. This point of view suggests to us an idea of the divine excellence of the soul’s mystic union and betrothal with God, specifically with the eternal Word, as described in glowing terms by Sacred Scripture, the Fathers, and the mystics. Nature does not invest the soul with the nobility needed to be a worthy bride of the Word and to enter into this exalted, inconceivable, mystic union with Him; otherwise the union would straightway cease to be truly mystic and to surpass nature. Natural love (that is, love proceeding from nature and based on nature’s dignity) cannot make the soul capable, still less sufficiently worthy, of claiming so intimate a union with God’s Son. The soul must first be ennobled and must be a daughter of the same royal Father, whose Son is the eternal Word; before she can advance to meet the Son of God, her Bridegroom, she must be adorned with heavenly beauty and be equipped with a higher, nobler, and freer love. The fruit of this chaste union must be something interior, and must be of such a nature that the soul, illuminated by the light of her Bridegroom, engenders in herself His likeness. With her beauty thus transfigured, the soul not only does not lose her virginal fairness and purity, but for the first time blossoms forth into true beauty and purity.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

Mary, Bride Of The Logos

“…From the moment of her creation and in virtue of the intention of her Creator, which underlies her creation, Mary was specially intended for the union as bride with the Logos and, as it were, was created in this union; and also that, by virtue of this intention of God, the entire existence of her person has grown together with her relation to the divine person of her Son, in a manner analogous to the existence of the flesh of Christ with His hypostatic union.

The analogy between the relation of Mary and of the humanity of Christ to the Logos, expressed in the ‘marriage with the Logos,’ is particularly revealed in this, that Mary is characterized in a signal manner in the language of the Church as ‘house and seat of the godhead’ or of the eternal Wisdom. She is as a house and seat in which in the real meaning of the word, the fullness of the divinity, is so infused as to dwell bodily therein. The eternal Wisdom is so implanted and deeply rooted in her that she seems to have grown together with Him. This, too, is the deeper meaning of the representation of Mary in the Apocalypse: the woman clothed with the sun.

By virtue of this relation to the Logos, Mary is in a special manner the ‘mirror’ and ‘image of God,’ because she is in the Logos illuminated through the radiation of the light of the godhead and permeated with the essential dew of the strength of God. As she is compared with the sun in the bride of the Canticle of Canticles, she appears also under both these names as assimilated to the Logos in the quality proper to Him which is characterized by the same names. She is consequently His ‘likeness’ or His ‘glory,’ in the same way as, according to St. Paul, the woman is the likeness and the glory of the man.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Mariology vol. 1

Old Heresies With New Names: Lutheranism, the New Manichaeism

“Many heretics wrongly believe that they exalt grace by contending that it displaces and destroys nature. That amounts to praising God as Giver of grace while insulting and disparaging Him as Creator…we remarked above that they who regard nature as powerless or hold that it is in itself capable of nothing but evil, disparage and affront the Creator’s work. For in the beginning God made all things good, and everything that He makes later is also good, so far as it comes from the Creator’s hand. Therefore I do not have to delay over the blasphemous contention of those heretics who decry the substance of man himself as wholly or partly evil, whether they consider it evil as existing without God, or as coming from the hand of God, or as made evil in consequence of personal or hereditary sin. The last is not entirely foreign to the otherwise subtle Jansenist view, which can without injustice be called the new Manichaeism.

Accordingly the substance and essence of man are good. But if the essence is good, the nature as such must also be good, because it is nothing else than the vital energy springing from the essence and the tendency toward the attainment of the end which the Creator destines for the being in question.

If then, the essence and substance are indestructibly good, the nature as such must also be indestructibly good. Therefore its natural goodness cannot be lost any more than nature itself can, since it is based on the goodness of the essence and proceeds therefrom. Consequently the powers given for the pursuit of natural goods and the inner, necessary striving for such goods cannot be lost. This is so true that even when sin becomes like a second nature in the will, nature continues to resist, and the keenest torment among the devils and the damned themselves consist in this conflict between nature that strives irresistibly for good and the will that is turned against good. And I maintain, furthermore, that such is the case with nature that is burdened with original sin as well as with nature that is not afflicted with original sin. As man’s substance remains the same after sin, nature too is the same.

Because the substance is good, therefore, the vital energy proceeding from it and the tendency toward a destined end must also be good. The proposition that a power striving for development necessarily arises from the essence in every substance, especially in every living and spiritual substance, is, I do not hesitate to say, so firmly established philosophically, that the opposite is thoroughly unphilosophical and incomprehensible. Many philosophers even describe the essence itself as a power that is ever active.

This truth is even more certain in the dogmatic field, for the Church chose this principle as the decisive criterion in its conflict against the Eutychians, Monergetes, and Monotheletes. The Church insistently discerned the resuscitation of Eutychianism in the latter two heresies, because the human nature of Christ, if it really existed, could not be conceived and represented as bereft of power and a tendency toward its own proper activity. And therefore the Church drew from the teaching of those heretics the conclusion that, if Christ’s human nature were completely inactive and motionless, it would cease to be a real nature and a real, existing essence.

Consequently, if every being has a power and inclination for activity, and indeed for good activity, since the power and inclination come from the Creator of the essence and are given by Him, we can say with full right that they who, like the Jansenists, deny every power and inclination toward good in fallen nature, are no less Manichaean than are those Lutherans who often asserted, to the discredit of creation, that man’s substance had become evil. We can say this with the same right as that with which the Church said to the Monergetes and Monotheletes that, by denying all power and energy in the human essence of the Savior, they had relapsed into the Monophysitism of the Eutychians.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

The Two Senses Of Nature In St. Augustine's Theology

“…St. Augustine , in his controversial works, used the word ‘nature’ according to its transcendental universality in several different meanings. This variety was imposed on him by the diversity of the controversies in which he engaged; and he never made it his particular business to seek a conciliation among the different senses by undertaking an analysis of the term. In all his writings against the Manichaeans, nature meant for him the essence and substance of created things, especially of spiritual beings, with their essential powers; it meant the true product of creation in the narrower sense. Accordingly, he maintained that nature itself could not be disfigured or destroyed by evil. But when the Pelagians came on the stage, the scene shifted at once, and nature appears suddenly as that which God established, as the condition of life which the created being originally received from the Creator’s bounty, the vital principle and the tendency to good originally conferred on the creature by the Creator, prescinding from the question whether these two endowments belonged to the essence and substance of the creature or were something supernatural. Understood in this sense, nature can be destroyed and annihilated by a sin of nature; the higher, supernatural freedom bestowed on nature can perish, and its life can be uprooted. If the point of view adopted against the Manichaeans had been preserved, none of these considerations could be urged against the Pelagians.”

-Matthias Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

The Reason Why Many People Have An Incorrect Or Insufficient Understanding Of Grace

"In the natural order...no one has ever philosophized about the natural order of life in man without starting from, or at least reverting to, the nature of man on which it rests and to which it conforms. But in the supernatural order this point is often neglected; no foundation analogous to nature is looked for, and that is the reason why a clear, sound idea of the supernatural order is so rarely achieved."

-Matthias Joseph Scheeben in Nature and Grace.

Materially Sufficient?

Some well known theologians such as Pope Benedict XVI, John Henry Newman, and Matthias Scheeben (not to mention the Fathers of the Church) posit that Scripture is materially sufficient. This means that Scripture contains, whether explicitly or implicitly, all that is needed for salvation. It must be noted clearly that this is not the Protestant view of Scripture. Protestants hold that Scripture is formally sufficient, meaning that not only does it contain all that is needed for salvation, but that what is revealed is so clear and obvious that anyone can interpret without any guidance from an outside source such as the Church. Formal sufficiency is of course false. As Dei Verbum 12, paragraph 3 states: “Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written.” Theologians who hold for material sufficiency affirm the above, while Protestants who hold for formal sufficiency deny it.

It seems to be though, that material sufficiency would be extremely easy to disprove. All one would have to do is show a part of the deposit of the faith that isn’t contained at least implicitly in Scripture and material sufficiency ceases to exist. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and cannot come up with anything not implicitly contained in Scripture. Thus, I am forced to hold for material sufficiency.

Can anyone out there think of any part of the deposit that is not contained in Scripture explicitly or implicitly?

The Two Divine Missions And The Communication Of Grace

“In the outpouring of supernatural, filial, divine love, of caritas into our hearts, the interior outpouring of the love between the Father and the Son that is consummated in the Holy Spirit is continued because it is reproduced. So we can say not only that the love is given to us and is poured out upon us, but that the Holy Spirit Himself is given to us and poured out upon us in this love. We should do even better to say that the habit and act of charity, poured forth by the Holy Spirit, come into our heart by the very fact that He Himself, the torrent of divine love, is given and drawn to our soul.

Similarly in the conferring of supernatural divine light and the reflection of the divine nature upon our soul, in the impress of the supernatural likeness of God, the eternal splendor of the Father is irradiated over us, and His consubstantial image, the Son of God, is imprinted in our soul and is reborn in us by an imitation and extension of the eternal production. Thus God’s Son Himself in His divine and hypostatic character is lodge in the creature as the seal of the creature’s likeness to God. By the impress of this seal the creature is made conformable to the Son Himself, and by fellowship with the Son he receives the dignity and glory of the children of God.

The application to the creature of the divine love-flame flaring up in the Holy Spirit by the enkindling of a similar flame, and the reflection upon the creature of the divine glory shining in the Son by the irradiation of a similar splendor: these two images give us a striking illustration of the two divine missions as prolongations of the eternal processions and their entrance into the creature. These images become still more striking if we combine them with the image of the stamp of the seal imprinted by God upon the soul in the spiritual kiss wherein He so pours forth the light of His countenance and the sigh of His heart that the soul is illuminated and transfigured by His light, and inflamed and animated by His breath.

In the case of the Holy Spirit especially the outer procession as a prolongation of the inner is most fittingly expressed by saying that the Father and the Son breathe Him into the creature. This is the exalted sense in which the Fathers expound the words of Genesis: ‘And the Lord God...breathed into his face the breath of life.’

The statement just made would suffice in itself to enable us to perceive a true mission of the divine persons (Son and Holy Spirit) in the communication of grace. In this communication the Son and the Holy Spirit, as distinct from the Father and from each other, are present in the creature by virtue of a defining image impressed by each of them, an image which is so vivid and perfect that it infinitely surpasses the symbol. They are both so closely connected with this image that they dwell in it, not only as regards our way of conceiving the matter, because of the relation of similarity, but really, with their substance and personality. This is so far the general reason that as God they are everywhere present, and also because, even if they were not already present everywhere in substance for that general reason, they have to be present in so perfect an impress and effluence of their most intrinsic, personal perfections and origins, just as the seal must be present in its counterpart. Indeed, unlike the material seal after an impression has once been made, they cannot even be thought of as removed from immediate contact with the impression, for the latter, which has existence only from them, also has existence only in them.”

-Matthias J. Scheeben in The Mysteries of Christianity.