Šv. Tomas Akvinietis: prigimties ir malonės santykis doktrinos sukūrimo perspektyvoje

Abstract

The article aims to investigate St.Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine on the relationship between grace and nature in its theological context. The theology of grace comes to be the very spot on which all the rays of different theological topics arc focused and thus the most important point of Thomistic theology. First of all, St. Thomas places his discourse about grace into the wider context of the creative order of the universe. One of the most important tasks for the theology of grace is to establish a relationship between grace and nature as properly understood and to penetrate into the certainity of supernatural reality. If considered separated, or even antithetic, grace and nature, as operating in two different order, begin to bear a metaphor of the two levels, two stages, or even two different worlds, bet ween which there is no communication but rather conflict. Whereas Thomistic insight into the distinction between grace and nature sees them as two complimentary dimensions of the creative order. The ultimate end of nature is her uinion with the supernatural. This clearly points to a single destiny of man as integral person created as being capable of transformation through! grace into glory. The article attempts to clarify the Thomistic notion of grace within the perspective of the idea of creation, generally understanding grace as the relation in which the creature stands to its Creator, creation being in a sense “the first grace”, by which God becomes indwelling in all things with his in nermost presence. The radical dependence of creature on God brings forth the absolute gratuitousness of being as a gift together with the intimate God’s presence in his every creature which is endowed by him with the gift of being. St. Thomas explains this relation by means of teleological creative causality. According to the principle of finality, all things naturally desire God as their end. The ultimate end of creatures consists in achieving divine likeness or participation in the divine nature according to their degrees of being. The real doctrine of St. Thomas on the relations hip between grace and nature had remained obscure for a long time and began to be clarified only in the 20-th century, due to the works of the eminent Tho mists such as E. Gilson, who was one of the first arguing against Caetanian tradition of separating grace and nature into two isolated spheres. Gilson was supported by H. de Lubak who emphasized the case of the „natura pura" theory, which originated in Bellarmincs’s times and was completely unknown for St. Thomas. The theory that man was created as “purely natural” with the divine grace imposed on him only later allows the possibility to rule out either natural or supernatural sphere and thus terminated either at the purely natural and secular view of man or at the „spiritualistic” one, which descredits and really „disgraces” human nature. In this respect, one of the most compelling interpretations of the grace/nature problem was offered by the transcendental Tho mist theologians such as K. Rahner and B. Lonergan who insisted on the constitutive openness of human nature to the supernatural. St. Thomas hold that man was created by God in grace as a means to achieve his ultimate end. So, nature presupposes grace being unable to attain her last end without its help. According to St. Thomas, there is a kind of an innate aptitude to receive grace in human nature. A careful analysis of St. Thomas’s texts shows that his theology does not destroy a concordance bet ween grace and nature. In both cases, it is God. who is the author, and it is by participating in his divine nature that human nature achieves her proper ultimate end. The article opens a perspective of considering Thomistic theology of grace in a Trinitarian context.