Grace And Nature

Nature & Grace

For Scheeben, our status as creatures means that not only all our actions but even our very existence from moment to moment depend on God, who, as our loving Creator, grasps us at the root of our being. This is radical dependence also means that we have certain duties toward God. Ultimately, the only proper posture we can adopt toward him is to bow our heads in profound humility before the one who has granted us participation in being from his infinite generosity. On a very practical level, this dependence means that our true exaltation can only come about through humble submission in love to him who made us. We do this through the handing over of our being to him in sacrifice (made possible by the sacrificial self-offering of Christ), just as true Aufklärung (enlightenment) can only come about by the sacrificium intellectus, the handing over of our intellect to the one who gives it back to us divinized by the light of faith. Everything is ultimately grace in that creation itself is absolutely gratuitous, a pure gift. But in God’s providence, we stand in relation to God in distinct ways on account of his stupendous generosity and love. While everything is indeed grace, there is a “double gratuity” that marks the Christian life: the grace of creation and that of divine sonship. The whole point of distinguishing nature and grace lies precisely in preserving the supernatural splendor of this twofold gratuity—that is, in distinguishing the grace of the natural order from the grace of our supernatural participation in divine life. If we don’t have a robust sense of the natural order, we won’t see how transcendent the supernatural order truly is.

Nature and Grace: or, some essential differences between the sentiments of the natural and spiritual man, etc

Nature and Grace

The passing years, which bury so many once-famous names under deep layers of forgetfulness, are raising Matthias Joseph Scheeben to an eminence reached by very few scholars. Time is the judge of all achievements, and has pronounced its verdict that Scheeben is the greatest theologian who has written in the German language. The reason for his importance is not hard to find. Scheeben is the chief theologian of the supernatural economy of the world. The intellectual blight known as rationalism had spread widely in the nineteenth century and had made disastrous inroads even in Christian circles. Although preliminary battles waged by Catholics who were turning back the unholy invasion, Scheeben was the champion who finally and decisively drove the enemy out of theology. From the very outset of his theological career, Scheeben had cherished the ambition of making the drab naturalistic world glow again in the light and beauty of grace, of bringing back to the awareness of men the glorious truth that they are God's children. In the first of his major books, Nature and Grace, he describes the supernatural as a sharing in the nature of God. This same theme, the splendor of our supernatural life, is the leading idea of all his works. He thought that a deep appreciation of the mysteries revealed by God was so important that he consecrated the tireless powers of his genius to the task of bringing out their beauty and force, and of emphasizing their meaning for the daily life of man. He insisted that these mysteries are the richest treasure of our spiritual inheritance and that theology is the inspiration of the fullest lie open to use-supernatural life with Christ and in Christ. Scheeben's masterly theological synthesis is best proposed in The Mysteries of Christianity, his most original work, but was clearly formulated from the beginning of his literary activity in Nature and Grace, the book of his energetic youth.