Nature and grace

In short, grace cannot answer to natural need as naturally known; for if it did it would not be grace.

Nor will it do to say that while grace does not answer to natural need, it does answer to the needs of a fallen human nature, as if it were that because of sin, and because we are creatures fallen, grace is demanded because our natures demand to be restored to their innocent condition. At any rate, Thomas does not believe this: in fact, the objection is obvious, grace being, in name and nature, “gratuitous,” it cannot be demanded by anything, except in a purely hypothetical sense: if we are to be saved then only grace can save us...for Thomas the fall is a human predicament which imposes absolutely no obligation on God to do anything about. Fallen as we are, without grace we have no right to anything but to stew in our own juice— in fact, fallen as we are, we hardly even know how far we are fallen; at best we can know that ours is a predicament, our ignorance of its nature being itself an aspect of that self-same fallen condition. For ours is like the condition of the person who is self-deceived : not only is he self-ignorant, he has somehow managed to hide from himself how it is that he is himself the cause of that ignorance and that he has a reason for remaining in it undisturbed. Therefore, for Thomas it takes grace to know that we are in need of grace; and it takes grace for us to know that there is a possible condition to which nature is restored, a condition far beyond the powers of nature even as they were before the Fall. It is in that sense that, for Thomas, nature is “perfected” by grace— not as if, knowing what we want, human beings are by grace given the gift of it, but rather, not knowing what we want, the gift of grace reveals to us the depth and nature of our need, a need that, as heretofore we were, was unknown to us.

Grace, therefore, does not exactly answer to our desire, as if we knew what our desire is. Grace answers to desires that only it can arouse in us, showing us what it is that we really want: grace is pure gift, the gift we could not have known that we wanted until we were given it. For grace does not merely solve the problem of the gap opened up by the Fall, restoring us to where we were before Adam's sin. It goes far beyond and above that, calling us into a friendship which is surplus by an infinite degree to the solution required. We need to come to know this, and to live by the knowledge that everything transacted between ourselves and God— that is, everything to do with the friendship that Jesus offered his followers— is the work of grace, a work that is of its nature supererogatory, being a solution that far exceeds what is needed by the problem it solves.

Thomas Aquinas by Denys Turner

Dealing with sadness

Given the prevailing caricature of the man whose physiognomy consisted of nothing but an oversize cerebellum, the chances are exceedingly low of anyone guessing Thomas to have been the author of the following sensitively practical reflections on how to cope with sadness. 
First, he says, you should cry, both tears and groans, though you might also try talk therapy. Above all, no stiff upper lip: First of all, because anything that is causing you inner hurt afflicts you all the more for being contained, as the mind becomes fixated upon it. But when it is let out it is in a certain degree dissipated and the inner sadness to that extent diminished. For this reason when people are afflicted by sadness and vent it with tears and groans, or even tell of it in words, the sadness decreases. 
A second reason is that human beings always get some pleasure out of acting appropriately, and weeping and groaning is just what the person who is sad and doleful should be doing. Being in this sort of way appropriate behavior it gives a certain kind of mitigating pleasure that reduces the sadness. 
Next, if sad, count on your friends. That is the natural thing to do. One reason, the weaker of two, he says, is that if a friend shares your sadness it will seem as if the burden of it is lightened by virtue of her carrying part of it for you. But the better reason is that being prepared to share a friend's sadness and console him is a way of showing love for him, and the perception of the love thus shown to him by a friend gives the sort of pleasure that alleviates the sadness. 
You could also, of course, try contemplative prayer, if, like Thomas, you find contemplation to be the most intense of all pleasures, the point being that it is always some kind of pleasure that drives sadness away. If, however, weeping, groaning, therapeutic talk, prayer, and friends all fail to cheer you up, take a hot bath and get a good night's sleep. Thus all-brain Thomas.

From Thomas Aquinas: a portrait, by Denys Turner

Necessary

...we are reminded by how far today we are afflicted by a certain kind of provinciality of mind, a reductivist mentality that can conceive of a question's being worth asking only if we know in advance some routine procedures guaranteed to provide intelligible answers to it. It is indeed an exceedingly curious reversal of commonsense intellectual priorities that a pre-formed procedure for answering questions should be allowed to dictate the legitimacy of the questions that may be asked. Thomas is intellectually braver, even perhaps more irresponsible: there are for him questions that have to be asked, but cannot be answered. He is prepared to ask the question: Could everything's being like the daffodil—“contingent” is his word for the fragility of existence—be just a fact, a sort of brute fact, requiring no further explanation? Or must everything's being like that demand an explanation, a cause, whose hold on existence does not need to be accounted for?—his word for such a mode of existence being “necessary.” Thomas's answer to that last question is in the affirmative: it has to be the case that some necessary being exists, otherwise the existence of all the contingent beings that there are is impossible to account for.

From Thomas Aquinas: a Portrait, by Denys Turner

Incompletely human

Even if humans were statistically just as likely to sin as they are to love their children, it cannot, for Thomas, be right in the same sense of the word “natural” to say that human beings naturally sin as that they naturally love their children. To find oneself puzzled by the words of the Letter to the Hebrews because the exception of his sinlessness seems a very drastic limitation upon Christ's solidarity with us; to find oneself wondering whether Christ could really have known what it is like to be us if he does not experience sin, as it were, from the inside; to imagine that one of the solidarities in which human beings share is solidarity in sin because we all do it and so understand one another in our sinning; to conclude, therefore, that it is a restriction on Christ's solidarity with us that he is absolutely sinless, for a Christ who could not sin would seem not to share our human nature in its concrete actuality—all this is, for Thomas, getting things upside down. 

...Unlike Christ, it is we who are incompletely human. Docetism is the heresy that Jesus is not truly a human being, but only apparently so, because he is too good to be true. Thomas's position is that it is we who, on account of our sinfulness, are not good enough to be true. We do not know for ourselves and from ourselves what it is like to be truly human. From ourselves and from others at best we get partial glimpses of what a true human being looks like. But we have no full picture of what it is to be truly human except from the human nature of Christ. The point about the exception made in the Letter to the Hebrews is that “solidarity in sin” is in fact an oxymoron.

...the casual theological identification of fallen human nature with human nature as such ignores what is manifestly intended by the author of Hebrews, for whom Christ alone can perfectly communicate with us because he is perfectly, indefectibly, human; it is precisely because he is free of sin that the intimacy of Christ's solidarity with our sinful selves is unhindered, and in him the view of what we truly are is uncluttered by the obstructing impedimenta of sin; and so it is precisely because we are dehumanized by our sinfulness that our solidarities with Christ and with one another are so tragically awry, and in consequence, our relationships, personal and political, beset by fantasy and illusion. For Thomas, Christ is more intimately human than we are, not less; closer to our true selfhood than we are; in closer solidarity with us because he is without sin, not distanced from us on account of his innocence, as we are distanced from ourselves by sin, from one another, and from God.

From Denys Turner's Thomas Aquinas, a Portrait. 

Prayer and desire

...we can say that for Thomas a person succeeds in living the happy life when she gets to do, regularly and routinely, what she “really wants.”

But here the force of the word “really” is not, as before, that in which it contrasts with the false perceptions of desire that characterize the self-deceived . There is a very profound sense in which even the most perfectly honest person may not know what she wants: not, that is, the case where, of two things both of which she wants, she does not know which to choose, like whether to marry John or James. More problematic is the case where there is something that we want but we do not know what it is, except that it is somehow importantly connected with our happiness. Such is the case when we are morally befogged, because our deepest desires are hidden from us by veil upon obscuring veil, of upbringing, of socialization, of personal insecurities and fears, of relationships abusive and abused, of desire habitually unfulfilled and frustrated; and in this sense of “want” in which we want something but for all these reasons do not know what it is, we do not know our own “wills.” For what we will is happiness; and what we really will , whether or not we know it, is whatever it is that will make us happy, but we may not —and all too often do not— know what it is. It is for this reason that the moral life consists in the first place in those practices that enable the discovery of what it is that we really want, the happy life, and the power of insight that leads to that discovery is what Thomas calls prudentia, skill in seeing the moral point of human situations, what true desires are to be met within them. It is then, and only secondarily that the moral life consists in virtuous forms of living, the practices of desire that prudentia has interpretatively uncovered within the maelstrom of desires as actually experienced.

And it is here within his conception of moral practice as desire-discovery— or as he calls it, “practical wisdom”— that for Thomas a principal means of tracing the way back to what we really want, is prayer, oratio. And our only available starting point for that practice of self-discovery is our wants and desires as we actually experience them. Therefore, Thomas says, we ought to pray for what we think we want regardless. For prayer is “in a certain manner a hermeneutic of the human will,” so that by way of placing our desires as we experience them before God we are asking also that those desires be “unfolded,”“explicated,” thereby to release their real significance, the real want that is wrapped up in, “implicated” in all their opacity in their form as experienced. Therefore, says Thomas, we ought to pray, as Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane, “in response to our animal desire” (secundum sensualitatem). For when we pray as Jesus did then, out of animal need and desire— for Jesus was scared of death, as naturally any animal is— we are placing that animal need and desire within the interpretative power of the divine will itself , wherein alone we will discover our own real will. Therefore, Thomas concludes, we ought always to pray for what we think we want; for Jesus prayed as he did in Gethsemane so as to teach us just that lesson, namely that it is “permitted for human beings naturally to desire even what [they know] is not God's will” and, as if in reinforcement of what for many is a startling thought, he cites the authority of Augustine to the same effect, commenting on the same prayer of Jesus: “It is as if [Jesus] were saying: ‘See yourself in me: for you [too] can wish something for yourself even though God wishes something else.’” Only thus, in the prayer of honest desire, is there any chance of our discovering what are our true desires, our real will.

Denys Turner in Thomas Aquinas: a portrait, (p. 181). Yale University Press.

Thomas and prayer

...for Thomas it was not only his judgment as a theologian, it was his practice as a Dominican, that prayer is the route down which grace traces us back to that place where what we really want lies dormant and all too often unrecognized. And prayer answers to the very desire that prayer itself discovers; prayer uncovers the hidden desire precisely by answering to it. We know from contemporary witnesses that when Thomas wants something he prays for it. That is what you should always do, he says, and it is a pity that what Thomas has to say about prayer is so sorely neglected in the secondary literature, if only because his own practice of prayer was so essential a part of his practice as a theologian. William of Tocco, one of his earliest biographers, made no such mistake. 

Every time that he wished to study, to undertake a disputation, to teach, to write, or dictate, [Thomas] first withdrew into prayer on his own and prayed pouring out tears, in order to obtain understanding of the divine mysteries.

Among contemporary witnesses the stories abound of Thomas having credited prayer above any intellectual ability of his own as accounting for such theological insights as his work might have provided. No doubt some of those stories are apocryphal in detail, pious conjectures of a stereotypically hagiographical kind. It is equally doubtless that they genuinely reflect the wider reality: Thomas wanted to know, and what Thomas wants he prays for. And if he put his theological insights down as much to the outcome of his pleading in prayer for understanding as to anything else, I can see no reason why we should be skeptical. It is not that Thomas thereby claims any divine warrant for his theological arguments, as if their coming to mind in the course of or as a result of prayer in itself authenticated them, as some writers in his times, and especially in the next century, were wont to claim for their work. Thomas never claims warrant for any of his theological conclusions on the grounds (as a son of mine when three years old once did) that “God told him,” otherwise than by way of appeal to what the Church claims God had told everyone. Thomas hid his prayer as he hid his bulk, and specifically insisted to any of his brethren who witnessed anything out of the ordinary by way of prayer experiences that under no circumstances should they report them to anyone else. What Thomas does know is that some kinds of understanding will come to the theologian only within a life of faith and prayer, as gift given to those who ask for it.

From Thomas Aquinas: a portrait, by Denys Turner. chapter six.

Being Christian

I think really, that as in all other fields, we must be Christian.  That is essentially what a Christian has to do.  There are some Christians who I have met in the media and their influence has been out of proportion to what it might seem to be, just because they were Christians and were known to be Christians.  I don't think that a Christian has to be a particular type of Christian to be a diplomat, or a particular sort of Christian to be a doctor, or a particular sort of Christian to be a labourer.  He has, in all circumstances, to be a Christian.

Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Imagine, by Steve Turner, page 127