Grace and consciousness

Another hurrah to Rahner. He notes that part of the standard view of grace among post-Reformation Catholics is the notion that grace is “above man’s conscious spiritual and moral life.” It is an object of faith, but it never penetrates to consciousness or experience: “only nature and its acts constitute that life which we experience as ours. We make up from the elements of our natural powers, habits, etc., those acts in which we intentionally direct ourselves towards God’s revealed mysteries which we know to be ‘essentially’ . . . supernaturally raised.” When we reflect on ourselves, we are aware of ourselves as a “pure nature,” even though we might not be; we can’t know. Pure nature differs from fallen nature only sicut spolatus a nudo – “as the man who has lost his clothes differs from the man who has never had any.”

As he points out, this has horrific practical consequences, for a supernatural grace that never gets to where I live is a supernatural grace I can easily ignore, or tap into as necessary while continuing to live my natural life as I please.

Rahner’s response to this viewpoint involves many scholastic intricacies, but he also thumps on the point that this paradigm goes contrary to Scripture, which describes the gift of the Spirit not “as only an entitative ‘elevation’ above man’s consciousness of his acts, which in his consciousness and existentially remain the same and are only changed through the Faith which comes from hearing.” Instead, the gift of the Spirit is life, anointing, comfort, light, inpiration and enlightenment. And “an entitatively elevated act, which on the conscious level remains a natural act, cannot . . . be called an inner enlightenment and inspiration.”