V. To the Fourth Question

82. To the fourth question [n.23] I say that God could confer the highest grace on Christ’s soul without the highest grace (as the argument to the opposite says [n.26]); because grace has only the idea of a second efficient cause with respect to enjoyment, and so enjoyment is possible without it.

83. But whether Christ’s will could, on its own part, act for the highest enjoyment as much without grace as with grace is dubious.

84. For suppose that the enjoyable object is present to the intellect, and that the will, without the object being present to any habit, could so elicit the act of enjoyment that grace was not required for eliciting any perfection of the enjoyment (as holds of any other partial cause that gives some perfection to the effect but does not give the will any causality proper to itself - rather the will has of itself its own causality as to proximate power, or at least as to the remaining cause). If so, then either a necessary connection of second causes is being posited, such that none could cause a determinate effect without a determinate second cause (in the way that a father, as father, cannot act for the generating of a son without the mother acting as second cause); or God is being posited as supplying the causality of any second cause whatever (so no causality of another cause is being posited), and then he could supply the causality of the mother and leave to the father his proper causality for being true father of his son (though no one would be the mother).

85. If the first of these [n.84] is held, then one must say that the will without grace cannot act for as much enjoyment as could be elicited by the will with the highest grace, although it could receive that enjoyment without grace.

86. But if the second [n.84] is held then one must say that God could supply the action of the highest grace, and the will without that grace could act for the highest enjoyment according to its own causality, while God supplies the action of grace as grace is a second cause.

87. However, by ordained power, Christ’s will cannot have the highest enjoyment actively or elicitively without the highest grace, because the ordaining is that the first cause, which naturally gets some action from the second cause, does not have power for the highest effect of both causes without such action of the second cause [cf. Ord. 1 d.2 n.129, d.42 nn.9-15]. Likewise, the ordaining is that no will is perfected to the highest, even as recipient in highest second act, unless it has the highest first act - and so it is not possible by ordained power that it should have the highest enjoyment without the highest grace.