Export a Citation 
Print View
hide main text 
show main text 
hide table of contents
show table of contents
previous
II. To the Initial Arguments
38. To the first argument [n.5] I say that although Christ’s passion does not now exist in fact yet it does exist in the divine acceptation, and this suffices for it to be a meritorious cause. For it is plain that we confer many things because of a good not present in itself but present in our memory, if it is past, or in our opinion, if it is future.
39. To the second argument [n.6] it can be said that all the sacraments of the New Law have efficacy from the passion of Christ as made present - not indeed an efficacy made present in exterior act but in interior act. For thus did Christ have the merit of the passion in the first moment of his conception, and the idea of merit more principally consists in that interior act. And, therefore, whatever he instituted in the time of his life could also then have efficacy from the passion as already perfectly willed by Christ himself, in which willing his principal sacrifice existed and in which willing his sacrifice was principally made pleasing to God. Nor can it be said that the passion would thus have been accepted before the incarnation, because although God foresaw it, yet it was not then offered in interior or exterior act. Or it can be said that all the sacraments of the New Law had, while Christ was alive, a lesser effect than they do after his passion, and yet it was not unfitting that they were instituted while he was alive, because they were instituted as going to have their principal efficacy, not for that time then, but for the time after his death.
40. To the third [n.7] I say that the intention of the Apostle there is that grace does not have a meritorious cause equal in desert, I mean in the case of him on whom it is conferred; but it can have a meritorious cause equal in desert within him together with a meritorious cause equal in desert that is extrinsic, in particular if that extrinsic meritorious cause is gratuitously given to him for whom it is a meritorious cause, so that it be for him such a cause.9
41. And if you object that grace (given for such a cause equal in desert) is not grace, because it is deserving and is due to merits, though not the merits of the receiver, one can concede that in all God’s works there has not been any work of mere grace save only the incarnation of the Son of God, and here too provided no merits preceded, which indeed is true in the primary divine ordination of the incarnation. Because if, at the time of the conception, any good merits of Mary preceded, yet they were not good absolutely with respect to the incarnation, but perhaps with respect to acceleration, so that the preordained incarnation might be fulfilled. Therefore, Augustine speaks well, On the Trinity 13.19 n.24, “In the case of things that arise in time, the supreme grace is that man has been joined to God in unity of person.”
42. To the final argument [n.8] I say that if the wound was inflicted on Christ after his death (as the Gospel narrates), then the sacraments did not flow from that wound as from a meritorious principal cause. But they are said to have flowed from it because of a certain more express likeness between the things that did flow from it and the sense realities that are found in certain of the sacraments. For the blood is more specially likened to the species that is blood in the Eucharist, and water is more specially likened to the water of baptism, which two are the principal sacraments. And this interpretation can be got from Gregory IX Decretals III tit.41 ch.8, ‘On the Celebration of Masses’, at the end, where it is said that “in those two things (that is, water and blood) the two greatest sacraments, of redemption and regeneration, shine forth.”