Theology · Grace

What Is Grace? Nature, the Supernatural and the Share in God's Life

Beyond the Basics

Most Catholics learn that grace is God’s free gift, and that there is sanctifying grace (the permanent gift) and actual grace (God’s help in the moment). That is true, and it is explained simply in What Is Grace? The Difference Between Sanctifying and Actual Grace.

But it leaves the deepest questions untouched. What does grace actually do to a human being? Why is it called supernatural? And what can St Peter mean when he says that we “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4)?

Nature and the Supernatural

The starting point is a distinction that runs through all Catholic theology: the difference between nature and the supernatural.

A thing’s nature is what it is, and what it is able to do by its own powers. A bird’s nature includes flying. Human nature includes reasoning, choosing and loving. By our nature we can know that God exists and that we owe Him worship (CCC 36). That is a great deal.

But there are things no created nature can reach by its own powers. Above all, no creature can see God as He is, or share in the inner life of the Trinity. That would be like a stone deciding to think. It lies beyond anything a creature is owed or capable of.

The supernatural is what lies above every created nature. Grace is supernatural in this strict sense: it gives a creature what it could never have by nature, namely a share in the life proper to God alone.

This is why the Church teaches that grace would have been a free gift even if there had been no sin. Adam and Eve, before the Fall, already lived by grace. It was not part of their human nature; it was God’s gift raising that nature to friendship with Him (CCC 374–375).

Grace Heals and Raises

After the Fall, grace does two things at once.

It heals. Original sin wounded human nature. Our minds are darkened, our wills weakened, our desires disordered (CCC 405). Grace heals these wounds, so that we can do the good that even our nature should be able to do. Theologians call this healing grace.

It raises. Beyond healing, grace lifts us to a level no human nature could reach: friendship with God, and eternal life with Him. This is elevating grace.

A famous principle of St Thomas Aquinas sums up the relationship: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8). Grace does not make us less human. It makes us fully human, and then more than human. This is why Catholic theology has always valued reason, the body, art and culture. They are not rivals to grace, but material for it.

Created and Uncreated Grace

Theologians distinguish two aspects of grace that belong together.

Uncreated grace is God Himself, giving Himself to us. Above all, it is the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul. Jesus promised: “If a man loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23). St Paul says that God’s love “has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

Created grace is the change this indwelling makes in us. Sanctifying grace is a real quality of the soul, a new way of being, given by God. Aquinas describes it as a kind of second nature, from which flow the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 110).

The two cannot be separated. God does not come to dwell in a soul without changing it, and the change is nothing other than the effect of His presence. A room is lit because the sun is shining into it; the light in the room is real, but it exists only because the sun is there.

Here we reach the heart of the matter. The Catechism quotes St Athanasius: “The Son of God became man so that we might become God” (CCC 460).

This sounds startling, but it is the common teaching of the Fathers, East and West. The Eastern tradition calls it theosis, or divinisation. It does not mean we become God by nature, or lose our identity, or dissolve into the divine. We remain creatures for ever. It means we share, really and not just metaphorically, in God’s own life: in His knowing and His loving.

Grace makes us adopted children of God (Romans 8:15–17). Christ is the Son by nature; we become sons and daughters by grace, joined to Him. Through grace, the Father looks at us and sees His Son.

This is also why grace is the seed of glory. The life of grace now and the life of heaven are the same life, at different stages. Grace is eternal life begun (CCC 1997–1998).

Grace, the Church and the Sacraments

God can give grace however He wills, but He has chosen to give it through Christ and His Church, above all through the sacraments. In the sacraments, created things (water, oil, bread and wine) become instruments of grace. This fits the principle that grace perfects nature: God reaches us through the material world He made, as He reached us through the human body of His Son.

Losing and Regaining Grace

Sanctifying grace is lost by mortal sin, because mortal sin is a deliberate rejection of the love that grace is (CCC 1861).

It is restored ordinarily through the Sacrament of Penance. But the Church also teaches that perfect contrition, sorrow for sin arising from love of God above all things, obtains forgiveness even of mortal sins, provided it includes the firm resolution to go to Confession as soon as possible (CCC 1452). God is not bound by the sacraments, though we are bound to use them.

Why It Matters

To understand grace this way changes how we see the Christian life. It is not mainly a programme of moral improvement. It is the life of God growing within us, slowly transforming everything we are.

It also changes how we see other people. Every baptised person in a state of grace is a dwelling place of the Trinity. St Paul’s question to the Corinthians is meant literally: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).