2. The Indwelling Holy Spirit: the Infused Virtues and the Gifts

To understand Aquinas’s ethics, it helps to begin with the central place Aquinas assigns to love. In discussing the virtues, Aquinas asks whether it is possible to have the infused virtue of love without also having the moral virtues; and, in response, he says, ‘All the moral virtues are infused simultaneously together with love’.Footnote ³ In fact, he is emphatic that there can be no moral virtue at all without the infused virtue of love. He says,

Because he thinks that all the virtues are infused and also accepts a unity of the virtues thesis, it seems to follow that for Aquinas all the virtues are infused at once, in an instant. And this is in fact what he does think.

On his view, a person begins the process of a life in grace through justification when he comes to faith; and the transition to justification in faith occurs in a datable, discernible instant. So, for example, Aquinas says,

In this same instant, it is also the case that all the virtues are simultaneously infused.

Actually, Aquinas supposes that in the one datable instant at which a person Jerome comes to faith, not only are all the virtues infused into Jerome, but the Holy Spirit is also given to Jerome. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit begins in this instant.Footnote ⁷ In the instant of a human person’s acquiring faith and becoming justified, the Holy Spirit comes into that person. When that happens, the indwelling Holy Spirit unites that person with God to some nascent degree; and in so doing, it makes God available to him to know, to love, and to enjoy.

When Aquinas describes the Holy Spirit, he says that the name of the person of the Holy Spirit is ‘Gift’. In saying this, he is validating a claim of Augustine’s: ‘the gift of the Holy Spirit is nothing but the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ⁸ To explain this claim, Aquinas says,

This is a position Aquinas maintains and develops in many places. So, for example, in commenting on Paul’s wish for the Ephesians, ‘that you may able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of the love of God]’, Aquinas says,

In Romans 5:5, Paul says ‘the love of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us’. In one of the many places in which Aquinas comments on this line, he says,

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Aquinas characterizes the relation of the Holy Spirit to the person in whom the Spirit dwells this way: ‘The Father … will give the Holy Spirit, who is the Consoler, since he is the Spirit of love. It is love that causes spiritual consolation and joy…’.Footnote ¹² And in commenting on a line in Ephesians, where Paul says that the Ephesians have the promise of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), Aquinas says, ‘The Holy Spirit is given with a certain promise, since by the very fact that he is given to us we become the children of God. For through the Holy Spirit we are made one with Christ’.Footnote ¹³

According to Aquinas, then, in the first instant of faith, every person of faith comes to have the Holy Spirit itself indwelling in her in an incipient union of love. And this is not the end of the story. The Holy Spirit’s coming brings with it, in that one and the same datable instant, not only all the infused virtues but also all the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹⁴

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are infused dispositions in the will that render a person attentive to God and apt to follow the inner promptings of God. Speaking of these gifts, Aquinas says, ‘These perfections are called “gifts”, not only because they are infused by God, but also because by them a person is disposed to become amenable to the divine inspiration…’.Footnote ¹⁵ And a little later he says, ‘the gifts are perfections of a human being, whereby he is disposed so as to be amenable to the promptings of God’.Footnote ¹⁶ There are seven such gifts: piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord, wisdom, understanding, counsel, and knowledge. And there are twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering, goodness, benevolence, mildness, fidelity, modesty, continence, and chastity.Footnote ¹⁷ About these, Aquinas says,

On Aquinas’s views, then, in the first instant of coming to faith, a person Jerome will have present not only with himself but even within himself the God who is his beloved. That is why the list of the fruits of this union begins with love, joy, and peace — love, because his beloved, who loves him, is present to him; joy, because of the dynamic interaction with his beloved, who is present to him in second-personal ways; and peace, because his heart already has what it most desires, his beloved, present to him.Footnote ¹⁹ As Aquinas explains it, there is no life in grace without the indwelling Holy Spirit, with its concomitant love, joy, peace, and the other fruits of this union, as well as all the gifts of the Holy Spirit and all the infused virtues.

3. Two Problems and a Solution

Here it is important to pause and take stock, because, manifestly, there are two problems with the preceding account of the thesis that all the virtues are infused at once when a person comes to faith. The first problem is that this thesis about the virtues seems highly counter-intuitive or just plain false. It seems that no one gains all the virtues at once, but that, on the contrary, there are people who have only some virtues and not others. And the second problem is that this account seems to be contradicted by the well-established theological view of sanctification as occurring gradually over the course of a lifetime. If all the virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit are infused at once, how could it also be true that sanctification is gradual?

To see the solution to the first problem, it is important to recognize what the preceding passages make abundantly evident, and what Pinsent has also argued for in detail, namely, that, on Thomistic ethics, the essence of moral excellence is second-personal.Footnote ²⁰ An Aristotelian virtue is an intrinsic characteristic, a property that can be gotten and preserved by an individual acting by himself as an individual agent. But the Thomistic understanding of moral excellence requires a much different characterization. As is clear from Aquinas’s emphasis on love as the foundational virtue, the virtue without which no other virtue is possible, a human person’s moral excellence is a function of her relation to God and other persons.

The quotations above demonstrate that, for Aquinas, it is open to every human person to have a second-personal connection of love with God, and every person who is in grace has such a connection. In relationship with God, a human person can know God’s presence and something of God’s mind in a direct and intuitive way that is in some respects like the interaction between human persons united in shared attention. On Aquinas’s views,

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are a manifestation and an outgrowth of a second-personal relationship of love with God on the part of a person, Paula. Every gift of the Holy Spirit has its source in God’s indwelling in Paula; and, in addition to its other functions, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit renders Paula attentive to God and apt to follow the inner promptings of God. In fact, for Aquinas, the Holy Spirit so fills a person with a sense of the love of God and God’s nearness that joy is one of the principal effects of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ²² Aquinas says,

And, in Summa contra Gentiles (SCG), expanding on the idea that a person of faith is friends with God, Aquinas says:

On Aquinas’s view, a second-personal connection of love between two human persons enables them to have what Aquinas calls ‘connaturality’ with each other.Footnote ²⁷ For Aquinas, as the passages above make clear, it is possible for a human person also to have connaturality with God.Footnote ²⁸ Because of Aquinas’s commitment to the unity of the virtues thesis, which for him encompasses also the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, this second-personal connection and the resulting connaturality with God is one or another degree of the optimal ethical condition for a human person. In this condition, a person in grace will not need to try to reason things out as regards ethics or struggle on her own to acquire good moral habits. She will be disposed to think and act in morally appropriate ways because of her second-personal interaction with God.

And so there is a solution to the first problem for Aquinas’s view. If we think of a virtue as an acquired moral excellence, then it is abundantly clear that no one gains all the virtues at once. But if we think of virtue as Aquinas does, as one or another manifestation of a union (in some incipient degree) with God, then it is clear that a person can gain the moral excellences all at once in a datable instant, the instant in which one comes to faith and receives the indwelling Holy Spirit.

The counter-intuitive character of Aquinas’s unity of the virtues thesis is further reduced by seeing that, on Aquinas’s view, the virtues can co-exist with contrary dispositions in a person.Footnote ²⁹ The possibility of fragmentation in a human psyche means that the mere presence of morally excellent dispositions is not enough by itself to render a person internally integrated around the good. So, for example, Aquinas says, ‘sometimes the habits of moral virtue experience difficulty in their works by reason of certain contrary dispositions remaining from previous acts’.Footnote ³⁰ As Aquinas sees it, then, although a person cannot acquire morally excellent dispositions by his own actions, through repeated acts of a morally wrong sort he can by himself acquire dispositions inclining him to the opposite of virtue. And in infusing all the moral virtues, God does not thereby remove the contrary dispositions at the same time.

With this last clarification, the counter-intuitive appearance of Aquinas’s unity of the virtues thesis is shown to be mistaken. And this resolution of the first problem with Aquinas’s ethics sets up the solution to the second problem as well. Although all the virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit are infused at the same time in the first instant of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling a person of faith, nonetheless the old acquired sinful dispositions remain; and they can make it difficult – not impossible, but difficult – to act in moral ways. It is not so difficult to understand, then, that sanctification can take such a long time and go so gradually, even though all the virtues, gifts, and fruits are infused at once in the first moment of faith.

4. God’s Action on the Will

This solution to these two problems with Aquinas’s account of ethicsFootnote ³¹ raises another problem, however: if God can infuse moral virtues into the will of a person Jerome, then why does God not also simultaneously remove all contrary, morally wrong dispositions from Jerome’s will? Then sanctification could take place in the same instant that the Holy Spirit comes to be indwelling, and there is an infusion of all the virtues, gifts, and fruits of the Holy Spirit.

The first thing to see in this connection is Aquinas’s insistence that nothing operates on a human will with efficient causation. For example, Aquinas canvasses the necessity involved in the operation of each of the four Aristotelian causes, including the efficient or agent cause (as he sometimes calls it); and he argues that there can be no agent or efficient causation on the will, because any such causation is, in his view, coercive. As he puts it, ‘the necessity of coercion is entirely repugnant to the will. … it is impossible for something to be coerced or violent simpliciter and [also] voluntary’.Footnote ³² Elsewhere he says,

Aquinas does not waver from this conviction even when it comes to divinely infused grace. So, for example, he says,

In SCG, Aquinas says,

And in Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (QDV) Aquinas sums up his position by saying, ‘God can change the will with necessity, but he cannot compel it’.Footnote ³⁶ But here we need to pause. What does it mean to say that God can change the will with necessity but cannot compel it? If omnipotent God changes something with necessity, how could it possibly be true that God does not also compel it?

Aquinas himself answers this question in some detail, and it is worth quoting his answer at length. He says,

Aquinas is here calling attention to what he takes to be an important difference in the ways in which God can change the will. But just what is this difference, and why does it matter?

The example Aquinas gives having to do with the motion of a stone is helpful in this regard. On Aquinas’s view, a stone is configured in such a way that it is inclined to fall downward. If the stone is thrown upward while it still has this configuration, then some violence or compulsion is exercised on the stone, because the stone is moved contrary to its own inclination or configuration. But it is possible to change the configuration of the stone. The configuration that makes the stone inclined to fall downward could be removed by God, and the stone could instead be given a new configuration, an inclination to move upward. In that case, the stone would presumably be like fire; it would be naturally disposed to move upward. If God were to alter the configuration of the stone in this way, then he would change the stone in such a way as to make the stone move upward. But now the upward motion would not occur as a result of any compulsion or violence on God’s part.

In the same way, Aquinas emphasizes in one place after another that God’s giving of grace is not simply God’s willing that a human will actually will something or other. Rather, it is God’s infusing of a form, the form of grace, after a previous form in the human will has been lost. And because a human being is capable of voluntary action, as a stone is not, the previous form is not something taken away by God, but rather something abandoned by a human person himself in consequence of surrendering to God. And so, on Aquinas’s view, ‘grace does not expel guilt in the manner of an efficient cause (effective) but in the manner of a formal cause (formaliter)’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The great importance of the distinction between the exercise of efficient causation versus the exercise of formal causation on a human will can readily be seen by recognizing its implications as regards the freedom of the will. If God were to act on Jerome’s will with efficient causation, then it would be entirely up to God which configuration there is in Jerome’s will. But because, on Aquinas’s view, God acts on the human will only with formal causation in the giving of grace, then, in fact, what configuration there is in Jerome’s will is ultimately up to Jerome even though the configuration Jerome has in grace is given to Jerome’s will by God. If Jerome were not to cease resisting God’s grace, then the gift of grace would not be given to Jerome. God might offer Jerome grace continually, but God will not in fact put this grace in Jerome’s will while Jerome is resisting it.

Furthermore, even though God acts directly on Jerome’s will in the giving of grace, Jerome nonetheless has alternative possibilities with regard to grace. That is because it is up to Jerome alone whether he resists grace or ceases resisting grace. Consequently, although the configuration in Jerome’s will when he accepts grace and comes to faith is a form given to the will by God, so that Pelagianism is ruled out, it is still true that Jerome has free will, even in the libertarian sense of ‘free’, with regard to grace. Ultimately, the one responsible for whether or not Jerome has grace is Jerome.

These reflections further support the claim that sanctification is a gradual process even though all the virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit are infused into a person simultaneously, and they explain why God does not immediately remove all the old morally wrong dispositions that a person acquired before coming to faith. The grace that is given in the infusion of the virtues and the gifts adds a configuration to the will where the will is open to receive it. But this grace does not by itself expel any other already existing morally wrong dispositions built up in Jerome by his past bad actions. If grace did expel those morally wrong dispositions, then God’s infusion of grace would constitute efficient causation on Jerome’s will, expelling a configuration already present in Jerome and substituting a new one. Instead, however, God’s infusion of grace exercises only formal causation on Jerome’s will.

So God adds a configuration only to the part of Jerome’s will that lacks a configuration; the infusion of grace adds a form where there is a privation of a form, and not where there is a form still present. But whether there is such a privation of form or not, however, is up to Jerome, because Jerome can resist grace or simply cease resisting it. Consequently, although all the good in Jerome’s will is a result of God’s infusion of grace, which introduces new forms into Jerome’s will, nonetheless Jerome is ultimately responsible for whether or not God introduces this grace into Jerome’s will. And so Jerome’s will is free even when God infuses grace into Jerome’s will.