SIXTH ARTICLE: WHETHER SANCTIFYING GRACE WAS A GIFT OF NATURE OR A PERSONAL GIFT IN ADAM

Some modern writers hold that in Adam sanctifying grace was not an endowment of nature but purely a personal gift.[1476] They admit that the gift, of original justice was an "accident of nature," to be transmitted with nature itself by generation, but they say that sanctifying grace has no intrinsic connection with original justice and was only the efficient cause or a condition "sine qua non" of original justice. From this it would follow that sanctifying grace was not transmitted with the nature and original justice by generation but that God immediately granted this grace to the person when he was generated, because of the disposition of the integrity of human nature. Finally, it would be inferred from this that original sin is not the privation of sanctifying grace but only the privation of integrity of nature.

Indeed, according to these writers, this doctrine is found not only in the works of many Scholastics who before the time of St. Thomas held that Adam received sanctifying grace after his creation and in view of his personal disposition, but these writers say that this is the definitive teaching of St. Thomas himself as found in the Theological Summa.

We shall inquire first whether this thesis is true according to the obvious sense of the Church's definitions, and secondly whether it is the teaching of St. Thomas.