Every time we feel inspired to grow in our relationship with God, we find ourselves confronted by various temptations. Some temptations are straightforward in their logic, attempting simply to distract, disperse, or delay. Other temptations are more subtle. One is especially deadly. It reasons, “If souls can be made to rely upon themselves, they will never actually rely upon God.” And so it undermines by apparent encouragement. You might say to yourself, “I want to become a saint.” The temptation responds, “Just try harder. Make a daily holy hour, go to daily Mass, pray a daily rosary, find a bunch of tough penances, read the whole Bible.” Or you might decide, “I want to stop watching pornography.” The temptation responds, “Just try harder. Make up your mind to stop, get an internet filter, get an accountability partner, downgrade to a dumb phone, begin an exercise routine.” Good ideas all, but if undertaken with merely human resources, they are often destined to fail. Try harder: a simple appeal with a deadly consequence. For, in the end, trying harder just convinces us more than ever of our own weakness.

The Psalmist sings, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Ps 61:2). The rock is the goal. The last chapter identified that goal as God but said little about how to reach it. Notice, the rock is “too high for me to reach.” If the goal is something out of reach — if simply trying harder will never be enough to reach it — then what’s left for us to do? How do we reach a rock too high for us to reach? In the Letter of James we read, “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (1:17). In the quest to reach God, we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We cannot write our own rags-to-riches story and simply include God in the acknowledgments. Reaching God is not a matter of trying harder. Our pursuit of happiness and our growth in holiness is God’s work.

In the next chapter and those to follow, we’ll take up the question of practical reason (making decisions) and how one goes about becoming a good practical reasoner. If we were to launch immediately into a list of “Ten Tips and Tricks for Better Decision-Making,” we would risk thinking of ourselves as self-made men and women; we would risk imagining the virtuous life as a mere matter of self-help. Instead, we will begin where all good Christian thought begins — with God. To grasp the place of prudence in a good and happy life (which is where we’re going), we have to see prudence in light of God, creation, redemption, and grace. For, while we may not be able to reach the rock on our own — by God’s grace, we can and will.

Think about what your status was before creation. Actually, don’t bother, because you can’t. Before God created the heavens and the earth (and even the term “before” is clunky, since there was no time) there wasn’t even any nothingness to speak of. So, then, this was our status: We weren’t even nothing. You can’t get poorer than that. By creating us, God looked upon our less-than-nothingness and put something there. He put us there. God looked to his divine abundance, and patterned us on himself, calling us forth from nothing (ex nihilo) to be something unto him.

How does one account for God’s decision to create? There doesn’t seem to be sufficient motivation. Before the dawn of time, God enjoyed the perfect fullness of blessed life. He had no need for adoration or assistance. He stood to gain nothing from bond servants or slavish worshipers. There was no human-shaped hole in God’s heart. He lacked nothing, and no thing could have been added to his all-sufficiency.

Creation, then, is testimony of God’s cosmic generosity. By his free choice, God brings a bewildering variety of good things into existence, among which we human beings are numbered. To all things he gives existence. To some things he gives life. To us, he gives even more. Beyond just being and living, we are made for understanding. God gives us (along with the angels) a spiritual nature capable of recognizing his generosity and referring it back to him. We can know and love God. We can behold his handiwork. We can see how he draws us to himself, not from any insecurity on his part, but rather from an infinite goodness. Based on this knowledge, we can have the confidence that God wants us to be happy. There’s just no other way to account for his choice. Creation is for us who are for God, and we make good on God’s bestowal of existence, life, and intelligence by acknowledging the gift and responding generously in turn.

Thus, from the outset, we see that God initiates a good work, one in which he is the primary cause — the main protagonist. Creation is not the fruit of created efforts. No amount of trying harder yields a universe. In truth, we receive everything that we are and have from him. If we are to become better thinkers and choosers, it’s not by tips or tricks; it is in union with him who thought of us from the beginning and who chose us for himself.

Creation should have been ample testimony of God’s love for mankind, and yet our first parents chose against it. Theologians differ when describing why Adam and Eve fell. Some suggest that they turned toward themselves and away from God. Others say that they took exception to receiving their beatitude as a gift. Still others figure that they failed to trust in God’s promises. Regardless of which answer best captures the nature of the sin, a common theme emerges — our first parents treated God’s original designs as if they were somehow lacking. God poured himself out in creation, providing us with all we needed to flourish, but humanity proved suspicious, weak, and proud.

By original sin, we were despoiled of grace and wounded in our nature. Whereas formerly the intellect was subject to God, the passions subject to the intellect and will, and the body subject to the soul, now a disorderly chaos reigns within. Left to ourselves, we find it only too easy to sin. Sin is simply the choice of something not in accord with our status as sons and daughters of God, something that wounds our relationship with God, self, and others. Saint Augustine defines sin as “any thought, word, or deed contrary to the eternal law.” Put in those terms, it sounds pretty unattractive, but in real time, sin is subtle. More often than not, it is a failure to pay attention to or care about something that we ought to. In the moment, we find ourselves preferring a lower good to a higher good and positively excluding the goodness of God’s plan.

So that’s the situation in which humanity finds itself after the Fall: mistrusting God, living for lower things, floundering in chaos. With God’s goodness having been called into question, one might have expected him to scrap his original plans. Why bother with such an ungrateful creature? There seems no point in an endless series of failures. But, rather than push the reset button and wipe out the memory of our betrayal, the God who marvelously created us went on to redeem us in an even more marvelous way.

Some Christian authors describe God’s act of creation as a harmonious song. Sin’s entry into the world sounds a discordant note that threatens to ruin creation’s harmony. Rather than banishing the sinful voice of fallen humanity, however, God re-orchestrates the other parts of creation’s song to produce an even richer harmony.

The fact that creation can be marred should not make us think that it is somehow deficient. A lily is beautiful to behold and delightful to smell, but it can easily be destroyed by a lawnmower. Just because a thing can be ruined doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Crabgrass is a hardy plant, but its resilience doesn’t make it better than the lily. The point is that creation’s fragility — the fact that mankind could fall from grace and did — provides the space for an even more excellent demonstration of God’s power. In the age succeeding the Fall, we see that God can bring good even out of evil.

Again, note the severity of our existential poverty. By sin we offended a God of inestimable dignity, severing our relationship with him and incurring a burdensome debt. We recognize at once the need to make up for that offense, but its weight proves too heavy for us. Left to ourselves, we have only finite resources on which to draw. How then do we atone for our offense, limited as we are by our human nature? No amount of trying will foot the bill.

Much could be said of how God answers this question through salvation history, but nowhere is his response more perfect and clear than in the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At the crux of history, in the fullness of time, God sent his only begotten Son to assume human nature and to suffer, die, and rise from the dead for love of us. Jesus Christ, the God-man, offers to the Father a pleasing sacrifice in human flesh. By virtue of his charity and obedience, he merits for us the reward of eternal life with him. His offering makes up for our fault and repairs the relationship that was ruined by our original parents. In this redemption, Jesus Christ re-creates man and woman in a manner that transcends the limitations imposed by original sin. In creation, God does something good. In redemption, he does something better.

What, precisely, is this something better — this “how much more,” to borrow from Saint Paul (cf. Rom 5)? Christ’s redemption is not motivated by a naive nostalgia for the days of Eden. It’s not a matter of simply reversing the original sin and getting back to where we were. God’s plans are wiser than that. He has a richer harmony in mind.

Consider this: In the original dispensation, grace, our created share in God’s divine life, would have been communicated with our nature in the ordinary course. When the woman conceived, her child would have enjoyed the life of grace from the first. As God infused the soul of the child, he would have also bestowed his grace and all that comes with it (virtues, gifts of the Holy Spirit, etc.). But, with the loss incurred by original sin, this arrangement ceased, and now each child comes into the world bereft of his original endowment but with a lingering longing for his supernatural destiny. We are born heaven-haunted.

By the Lord’s paschal mystery, this way to the life of grace and glory is re-opened, but in a manner that surpasses the original plan. Now, instead of receiving grace as a God-given birthright, each individual Christian is incorporated, one by one, by the Sacrament of Baptism, into the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. What originally would have been communicated to the whole of mankind in each and every generation is now communicated singly in the context of an ecclesial and sacramental friendship. And so, instead of returning to Eden, we are ushered into the kingdom of heaven, the very life of Christ.

This turning from sin and turning to God with the infusion of grace at baptism is continually reenacted in the Sacrament of Penance. When we sin, there is a temptation to regret the sin — to wish it undone. We know our sins have wounded our relationship with God, self, and others, and we would like to have them blotted out from memory (and even reality). But the logic of the Sacrament of Penance operates in a different register. In this sacrament, the Christian is not called to cultivate regret, but rather the virtue of penitence. A penitent heart laments and hates sin because it desires a deeper conversion. Penitence inspires the Christian to look back on the past and to acknowledge how Christ is at work even there — permitting sin and incorporating it into a story of yet more perfect love by bringing goodness out of evil. So, too, with the original sin. Humanity’s rejection of divine love was tragic, to be sure, but it has served to fasten us all the more to Christ. As the Easter Exsultet sings, “O happy fault, which earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

“Set me upon the rock too high for me to reach.” Our God comes down, in a sense, and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Salvation is not something of our own fashioning nor is it a fruit of our trying harder. Rather, it is an entirely unmerited gift from God, one that he offered once for all, but yet does not tire of extending to us with each passing day.

Our happiness is to be had in God, and if we are to arrive there, it will be by his gracious assistance. What, then, are the concrete means that the Lord gives to conduct us to himself? How does he get us there?

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6). The first means to our salvation is Jesus Christ. God gives us himself. In the Incarnation, the only begotten Son of God takes our human nature to himself, sharing with us in all things but sin. By doing so, he ensures that we can truly meet him — touch him — in every aspect of our human lives. The Lord has a human soul and a human body, a human intellect and a human will, human passions and even human hunger, thirst, and fatigue. He was conceived; he was born; he suffered and died; he was raised and exalted. “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb 4:15).

As the one bridge between God and man, Jesus mediates the infinite gap between divinity and humanity, and through his humanity he conducts us into the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The rock too high for us to reach came down to the ledge where we were standing. There is a yawning chasm of being between God and man; his nature surpasses ours in a manner defying comprehension. In the order of being, we are closer to the nature of a fly than we are to the nature of God. But in the Incarnation, the Lord Jesus emptied himself, drew near to sinful humanity, and brought us up with him into the divine nature. He “set aside” the glory of his divinity to seek and to save the lost, to live among us as one born of woman, to deliver us from destruction and lead us back to God. And, as a result, we believe and hope that we can heal from sin and live with him forever.

When the Scriptures speak of the reason God became man, they speak straightforwardly of our need for deliverance: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk 19:10). But while saving us from sin, the Lord sees fit to bestow on us yet further riches. In his Incarnation, Christ not only reveals his divinity, but he also begins a process whereby he gives us a share in it. It is common in the Christian tradition to speak of the Incarnation as a principle of deification or divinization, both of which words mean our becoming like God. Saint Peter writes of salvation in just these terms:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:3–4)

In short, the goal of human life isn’t merely to be kind or successful or well-regarded. It is to become like God. As Saint Athanasius writes, “For He was made man that we might be made God.”

Jesus Christ is the unique Mediator and perfect means for bringing mankind to God. There is absolutely nothing lacking to this mediation. That being said, the Lord himself has chosen to employ further means, other mediations, to perpetuate his presence in time and space well beyond his earthly life. The Church is one such means in which we find still further means. God sends his Son, the Son institutes the Church, in the Church we receive the sacraments, and from the sacraments we are enriched with every grace, virtue, and gift of the Holy Spirit. By grace, virtue, and gifts, we are conformed to the mysteries of Christ’s life given in the sacraments. These mysteries make us like him and draw us into the communion of the Blessed Trinity. So, if Christ’s mediation is sufficient, why the sacraments?

Saint Augustine defines a sacrament as a sacred sign that makes men holy. In each of the seven sacraments, a visible sign is in service of an invisible grace that it communicates for our salvation. By saying that sacraments make men holy, make is used here in just about the strongest imaginable sense. The sacraments are not just suggestive symbols. If, for instance, you roll up to a stop sign, the sign doesn’t do to your car what it suggests. You could choose to stop or you could roll right through it. Sacraments, by contrast, work in a much stronger sense. A sacrament is like a stop sign that physically stops the believer’s car. It actually causes what it signifies. It establishes and strengthens communion with God.

The sacraments accomplish this end in a way that is profoundly human. Each human being is made up of body and soul, a profound union of material and immaterial reality. Relying on our five external senses, we start by perceiving sensible things and move to understanding intelligible ones. Smells recall memories. Sights inspire us with wonder. Hearing transmits words and their meanings. In a similar way, the Church’s sacraments communicate immaterially what they signify materially. The sacraments use everyday things — water and oil, bread and wine, human speech and touch — and employ them to communicate sublime mysteries. All at once, we are humbled by the ordinary signs and exalted by the extraordinary realities.

The sacraments are also profoundly communal. Parents and godparents bring the child to the baptismal font. Confirmands take the name of a new patron, one of their forebears in the Faith. Holy Communion makes the recipient more powerfully part of the Mystical Body. The evidence is abundant. The sacraments work effectively to solidify the fellowship of the People of God. In every sacrament we receive the gift of God for ourselves, but we are also made more perfectly a member of the Church, partaking more excellently of its communal life and worship.

Here, again, the means are not a matter of trying harder. The Lord saves the Christian through simple signs in the company of believers. The fact of our humility and dependency is communicated in spades. Salvation is not ours to grasp. It is ours to receive — a rock too high for us to reach. It remains for the believer to beg for that gift, and to receive as God sees fit to give it within the life of the Church and her sacraments.

The divine life courses from God through his Christ into the Church and her sacraments. Ultimately, these mysteries are applied in each human heart. Through this great chain of mediation, the tide of divine abundance spills over the bounds of the Godhead and flows over the individual believer, cleansing and illuminating him in his interior life. What is more, this water of divine life permeates the individual believer, getting into all the nooks and crannies of his very existence. This interiorization of the divine abundance is exactly what is meant by grace.

It’s impossible to speak of the Christian mysteries without speaking of grace, and so, of course, I’ve already mentioned it. Time, then, for more clarity. As it’s used in everyday speech, grace has three basic senses.

1. First, grace refers to one person’s positive regard (or love) for another, as when we say that a particular student is in the good graces of her teacher.
2. Second, grace refers to any gift that is freely given. If your work associate goes to Switzerland on a business trip and brings each of the members of your group a bar of delicious chocolate, you might say it was very gracious of him.
3. Third, grace can refer to the thanks rendered for a gift. This actually forms the linguistic connection between grace (gratia) and gratitude.

Each of these three senses is at play when we speak about grace in Christian theology. Grace refers to:

1. God’s love for the believer, which
2. takes concrete shape in the life of the believer, and
3. moves him or her to render thanks unto God.

In this specifically Christian sense, grace is defined as the human person’s created participation or share in the uncreated life of God. As a share in the divine life, grace effects the spiritual adoption of the baptized into the household of God, making them truly to be his sons and daughters. By grace, God comes to our souls and takes up a kind of residence, dwelling within them as in a temple, provided we do not commit mortal sin.

Sanctifying grace — a name for grace taken from its enlivening effect in our souls — elevates the whole person by a supernatural habit. Here, we can draw an analogy with health. We say someone is healthy when everything in the bodily organism is as it should be. All the organs — with their inner workings and interrelations — are functioning well. We say someone is sick when this equilibrium has been somehow compromised. Even a small mass or slightly unusual proliferation of cells is enough to render one unhealthy. We wouldn’t say, “You know, he’s got pancreatic cancer, but otherwise he’s healthy as a horse.” Health is said of the whole person. Grace is like the health of the spiritual person. By the presence of sanctifying grace in our souls, the supernatural organism — that is, the human person destined for eternal life in heaven with God — is made to function as intended. In every facet of the life of the soul (intellect, will, and passions) grace heals the wounds incurred by sin and grows beyond the limitations of nature.

To this point, I’ve described grace mostly in terms of being. Grace makes us to be like God. It makes us to be spiritually healthy. But that’s not all there is to be said on the matter. Grace also transforms our doing by giving rise to virtues. Aristotle defined virtue as a quality of soul that makes one to be good and to act well. A virtue is a habit of the intellect, will, or passions, which empowers us to live in accord with human nature.

In the Christian tradition, we distinguish between acquired virtues and infused virtues. Acquired virtues are the virtues that we can build up on our own (though without grace we can only do so imperfectly and sometimes not all). These are the “practice makes perfect” habits of ordinary human life. We can acquire the virtue of temperance by refraining time and again from overindulgence, or we can acquire the virtue of fortitude by consistently facing difficulties and fears. By repetition, we acquire a settled disposition of the soul to act for goods that lead to our flourishing.

Beyond acquired virtues, there are also infused virtues, the most notable of which are faith, hope, and charity. Infused virtues are given by God as an interior effect of grace. An infused virtue is not acquired by mere discipline and devotion. Rather, God just pours it (infuses it) into the soul. As with the acquired virtues, the infused virtues make one to be good and to act well, but they do so on a higher plane. Because of their divine origin and higher function, the infused virtues far outstrip the acquired virtues in excellence and efficacy.

The limits of the divine abundance stretch even beyond the virtues. God gives a variety of other interior helps. The last we will discuss here are the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Like the infused virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit — wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord — are supernatural habits. They inform our intellect, will, and passions, subjecting them to the reign of grace in our lives. The gifts accomplish this work by disposing us to be receptive to God’s promptings. You can think about the divine work in terms of a radio transmission. The Holy Spirit is constantly “transmitting” indications of the divine will, but we may not be able to pick them up. We could be on the wrong frequency, or there could be too much interference, or we may not even know how to work the radio. In this image, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are like interior receivers perfectly attuned to the Holy Spirit’s transmission. They open to us a world shot through with indications of the divine will.

By the gifts of the Holy Spirit baptized persons become well-disposed to receive and act upon these divine inspirations. It’s as if we are carried along by a divine breath or instinct. The gifts allow God to move the baptized person easily and promptly. While the virtues cause us to act in a human mode, the gifts cause us to act in a divine mode. Operating by the virtues is like pulling at a boat’s oars and working through the waves of life in a way proper to human ingenuity. Operating by the gifts, however, is like hoisting the sail and being sped along by the divine help. Over the course of a life, the gifts of the Holy Spirit render the believer more and more docile to the divine inspiration and zealous for carrying it out. It is thus that we come to the heights of Christian perfection by an ever more mature exercise of the gifts.

Perfection (or, simply, salvation) is just a matter of responding well and generously to God’s initiative. Salvation is God’s work before it is ever ours. It is wholly beyond our means — a rock too high for us to reach. Though we certainly must exert ourselves in the effort, it’s not enough to appeal to our weak and wounded will. If we hope to try harder (or to try at all), it is only by God’s grace. Through the abundant testimony of creation and the Incarnation, we know that God is manifestly generous in providing for us. He gives us the Lord’s sacred humanity; he gives us the Church; and he gives us the sacraments. He pours grace, virtues, and gifts into our souls, imparting a redeemed and supernaturalized existence. This redeemed way of being human is the proper setting for the choices we seek to make and the prudence we hope to foster. Our choice for him stands always under the mercy of his choice for us.

How do you imagine yourself in relation to God? As his ambassador? As his employee? As his slave? How do the doctrines of creation and redemption challenge that image?

What are some typical ways you think about past sins? With embarrassment? Regret? Self-accusation? What are some ways the Lord is using those sins in your conversion?

How would you define grace in your own words? How often does grace enter into your conscious thoughts about your past, present, and future? What would your life look like if you patterned your day more on the life of grace?