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Supernatural Order

The Supernatural Order is the ensemble of effects exceeding the powers of the

created universe and gratuitously produced by God for the purpose of raising the

rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny. The

meaning of the phrase fluctuates with that of its antithesis, the natural order.

Those who conceive the latter as the world of material beings to the exclusion of

immaterial entities, or as the necessary mechanism of cause and effect to the

exclusion of the free agency of the will, or again as the inherent forces of the

universe to the exclusion of the extrinsic concurrence of God, quite consistently

call supernatural all spiritual facts or voluntary determinations or Divine

operations. There is no objection to that way of speaking provided the assertion

of the supernatural so understood be not made, by a fallacious transference of

meaning, to screen the negation of the supernatural as defined above. Catholic

theologians sometimes call supernatural the miraculous way in which certain

effects, in themselves natural, are produced, or certain endowments (like man's

immunity from death, suffering, passion, and ignorance) that bring the lower

class up to the higher though always within the limits of the created, but they are

careful in qualifying the former as accidentally supernatural (supernaturale per

accidens) and the latter as relatively supernatural (prœternaturale). For a concept

of the substantially and absolutely supernatural, they start from a comprehensive

view of the natural order taken, in its amplest acceptation, for the aggregate of all

created entities and powers, including the highest natural endowments of which

the rational creature is capable, and even such Divine operations as are

demanded by the effective carrying out of the cosmic order. The supernatural

order is then more than a miraculous way of producing natural effects, or a notion

of relative superiority within the created world, or the necessary concurrence of

God in the universe; it is an effect or series of effects substantially and absolutely

above all nature and, as such, calls for an exceptional intervention and gratuitous

bestowal of God and rises in a manner to the Divine order, the only one that

transcends the whole created world. Although some theologians do not consider

impossible the elevation of the irrational creature to the Divine order, v. g., by way

of personal union, nevertheless it stands to reason that such an exalted privilege

should be reserved for the rational creature capable of knowledge and love. It is

obvious also that this uplifting of the rational creature to the supernatural order

cannot be by way of absorption of the created into the Divine or of fusion of both

into a sort of monistic identity, but only by way of union or participation, the two

terms remaining perfectly distinct.

Not being an a priori conception but a positive fact, the supernatural order can

only be known through Divine revelation properly supported by such Divine

evidences as miracle, prophecy, etc. Revelation and its evidences are called

extrinsic and auxiliary supernatural, the elevation itself retaining the name of

intrinsic or, according to some, theological supernatural. There are three principal

instances of such elevation:

1.The hypostatic union or the assumption of the Sacred Humanity of Christ

into the personal dignity of the Son of God;

2.The calling of the faithful angels to the beatific vision whereby they see

always the face of the Father who is in heaven (Matt., xviii, 10), and

3.The elevation of man to the state of grace here and glory hereafter.

The hypostatic union and the angelic supernatural are both closely connected

with our own elevation. From St. John (i, 12-14) we know that the hypostatic

union is the ideal and instrument of it, and St. Paul declares that the angels are

"all ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall receive the inheritance

of salvation" (Heb., i, 14). Leaving for separate treatment the auxiliary

supernatural (see REVELATION; MIRACLE; PROPHECY), the hypostatic union (see

INCARNATION), and the angels' elevation (see ANGELS), this article deals with the

supernatural order in man both in its history and analysis.

Briefly, the history is this: From the beginning, man was raised, far above the

claims of his nature, to a life which made him, even here below, the adopted child

of God, and to a destiny which entitled him to the beatific vision and love of God

in heaven. To these strictly supernatural gifts by which man was truly made

partaker of the Divine nature (II Pet., i, 4) were added preternatural endowments,

that is immunity from ignorance, passion, suffering and death, which left him

"little lower than the angels" (Ps. viii, 6; Hebr., ii, 7). Through their own fault, our

first parents forfeited for themselves and their race both the God-like life and

destiny and the angel-like endowments. In His mercy God promised a Redeemer

who, heralded by ages of prophecy, came in the fulness of time in the person of

Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. By His Incarnation, labours, passion,

and death, Jesus Christ restored mankind to its former Divine sonship and

heavenly inheritance, if not to its quasi-angelic prerogatives, the virtue of

Redemption being applied to us through the joint ministrations of the inner Spirit,

and of the visible Church, in the form of actual helps, habitual sanctity, and the

power of meriting Heaven.

An analysis of the supernatural order, barely inaugurated by the Fathers, but

brought to a point of great perfection by the Schoolmen and post-Tridentine

theologians, discloses the various elements that make up order, that is an end,

means, and laws. The end is man's destination to see God face to face and to

love Him correspondingly. If, as will be shown, the intuitive vision of God is our

true destiny and moreover transcends our highest natural powers, then we must

be given means capable of attaining that end, that is supernatural. Those means

can be no other than our own actions, but invested with a higher power that

makes them meritorious of Heaven. Grace, both actual and habitual, is the

source of that meriting power: while habitual grace, with its train of infused virtues

or faculties raises our mode of being and operating to a sphere which is God's

own, actual grace spurs us on to justification and, once we stand justified, sets

in motion our supernatural powers causing them to yield good and meritorious

works. In the supernatural order, as in all others, there are also specific laws.

The work of man's sanctification depends in a manner on the general laws of the

universe and most certainly upon the carrying out of all the moral precepts

written in our hearts. Besides these laws, which Christ came not to abolish,

there are positive or freely established enactments ranging all the way from the

Divinely appointed conditions of salvation to the revealed obligations and even the

rules governing our growth in holiness. Glory and grace, being the central

features of the supernatural order, special reference will be made to them both in

the exposition of errors and the establishment of the Catholic doctrine.

I. ERRORS

The theories denying or belittling the supernatural order may be classified from

the standpoint of both their historical appearance and logical sequence, into

three groups according as they view the supernatural;

1.In our present de facto condition,

2.In the original status of man,

3.In its possibility and evidences.

To the first group belong Pelagianism and Semipelagianism. Influenced, no

doubt, by the Stoic ideal and their own ascetic performances, the Pelagians of

the fifth century so magnified the capacity of human nature as to pronounce

natural to it both the beatific vision and the human acts by which it is merited.

They were condemned by the Councils of Mileve and Carthage, 418. Less daring,

the Semipelagians, censured by the Council of Orange (529), subtracted from the

supernatural only certain phases of man's life as the beginning of faith and final

perseverance. To this group belong also, in a manner, the false mystics of the

fourteenth century, the Beghards condemned by the Council of Vienne (1312), for

claiming that the rational creature possesses beatitude in itself without the help

of the lumen gloriœ and Eckhart, whose identification of the Creator and the

creature in the act of contemplation was censured by John XXII in 1329.

To the second group belong the early Reformers and the Jansenist School,

though in different degrees. Misinterpreting the still imperfect terminology of the

Fathers who called natural, in the sense of original, the elevation of our first

parents, the early Reformers held that, according to Patristic teaching and

contrarily to the Schoolmen, that elevation was not supernatural. Their error,

rejected by the Council of Trent (Sess. V, decretum de peccato originali, can. 1),

was taken up again, but in a more refined form, by Baius who, indeed,

designated as supernatural man's original condition but nullified the meaning of

the word by stating that our first parent's elevation was demanded by and due to

the normal condition of humanity. In spite of his condemnation by Pius V

(Denzinger, 9th ed., nn. 901, 903, 906, 922) he was followed by the Jansenist

Quesnel and the pseudo-Synod of Pistoia, the former censured by Clement XI

(Denzinger, nn. 1249, 1250) and the latter by Pius VI (Denzinger, nn. 1379, 1380,

1383). A confusion between the moral and the supernatural order, frequently

found in the Baianist and Jansenist writings, was reproduced more or less

consciously by some German theologians like Stattler, Hermes, Gunther, Hirsh,

Kuhn, etc., who admitted the supernatural character of the other gifts but

contended that the adoption to eternal life and the partaking of the Divine nature,

being a moral necessity, could not be supernatural. That revival of an old error

found a strong and successful opponent in Kleutgen in the second volume of his

theology on the supernatural.

To the third group belongs the Rationalist School from Socinus to the present

Modernists. While the foregoing errors proceeded less from a direct denial than

from a confusion of the supernatural with the natural order, the Rationalist error

rejects it in its entirety, on the plea of philosophical impossibility or critical

non-existence. The Syllabus of Pius IX and the Vatican Constitution "De fide

catholica" (Denzinger, n. 1655) checked for a while that radical Naturalism which,

however, has reappeared lately in a still more virulent form with Modernism.

While there is nothing common between Rosmini and the present Modernists, he

may, all unwittingly, have paved the way for them in the following vaguely

Subjectivist proposition: "The supernatural order consists in the manifestation of

Being in the plenitude of its reality, and the effect of that manifestation is a

God-like sentiment, inchoate in this life through the light of faith and grace,

consummate in the next through the light of glory" (36th Rosminian proposition

condemned by the Holy Office, 14 Dec., 1887). Preserving the dogmatic formulæ

while voiding them of their contents, the Modernists constantly speak of the

supernatural, but they understand thereby the advanced stages of an evolutive

process of the religious sentiment. There is no room in their system for the

objective and revealed supernatural: their Agnosticism declares it unknowable,

their Immanentism derives it from our own vitality, their symbolism explains it in

term of subjective experience and their criticism declares non-authentic the

documents used to prove it. "There is no question now," says Pius X, in his

Encyclical "Pascendi" of 8 Sept., 1907, "of the old error by which a sort of right

to the supernatural was claimed for human nature. We have gone far beyond

that. We have reached the point where it is affirmed that our most holy religion, in

the man Christ as in us, emanated from nature spontaneously and entirely. Than

this, there is surely nothing more destructive of the whole supernatural order."

II. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

From the above documents, it may be summarized in three points: (1) The fact of

man's elevation to grace and glory as against the Pelagian error; (2) the

supernatural character of that elevation as against the Protestant and Jansenist

theory; and (3) as against Rationalism, its possibility and the validity of its

credentials.

1. The fact of man's elevation, probably alluded to in the likeness of God

imprinted in Adam (Gen., i, 26), in the tree of life from which he was barred in

consequence of his sin (Gen., iii, 22), and in the intimate union of man with God,

as described in the Sapiential and Prophetic books, has its full expression in the

discourses of Jesus Christ (John, vi and xiv-xvii), in the prologue of the Fourth

Gospel compared with John, ii and iii, and in the introduction to several Epistles

like I Cor., Eph., and I Pet. The direct and face-to-face vision of God is our future

destiny (I Cor., xiii, 12; I John, iii, 2). In this world we are not in name only but in

very fact the sons of God (I John, iii, 1), being born anew (I John, iii, 7) and having

the charity of God infused in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us

(Rom., v, 5). The emphasis laid by the early Fathers on man's deification has

been shown elsewhere (see ADOPTION). In view of all this it is not true that the

Fathers had not even a name to designate the supernatural, as is often asserted

by modern critics. De Broglie (Le surnaturel, p. 45) shows that there were at

least four different phrases to express the supernatural gifts: hyper physin (above

nature), adscititia (superadded), exothen tes ousias (foreign to the essence),

charis, charismata (gratuitous).

2. The gratuitous or supernatural character of the beatific vision was placed in

bold relief by St. Paul (I Tim., vi, 15) and St. John (i, 18 and vi, 46). St. Irenæus

merely paraphrases their teaching in the famous sentence: "Homo a se non videt

Deum; ille autem volens videtur hominibus quibus vult, quando vult,

quemadmodum vult; potens est enim in omnibus Deus" (Contra hæres., v, 20).

Neither can one read such passages as Eph., i, 16-19 and iii, 14-21; Col., i, 10

sq.; II Pet., i, 4; etc., without realizing that the supernatural character of the

intuitive vision applies likewise to present charity "which surpasses all

knowledge". The transcendence of the supernatural order, not only above our

present de facto condition, but also above our native constitution viewed

philosophically in the elements and properties and exigencies of human nature,

is not emphasized in early Christian literature, which deals not with abstractions.

St. Paul, however, describing the rôle of the Redeemer which is to renovate,

repair, and restore, comes very near the point by hinting that our present, clearly

supernatural elevation is but a return to the no less supernatural condition of the

"old Adam"; and while the point is not fully discussed by the Fathers before the

Pelagian controversies concerning original sin, yet some passing remarks by St.

Irenæus (Contra hæres., III, xviii, 1, 2) and St. John Chrysostom (X Homily on St.

John, 2) show that there is no chasm between the early Fathers, St. Augustine,

who presented a bold, if not finished, delineation of the supernatural as such, and

the Schoolmen and post-Tridentine theologians (as Soto, "De natura et gratia";

Ripalda, "De ente supernaturali"; Suarez, "De variis statibus") who carefully

distinguished the various states of human nature. Ripalda's opinion to the effect

that the beatific vision which is de facto supernatural to the whole actual creation

might become natural to some possible higher creature, has never been formally

condemned by the Church; it is however unanimously rejected by theologians, as

it seems less conformable to Scriptural sayings and tends to destroy the

absolute transcendence of the supernatural order.

3. The philosophical possibility and the critical ascertainment of the supernatural

order are the central point of Christian apologetics. Against the prejudicial views

of the Rationalists who pronounce it inexistent, or unnecessary, or mischievous,

or even impossible, Christian apologists urge, and to good purpose, the critical

value of the records on which it rests, its quasi-necessity for the correct conduct

of life, the profits it brings to its recipients, and the utter want of foundation of its

so-called antinomies. Having thus cleared the ground, they proceed to collect

and interpret and organize the various data of Revelation, the result being a

harmonious and truly grandiose system of overlife. From the commonly received

axiom that "grace does not destroy but only perfects nature" they establish

between the two orders a parallelism that is not mutual confusion or reciprocal

exclusion, but distinction and subordination. The Schoolmen spoke freely of

nature's possibilities (potentia obedientialis) and even conations (appetitus

naturalis) towards the supernatural. To those traditional methods and views some

Christian writers have, of late, endeavoured to add and even substitute another

theory which, they claim, will bring the supernatural home to the modern mind

and give it unquestionable credentials. The novel theory consists in making

nature postulate the supernatural. Whatever be the legitimity of the purpose, the

method is ambiguous and full of pitfalls. Between the Schoolmen's potentia

obedientialis and appetitus moralis and the Modernist tenet according to which

the supernatural "emanates from nature spontaneously and entirely" there is

space and distance; at the same time, the Catholic apologist who would attempt

to fill some of the space and cover some of the distance should keep in mind the

admonition of Pius X to those "Catholics who, while rejecting immanence as a

doctrine, employ it as a method of apologetics, and who do this so imprudently

that they seem to admit that there is in human nature a true and rigorous

necessity with regard to the supernatural order and not merely a capacity and

suitability for the supernatural such as has at all times been emphasized by

Catholic apologists" (Encyclical "Pascendi").

RIPALDA, De ente supernaturali (Paris, 1870); SCHRADER, De triplici ordine (Vienna, 1864);

TERRIEN, La grace et la gloire (Paris, 1897); BAINVEL, Nature et surnaturel (Paris, 1903); DE

BROGLIE, Le surnaturel (Paris, 1908); LIGEARD, Le rapport de la nature et du surnaturel d'après

les théologiens scolastiques du XIIIe au XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1910). A more complete bibliography

is found in: WILHELM AND SCANNELL, Manual of Cath. Theology, I (London, 1906), 430;

TANQUEREY, Synopsis theol. dogmat., I (New York), 345; BAREILLES, Le catéchisme romain, III

(Montrejeau, 1908), 352; LABAUCHE, . . . L'homme . . . in Leçons de théol. dogmatique (Paris,

1908).

J. F. Sollier

Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter

Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIV

Nihil Obstat, July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor

Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org