Chapter III: QUESTION 110 THE GRACE OF GOD WITH RESPECT TO ITS ESSENCE

After considering the necessity of grace for our final end, St. A Thomas passes to the treatment of its essence. This question is particularly concerned with habitual or sanctifying grace which, by antonomasia, is called “grace,” whereby man is made pleasing to God, His child and heir. Actual grace is reducible to this habitual grace in a certain sense, as a disposition to a form or a proportionate movement within the same order and species. This actual grace is considered by itself in question III on the divisions of grace. 

The present question (110) is divided into four articles which are arranged progressively, proceeding from the general to the particular, from the genus to the specific differences, as follows:

1. Whether grace posits something in the soul, or whether it is something existing in God outside of us.

2. Whether grace is a quality.

3. Whether grace differs from infused virtue, especially from charity.

4. Whether it resides in the essence of the soul as in a subject; this question presupposes the solution of article three.

We are therefore dealing both with the formal cause and with the quasi-material cause or subject in which grace is received.