Bending the Spirit of the Soldier

In a thought as systematic and clear as Aquinas’, finding problems or ambiguities in his works can be daunting. For he structures his arguments which brooks no confusion: for example, Aquinas structures his Summa Theologiae along questions and articles such that the articles move from the general to the particular, answering: 1) an sit, 2) quid sit, et 3) quomodo sit. Moreover, each article has an internal, rhetorical structure which poses: 1) a question with an implied answer, 2) usually three objections, the disputatio, 3) a sed contra, citing an philosophic or Biblical authority, 4) a respondeo, with either a theological and/or philosophic answer, and finally, 5) replies to the previous objections. Throughout the Summa, Aquinas repeats this structure in an orderly manner, implying the keen pedagogical concern he has for his audience, who finds that each article and each question review and then build upon the previous questions and articles.

But, as Aquinas points out in his Prologue of his Summa, the order must not be too obviously repetitious, “because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of the readers.”[1] This awareness of the state of his readers implies an accommodation to his various readers, “[b]ecause the Master of Catholic Truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners”.[2] As Flannery O’Connor puts it, “The more I read St. Thomas the more flexible he appears to me.”[3] Aquinas’ rhetorical flexibility assumes a trust on the part of his readers, such that they will have sufficient powers to follow, understand, and learn from his thought in an implicit dialogue of teacher and student. This trust of man’s natural powers also informs the entirety of Aquinas’ thought, powers which include the human intellect, or “intelligible light itself, which of itself is sufficient for knowing certain intelligible truths” (ST I-II Q 109 a1, 653).[4]

These natural powers, however, are nestled within the larger sphere of God’s supernatural power, akin to the human light-divine light metaphor or the teacher-student dialogic metaphor but not quite. Such metaphors alone may work for such thinkers as Plato, in which the only thing wrong with man is merely ignorance, but not for Aquinas. Although Aquinas is a Master of Catholic Truth, he is not Truth qua grace, which not only removes ignorance but also sin. For even though man’s natural powers exist, “in the state of corrupted nature, man falls short even of what he can do by his nature, so that he is unable to fulfill all of it by his own natural powers” (ST I-II Q109 a2, 655). The human light-divine light and teacher-student metaphors are inadequate to convey the sense of man’s need to heal his fallen nature, and so Aquinas turns to the metaphor of the sick man and his cure (ST I-II Q 109 a2, 655). But readers may lose sight of man’s natural powers, albeit diminished, in this metaphor, especially when one considers how God’s grace and human free-will interact with each other. In illustrating this interaction, especially about how grace prepares human free-will to accept grace, Aquinas uses a metaphor that seems to be the least intellectual and the least spiritual, i.e., a martial metaphor:

[M]an must be directed to the last end by the motion of the first mover, and to the proximate end by the motion of any of the subordinate movers. So, too, the spirit of the soldier is bent towards seeking the victory by the motion of the leader of the army – and towards following the standard of a regiment by the motion of the standard-bearer. And thus, since God is absolutely the First Mover, it is by His motion that everything seeks Him under the common notion of good, whereby everything seeks to be likened to God in its own way. ….Man’s turning to God is by free choice; and thus man is bidden to turn himself to God. But free choice can be turned to God only when God turns it.

In illustrating the interaction of grace and free-will in a martial metaphor, Aquinas is able to stress the supremacy of God – the leader, while maintaining the free, natural powers of man – the soldier under the leader. This seemingly simple metaphor is flexible such that one can consider what it means to be a soldier in God’s army (or, to use the terminology of Confirmation, a soldier of Christ), and what it means to have God as a leader. Let us consider the theological implications of this martial metaphor of grace and free-will.

At first, the leader-soldier metaphor seems strange because one is used to thinking of God and man as Creator and creature. God, from the overabundance of his Love qua Existence, creates ex nihilo, and this creation, which includes human nature, is good, even with the original transgression. As scholar Etienne Gilson states, “if sin had abolished all good it would have abolished all being along with the good and the world would no longer exist.”[5] Since God is Existence and is Good, then everything that exists is good because it exists. This universal good given by God is, as Gilson succinctly puts it, “the grace which is nature”.[6] This “natural,” or sufficient, grace is the ontological basis of man’s natural powers, which includes his intellect and free-will, and, as Gilson further states, is the “eternal law… ‘written’ in our hearts.”[7] To return to the martial metaphor, this sufficient grace is thus what enlists man in God’s army, which is creation itself. The leader-soldier metaphor takes the Creator-creature metaphor as a given on which the martial metaphor builds. God has created, His creation is good, the first parents have committed the original transgression, and every man born afterwards is made to serve – in the martial connotation of that word, “to serve.” But along with that original design to serve is a corrupted nature towards going AWOL, so to speak, which is the improper use of those good natural powers, which the man possesses as a person.

Herein is the main difference between the guardian-dogs[8] of Plato’s Republic and Aquinas’ soldier: personality. Says Gilson, “To designate the individuality proper to a free being we call him a person. Thus the essence of personality is one with that of liberty… [which] has its roots in rationality.”[9] Unlike the Platonic warrior-dogs, each soldier is an individual, a person. His leader is a Person, and he is a person because he participates in his leader’s Person. States Gilson:

[W]e are persons because we are the work of a Person; we participate in His personality even as, being good, we participate in His perfection; being causes, in His creative power; being prudent, in His providence; and, in a word, as beings in His being. To be a person is to participate in one of the highest excellences of the divine being.[10]

This participation implies that man, in his independence, partakes, or shares, in God’s personality, perfection, creative powers, providence, and being. Unlike an absolute vessel, which channels divine power but does not participate nor cooperate with the divinity which flows through it, man, being an individual with a rational nature, is a participant because he has his natural powers with which to participate.

But, as mentioned earlier, the original transgression disorders these natural powers such that man as soldier is heavily inclined towards AWOL (to return to the martial metaphor). By definition, the soldier serves in the military for a cause larger than himself. He remains an individual but is part of a larger community of fellow soldiers, i.e., his fellow man, and is dependent upon his fellow soldiers and his leader for his existence as a soldier. In non-martial terms, this is Christ’s greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[11] The soldier is meant to serve; he perfects his being in service of others. But with his corrupted nature, he separates himself from the larger community of his fellow soldiers and his leader; in other words, he denies his telos, the very reason for his existence. And this denial, of course, is sin, committed freely because the will remains free, albeit disordered and misguided.

God creates nature such that nature has sufficient grace. Even though, as Gilson states, the “work of creation is shattered, …the fragments remain good, and with the grace of God, they may be reconstituted and restored.”[12] The continuing, yet diminished, goodness of Creation and the continual providence of the Good Creator are interrelated.[13] Just as there is “the grace which is nature”, there is “the grace which saves nature.”[14] In the martial metaphor, the leader qua grace of God saves the soldier qua disordered human nature by his motion qua grace. “[T]he spirit of the soldier is bent towards seeking the victory by the motion of the leader of the army” states the metaphor. Restated in the active voice, “The motion of the leader of the army bends the spirit of the soldier towards seeking the victory.” The victory is the healing of the sinner such that he returns to his original, ordered, unified state. The bending of the soldier’s spirit is the sinner’s conversion, or, at least, his open receptivity for conversion. Now, what the “the motion of the leader” implies is twofold: the motion of guidance and the motion of command. For the verb “to lead” implies both to guide and to command, and so the leader acts both as a guide and as commander for the errant soldier. As a guide, the leader, in a continuous presence or agency, indicates the proper course of the soldier; in this sense, the leader (God) is a mediator between the soldier (man) and victory (healing and/or beatitude). As a commander, the leader, in a position of authority, directs the proper action of the soldier; in this sense, the leader is a law-giver to the soldier for the sake of victory. In short, the leader shows the way and tells what needs to be done. Since the soldier is a person, he can choose to reject the guidance and commands of his leader, i.e., man can choose to reject God’s grace. God, respecting the personality of his creation, will not impose on man’s free will, lest He makes void the goodness of his creation, i.e., man’s free-will. Like the leader punishing the unrepentant, AWOL soldier by throwing him in the brig, God punishes the unrepentant sinner with reprobation. The freedom of the leader’s motion and the freedom of the soldier’s spirit rejecting this motion is clear.

But the bending of the soldier’s spirit by this motion to accept the self-same motion is not as clear as the rejection. For, lest one forgets, “Man’s turning to God is by free choice; and thus man is bidden to turn himself to God. But free choice can be turned to God only when God turns it.” This passage seems contradictory. But if one returns to the previous notion that the martial metaphor takes as given the goodness of creation, i.e., the sufficient grace which is ontologically imprinted onto creation, then one can somewhat work through this paradox of free-will and grace. For in the eyes of God, being in eternity, there is only one operative grace: grace is grace. But in the eyes of man, being in time, there are two graces: to repeat Gilson, “the grace which is nature and the grace which saves nature.” The soldier knows in his heart (for the eternal law is “written” in his heart) that the motion of his leader is good and is beneficial to him. The motion of his leader catches his eye, and he turns to his leader, rejecting his own inclination towards going AWOL. The “heart-knowledge” of his leader’s motion is the sufficient grace. The mystery, however, is why the soldier chooses to cooperate with the motion – now seen as efficient grace – instead of rejecting it. The difficulty lies in this “why” since, as Aquinas states succinctly, the soldier’s spirit freely accepts his leader’s motion because his leader’s motion has prepared the soldier’s free-will to be open to grace. In other words, man becomes aware of God’s grace as found in his own existence, i.e., the awareness of his ontological dependence upon God’s grace. But this awareness of this grace is caused by grace such that the man’s acceptance of God’s grace and the grace that allows him to accept God’s grace is simultaneous. As mentioned earlier, God does not live in time, but man does; and so the problem of the simultaneity of grace, with which free-will acts with and is acted upon, is not God’s but man’s. In the eyes of man, this “secondary” grace, then, is what heals man’s corrupted nature and, also, is what protects and strengthens his nature from falling again into sin.

Taking the idea of grace as an agent of strength, Aquinas returns to the martial metaphor as he discusses the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation. “[I]n this sacrament a man receives the Holy Spirit for strength in spiritual combat…. [H]e is signed with the cross as a soldier… the sign of his leader” (ST IIIa Q72 a10, 219). Also, “the one who is confirmed has… a sponsor who should instruct him for the combat” (ST IIIa Q72 a10, 219). Moreover, “Although the baptized has become a member of the Church, he has not yet enrolled in the Christian militia [militiae Christianae]. Therefore, yet another who is already enrolled in the Christian militia presents him to the bishop, who is like the general of an army” (ST IIIa, Q72, a11, 221). In posing the martial metaphor as an apt image of man’s conversion to God earlier in the Summa, Aquinas has prepared his readers such that when they arrive at the discussion of Confirmation, the extended martial metaphor – Christians as foot-soldiers, sponsors as fight instructors, the Church as an army, bishops as generals, and God as the leader – does not seem foreign. It is only repetition of the previous metaphor. In this preparation-and-then-repetition, therefore, one sees Aquinas concern for his readers, a concern which marks him as a Master teacher.

Thus, in using a martial metaphor as the interaction of grace and free-will in the process of conversion, Aquinas is able to illustrate the various intricacies in regard to what it means to be a soldier in God’s army, a miles Christianus, and what it means to have God as a leader. Moreover, in introducing this flexible martial metaphor early in his Summa, Aquinas prepares his readers such that he can extend this metaphor to a great length in his discussion of the sacrament of Confirmation. This awareness of his readers also assumes a trust on the part of his readers, such that they will have sufficient powers to follow, understand, and learn from his thought in an implicit dialogue of teacher and student. But, as one sees in the martial metaphor, the teacher and the student are both soldiers in God’s army. One is reminded of St. Paul’s letter to Timothy:

So you, my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well. Bear your share of hardship along with me like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. To satisfy the one who recruited him, a soldier does not become entangled in the business affair of life.[15]

Both teacher and student are moved towards victory, for the glory of God and, ultimately, for the love of God.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas. Ed. Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random House, 1948.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae: Vol. 57 Baptism and Confirmation 3a. 66-72. Trans. James J. Cunningham, O.P. New York: McGraw Hill, Blackfriars, 1975.

Gilson, Etienne. The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy. 1936. Trans. A.H.C. Downes. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1979.

Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2^nd ed. Trans. and ed. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

[1] Class handout, given 3/27/2001.

[2] Ibid.

[3] O’Connor, Flannery, The Habit of Being, 97.

[4] The parenthetical citations are from Aquinas’ work, Summa Theologiae (ST) and in the form of title, question, article, and page number.

[5] Gilson, Etienne, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 122.

[6] Gilson, 379.

[7] Gilson, 335.

[8] Plato, Republic, 53.

[9] Gilson, 202.

[10] Gilson, 205.

[11] Mt. 22:37-39.

[12] Gilson, 127.

[13] Gilson, 153.

[14] Gilson, 379.

[15] 2Tm2:1-4.

Bending the Spirit of the Soldier: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Martial Metaphor of Grace and Human Free-Will