Following Saint Anselm,
4
Aquinas maintained that origi-
nal sin is the absence of original justice, “the disordered
disposition rising from the dissolution of that harmony
in which original justice consisted.”
5
Aquinas insists that
original justice entails that the first human beings be created
in the state of grace—“concreated,” to use the technical
term. Given what we know from revelation about God’s
purpose in creating persons with whom to share his life, it
wouldmake no sense, Aquinas thinks, to create them from
the start in a state where such participation would have
been impossible. Thus for Aquinas, original justice was a
“concomitant of the nature of the species [
accidens naturae
spec-iei
], not as being caused by the basic elements of the
species, but as a gift given by God to human nature as a
whole.”
6
“Original justice was a particular gift of grace di-
vinely bestowed upon all human nature in the first parent.”
7
This is a hugely important point. In God’s plan for
the human race, there is no room for an interval of time—however brief—in which creaturely persons would have
existed outside the ambit of grace. To be sure, there had
to be an opportunity for the free embrace of the grace of
communion on their part, but such an embrace would only
be possible for persons already in the state of grace. Thus,
for Aquinas, both pure spirits—the angels—and embodied
persons—human beings—were concreated in grace and
thus free to embrace the communion on offer.
For the angels, with immediate intuitive knowledge,
no interval of time was necessary to embrace, or fail to
embrace, the divine offer of communion. Like the angels,
human beings were concreated in grace; unlike them, some
4 cf. Kors, 23-24
5 ST 1a2ae. 82, 1-3
6 ST 1a. 100, 1
7 ST 1a2ae. 81, 2