Supernatural - in Catholicism

In Catholicism

In Catholicism, while the meaning of the term and its antithesis vary, the “Supernatural Order” is the gratuitous production, by God, of the ensemble of miracles for the elevation of man to a state of grace, including the hypostatic union (Incarnation), the beatific vision, and the ministry of angels. Divine operation, “spiritual facts” and “voluntary determinations” are consistently referred to as “supernatural” by those who specifically preclude the “extrinsic concurrence” of God or by those espousing a materialist or determinist worldview that excludes immaterial beings or free will. Barring disingenuous intent, there is no objection to this manner of speaking.

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… 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.

— Joseph Sollier, The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14., Supernatural Order

Divine revelation of the supernatural order is considered to be a matter of fact, contingent upon proper evidence of such, (miracle, prophecy etc.). “The revelation and its evidences are called extrinsic and auxiliary supernatural, the elevation itself retaining the name of intrinsic or, according to some, theological supernatural.” The supernatural order was analyzed primarily by scholastic and post-Tridentine theologians. Theories denying or belittling the supernatural order, are historically classified into three groups:

1. present de facto condition (Pelagianism, Beghards, Stoic influence),
2. the original status of man (Reformers such as Baius, Protestant and the Jansenist School),
3. possibility and evidence (Rationalist School, from Socinus to the present Modernists).

Rosmini … 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.” …

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”).

— Joseph Sollier, The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14., Supernatural Order