Was Adam’s Grace Christ’s Grace?

Simon Francis Gaine, OP

Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas – Angelicum

Catholic theologians have normally taught that, before the Fall, the first human beings were gifted with God’s supernatural grace. St Thomas held that this grace was bestowed on Adam and Eve from the very first moment of their existence. So grace was originally given together with nature. But was this grace also somehow the grace of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ? Was Christ somehow given together with nature and grace from the very beginning?

This lecture was originally livestreamed on December 3, 2021 as part of the Grace & Nature: Contemporary Controversies Conference held at the Angelicum in Rome. All of the talks for this conference are available on our YouTube page in this playlist.

Fr. Simon Francis Gaine, OP is an English Dominican, Director of the Angelicum Thomistic Institute, and the Pinckaers Professor of Theological Anthropology and Ethics. He was recently appointed a member of the International Theological Commission. He is the author of Will There Be Free Will in Heaven? Freedom, Impeccability and Beatitude (2003) and Did the Saviour See the Father? Christ, Salvation and the Vision of God (2015). Most recently he has published a chapter on the reception of St Thomas’s Christology today in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas (2021).

en_USEnglish