At the same time, the passions of Christ's members can only asymptotically tend toward the ideal of the God-Man's perfected humanity, on account of the fomes peccati. In this age the faithful still bear something of the image of the "man of dust" even as they will then completely bear the image of the "man of heaven" (1 Cor 15:47-50). Thomas teaches explicitly that Christ's passions are exemplary for us who receive his grace. He also teaches that our humanity is wounded by original sin even in the life of grace, for justification does not include a restoration of the integrity Adam had in the Garden before sin. So "the continual corruption of the sensuality ... understood as referring to the fomes .. . is never completely destroyed in this life, since, though the stain of original sin passes, its effect remains."120 Even in the text from De veritate, q. 26, a. 8, mentioned above, which speaks of growth in the propassiones, Thomas still cautions that even the perfect "have passions not only foreseen but sudden, not only in respect to good but even in respect to evil."121 Elsewhere Thomas describes the wounding of human nature by the fall in terms of the loss of the original justice, which includes the gift of integrity, by which reason was subject to God and the sense appetite to reason. Accordingly, "all the powers of the soul are left, as it were, destitute of their proper order."122 This gives rise to disordered desires, including disordered passions, in humankind in our present state. This wounding is not removed by the grace of Christ in this age:

In the state of corrupt nature man needs grace to heal his nature in order that he may entirely abstain from sin. And in the present life this healing is wrought in the mind-the carnal appetite being not yet restored. Hence the Apostle (Rom 7:25) says in the person of one who is restored: "I myself, with the mind, serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin." And in this state man can abstain from all mortal sin, which takes its stand in his reason, as stated above (q. 75, a. 5); but man cannot abstain from all venial sin on account of the corruption of his lower appetite of sensuality.123

120 o STI-II, q. 74, a. 3, ad 2.121 Leonine ed., 22/3: 776b.122 22 ST I-II, q. 85, a. 3.123 ST I-II, q. 109, a. 8. See also a. 9, where Thomas notes that man needs the further help of actual grace generally and "for this special reason-the condition of the state of human nature. For although healed by grace as to the mind, yet it remains corrupted and poisoned in the flesh, whereby it serves the 'law of sin' (Rom 7:25)," as well as in the other faculties according to the same fourfold wounding mentioned in q. 85, a. 3.

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The Propassiones of Christ, His Fullness of Grace, and His Moral Exemplarity according to St. Thomas Aquinas

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