Willing What God Wills

This chapter takes as its starting point the Thomistic interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement, on which the role of the atonement is to bring a human person into a life in grace; and it argues against one interpretation—Eckhart’s or else an Eckhart-like interpretation—of what a life in grace is. Understanding the internal psychic state of a person in grace is a help to understanding the atonement, but this chapter argues that the psychic state Eckhart recommends for life in grace is actually pernicious to the traditionally understood purpose of both suffering and atonement. Whatever the internal configuration is of a human person in a condition of mutual indwelling with God, it is not the self-destructive absence of desire urged by Eckhart. Aquinas’s view that Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is the model for such a state is much more promising.