The final issue about grace is one that I would like to discuss in some detail. It concerns how to resolve a set of problems that often arises in contemporary Catholic thinking about the relationship between nature and grace when human nature is taken to be itself directed or oriented to grace. Because my own account makes grace central to human life, it raises these same problems. They concern the free character of grace and the integrity of human nature.

If God had created humans in a way that allowed them to exist entirely apart from grace by giving them a nature that made no reference to it, there would be no trouble recognizing the free or gratuitous character of God's grace. God's grace in that case offers something over and above what we are by nature, a whole new layer or tier of gifts that our nature neither requires nor gives us any particular reason to expect. For the same reason, the integrity of human life, its dignity and value, would also be easy to see apart from the gift of grace. However wonderful, grace would come as a supplement to a nature complete on its own terms and esteemed in unqualified fashion for its created goodness.

Indeed, in order to show that God's grace is not owed to us and that human life without it is still something to be appreciated, Catholic theologians in the early modern period increasingly posited a “pure” human nature, meaning by that human nature with a self-contained and self-sufficient character apart from God's grace.