The Supernatural Order

The Supernatural Order is the ensemble of effects exceeding the powers of the created universe and gratuitously produced by God for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny. The meaning of the phrase fluctuates with that of its antithesis, the natural order. Those who conceive the latter as the world of material beings to the exclusion of immaterial entities, or as the necessary mechanism of cause and effect to the exclusion of the free agency of the will, or again as the inherent forces of the universe to the exclusion of the extrinsic concurrence of God, quite consistently call supernatural all spiritual facts or voluntary determinations or Divine operations. There is no objection to that way of speaking provided the assertion of the supernatural so understood be not made, by a fallacious transference of meaning, to screen the negation of the supernatural as defined above. 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. Although some theologians do not consider impossible the elevation of the irrational creature to the Divine order, v. g., by way of personal union, nevertheless it stands to reason that such an exalted privilege should be reserved for the rational creature capable of knowledge and love. 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.