RECAPITULATION AND SUPPLEMENT
I. WHETHER SANCTIFYING GRACE
IS A FORMAL PARTICIPATION IN DEITY AS IT IS IN ITSELF
(We here reprint an article which
appeared in the Revue Thomiste, 1936.)
“Grace, which
is an accident, is a certain participated likeness of the divinity
in man” (St. Thomas, IIIa, q. 2, a. 10 ad I).
This question
has been put to us in connection with recent debates
and with reference to what we
recently wrote in the Revue Thomiste on the subject of Deity.
More precisely, the question
was formulated as follows: Is grace a participation in Deity as it
is in itself and as seen by the blessed, or only in Deity as
imperfectly known by us? This latter aspect could be further
differentiated: Is it a question of Deity as imperfectly known by
the philosopher, or as known by the theologian-wayfarer?
State of
the question. In order to
grasp better the sense of the terms, let us recall what we have
discussed elsewhere
at greater length. The Deity
as it is in itself remains naturally unknowable, and even cannot be
known except by the immediate vision of the blessed. But among the
divine perfections which it contains formally in its eminence, which
we know by natural means, is there not one which has priority over
the others, from which the others can be deduced, as the properties
of man are deduced from his rationality?
The
controversy on this subject, relative to the formal constituent of
the divine nature according to our imperfect mode of knowledge, is
well known. Even the Thomists themselves are not in complete accord
on this point. Some maintain that this formal constituent is
subsistent being itself, according to the words of Exod. 3:14: “I am
who am,” because all the divine attributes are deducible therefrom.
Others hold that it is subsistent intellection (intelligere
subsistens). We have explained elsewhere
why we accept the first solution, on account of the text from
Exodus, of the radical distinction between subsistent being
andcreated being, and because all the divine attributes are
deducible from it. Does not St. Thomas accordingly delay treating of
the divine intelligence until question fourteen of the First Part,
after he has deduced several attributes from subsistent being
itself?
Whatever may
be the issue of this discussion, it remains true for all Thomists
that Deity as it exists in itself is superior to all the absolute
perfections which it contains in its eminence (formaliter
eminenter).
This is
evident from the fact that these perfections, which are naturally
capable of participation by creatures, such as being, life,
intelligence, are naturally knowable in a positive way, whereas
Deity is not: it is the great darkness which the mystics speak of.
It designates the very essence of God, that which is proper to Him,
His intimate life. It is the object of the beatific vision itself,
and, before that vision, it is the “obscurity from above” which
proceeds from a light too intense for the weak eyes of our souls.
From this it
can be inferred that subsistent being itself contains only in
implicit act the attributes which are progressively deducible from
it, but Deity as such contains them in explicit act, since, when it
is seen, there is no longer any need of deducing these attributes.
Deity can thus be represented as the apex of a pyramid the sides of
which would represent subsistent being, subsistent intellection,
subsistent love, mercy, justice, omnipotence, that is, all the
attributes formally contained in the eminence of Deity. To adopt a
less far-fetched symbolism, Deity in relation to the perfections
inhering in its eminence is somewhat like whiteness in relation to
the seven colors of the rainbow, with this difference: the seven
colors are only virtually present in the whiteness, whereas the
absolute perfections (being, intelligence, love, etc.) are in Deity
formally and eminently.
Thereupon the
question presents itself: Is grace a participation in the divine
nature (or in Deity), the intimate life of God as it is in itself,
or only in the divine nature as it is imperfectly conceived by us as
subsistent being or subsistent intellection?
The
theologians who have written on this subject generally concede that
grace is a participation in Deity as it is in itself, objectively
(inasmuch as it disposes us radically to see it). But some add that
it is not so intrinsically or subjectively, for Deity is infinite
and hence, as such, cannot be participated in subjectively.
Furthermore, they declare that Deity is the intimate life of God,
none other than the Trinity of the divine persons. Now grace cannot
be a subjective participation in the Fatherhood, the Sonship, the
Spiration which constitute the intimate life of God. These
theologians deduce therefrom that grace is subjectively a
participation in the divine nature as imperfectly conceived by us,
as one (not as triune) and as subsistent intellection.
It is at once evident that this viewpoint can
be interpreted in two ways, according to whether it refers to the
divine nature imperfectly known by the philosopher or to the divine
nature imperfectly known beneath the light of essentially
supernatural revelation by the theologian, who knows God, not only
under the nature of being and first being, but also under the nature
of Deity, already known obscurely by the attributes of God, author
of grace (as supernatural Providence) and, above all, by the mystery
of the Trinity. (Before the revelation of this mystery of the
Trinity, under the Old Testament, the super-natural providence of
God, author of salvation, was known.)
Basis of a solution. To the question thus
stated, we reply that, according to traditional teaching,
sanctifying grace in itself is intrinsically (and not merely in an
objective, extrinsic manner) a formal, analogical (and, of course,
inadequate) participation in the Deity as it is in itself, superior
to being, intelligence, and love, which it contains in its eminence
or formally and eminently. As Cajetan says, Ia, q. 39, a. I, no. 7:
“The Deity is prior to being and all its differences; for it is
above being and beyond unity, etc.” The reasons which we are about
to indicate are presented in progressive order, beginning with the
most general.
I. There can be no question of a participation
in the divine nature merely as conceived by the philosopher. He
does, in fact, know God as first being and first intelligence,
inasmuch as He is author of nature, but not as God, author of grace.
This is the basis of the dis-tinction between the proper object of
natural theology or theodicy (a branch of metaphysics): God under
the reason of being and as author of nature, and the proper object
of sacred theology: God under the nature of Deity (at least
obscurely known) and as author of grace. This is the classical
terminology employed by the great commentators on St. Thomas, Ia, q.
I, a. 3, 7; cf. Cajetan, Bañez, John of St. Thomas, the
Salmanticenses, Gonet, Gotti, Billuart, etc. Nowadays several
writers make use of this classical terminology from force of habit,
without apparently having pondered very deeply the difference
between the proper object of theodicy, or natural theology, and that
of theology properly so called. Nevertheless St. Thomas has
expressed this difference in very precise terms, Ia, q. I, a. 6:
“Sacred doctrine properly treats of God under the aspect of highest
cause, for it considers Him not only to the extent that He is
knowable through creatures (as the philosophers knew Him) but also
with respect to what He alone knows of Himself which is communicated
to others by revelation.” This is what later theologians referred to
as “God, not under the general reason of being, but under the
essential, intimate reason of Deity, or according to His intimate
life.” Hence in the question which engages our attention, we are not
concerned with the divine nature only as it is imperfectly conceived
by the philosopher.
2. Moreover,
only God can produce grace in an angel or in the very essence of the
soul, and He does so independently of the conception which the
philosopher or theologian holds regarding the divine nature, and
independently of any natural effect which might be the source of
these imperfect conceptions. Grace thus assimilates us immediately
to God as such in His intimate life; it is therefore a formal,
analogical participation in the Deity as it is in itself. In the
natural order, a stone has an analogical likeness to God inasmuch as
He is being, the plant inasmuch as He is living, man and angel
inasmuch as He is intelligence. Sanctifying grace, which is far
superior to the angelic nature, is an analogical likeness to God
inasmuch as He is God, or to His Deity, to His intimate life, which
is not naturally knowable in a positive way. This is why, above the
kingdoms of nature (mineral, vegetable, animal, human, angelic),
there is the kingdom of God: the intimate life of God and its formal
participation by the angels and the souls of the just.
Therefore to
know perfectly the essence or quiddity of grace, one would have to
know the light of glory of which it is the seed, just as one must
know what an oak is to know the essence of the germ contained in an
acorn. But it is impossible to know perfectly the essence of the
light of glory, essentially ordered to the vision of God, without
knowing the divine essence immediately by intuition. Hence St.
Thomas declares, in demonstrating that only God can produce grace,
Ia IIae, q. 112, a. 2: “It must be that God alone should deify,
communicating a fellowship in the divine nature by a certain
participated likeness, just as it is impossible for anything but
fire to ignite.” The word “deify” shows that grace is a
participation in the divine nature, not according to the reason of
being or intelligence merely, but by the essential, intimate reason
of Deity.
3. But in that case, it will be objected, grace
would have to be intrinsically a (subjective) participation in the
intimate life of God. Now this is none other than the Trinity of
the divine persons. There would therefore be in grace a
participation in the fatherhood, the sonship and the spiration,
which theory is a departure from traditional teaching.
The answer to this objection is
that, according to traditional teaching, and particularly that of
St. Thomas, the adoptive sonship of the children of God, ex Deo nati,
is a certain likeness to the eternal sonship of the Word. In fact we
find explicitly in IIIa, q. 3, a. 5 ad 2: “Just as by the act of
creation divine goodness is communicated to all creatures by way of
a certain similitude, so by the act of adoption a similitude of
natural sonship is communicated to men, according to the words of
Rom. 8:29: ‘Whom He foreknew . . . to be made conformable to the
image of His Son.’” And further (ibid., a. 2 ad 3):
“Adoptive
sonship is a certain likeness of eternal sonship; just as all the
things that were made in time are, as it were, likenesses of those
which were from all eternity. Man however is likened to the eternal
splendor of the Son by the brightness of grace, which is attributed
to the Holy Ghost. And hence adoption, although common to the whole
Trinity, is appropriated to the Father as its author, to the Son as
its exemplar, to the Holy Ghost as imprinting this likeness of the
exemplar upon us.”
Likewise St.
Thomas again in his commentary on Rom. 8:29 thus explains the words
“to be made conformable to the image of His Son”: “He who is adopted
as son of God is truly conformed to His Son, first, indeed, by a
right to participate in His inheritance . . . ; secondly, by sharing
His glory (Heb. 1:3). Hence by the fact that He enlightens the
saints with the light of wisdom and grace, He makes them conformable
to Himself. . . . Thus did the Son of God will to communicate to
others a conformity with His sonship, that He might not only be the
Son, Himself but also the first-born of sons. And so He who is the
only-begotten by eternal generation (John 1:18), . . . is, by the
conferring of grace, the first-born of many brethren. . . .
Therefore we are the brothers of Christ because He has communicated
a likeness of sonship to us, as is here said, and because He assumed
the likeness of our nature.”
St. Thomas
speaks similarly in his commentary on St. John’s Gospel (1:13),
explaining the words, “who are born of God.” “And this is fitting,
that all who are sons of God by being assimilated to the Son, should
be transformed through the Son. . . . Accordingly the words, ‘not of
blood, etc.,’ show how such a magnificent benefit is conferred upon
men. . . . The Evangelist uses the preposition ‘ex’ speaking
of others, that is, of the just: ‘Ex Deo nati sunt’;
but of the natural Son, he says ‘De Patre est natus.’ ” Why?
Because, as explained in the same commentary, the Latin preposition
‘de’ indicates either the material, efficient, or
consubstantial cause (The smith makes a little knife of [de]
steel); the Latin preposition ‘a’ always refers to the
efficient cause, and the preposition ‘ex’ is general,
indicating either the material or efficient cause, but never the
consubstantial cause.
Now the
objection raised was that grace cannot be intrinsically a
(subjective) participation in the Deity or the intimate life of God,
for that is none other than the Trinity of persons in which there is
no participating. The participation is in the divine nature as one.
From what has
just been explained, the reply may be made as follows: True, the
participation is in the divine nature as one, however not merely
such as conceived by the philosopher, but such as it is in itself,
in the bosom of the Trinity. It is not only a question of the unity
of God, author of nature, but of that absolutely eminent, naturally
unknowable unity which is capable of subsisting in spite of the
Trinity of persons. We are concerned with the unity and identity of
the nature communicated by the Father to the Son and by Them to the
Holy Ghost. Therein lies the meaning of the traditional proposition
which we have just read in St. Thomas: “Adoptive sonship is a
certain likeness of eternal sonship.” So has it always been
understood.
From
all eternity God the Father has a Son to whom He communicates His
whole nature, without dividing or multiplying it; He necessarily
engenders a Son equal to Himself, and gives to Him to be God of God,
Light of Light, true God of true God. And from sheer bounty,
gratuitously, He has willed to have in time other sons, adopted
sons, by a filiation which is not only moral (by external
declaration) but real and intimate (by the production of sanctifying
grace, the effect of God’s active love for us). He has loved us with
a love that is not only creative and preserving, but vivifying,
which causes us to participate in the very principle of His intimate
life, in the principle of the immediate vision which He has of
Himself and which He communicates to His Son and to the Holy Ghost.
It is thus that He has predestinated us to be conformable to the
image of His only Son, that this Son might be the first-born of many
brethren (Rom. 8:29). The just are accordingly of the family of God
and enter into the cycle of the Holy Trinity. Infused charity gives
us a likeness to the Holy Ghost (personal love) ; the beatific
vision will render us like the Word, who will make us like unto the
Father whose image He is. Then the Trinity which already dwells in
us as in a darkened sanctuary, will abide in us as in an
illuminated, living sanctuary, where It will be seen unveiled and
loved with an inamissible love.
The only Son
of God receives the divine nature eternally, not merely as it is
conceived by the philosopher (as being itself or even as subsistent
intellection), but as it is in itself (under the reason of the Deity
clearly perceived). Consequently He received the unity of that
nature, not only as conceived by the philosopher, but as it is
capable of subsisting in spite of the Trinity of persons really
distinct one from another. He receives with Deity the essential
intellection common to the three persons, which has for its primary
object the Deity itself known comprehensively. He also receives
essential love, not only as known by the philosopher, but that
essential love which, remaining numerically the same, belongs to the
three persons, since they love one another by one sole, identical
act, just as they know one another by the same, identical
intellection.
Now according
to traditional teaching, as we have just seen, sanctifying grace
makes us children of God by an analogical, participated likeness to
the eternal sonship of the Word. Hence, in us, it is a participation
in Deity as it is in itself, not only under the nature of being or
under the nature of intellection, but under the nature of Deity, and
not only a participation in Deity as known obscurely by the
theologian through created concepts, but as it is in itself and seen
as it is by the blessed.
Such is the
true sense of these assertions, admitted by all theologians. But
their profundity does not always receive sufficient attention. The
mineral already resembles God analogically as being, the plant and
animal as living, man and angel as intelligent; but the just man by
grace resembles God precisely inasmuch as He is God, according to
His very Deity or His intimate life as it is in itself. Thus the
just man penetrates, beyond the human kingdom of reason, beyond the
angelic kingdom, into the kingdom of God; his life is not merely
intellectual but deiform, divine, theological: “it is deified,”
according to St. Thomas, Ia IIae, q. 112, a. I.
That is truly
the formal aspect of the life of grace, what is proper to it,
unique, significant, and interesting. Thereby it is a formal,
although inadequate and analogical, participation in the divine
nature as it is in itself, or of Deity as such. This is found above
all in con-summate, inamissible grace received into the essence of
the soul, and also in the light of glory received into the intellect
by the beatified soul, and in the charity received into its will.
4. It is, then, materially (in the
theological sense of the term) that grace is a finite accident (an
entitative habit received into the essence of the soul), that
infused faith is an operative habit received into our intellect, and
charity an operative habit received into our will. All of this is
true by reaTon of the receptive subject. But these habits are a
formal participation in the intimate life of God; otherwise they
would not dispose us to see it as it is in itself by an immediate
vision that will have the same formal object (objectum formale
quod et quo) as the uncreated vision which God, one in three
persons, has of Himself.
This
distinction of what grace is either materially or formally, is
similar to the one that is generally made in the natural order
between intelligence and the created mode whereby it exists in us
and in the angels, as a
faculty (accident) distinct from the substance of the soul or of the
angel, distinct also from the act of intellection. This is quite
true and does not prevent intelligence as such from being an
analogical perfection, the formal notion of which does not imply any
imperfection, and which, consequently, is to be found properly and
formally in God as subsistent intellection. In the same way, the
perfection of wisdom is distinguished from its created mode whereby,
in us, wisdom is measured by things, whereas in God it is the
measure and cause of things.
From the same
more or less material standpoint, when sanctifying grace is compared
to faith and charity, it may be said that grace is a participation
in the Deity as a nature, faith a participation in the Deity or
intimate life of God as knowledge, and charity a participation in
that intimate life as love. But it is always a question of formal
participa-tion in the intimate life of God or in the Deity in its
eminent unity, not such as it is known by the philosopher, but as it
is in itself in the Trinity.
Moreover, sanctifying grace cannot be an
objective participation in the Deity as it is in itself (and dispose
us radically to immediate vision) without being intrinsically
specified by it, that it, without having an essential (or
transcendant) relationship to the Deity as it is in itself.
Hence, in his reply to Father Menéndez Rigada, Father Gardeil
recognizes, with reference to the passage from the Salmanticenses
which we have just indicated in a note, that “it does not seem
possible for the intuition of the divine persons to originate in
sanctifying grace, if the latter is not a kind of exemplary
participation in the divine nature inasmuch as it subsists in the
divine persons. For, as the Salmanticenses declare (loc.
cit.), the inclination toward an object should originate in some
participation in the object aimed at.” Yes, for there is here, not
an accidental, but an essential (or transcendant) relationship
between grace and Deity seen immediately. This argument clarifies
the last problem which we are about to propose.
6. In the light of what immediately precedes,
it is apparent that subsistent intellection (intelligere
subsistens), even considered subjectively, is no less infinite
than subsistent being, or than Deity as it is in itself. Granted
that sanctifying grace can be a participation in the divine nature
as intellection, one should admit that it can be a participation in
Deity as it is in itself.
If it is objected: but Deity as it is in itself
is, like subsistent being, infinite and therefore cannot be
participated in subjectively or intrinsically, the reply in the
words of Father Gardeil is as follows:
“That would be true if a participation could be adequate, but
it could be only imitative and analogical.” The Salmanticenses (o.p.
cit., no. 64) are in accord: “Therefore in the mind of St.
Thomas it is perfectly consistent for grace to participate, that is,
to imitate, the whole being as to its essence and infinity, although
it does not correspond to it adequately in all its predicables but
only partially.
Deity is thus
identified with subsistent being itself (inasmuch as it contains
being and the other absolute perfections formally and eminently),
whereas in us the formal, analogical participation in Deity takes
the form of an accident. This is the more or less material, not
formal, aspect of sanctifying grace, just as in the natural order
there is a difference between the perfection of intelligence and the
created mode whereby it is in us a faculty distinct from the
substance of the soul and the act of intellection.
Conclusion.
For these various reasons, of which the first are more general and
are presupposed according to our mode of cognition, we consider
sanctifying grace to be a formal, analogical participation in Deity
as it is in itself. Two important corollaries follow from this:
1. It can be seen manifestly, as we have
established elsewhere,
that reason alone is incapable (for instance, by the natural,
conditional, inefficacious desire to see God) of demonstrating
precisely the possibility of grace, the possibility of a formal,
analogical participation in the Deity or intimate life of God which
would be, materially, a finite accident of our souls. Of this
possibility reason can give a proof of suitability, but not an
apodictic proof, for, of itself, reason cannot know the Deity or
intimate life of God positively. “This possibility of grace,” as is
commonly taught, “is neither proved nor disproved apodictically, but
it is urged by reason, defended against those who deny it, and held
with a firm faith.”
2. With regard
to the problem of the formal constituent of the divine nature,
according to our imperfect mode of understanding, the solution which
identifies it with subsistent intellection rather than with being
itself is not confirmed by the sequence: grace would be a
participated likeness, not of subsistent being but of subsistent
intellection. This question of the philosophically formal
constituent is of no importance here for the definition of grace,
which is in reality a participated likeness in Deity, superior to
both being and intellection which are contained in its eminence,
that is, formally and eminently.
The doctrine
we have just presented is found in St. Thomas, Ia, q. 13, a. 9:
“This name of God is not communicable to any man according to the
fullness of its meaning, but something of it is so by a kind of
likeness, so that they may be called ‘gods’ who participate by such
a likeness in something of the divinity, according to the words
of psalm 81:
‘I have said: You are gods.’ ” And the answer to the first
objection: “The divine nature is not communicable except by the
participation of likeness.” Likewise IIIa, q.2, a.6 ad I. Cf.
Salmanticenses, De gratia, disp. IV, the quiddity and
perfection of habitual grace, dub. IV, nos. 62, 63, 7072, where the
participation by formal, analogical imitation is very well defined;
also John of St. Thomas and Gonet, quoted in the same place.
NOTE
SUPERNATURAL AND NATURAL
BEATITUDE
In his volume entitled
Surnaturel (Etudes historiques, 1946), p. 254, Father H.
de Lubac, having examined certain texts of St. Thomas on the
distinction between the natural and the supernatural, writes as
follows: “At any rate, nothing in his works declares the distinction
which a certain number of Thomistic theologians would later concoct
between ‘God the author of the natural order’ and ‘God the object of
supernatural beatitude.’ . . . Nowhere, explicitly or implicitly,
does St. Thomas refer to a ‘natural beatitude.’” It is evident that
Father de Lubac has never explained the Summa theologica
article by article.
St. Thomas
says, Ia, q. 23, a. I, Whether men are predestined by God: “It
pertains to providence to ordain a thing to its end. But the end
toward which created things are ordained by God is twofold. One,
which exceeds the proportion and faculty of created nature, is
eternal life, which consists of the divine vision and which is
beyond the nature of any creature as is shown above (Ia, q. 12, a.
4). The other end, however, is proportioned to created nature, such,
that is, as a creature can attain to by the power of its nature.
Again in the
De veritate, q. 14, a. 2: “The final good of man, which first
moves the will as to its final end, is twofold. One good is
proportioned to human nature, since natural powers are sufficient to
attain it; this is the happiness of which the philosophers have
spoken. It is either contemplative, consisting in the act of wisdom,
or active, consisting first in the act of prudence and accordingly
in the acts of the other moral virtues. The other good of man
exceeds the proportion of human nature, since natural powers do not
suffice to attain it, nor even to conceive or desire it; but it is
promised to man by the divine bounty alone.” The whole article
should be read; it affirms that “in human nature itself there is a
certain beginning of this good which is proportioned to nature,” and
further that infused “faith is a certain beginning of eternal life.”
St. Thomas
also declares, Ia IIae, q. 62, a. I: “The beatitude or happiness of
man is twofold. One sort is proportioned to human nature, that which
man can attain by the principle of his nature. But the other is a
beatitude surpassing human nature, to which man can attain only by
divine power, by means of a certain participation in divinity,
according to the words of St. Peter’s Second Epistle (1:4): ‘By
these [the promises of Christ] . . . you may be made partakers of
the divine nature.’ ” St. Thomas speaks similarly with reference to
angels, Ia, q. 62, a. 2.
He even
affirms, II Sent., dist. 31, q. I, a. I ad 3: “In the
beginning when God created man, He could also have formed another
man of the slime of the earth and have left him in his natural
condition; that is, he would have been mortal, passible, and have
experienced the struggle of concupiscence against reason; this would
not have been derogatory to human nature, since it follows from the
principles of nature. Nor would any reason of guilt or punishment be
attached to this defect, since it would not be caused voluntarily.”
This is indeed evident for, if sanctifying grace and likewise the
gift of integrity and immortality are gratuitous or not due (as
defined against Baius), it follows that the merely natural state
(that is, without these gratuitous gifts) is possible both from the
part of man and from that of God.
Is
sanctifying grace a permanent gift in the just, like the infused
virtues? Of recent years an opinion has been expressed according to
which sanctifying grace is not a form or a permanent, radical
principle of supernatural operations, but rather a motion.
It is nevertheless certain
that the infused virtues, especially the three theological virtues,
are, within us, permanent principles of supernatural operations and
meritorious as well; and it is no less certain that sanctifying or
habitual grace is the permanent root of these infused virtues. It is
not therefore merely a transitory motion, nor even a motion
unceasingly renewed in the just man as long as he preserves
friendship with God. The Fathers always referred to the theological
virtues and to sanctifying grace which they presuppose as their
radical principle.
The Council
of Trent leaves no room for doubt on this point. Denzinger in his
Enchiridion sums up the definitions and declarations of the
Church very correctly in the formula: “Habitual or sanctifying grace
is distinct from actual grace (nos. 1064 ff .); it is an infused,
inherent quality of the soul, by which man is formally justified
(nos. 483, 792, 795, 799 ff., 809, 821, 898, 1042, 1063 ff.), is
regenerated (nos. 102, 186), abides in Christ (nos. 197, 698), puts
on a new man (no. 792), and becomes an heir to eternal life (nos.
792,799 ff .).
II. THE PRINCIPLE
OF PREDILECTION AND EFFICACIOUS GRACE“
Since the
love of God is the cause of the goodness of things, nothing would be
better than another were it not better loved by God” (St. Thomas,
Ia, q. 20, a. 3).
One
of the greatest joys experienced by the theologian who, for long
years, has read and explained each day the Summa theologica
of St. Thomas, is to glimpse the sublime value of one of those
principles, often invoked but not sufficiently contemplated, which
by their simplicity and elevation form, as it were, the great
leitmotivs of theological thought, containing in themselves
virtually entire treatises. The great St. Thomas formulated them
especially toward the end of his comparatively short life, when his
contemplation had reached that height and simplicity which one
associates with the intellectual vision of the higher angels, who
encompass within a very few ideas vast regions of the intelligible
world, metaphysical landscapes, so to speak, composed not of colors
but of principles, and illumined from above by the very light of
God.
Among these
very lofty, very simple principles upon which the contemplation of
the Angelic Doctor paused with delight, there is one to which
sufficient attention is not generally paid and yet which contains in
its virtuality several of the most important treatises. It is the
principle which we find thus formulated, Ia, q. 20, a. 3: “Since the
love of God is the cause of the goodness of things, none would be
better thari another, were it not better loved by God.” In article 4
of the same question, the same principle is thus stated: “If some
beings are better than others it is because they are better loved by
God.” In short: no creature is better than another unless it is
better loved by God. This may be called the principle of
predilection, for principles derive their names from their
predicates.
This is the
principle against which all human pride ought to dash itself. Let us
examine: 1. its bases, necessity, universality, 2. its principal
consequences according to St. Thomas himself, and 3. by what other
principle it should be balanced so as to maintain in all their
purity and elevation the great mysteries of faith, particularly
those of predestination and the will for universal salvation.
THE BASIS,
NECESSITY, AND UNIVERSALITY OF
THE PRINCIPLE OF PREDILECTION
This principle,
“no creature is better than another unless better loved by God,”
seems at the outset to be manifestly necessary in the philosophical
order. If the love of God is, in fact, the cause of the goodness of
creatures, as St. Thomas affirms in the first text quoted, no one
can be better than another except for the reason that it has
received more from God; this greater goodness in it, rather than in
another, obviously comes from God.
As will be
seen, this principle of predilection is a corollary of the principle
of effcient causality: “Every contingent being or good requires an
efficient cause and, in the final analysis, depends upon God the
first cause.” It is also a corollary of the principle of finality:
“Every agent acts for an end”; consequently the order of agents
corresponds to the order of ends,
the first agent produces every good in view of the supreme end,
which is the manifestation of His goodness, and hence it is not
independently of Him or of His love, that one being is better than
another, the plant superior to the mineral, the animal to the plant,
man to the animal, one man to another, either in the natural order
or in the order of grace.
It is also
apparent from reason alone that this principle is absolutely
universal, valid for every created being from a stone to the
hightest angel, and not merely applicable to their substance, but to
their accidents, qualities, actions, passions, relations, etc., for
whatever is good in them and better in one than another, whether it
is a question of physical, intellectual, moral, or strictly
spiritual values.
The principle of predilection is also
supported by revelation under various aspects in both the Old and
New Testaments; it is even applied therein to our free, salutary
acts. Our Lord tells us: “Without Me you can do nothing”
in the order of salvation. St. Paul explains this by saying: “It is
God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to
His good will”;
“Who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not
received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou
hadst not received it?”
The principle in question is contained in many other texts cited by
the Council of Orange:
“Unto you it is given for Christ, not only to believe in Him, but
also to suffer for Him”;
“Being confident of this very thing, that He, who hath begun a good
work in you, will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus”;
“By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves,
for it is the gift of God”;
Now concerning virgins . . . I give counsel, as having obtained
mercy of the Lord, to be faithful.”
Again we find: “Do not
therefore, my dearest brethren. Every best gift, and every perfect
gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with
whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration”;
“No man can say the Lord
Jesus, but by the Holy Ghost”;
“Not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of
ourselves: but our sufficiency is from God.”
That is
clearly the principle of predilection or of the source of what is
better. St. Augustine often expresses it in commenting on the
scriptural texts which we have just quoted together with several
others from the Epistle to the Romans (chapters 8, 9, and 11). He
applies it not only to men but to angels, regarding whom there is no
question of the fact of original sin (by title of infirmity,
titulus infirmitatis) but only of right, of the dependence (titulus
dependentiae) of the creature upon the Creator, both in the
natural order and in the order of grace. He observes that those
angels who attained supreme beatitude received greater aid than the
others, “amplius adjuti.”
St. Thomans
discerned an equivalent formula of the principle of the origin of
superiority in the Council of Orange and the scriptural texts cited
by it. He writes, in fact, with reference to predestination, in
rendering an account of the condemnation of the Semi-Pelagians who
attributed the beginning of salvation to man and not to God: “But
opposed to this is what the Apostle says (II Cor. 3:5), that we are
not sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves.
However no principle can be found anterior to thought. Hence it
cannot be said that any beginning exists in us which is the cause of
the effect of predestination.” The reader is no doubt acquainted
with the texts of the Council of Orange (can. 4; cf. Denz., nos.
177-85): “If anyone holds that God waits upon our will to cleanse us
from sin, and does not admit that even our willing to be cleansed is
brought about by the infusion and operation of the Holy Ghost, he
resists the Holy Ghost Himself . . . and the salutary preaching of
the Apostle: ‘It is God who worketh in you, both to will and to
accomplish, according to His good will’ (Phil. 2:13).” Canon 9 on
the help of God asserts: “It pertains to the category of the divine
when we both think rightly and restrain our steps from falsehood and
injustice; for whatever good
we may do, God operates in us
and with us to enable us to operate”; and canon 12 on the quality in
which God loves us: “God so loves us according to the quality we
shall have by His gift, and not as we are by our own merit.” This
text taken from the fifty-sixth Sentence of St. Prosper summarizes
the one preserved in the Indiculus de gratia Dei, a
collection of anterior statements by the Holy See wherein we read (Denz.,
nos. 133-4): “No one uses his free will well except through Christ”;
“All the desires and all the works and merits of the saints should
be referred to the glory and praise of God, for no one pleases Him
otherwise than by what He Himself has bestowed.” This is essentially
the principle of the origin of superiority in a formula almost
identical with the one which St. Thomas was to give later (Ia, q.
20, a. 4). The same Indiculus preserves the following (Denz.,
nos. 135, 137, 139, 141, 142): “God so works in the hearts of men
and in the free will itself, that a devout thought, holy counsel and
every movement of good will is from God, since we can do some good
through Him without whom we can do nothing (John 15:5)”; and
likewise, no. 139: “The most devout Fathers taught the beginnings of
good will, the growth of commendable desires, and perseverance in
them to the end is to be referred to the grace of Christ . . .”;
“Hearkening
to the prayers of His Church, God deigns to draw many souls from
every kind of error, and once they are rescued from the power of
darkness He transports them into the kingdom of the Son of His love
(Col. 1:13), that from vessels of wrath He might fashion vessels of
mercy (Rom. 9:22). All this is regarded as of divine operation to
such an extent that gratitude may always be referred to God as
effecting it.”
The end of
this famous Indiculus is well-known: “Let us acknowledge God to be
the author of all good dispositions and works . . . Indeed, free
will is not taken away but rather liberated by this help and gift of
God . . . He acts in us, to be sure, in such wise that nothing
interior is to be withdrawn from His work and regard; this we
believe to satisfy adequately, whatever the writings taught us
according to the aforesaid rules of the Apostolic See” (Denz., no.
142). Is this not equivalent to saying: “In the affair of salvation
everything comes from God”? “Nothing interior is to be withdrawn,”
as the last text quoted declares. If, then, one man is better than
another, especially in the order of salvation, it is because he has
been loved more by God and has received more. This is the meaning
of: “What hast thou that thou hast not received?” quoted by the
Council of Orange (Denz., nos. 179, 199). The sense in which the
same Council speaks of God the author of every good, whether natural
or supernatural, is explained by the definition contained in canon
20: “Nothing of good can exist in man without God. God does many
good things in man which are not done by man; but man does nothing
good which God does not grant it to him to do” (Denz., no. 193); and
canon 22: “No one has anything of his own but lying and sin. But if
a man possesses anything of truth and justice it comes from that
fountain for which we should thirst in this desert, so that,
refreshed, as it were, by a few drops from it, we may not faint on
the way.” Cf. in the Histoire des Conciles of C. J. Héflè,
translated, corrected, and augmented with critical notes by Dom. H.
Lecleroq, Vol. II, Part II, pp. 1085-1110, the passages from St.
Augustine and St. Prosper from which these canons of the Council of
Orange are drawn, as confirmed by Boniface II; the most interesting,
of course, are those concerning the beginning of salvation and final
perseverance (“persevering in good works”) for both of which they
affirm the necessity of a special, gratuitous grace (Denz., nos.
177f., 183). But the grace of final perseverance is that The Semi-Pelagians,
reducing predestination to a foreknowledge of merits, held that from
the height of His eternity God desires equally the salvation of all
men and that He is therefore rather the spectator than the author of
the fact that one man is saved rather than another. Is this true or
not? Such was the profound question which confronted thinkers at the
time of the Semi-Pelagian heresy, as anyone will recognize who reads
St. Augustine and St. Prosper.
But did the Council of Orange leave it
unanswered? It asserted the principle of predilection, affirming, as
everyone admits, the necessity and gratuity of grace which is not
granted to all in the same manner, and demonstrating that in the
work of salvation everything, from beginning to end, is from God,
who anticipates our free will, supports it, causes it to act without
doing it any violence, lifts it up often, but not always; and
therein lies the very mystery of predestination. So true is this
that, heneceforth, to avoid Semi-Pelagianism it will always be
necessary to admit a certain gratuity in predestination.
Is not the
incontrovertible principle of all this teaching that all good
without exception comes from God, and that if there is more good in
one man than in another, it cannot be so independently of God? ‘“For
who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not
received ?” This text, according to St. Augustine, should cause us
to admit that there is no sin committed by any other man that I am
not capable of committing under the same circumstances, as a result
of the weakness of my free will or of my own frailty (the apostle
Peter denied his Master thrice); and if, in fact, I have not fallen,
if I have persevered, it is no doubt because I have labored and
struggled; but without divine grace I should have accomplished
nothing. Such was the thought of St. Francis of Assisi at the sight
of a criminal condemned to death. St. Cyprian had said (Ad Querin.,
Bk. III, chap. 4, PL, IV, 734): “We should glory in nothing, when
nothing is our own.” St. Basil asserts (Hom. 22 De humitate):
“Nothing is left to thee, O man, in which thou canst glory . . . for
we live entirely by the grace and gift of God.” And St.’ John
Chrysostom adds (Serm. 2, in Ep. ad Coloss., PG, LXII, 312): “In
the affair of salvation everything is a gift of God.”
THE PRINCIPAL APPLICATIONS OF
THE PRINCIPLE OF
PREDILECTION, ACCORDING TO
ST. THOMAS
St. Thomas deduces therefrom, in the
first place, the reason for the inequality of creatures, Ia, q. 47,
a. I: “The distinction and multitude of things is from the design of
the first agent who is God; for He brought creatures into existence
in order to communicate His goodness to them and be represented by
them. And since He cannot be adequately represented by one creature,
He produced a multitude of diverse creatures”; and article 2: “And
unequal . . . because a formal distinction [which is paramount]
always requires inequality.” By creation God willed to manifest His
goodness, but it could not be sufficiently represented by one
creature, which would be too deficient and limited for that. Hence
He desired many and these unequal and subordinate one to another,
for the mere material multiplication of individuals of the same
species is much less representative of the richness of divine
goodness than a multiplicity of species, hierarchically arranged as
are numbers. Leibnitz remarked that there would be no satisfaction
in having a thousand copies of the same edition of Virgil in one’s
library. But among these unequal creatures, one is better than
another only because it has received more from God.
St. Thomas
draws from the same principle the reason why grace is not equal in
all men, Ia IIae, q. 112, a. 4: “It cannot be said,” he remarks,
“that the primary reason for this inequality arises from the fact
that one man has prepared himself better than another to receive
grace, for this preparation does not pertain to man except so far as
his free will is moved by God. Hence the primary reason for this
difference must be found in God who dispenses the gifts of His grace
in diverse ways, so that the beauty and perfection of the Church may
come forth from these different degrees.” God sows a more or less
choice divine seed in souls according to His good pleasure with the
beauty of His Church in view.
St. Thomas
also deduces from this principle of the origin of superiority that
if one man prepares himself better than another for justification it
is because, in the last analysis, he received more help from a
stronger actual grace. In fact the holy doctor states in his
commentary on St. Matthew (25:15) with reference to the parable of
the talents: “He who strives harder receives more grace, but the
fact that he does strive requires a higher cause.” Again on the
Epistle to the Ephesians (4:7), with respect to the words, “To every
one of us is given grace, according to the measure of the giving of
Christ,” St. Thomas comments: “This difference is not owing to fate
or chance or merit, but to the giving of Christ, that is, to the
extent to which Christ measured it out to us. . . . For, as it is in
the power of Christ to give or not to give, so also is it to give
more or less.”
The principle
of the origin of superiority is so evident that all theologians
would accept it, did it not imply as a consequence that grace, which
is followed by its effect, is infallibly efficacious of itself and
not on account of our consent. Yet this consequence is manifest, as
many texts of St. Thomas show. If, in fact, actual grace followed by
consent to the good were not infallibly efficacious of itself but
only through the consent which follows it, there would be the
possibility that of two men equally aided by grace one would become
better than the other by his consent; he would become better without
having been loved and aided more by God.
This reason is put forth by all Thomists.
It rests on the principle of which we are speaking and is a6rmed
equivalently in several texts of St. Thomas. It is found clearly
stated particularly in the distinction which he establishes between
consequent divine will (which bears upon every good, easy or
difficult, which will come to pass here and now) and antecedent
divine will (bearing on the good separated from the particular
circumstances without which nothing comes to pass); cf. Ia, q. 19,
a. 6 ad I : “What we will antecedently we do not will absolutely but
under a particular aspect; for the will is applied to things as they
are in themselves, and in themselves they are individual. Hence we
will a thing absolutely to the extent that we will it taking into
account all the particular circumstances, which means willing it
consequently. . . . And thus it is evident that whatever God wills
absolutely comes to pass, although what He wills antecedently may
not.” If it happens, then, that Peter becomes here and now better
than another man, whether by a facile or a difficult act, this is
because from all eternity God has so willed by consequent will.
St. Thomas adds that this consequent will is
expressed in time by a grace which is efficacious of itself; cf. Ia
IIae, q. 112, a. 3: “The intention of God cannot fail, according to
the affirmation of Augustine in the book De dono perseverantiae,
chap. 14, that those who are liberated are most certainly liberated
by the beneficence of God. Hence if it is in the designs of God who
moves, that the man whose heart He moves should obtain grace, he
will infallibly obtain it, according to the words of John 6:45:
‘Everyone that hath heard of the Father, and hath learned, cometh to
Me.’”
This proposition of St. Thomas is manifestly
very different from an apparently similar one of Quesnell,
for the latter denies freedom from necessity and admits only freedom
from coercion; moreover, he denies sufficient grace and considers
every actual grace intrinsically efficacious.
Many other
texts of St. Thomas on the intrinsic efficacy of grace might be
cited. They are well known, quoted and explained in all the
treatises on grace written by Thomists.
This conception of the
intrinsic efficacy of grace is in no way contradictory of the
traditional definition of free will, which recent historical works
have set in increasingly clear relief: “the faculty of choosing the
means in view of an end to be attained,”
so that to deviate from the true end is an abuse of liberty.
Intrinsically efficacious grace is opposed
only to a new definition of free will
which disregards the specifying object of the free act (an object
not good in every respect), a definition which will not withstand
metaphysical analysis and which is unmindful of the truth that free
will is applied not univocally but analogically to God and to man,
according to a reason not absolutely but proportionately the same,
so that the free will of man, not only as an entity but also
as such under the idea of free entity (sub ratione liberi
arbitrii) depends on God, who is not merely first being, but
first intelligence and first liberty. Freedom is a perfection in
God, and we can participate in it only analogically.
As a matter
of fact, the human will can resist efficacious grace if it so wills,
as the Council of Trent declares, but as long as the will is under
efficacious grace, it never wills to resist. Under efficacious
actual grace it never sins, for the grace which is termed
efficacious is that which is followed by its effect: consent to
good. As St. Thomas ex-plains, in the same way, a man who is seated
can stand up, he has the real, proximate power to do so; but as long
as he remains seated he never does stand up, since by virtue of the
principle of contradiction, he cannot be both seated and standing.
The new
definition of liberty: “a faculty which, assuming all the
prerequisites for acting, can either act or not act,”-if understood
in the sense: under efficacious divine motion and after the final
salutary, practical judgment, the free will not only can resist but
at times actually does-such a definition is contrary to the
principle of predilection which is a corollary of the principles of
causality and finality.
By what other principle should that of
predilection be balanced? By the following: God never commands the
impossible. St. Thomas, great contemplative even more than able
dialectician, recognizes that the Christian doctrine of
predestination and grace rises like a summit above the two opposing
chasms of Pelagianism and predestinationism. He understands that, on
undertaking the ascent of that peak, one must deviate neither to
right nor to left, neither toward a rigid doctrine which restricts
the will for universal salvation and limits sufficient grace nor
toward a contrary doctrine which denies the intrinsic efficacy of
grace. He perceives, too, that one must not come to a halt halfway
up the slope at one of those eclectic combinations which would admit
grace to be intrinsically efficacious for difficult acts conducive
to salvation and not intrinsically efficacious for facile acts
conducive to salvation. Such a solution may appear simple in
practice, but speculatively it disregards the necessity and
universality of principles with relation to divine causality,
principles which there upon lose all their value; and it adds to the
obscurity of the doctrine admitted for difficult acts the insoluble
difficulties of that which is admitted for facile acts. St. Thomas
sees in such eclectic combinations nothing but a quite human
clarity, merely apparent and without basis, substituted for the
higher obscurity of the mystery, the loftiness of which is thus
minimized. Assuredly he does not look upon this as an insoluble
question which it is useless to fathom, but rather as an object of
loving contemplation, “the terrible but sweet mystery of the love of
predilection in God: ‘Who is like to Thee, among the strong, O Lord?
who is like to Thee, glorious in holiness, terrible and
praiseworthy, doing wonders?’ (Exod. 15:11) .”
Incapable of
stopping halfway as does eclecticism, St. Thomas aspires to climb
straight toward the summit. But at a certain height the trail ends,
the path has not yet been blazed, as St. John of the Cross indicates
on the illustration representing the Ascent of Carmel. St. Thomas
perceives clearly that here on earth no one can attain to that
culminating point where it will be granted him to see the intimate
reconciliation of the will for universal salvation with gratuitous
predestination. Thus he preserves all the loftiness of the mystery
and does not seek to substitute for its sublime obscurity any vain
human clarity. But without seeing the summit (faith regards what is
not seen), he succeeds in determining where it is to be found by
means of higher principles which mutually balance one another. He
formulates these very lofty, very simple principles with such great
lucidity that they only bring out in clearer relief the superior
obscurity of the inaccessible mystery located in its true site,
there where it must be contemplated in the cloud of faith, and not
elsewhere. It is one of those most beautiful chiaroscuros which have
ever attracted and riveted the contemplation of great theologians.
The masters of former times delighted in such vistas, painted not
with pigments but with principles, wherein the luminous circle
surrounding the mystery expresses so powerfully the grandeur of
faith; vistas so manifestly surpassing those of the greatest
painters or the most beautiful musical conceptions of Beethoven or
Bach. And just as these great artists understood that har-mony is
destroyed by a discordant commingling of sharps and flats, so did
those great masters of theology strive no less to avoid the jarring
dissonance produced in such difficult questions by a sharp which
would tend toward predestinationism or a flat which would incline
toward the opposite error.
The
principles which produce equilibrium here are, on the one hand, that
of predilection: “no creature is better than another unless it is
better loved by God,” a simple interpretation of the words of
Christ: “Without Me, you can do nothing,” and of those of St. Paul:
“It is God who worketh in you, both to will and accomplish,
according to His good will”; “Who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast
thou that thou hast not received?” This principle is immutable, and
together with it that other: “All that God wills by consequent will
comes to pass, without liberty being thereby destroyed.”
On the opposite slope of the invisible,
inaccessible peak, so as to determine the point where it rises and
where the blessed contemplate it in heaven, must be recalled the
principle of St. Augustine quoted by the Council of Trent (Denz.,
no. 804): “God does not command the impossible, but by commanding He
teaches thee both to do what thou canst and to ask what thou canst
not.” This formula is sacrosanct.
Invoking several passages of St. Paul, St.
Augustine,
St. Prosper,
and St. John Damascene, the Angelic Doctor gives us the
principle of the will for universal salvation (“God . . . will have
all men to be saved,” I Tim. 2:4) in an admirable and very profound
formula which echoes the most beautiful psalms in praise of the
mercy of God. He writes (Ia, q. 21, a. 4): “Every work of divine
justice presupposes a work of mercy or of sheer bounty, and finds
therein its basis. If, in fact, God owes something to His creature,
it is by virtue of a preceding gift. If He owes a reward to our
merits, it is because He has first given us the grace to merit; if
He owes it to Himself to give us the grace necessary for salvation,
it is because, from pure liberality in the first place, He has
created us and called us to the supernatural life. . . . Divine
mercy is thus the root, as it were, or the principle of all the
divine works; it penetrates them with its virtue and governs them.
In the capacity of primary source of all gifts, it is mercy which
has the strongest influence, and it is for this reason that it
surpasses justice, which takes second place. This is why, even with
regard to things due to the creature, God in His superabundant
liberality gives more than justice requires, “et propter hoc
etiam ea, quae alicui creaturae debentur, Deus ex abundantia
suae bonitatis largius dispensat quam exigat propitio rei.” (See
also Ia, q. 21, a. 2 ad 3.) St. Thomas also affirms in the very
question dealing with predestination: “God does not deprive anyone
of what is his due.”
“He gives help sufficient to avoid sin”;
“Those to whom efficacious help is not given are denied it in
justice, as punishment for a previous sin, . . . those to whom it is
granted receive it in mercy.”
This is the echo of the psalms relating to divine mercy,
particularly Ps. 135: “Praise the Lord, for He is good: for His
mercy endureth forever. Praise ye the God of gods: for His mercy
endureth forever.” Likewise Ps. 117: “Give praise to the Lord, for
He is good.”
How is this mercy, principle of all the works
of God, reconcilable with the divine permission of evil and of the
final impenitence of many? Why does it sometimes raise up the
sinner, but not always? Therein lies a mystery surpassing the
natural powers of any intelligence created or capable of being
created, and beyond them not only because of its essential
supernaturalness, as in the case of the Trinity, but also by the
contingency resulting from dependence on the sovereign liberty of
God:
“If efficacious grace is refused to many,” says St. Thomas following
St. Augustine, “it is in justice, as the result of a sin [permitted,
of course, by God, but of which He was in no sense the cause]; if
this same grace is granted to others, it is out of mercy.”
It is fitting that these two divine perfections should be
manifested, as St. Paul declares;
there is consequently involved here the cooperation of
infinite justice, infinite mercy, and also of supreme liberty,
eminently wise in its good pleasure, which is in no way a caprice.
Obviously each of these divine perfections herein involved exceeds
the natural powers of any intelligence created or capable of being
created. None among them may be limited, just as in the mystery of
the Cross and Passion of the Savior neither infinite justice nor
infinite mercy may be restricted; they are reconciled in the
uncreated love of God and in the love of Christ delivered up for our
sake. The apparently contradictory aspects of a mystery must not be
restricted for the sake of a better understanding of them. Rather
must one, as it were, soar above this apparent contradiction by the
contemplation of faith. This is why St. Paul exclaims: “O the depth
of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How
incomprehensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways!”
(Rom. 11:33.)
To acknowledge this mystery which is at the
topmost point of the peak we have just been describing, of that
summit which can never be seen from here below, one must cling to it
in pure faith, as Holy Scripture frequently urges us to do. Let us
recall, for example, the hymn of thanksgiving uttered by the elder
Tobias (Tob 13): “Thou art great, O Lord, forever, and Thy kingdom
is unto all ages. For Thou scourgest and Thou savest: Thou leadest
down to hell, and bringest up again: and there is none that can
escape Thy hand. . . . There is no other almighty God besides Him.
He hath chastised us for our iniquities: and He will save us for His
own mercy. See then what He hath done with us, and with fear and
trembling give ye glory to Him: and extol the eternal King of worlds
in your works.”
Theology, as the Council of the Vatican
asserts,
is essentially ordained to the contemplation of revealed
mysteries; infused faith, entirely divine and essentially
supernatural, is, in spite of its obscurity, eminently superior to
it, especially faith which is enlightened by the gifts of wisdom and
understanding. It becomes increasingly evident, then, that this
obscurity does not derive from absurdity or incoherence, but from a
light too intense for our feeble gaze. We begin to realize that,
with reference to these great mysteries of predestination, of grace,
and also of the will for universal salvation, we should read above
all the great theologians who were at the same time great
contemplative.
We come to understand better and better why, in the passive
purification of the soul described by the great spiritual writers,
St. John of the Cross in particular, the light of the gift of
understanding removes little by little the false lucidity of
eclectic combinations which stop halfway, and set the soul in the
presence of the real mystery without diminishing its sublimity. We
finally grasp the reason for St. Theresa’s remark: “The more obscure
a mystery is the more devotion I have to it,” obscure, that is, with
the translucent darkness which gives us a presentiment of the very
object of the contemplation of the blessed. Above all, we attain to
a growing realization of the fact that what is most obscure in these
mysteries is what is most divine, most elevated, most lovable; and
if we cannot yet cling to them in vision, we do so by faith and by
love.
The mystery involved here, whence proceeds the
principle of the origin of superiority to which this principle
leads, is the incomprehensible mystery of the love of predilection
in God. “No created being would be better than another were it not
better loved by God” (Ia, q. 20, a.
3); “What hast thou that thou hast not received?” (I Cor. 4:7); “He
[God] chose us in Him [Christ] before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and unspotted in His sight in charity.
Who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through
Jesus Christ unto Himself: according to the purpose of His will:
unto the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He hath graced
us in His beloved Son” (Eph. 1:4-6). We can understand that these
words, “unto the praise of the glory of His grace,” ought to become
the delight of contemplatives, expressing as they do with
extraordinary splendor the principle of predilection which
manifestly dominates all the problems of sanctifying and actual
grace in every degree.
II. THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SUFFICIENT AND
EFFICACIOUS GRACE
(By way of
recapitulation, we here reprint this article which appeared in
French in the Revue Thomiste, May, 1937.)
“Whatsoever
the Lord pleased He hath done” (Ps. 134:6). “God does not command
the impossible” (St. Augustine and Council of Trent, Sess. VI, chap.
II).
We dealt with
this subject in a book which appeared in 1936: La prédestination
des saints et la grâce; cf. especially pp. 257-64; 341-50;
141-44. In the present article we wish to stress a higher principle
admitted by all theologians wherein the Thomists find the ultimate
basis of the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace.
The problem. It is certain from
revelation that many actual graces bestowed by God do not produce
the effect (or at least the entire effect) toward which they are
ordered, whereas others do. The former are called sufficient and
purely sufficient; they confer the power of doing good without
carrying over efficaciously to the act itself. Man resists their
attraction; but their existence is absolutely certain, regardless of
what the Jansenists maintain. Otherwise God would command the
impossible, which would be contrary to His mercy and His justice.
Sin, moreover, would be inevitable; hence it would no longer really
be sin and consequently could not be justly punished by God. In this
sense we say that Judas, before sinning, could really, at the time
and place, have avoided the crime he committed; the same is also
true of the unrepentant thief before he expired beside our Lord.
The other actual graces which are termed
efficacious not only convey the real power of observing the
commandments; they cause us to observe them in fact, as in the case
of the good thief in contrast with the other. The existence of
efficacious actual grace is affirmed in numerous passages of
Scripture, such as: “I will give you a new heart, and put a new
spirit within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your
flesh, and will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My spirit
in the midst of you: and I will cause you to walk in My
commandments, and to keep My judgments, and do them” (Ezech. 36:26
f.); “Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath done” (Ps. 134:6), that
is, all that He wills, not conditionally but absolutely, He
accomplishes even the free conversion of man, as in the case of King
Assuerus at the prayer of Esther (Esther 13:9; 14:13); “And God
changed the king’s spirit into mildness” (ibid., 15:11). The
infallibility and efficacy of a decree of God’s will are obviously
based in these texts upon His omnipotence and not upon the foreseen
consent of King Assuerus. In the same sense the Book of Proverbs
declares (21:1): “As the divisions of waters, so the heart of the
king is in the hand of the Lord: whithersoever He will He shall turn
it”; likewise Ecclus. 33:24-27. Jesus Himself declares: “My sheep
hear My voice: and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them
life everlasting: and they shall not perish forever, and no man
shall pluck them out of My hand” (John 10:27); and again: “Those
whom Thou gavest Me have I kept; and none of them is lost, but the
son of perdition, that the scripture may be fulfilled’’ (ibid.,
17:12). St. Paul writes with the same purport to the Philippians
(2:13): “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to
accomplish, according to His good will.”
The Second Council of Orange, opposing the
Semi-Pelagians, quotes several of these scriptural texts and refers
to the efficacy of grace in the following terms (Denz., no. 182):
“Whatever good we do, God works in us and with us so that we may
work.” There is therefore a grace which not only gives the real
power of doing good (which exists in one who sins), but which is
effectual in the act, although it does not exclude our free
cooperation but arouses and induces it in us. St. Augustine explains
these same scriptural texts when he says: “God converts and
transforms the heart of the king . . . from wrath into mildness by
His most secret and efficacious power” (I ad Bonifatium,
chap. 20).
Hence a great
majority of the ancient theologians, Augustinians, Thomists,
Scotists, have allowed that the grace termed efficacious is so of
itself, because God wills it and not because we will it by a consent
foreseen in the divine prevision. God is not merely the spectator of
what distinguishes the just man from the sinner; He is the author of
salvation. It is true that these ancient theologians are divided on
the secondary question of explaining how grace is efficacious of
itself; some have recourse to the divine motion known as physical
premotion, others to a predominating delight or some similar
attraction. But all admit that the grace called efficacious is so of
itself.
Molina, on
the contrary, maintained that it is extrinsically efficacious on
account of our consent which was foreseen by God through mediate
knowledge. This mediate knowledge has always been rejected by
Thomists who accuse it of attributing passivity to God with respect
to our free determinations (possible in the future, and then future)
and of leading to determinism regarding circumstances (so far as, by
examining these, God would foresee infallibly what a man would
choose). Thus the very being and the goodness of man’s free and
salutary choice would derive from him and not from God, at least in
the sense in which Molina writes: “It may happen that, with equal
help, one of those called will be converted and not the other.
Indeed, even with less help one man may rise while another with
greater help does not, but perseveres in his obduracy.”
The opponents of Molinism reply that there
would thus be a good, that of salutary free choice, which would not
proceed from God, the source of all good. How then can the words of
Jesus be sustained (John 15:5): “Without Me you can do nothing” in
the order of salvation, and those words of St. Paul: “For who
distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received?
And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not
received it?” (I Cor. 4:7.) It would in fact come to pass that of
two sinners placed in the same circumstances and equally aided by
God, one would be converted and not the other; man would distinguish
himself and become better than another without greater assistance
from God, without having received more, contrary to the text of St.
Paul.
The Molinists
do not fail to press the question further: If in order to act
effectually one requires, in addition to sufficient grace, a grace
which is efficacious of itself, does the former truly convey a real
power of acting? It does so, the Thomists reply, if it is true that
a real power of acting is distinct from the action itself; if it is
true, as Aristotle maintained against the Megarians, that an
architect who is not actually building still has the real power to
do so; if it is true that a man who is asleep still has a real power
of seeing: from the fact that he is not exercising his sight at the
moment it does not follow that he is blind, Moreover, if a sinner
did not resist sufficient grace, he would receive the efficacious
grace proferred in the former, as the fruit is in the flower. If he
refuses, he deserves to be deprived of this further help.
Our
adversaries insist that St. Thomas himself did not distinguish
explicitly between grace efficacious of itself and grace which
merely conveys the power of doing good. It is an easy matter to cite
many texts of the Angelic Doctor wherein he makes this distinction;
for instance: “The help of God is twofold: God gives a faculty by
infusing power and grace through which man is made able and apt to
operate. But He confers the very operation itself inasmuch as He
works in us interiorly moving and urging us to good, . . . according
as His power works in us both to will and to accomplish according to
His good will” (In Ep. ad Ephes., chap. 3, lect. 2);
likewise, Ia IIae, q. 109, a. I, a. 2, a. g, 10; q. 113, a. 7, 10,
and elsewhere. He also writes: “Christ is the propitiation for our
sins, for some efficaciously, for all sufficiently, since the price
of His blood is sufficient for the sal-vation of all, but possesses
efficacy only in the elect, on account of an impediment” (In Ep.
ad Tim., 2:6). God often removes this impediment, but not
always. Therein lies the mystery. “God deprives no one of what is
his due” (Ia, q. 23, a. 5 ad 3); “He gives sufficient help to avoid
sin” (Ia IIae, q. 106, a. 2 ad 2). As for efficacious grace, “if it
is given to one sinner, that is through mercy; if it is denied to
another, that is in justice” (IIa IIae, q. 2, a. 5 ad I) .
Thomists
analyze these texts as follows: Every actual grace which is
efficacious of itself with regard to an imperfect salutary act such
as attrition, is sufficient with regard to a more perfect salutary
act such as contrition.
This is manifestly the sense of St. Thomas’ doctrine, and, according
to him, if a man actually resists the grace which confers the power
of doing good, he deserves to be deprived of that which would
effectually cause him to do good.
But St. Thomas not only distinguished between these two graces; he
indicated the ultimate basis of the distinction.
ANTECEDENT AND
CONSEQUENT DIVINE WILL
Thomists
generally affirm that the distinction between efficacious and
sufficient grace is based, according to St. Thomas, on, the
distinction between consequent will and antecedent will, as
explained by him (Ia, q. 19, a. 6 ad I ). From the will known as
consequent proceeds efficacious grace, and from the antecedent will,
sufficient grace.
In this
connection, St. Thomas writes: “The will is applied to things in
accordance with what they are in themselves; but in themselves they
are individual. Hence we will a thing absolutely inasmuch as we will
it taking into consideration all the particular circumstances; this
is willing consequently. . . . And thus it is evident that whatever
God wills absolutely comes to pass.” As the psalms tell us,
“Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath done” (Ps. 1346).
The object of
the will is the good. But goodness, unlike truth, resides formally
not in the intellect but in the thing itself, which exists only here
and now. Therefore we will absolutely, purely and simply, whatever
we will as it must be realized here and now. This is consequent
will, which is always efficacious in God, for all that God wills
(unconditionally) He accomplishes.
If, on the contrary, the will regards what is
good in itself independent of circumstances, not here and now, it is
the antecedent (or conditional) will, which in itself and as such is
not efficacious, since the good, natural or supernatural, facile or
difficult, is realized only here and now. That is why St. Thomas
says in the same place a few lines before: “In its primary
signification and considered absolutely, a thing may be good or
evil, which, however, when considered in connection with something
else that effects the consequent estimate of it, may become quite
the contrary; just as it is a good thing for a man to live,. . . but
if it is added with regard to a particular man that he is a
murderer, . . . it is a good thing for him to be executed.”
Thus during a storm at sea, a merchant would
wish (conditionally) to save his merchandise, but he is willing in
fact to cast the merchandise into the sea to save his life (Ia IIae,
q. 6, a. 6). Thus likewise does God will antecedently that all the
fruits of the earth come to maturity, although for the sake of a
higher good He permits that all do not do so. Again, in the same
way, God wills antecedently the salvation of all men, although He
permits sin and the loss of many in view of a higher good of which
He alone is judge. Hence St. Thomas concludes in the text quoted:
“It is thus evident that whatever God wills absolutely comes to
pass, although what He wills antecedently may not.” It nevertheless
remains true that God never commands the impossible, and that by His
will and love He renders the keeping of the commandments possible to
all, in the measure in which they are known and can be known. “He
gives sufficient help to avoid sin” (Ia IIae, q. 106, a. 2 ad 2). In
fact, He gives to each even more than strict justice demands (Ia, q.
21, a. 4). So does St. Thomas reconcile the antecedent divine will
which St. John Damascene speaks of, with omnipotence which must not
be lost sight of.
THE ULTIMATE
PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TWO WILLS AND THE
TWO GRACES RESTS
But is there not a higher, simpler
principle from which the distinction may be derived between the two
divine wills, one of them always efficacious, the other conditional
and the source of sufficent grace? Is there not a universally
accepted principle whence proceeds the notion of consequent and
antecedent will, which we have just reviewed, and which would
justify them in a higher light before the eyes of those who might
remain unconvinced?
The principle
we are seeking is precisely the one upon which this entire article
of St. Thomas is based (Ia, q. 19, a. 6). It is expressed in the
psalms in the words (134:6): “Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath
done.” That is, God brings to pass all that He wills purely and
simply, with an unconditional will. This is the will known as
consequent, the principle of grace efficacious in itself. The
enunciation of this principle is completed by the formula: “For
nothing is done in heaven or on earth unless God either graciously
brings it about or permits it to happen in His justice.” In other
words, nothing happens without God’s willing it if it is a good or
permitting it if it is an evil.
So does the Church teach universally, and accordingly it is
acknowledged that there is in God a conditional will, termed
antecedent, which regards a good the privation of which is permitted
by God for the sake of a higher good. Thus He permits that in
certain cases His commandments are not kept, and He does so for the
sake of that higher good, the manifestation of His mercy or of His
justice.
To this
principle must be added another which is also universally received,
was frequently invoked by St. Augustine,
and was quoted by the Council of Trent, Sess. VI, chap. II: God
never commands the impossible. The fulfillment of His commands is
really possible, in the measure in which they can be known. Hence it
is evident that the antecedent divine will is the source of a
sufficient grace which renders the accomplishment of the precepts
really possible, without causing them to be fulfilled here and now.
From these
two revealed principles is derived, as can be seen, the distinction
between the two divine wills, the one always efficacious, called
consequent, the other conditional and the source of sufficient
grace. Herein lies the ultimate basis, then, of the distinction
between the two kinds of grace which we are considering.
There is no
exception to the universal principle: All that God wills (purely,
simply, and unconditionally) comes to pass, without thereby
violating our liberty, for God moves it strongly and sweetly,
actualizing rather than destroying it. He wills efficaciously our
free consent, and we do consent freely. The sovereign efficacy of
divine causality extends even to the free mode of our acts (Ia, q.
19, a. 8). This supreme maxim is thus explained by St. Thomas (ibid.,
a. 6): “Since the divine will is the most universal cause of all
things, it is impossible for it not to be fulfilled,” when it is a
question of unconditional will. The reason for this is that no
created agent can act without the concurrence of God, or fail
without His permission. Hence this principle amounts to a
declaration of what is generally taught by the Church: No good is
brought about here and now (in one man rather than in another)
unless God has willed it positively and efficaciously from all
eternity; and no evil, no sin, takes place here and now (in one man
rather than in another) unless God has permitted it. The simpler
formula is frequently used: Nothing takes place without the will of
God if it is a good, or the permission of God if it is an evil.
Equivalent definitions are found in the Councils, for example, that
of Trent (Denz., no. 816).
This very
sublime and absolutely universal principle is repeated by many
writers without any perception of what it implies. But it implies
precisely, as we have just seen, the basis of the distinction
between the two kinds of grace we are discussing, grace efficacious
in itself and grace which is merely sufficient, which man resists,
but which he would not resist without divine permission.
Hence in the
ninth century, in order to terminate the discussions with regard to
Gottschalk’s opinion and to grant to the Augustinian bishops what
they were asking, and at the same time maintaining the divine will
for universal salvation and the responsibility of the sinner, the
synodal letter approved by the Council of Toucy in 860 began in the
following terms”:
“God did all that He willed in heaven and on earth. For nothing is
done in heaven or on earth unless He either graciously accomplishes
it or permits it to happen in His justice.” That is to say that
every good, natural or supernatural, easy or difficult, initial or
final, comes from God, and that no sin takes place, nor does it take
place in one man rather than in another, without divine permission.
This extremely general principle very evidently contains innumerable
consequences. St. Thomas saw in it the equivalent of the principle
of predilection which he thus formulated (Ia, q. 20, a. 3): “Since
the love of God is the cause of the goodness of things, nothing
would be better than something else did not God will a greater good
to one than to another.” No one would be better than another were he
not more loved and helped by God. This is the equivalent of St.
Paul’s: “For who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou
hast not received?” (I Cor. 4:7.)
CONSEQUENCES OF THIS PRINCIPLE
This truth is
one of the foundations of Christian humility, resting on the dogmas
of creation out of nothing and of the necessity of grace for every
salutary act. The same principle of predilection contains virtually
the doctrine of gratuitous predestination, for, as St. Thomas shows
so clearly (Ia, q. 23, a. 5), since the merits of the elect are the
effect of their predestination, they cannot be its cause. This great
truth leads the saints, when they see a criminal mounting the
scaffold, to say within themselves: “If that man had received all
the graces I have received, he would perhaps have been less
unfaithful than I; and had God permitted in my life all the faults
He permitted in his, I should be in his place and he in mine.” Such
humility in the saints is manifestly the consequence of the
principle: “Nothing happens unless God wills it, if it is a good, or
permits it, if it is an evil.”
In fact,
whatever there is of being and of action in the sin, apart from the
moral disorder it contains, all proceeds from God, first cause of
all being and all action, as St. Thomas demonstrates so well (Ia
IIae, 9.79, a.2). The divine will cannot will, either directly or
indirectly, the disorder which sin contains (ibid., a. I),
nor can divine causality produce it. That disorder is outside the
adequate object of God to much greater extent than sound is outside
the object of the sense of sight. Just as we cannot see a sound, so
God cannot be the cause of the disorder which lies in sin; but He is
the cause of the being and action which it contains. There is
nothing more precise and more “precisive,” if we may so speak, than
the formal object of a faculty.
Thus, although goodness and
truth are not actually distinct in any reality, the intelligence
attains to it only as true and the will only as good. In the same
way, the effect of gravity in our bodily organism must not be
confused with that of electricity or of heat; each of these causes
produces its own effect in us, not that of any other. Likewise God
is the cause of being and action in sin, but not of its moral
disorder. Thus is verified once more the principle: nothing real is
effected without God’s will, nor any evil without His permission.
It is
apparent, therefore, that theology should not only labor to deduce
new conclusions following from its principles, but should also
return to the first principles of faith so as to clarify conclusions
which do not seem certain to those who do not recognize their
connection with the prime verities.
To revert to
the distinction between grace efficacious in itself and sufficient
grace, it must be said, according to the generally accepted same
circumstances, as were the two thieves who died with our Lord,
eternity for his salvation, and if the other continues in his
impenitence, this does not happen without the just permission of
God.
It is clear
that if one of these two sinners should be converted, it will be as
a result of a special mercy which causes him to merit before death
and subsequently will crown its own gifts by rewarding him. But if a
just man never sins mortally from the time of his first
justification in baptism, that is the result of an even greater
bounty on the part of God, who has preserved him thus efficaciously
in good when He could have permitted his fall. This simple
observation demonstrates the gratuity of predestination.
Such
manifestly are the ultimate principles of the distinction between
grace efficacious of itself which causes one to do good and
sufficient grace which gives the power to do good. If a man resists
the latter, as we have said, he deserves to be deprived of the
former, which is offered to him in sufficient grace, as the fruit in
the flower. Resistance or sin falls upon sufficient grace like hail
upon a tree in blossom, which gave promise of a rich yield of fruit.
The Lord in His mercy often lifts up the sinner; but He does not
always do so, and therein lies the mystery.
Molina,
refusing to admit that efficacious grace is so intrinsically, or of
itself, maintained that it is efficacious only on account of our
consent foreseen from all eternity through mediate knowledge. Thus
there is a good, namely, that of our free, salutary determination,
which comes about without God’s having willed it efficaciously,
contrary to the principle: “Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath
done; nothing is done unless He either graciously does it or permits
it to happen in His justice.”
Molina, nevertheless, attempts to preserve this
universally accepted principle. But he succeeds only in retaining it
in an indirect, extrinsic way by asserting that God from all
eternity has seen, through mediate knowledge, that if Peter were
placed in given circumstances with such and such sufficient grace,
he would in fact be converted; and thereupon, since He had the
intention of saving him, He willed to place him in these favorable
circumstances rather than in others wherein he should have been
lost. Thus the supreme principle which we have invoked, as well as
that of predilection, would be degraded to a condition of
relativity. It is no longer intrinsically true of itself but only on
account of circumstances extrinsic to the salutary determination.
In fact, for
Molina it remains true, contrary to the principle of predilection,
that of two sinners placed in the same circumstances and equally
aided by God, one may be converted and not the other. “A person who
is aided by the same or even less help can rise from sin, while
another with greater help does not rise but remains in his obduracy.
One of the two is converted without having received any more,
contrary, so it seems, to the words of St. Paul: “Who distinguisheth
thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received?” (I Cor. 4:7.)
THE PROBLEM
One objection
remains, which St. Paul himself poses: “Thou wilt say therefore to
me: Why doth He then find fault? for who resisteth His will?” (Rom.
9:19.) We know the Apostle’s answer: God can prefer whom He wills
without thereby being unjust (ibid., 14-24), and the hymn to
divine wisdom whose designs are impenetrable: “O the depth of the
riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How
incomprehensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways! .
. . Who hath been His counsellor? Or who hath first given to Him,
and recompense shall be made him?” (ibid. 11:33-35.) St.
Augustine makes the same reply: “Why does He draw this man and not
that one? Do not attempt to judge if you do not wish to err.”
St. Thomas adds that
predestination cannot have as its cause the merits of the elect
since these are the effect of predestination, which consequently is
gratuitous or dependent upon the divine good pleasure (Ia, q. 23, a.
5).
Not infrequently an effort is made to answer
the foregoing problem more specifically than either St. Paul, St.
Augustine, or St. Thomas did. But is not the significance of the
mystery sacrificed to an inferior sort of clarity which it does not
contain? From this standpoint one comes back, in spite of oneself,
to the position of Molina, for instance, by the statement which
recently appeared as follows: “Herein lies the mystery of
predestination: Since from all eternity God knew that Judas would
not profit by the sufficient graces which He willed to give him, why
did He not will to give him, as he did to the good thief, graces
with which He knew that he would correspond?” That is indeed the
language of the Molinists and, willy-nilly, it presupposes the
theory of mediate knowledge, which posits a passivity in the
foreknowledge regarding the free determination a man would take,
were he placed in given circumstances, and which he will take if he
is in fact so placed. There is the dilemma: God either determines or
is determined; there is no middle ground.
If, on the contrary, one
attempts to safeguard the generally accepted principle: “Nothing
happens which God has not either efficaciously willed if it is a
good, or permitted if it is an evil,” it does not suffice to affirm,
as in the formula quoted above, that God knew what would happen,
that the good thief would consent to the sufficient grace and that
Judas would resist it. It must be held that: in one case, God
permitted the final impenitence of Judas (had He not permitted it,
it would not have happened, and God would not have been able to
foresee it infallibly) and He would not have permitted it if he had
willed efficaciously to save Judas. In other case, God willed
efficaciously the conversion of the good thief because He willed
efficaciously to save him (gratuitous predestination to glory).
This is the conclusion which
proceeds from the generally accepted principles.
If a good which ought to happen does not happen
(such as the conversion of Judas), it must be concluded that God had
not efficaciously willed it to happen actually although He may have
willed the possibility of its happening (antecedent will) and that
Judas should hav eth real power to be converted, without being so in
fact. (Thus a man who is asleep and not actually seeing still has
the real power of sight.) If, on the contrary, a good actually
comes to pass (such as the conversion of Peter), it must be
concluded that from all eternity God had efficaciously willed (by
consequent will) that it should in fact take place, and in Peter
rather than in Judas.
It follows, therefore, that no one would be
better than another (all other things being equal), were he not
better loved efficaciously and aided more by God (consequent will);
although the other (less loved) could, of course, have received and
often may, under other circumstances, have received greater graces.
Thus Judas received the grace of the apostolate which many of the
elect have never received. Hence no one would be better than
another were he not loved more by God through consequent will. This
is the meaning of the divine predilection upon which predestination
is based (cf. St. Thomas, Ia, q. 23, a. 4). Bariez says no more than
St. Thomas on the subject, and it is quite apparent that the epithet
of “Bañezianism” to designate classical Thomism is only a poor
attempt at humor, as Father N. Del Prado demonstrates (De gratia,
1907, III, 427-67: Whether Bañezianism is not really a farce
invented by the Molinists). Molina spoke more frankly and admitted
that his doctrine did not coincide with that of St. Thomas.
As for negative reprobation, according to the
Angelic Doctor, it consists precisely in the divine permission of
sins which in fact will not be remitted and especially of the sin of
final impenitence.
To this one cannot make answer, as has recently been done, that the
permission of sin is general with regard to elect and reprobates
alike; it is clear that we are here dealing with the will to permit
sin which will not be forgiven.
CONCLUSION
Hence it is apparent that the
ultimate bases of the distinction between grace efficacious in
itself and sufficient grace, as well as between consequent divine
will and antecedent will, is to be found in these two principles:
“Nothing happens which God has not either willed efficaciously if it
is a good, or permitted if it is an evil”; and “God never commands
the impossible, but renders the fulfillment of His commands really
possible when He imposes them and to the extent to which He imposes
them and to which they can be known.”
If the true
meaning of each of the terms of these two principles is well
weighed, especially the opposition that exists between
“efficaciously willed” and “permitted,” it can be seen that there is
a real difference between efficacious grace, the result of the
intrinsically efficacious will of God, and merely sufficient grace,
the result of His antecedent will accompanied by the divine
permission of sin. In the first case, God confers the free, salutary
action. In the second, He gives the real power to act, but not to
act efficaciously. In sufficient grace, we cannot repeat too often,
efficacious grace is offered, as the fruit in the flower, as act in
potency. But if anyone resists sufficient grace, he deserves to be
deprived of the efficacious help which he would have received had it
not been for this resistance.
Therein lies
a great mystery, as St. Paul acknowledges (Rom. 9:14-24; 11:33-36).
He reminds us that, without being unjust, God can show preference
for whom He will. No one has first given unto Him that he should
receive a recompense in return. “O the depth of the riches of the
wisdom and of the knowledge of God! . . . who hath been His
counsellor? Or who hath first given to Him, and recompense shall be
made him?
What
does appear manifestly in the midst of this chiaroscuro is that the
question here posed involves the reconciling of infinite justice,
infinite mercy, and supreme liberty within the eminence of Deity. If
the grace of perseverance is granted to one, it is out of infinite
mercy; if it is not granted to another, that is in just punishment
for his faults. Each of these divine perfections is infinite, and
their intimate reconciliation in the eminence of Deity or in the
inner life of God can be seen only in the immediate vision of the
divine essence.
The
principles which we have just enunciated and which balance one
another give us an inkling about the location of the summit toward
which they converge, but the peak remains hidden from our sight.
Only in heaven shall we behold the intimate reconciliation of these
two truths: “Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath done” (Ps. 134:6),
and “God does not command the impossible.” He who receives from God
the real power to observe the commandments does not always do so in
fact. If he observes them, he is obviously better in that respect.
And this is a sign that he has received more.
We must
therefore conclude with Bossuet: “Let us learn to control our
intelligence so as to admit these two graces [sufficient and
efficacious] of which the one leaves the will without any excuse
before God and the other does not allow it to glory in itself.”
Sufficient grace leaves us
without any excuse before God because, as we have said, in it
efficacious grace is offered to us; but by the very fact that a man
resists this divine attention, he deserves to be deprived of the
efficacious help which was virtually offered to him. Resistance to
grace is an evil which derives from us alone; nonresistance is a
good which would not come to pass here and now, had not God willed
it from all eternity with a consequent or efficacious will.
But to arrive
at a clear understanding of this doctrine, one must avoid several
confusing misconceptions that are frequent among those who read the
explanation of it for the first time. It would be an error to think
that some receive only efficacious graces and others only sufficient
graces. We all receive both of these helps. Even those who are in
the state of mortal sin occasionally receive an efficacious grace to
make an act of faith or of hope; but they often also resist the
sufficient grace which inclines them toward conversion. Faithful
servants of God frequently receive sufficient graces which they do
not resist and which are followed by efficacious graces. The various
degrees of sufficient grace must also be carefully considered. First
of all, sufficient grace is far from always being sterile or merely
sufficient; it is rendered sterile by our resistance. But if this is
not forthcoming, sufficient grace, followed by efficacious help,
fructifies like a flower which produces, under the action of the
sun, the fruit which it is intended to yield.
Moreover,
sufficient graces are most varied in kind. There are, in the first
place, the exterior graces such as the preaching of the gospel, good
example, wise direction. Then there is the interior habitual or
sanctifying grace received in baptism which confers the radical
power of acting meritoriously. There are the infused virtues and the
gifts of the Holy Ghost, which are so many principles bestowing the
proximate power of supernatural action. There are interior actual
graces, graces of light which produce good thoughts, graces of
attraction which cause an impulse toward the good, inclining us to a
salutary consent to good without causing us as yet to produce it.
Thus it is that, as we have said above, the grace which produces
attrition in us efficaciously is sufficient with regard to
contrition.
Sufficient
grace, which renders possible the fulfillment of duty, may therefore
go very far in the order of this real possibility. But however far
it may go in this order of proximate power to produce a given
salutary act, for instance, contrition, it remains distinct from the
efficacious grace which will cause us to produce freely, here and
now, this particular act of contrition. The latter would not in fact
have been produced had it not been willed eternally by the
consequent will of God.
A cursory
reading of this doctrine may leave one unaware of how far sufficient
grace can go within us. Sometimes it urges us with insistence not to
resist God’s will in a certain respect, manifested repeatedly by a
superior or a spiritual director. It may happen that for a year or
two or even more all the circumstances continue to confirm what is
being asked of us in God’s name. And yet the soul continues to allow
itself to be deceived by self-love and by the enemy of all good; it
resists the light over a period of months, in spite of all the
prayers that are said for it and all the Masses offered for its
intention. The prayers and Masses obtain for it graces of light
which produce good thoughts in it, graces of attraction which elicit
transitory impulses toward the good. But these sufficient graces are
blocked by a resistance which may even go so far as obduracy of the
heart. Then is fulfilled the text of the Apocalypse (3:19): “Such as
I love, I rebuke and chastise. Be zealous therefore, and do penance.
Behold, I stand at the gate, and knock. If any man shall hear My
voice, and open to Me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup
with him, and he with Me.”
“Behold, I
stand at the gate, and knock,” says the Lord. The soul often
resists; it does so by itself; the evil comes only from the soul.
When it ceases to resist and at least hearkens to Him who knocks, it
is already He, the Lord, who gives it to the soul to listen with
docility. And if it really stops resisting, it will be led from
grace to grace even to divine intimacy.
If the soul
ceases its resistance, efficacious grace ever sweeter and stronger
will be given it; sweetly and strongly will this grace gradually
penetrate its will, as the beneficial warmth penetrates little by
little a cold body which has been frozen stiff. Then the soul
becomes more and more aware that all the resistance came from itself
alone; that the nonresistance is itself a good proceeding from the
author of all good; and that the soul must ask it of Him in that
prayer which the priest repeats every day at Mass before the
Communion, a prayer by which he begs for the efficacious grace which
leads one to the good: “Lord, make me always adhere to Thy
commandments and never suffer me to be separated from Thee.” Grant,
Lord, not only that I may have the power of observing Thy
commandments, but that I may in fact observe them; and never permit
me to be separated from Thee.
Undoubtedly,
he who keeps the commandments is better than he who, although really
able to keep them, does not do so. He who is thus rendered better
should thank the sovereign goodness for it. The distinction between
the two helps, sufficient and efficacious, which we have been
speaking of, is a basis for the act of thinksgiving which De
praedestinatione sanctortum, the elect will sing forever the
mercy of God and will see how this infinite mercy is perfectly
reconciled with infinite justice and sovereign liberty.
IV. THE BAÑEZIAN
COMEDY AND CONTEMPORARY SYNCRETISM
Any consideration of the renewal of
Thomistic studies in the past hundred years must take into account
the great names of the eminent Jesuits Kleutgen, Cornoldi,
Liberatore, and more recently, Louis Billot and G. Mattiussi, who
labored so admirably throughout their lives to lead minds back to an
understanding of the works of St. Thomas. They were great admirers
and often penetrating interpreters of the Angelic Doctor. Only in
heaven will it be known what great friends he has had among the sons
of St. Ignatius. We experience a particular joy in sincerely
rendering this testimony.
It is to be
regretted that the same elevation of mind is not found in several
authors who in the past few years have taken to applying the epithet
of “Bañezian’’ to real Thomists. It is an ill-natured witticism to
which the best theologians of the Society of Jesus would never
stoop. This designation of “Bañezian” referring to genuine Thomists
is even adopted by certain authors as if it were an accepted term.
We are thereby reminded of the chapter, “De Comoedia banneziana,”
which is to be found in a work by Father N. Del Prado, O.P., De
gratia et libero arbitrio (Fribourg, 1907, III, 427-66).
This latter work, out of print for several
years, brought the sum of 6,000 lire before the last war, so we are
informed, and must be even more valuable today. In the chapter
referred to, pp. 457 ff., the author recalls that Dr. John Ude of
Graz, who had received from his professors in Rome the conviction
that classical Thomism was an invention of Bañez, undertook to write
a book entitled: Doctrina Capreoli de influxu Dei in actus
voluntatis humanae (Graz, Istria, 1904). He professed to show
that the doctrine defended by Bañez was nowhere to be found in the
early commentators on St. Thomas. But what was his surprise when, in
Capreolus himself, he came upon the doctrine of predetermining
divine decrees and causally predetermining premotion! In the first
part of his book he still speaks in behalf of Molinism, but
subsequently (op. cit., pp. 162, 182, 197-203, 215,
216, 259) he is obliged to conclude that Capreolus
had
certainly taught what Bañez declared and that this doctrine is St.
Thomas’ own, as has been demonstrated by Fathers Dummermuth
and Del Prado. We have proved the point at great length elsewhere,
and shall quote in the present article several texts of St.
Thomas. It suffices to recall for the moment the two following: “If
God moves the will toward anything, it is incompatible with this
position that the will should not be moved toward it. However, it is
not absolutely impossible. Hence it does not follow that the will is
moved by God of necessity” (Ia IIae, q. 10, a. 4 ad 3). God
actualizes liberty in the will and even the free mode itself whereby
it directs itself toward any good conducive to salvation,
safeguarding under this very movement the power (not the act) of
choosing a contrary object. Likewise, “The intention of God cannot
fail. . . . Hence if it is in the intention of God who moves that
the man whose heart He moves should receive [sanctifying] grace, he
will infallibly receive it” (Ia IIae, q. 112, a. 3 c; cf. also IIa
IIae, q. 24, a. II, and Contra Gentes, Bk. III, chaps. 91,
92, 94).
It is absolutely certain that, according to St.
Thomas, God knows in a comprehensive manner all that He is, all that
He can do, all that He wills and accomplishes, all that He permits,
and that thus, without any passivity or dependence with regard to
our free determinations, He knows all that is knowable. “The
knowledge of God is the cause of things and is in no way caused by
them” (Ia, q. 14, a. 5,8). Without any doubt the Molinist theory of
scientia media has no foundation in St. Thomas. It is quite certain,
according to him, Ia, q. 19, a. 8, that God willed efficaciously
from all eternity the free acts of Christ the Redeemer, Mary’s fiat,
the conversion of Mary Magdalen, of the good thief, and of Saul. And
it is for this reason that these acts rather than their contraries
are present to Him from all eternity (Ia, q. 14, a. 3), and that
they took place infallibly in time, in a free manner, because He had
efficaciously willed that they should happen freely (Ia, q. 19, a.
8). “God,” says Bossuet, “wills from eternity all the future
exercise of human liberty so far as it is good and real. What can be
more absurd than to say that it does not exist for the reason that
God wills it to exist” (Traité du libre arbitre, chap. 8)?
Texts from St. Thomas abound proving that this is indeed his
teaching; they are well known. Not to take into account these texts,
often quoted by Thomists, is to proceed unscientifically. The only
opposition offered is to dismiss the case. This is done by that
well-known theologian of distinction who adheres, in spite of every
argument, to the Molinist theory of scientia media. His
answer to us was:“Even if the doctrine of predetermining decrees is
in St. Thomas, we will have none of it.” At least he had the merit
of being outspoken. He would have been greatly surprised had he been
told that he was indulging in pragmatism which could easily lead to
a revision of the traditional definition of truth so as to define
it, not as that which is, but as that which pleases us and which we
wish to say and to hear others say.
But the
subject deserves a more forthright discussion. It is objected: for a
man to be free under efficacious grace, it is not enough for him to
retain, under that grace, the power of resisting; he must be able to
accommodate the grace with actual resistance. If that is the case,
genuine Thomists have always replied with St. Thomas himself, then,
for Socrates to be sitting down freely, it does not suffice that he
meanwhile retains the power to rise, but he must be able to
accommodate those two contrary positions and be at the same time
seated and standing, which is impossible. In the same way,
efficacious grace to which resistance was made in fact would no
longer be efficacious.
But our
adversaries have no wish to hear such an answer. And so they
continue in certain of their works to call real Thomists “Bañezians.”
In order to hold on to the title of Thomists themselves without
being challenged they deprive the true intellectual sons of St.
Thomas of that right. And readers who lack keenness of perception or
who are misinformed allow themselves to be taken in. Suppose someone
tried to deprive the true descendants of the Bourbon line of their
name: would not the cry of injustice be raised? The case is a
parallel one.
Bañezianism
is then described after a fashion which no real Thomist would
accept, and this description finds its way subsequently into the
works of authors who attempt to advance matters by a reconciliation
of the two contradictorily opposed doctrines, and who express
themselves in a way of which Msgr. P. Parente is typical. In his
De creatione universali (1943, p. 139), in the belief that he is
accurately reporting the doctrine of the Thomists, labeled “Bañezians,”
he writes:
“When the
will acts under the impulse of God, it cannot deviate toward
anything else in the composite sense; but it can do so
in the divided sense. Evidently, as long a the
divine motion continues, the will is not free, that is, it
cannot
fail to desire that to which it is determined by God (composite
sense); but it could if it prescinded from that motion (divided
sense). Similarly a person who sits down, while he is seated, cannot
stand, but he does not relinquish the power of standing, in the
divided sense, that is, after he has been seated.” The same author
expresses himself in similar terms in his Antropologia
supernaturalis, 1943, p. 194.
This is the divided sense as Calvin
understood it, and it is easy to understand that it should be
rejected. But why not seek the correct meaning of this term from the
Thomists themselves?
We affirm that God actualizes liberty in us, so that there no longer
remains a passive or potential indifference, but rather an actual,
dominating indifference with which our will, specified by the
universal good, directs itself toward such and such a particular
good which is commanded (toward an object not in every respect
good), while preserving under this divine motion the power (not the
act) of choosing the contrary. Thus Socrates, while seated, is able
to stand, but he cannot be at the same time seated and standing. In
the same way, a person with his eyes closed does not see at that
moment, but he retains the real faculty of sight; he is not blind.
Potency is really distinct from act and can exist without it.
Likewise under grace which is infallibly efficacious of itself, the
will is able to resist (the opposite power remains); but under that
grace it never does resist in fact, just as it never happens that
while Socrates is seated he is standing. Efficacious grace which a
man would resist in fact would no longer be efficacious.
The composed sense of Calvin, declared by him
to be unattainable, is our divided sense, which we maintain is real.
As for the divided sense of Calvin, it is heretical. According to
him, freedom and the power to resist do not remain under efficacious
grace, but only reappear later. Thomists have never sustained such a
theory; if they had, they would have completely misunderstood the
teaching of their Idaster. They understand the divided sense in
exactly the same way as St. Thomas.
Another doctrine which they do not hold is
attributed to Thomists when it is said: “Thomists add that God
bestows sufficient grace in such wise that to those who make good
use of it He may grant efficacious grace; but according to their
opinion, the good use of sufficient grace depends upon efficacious
grace. Therefore the matter is left unexplained.”
What Thomists maintain is this: If a man resists sufficient grace,
then he deserves to be deprived of efficacious grace, and it is
clear that the latter is not necessary to resist the former.
Culpable resistance falls upon sufficient grace (in which
efficacious grace is offered) like hail upon a tree in blossom,
which promised much fruit; but the fruit will certainly not develop.
As for the disorder of sin, God who condemns
it, permits it without being its cause. This divine permission is
only a condition sine qua non. The disorder proceeds solely
from the defective and deficient created will and in no sense from
God, who absolutely cannot produce it; for this disorder is outside
the adequate object of His will and omnipotence, just as sound is
beyond the range of the sense of sight, or truth outside the
adequate object of the will. “Nothing is more precise than the
formal object of any power.” Hence the divine motion toward the
physical act of the sin (as being and as action) prescinds from its
malice. Again with regard to this last point, the authentic
Thomistic teaching is often rendered utterly unrecognizable in the
unscientific presentations that are made of it. All that would be
necessary would be to cite the two articles of St. Thomas (Ia IIae,
q. 79, a. I, 2); Thomists hold no other view.
THE NEW
SYNCRETISM
What is the
substance of the new syncretism proposed by Msgr. P. Parente? He
rejects Thomism and the Molinist theory of scientia media, as
well as that of simultaneous concurrence, while admitting a
non-predetermining premotion. He is seeking an intermediate
position. The question is whether such a position is possible
between two contradictory propositions. God knows certainly all
future contingencies either before or not before His predetermining
decree; is any middle ground possible?
I. The new syncretism rejects what it refers to
as rigid Thomism or Bañezianism, that is, the doctrine of
predetermining divine decrees and the divine motion derived from
them. What is its objection to this teaching? We are told in the
De creatione universali, p. 144: “It does not seem possible to
preserve human liberty if the will of man is said to be and is
determined by God toward one object. Nor will it help to have
recourse to composite and divided sense, since the question concerns
freedom, not before or after divine motion (in the divided sense),
but during that motion (in the composite sense). Therefore if in
this latter sense the will, inasmuch as it is determined to one
object, is not free, it never will be free, since without this
motion it never has the power to act.”
We have just seen that this interpretation of
divided sense, attributed to Thomists, is by no means their own;
more than that, it is heretical. Under efficacious grace a man can
resist, but he does not do so in fact; grace would then no longer be
efficacious. Moreover, we hold that by grace efficacious in itself
God infallibly moves the will to determine itself freely in the
direction of the commandment; this motion is thus a causal
predetermination distinct from the formal determination of the act
to which it is ordained. God determines to one object in the sense
that He determines us to obey rather than not to obey.
2. The new syncretism also rejects Molinism;
cf. Msgr. Parente, De creatione universali, p. 144: “If a
creature is said to be moved primarily by itself to its operation, a
twofold absurdity follows, namely, the creature determines God and
its passes from potency to act independently of God. . . . Moreover,
reasoning, both theological and philosophical, here demands not
coordination but subordination.” Furthermore, Msgr. Parente writes
with respect to mediate knowledge (De Deo uno, 1938, p. 247):
“Again this whole Molinistic theory simply abounds in obscurity as
not a few Molinists acknowledge. For it is dificult to see how
anything may be regarded as real (in the future) to the divine mind
while withdrawn from the divine will. However it may be explained,
this is imputing a certain determinism to God Himself. But if the
futurity of free acts as dependent with respect to circumstances is
urged overmuch, then we fall into determinism of circumstances. . .
. In recent times no theologians have made any advance in the
direction of reconciliation. Thus L. Janssens, De Deo uno,
Vol. II, declares that the medium of knowledge of all future
contingencies is the divine essence to the extent that it is
eternal, or the eternity of God itself, to whom all things are
present. But this opinion, if it prescinds from the divine volition,
either does not explain enough, or reverts to the theory of those
who hold that God draws His knowledge from His own creatures.”
Mediate
knowledge is then rejected by the new syncretism because God would
be determined in His foreknowledge by a free determination (future
contingency) which would not derive from Him. Thus far, this is a
refutation of misinterpreted Thomism by means of Molinism, and of
Molinism by means of Thomism.
But at this point, if the new theory refuses to
come back to predetermining decrees, which it has discarded, how
will it solve the inevitable dilemma: God either determines or is
determined; there is no midway between the two? If He does not
determine, then He is determined by a determination which does not
come from Him but is imposed upon Him, since He knows it infallibly
without its being derived from Him; for example, if the good thief,
crucified on Calvary beside Jesus, had the help of sufficient grace,
he would be converted, while the other in the same circumstances and
with equal grace would not.
The new syncretism considers that it has solved
the difficulty by declaring that our free, salutary determination
comes from God mediately by way of our deliberation. Cf. Parente,
De creatione universali, p. 158. “In a free act a twofold
element must be distinguished, that of its exercise and that of its
specification. The first in the actuating of the will is in the line
of efficient causality which is to be ascribed to God immediately;
the other is the determination of the act from the standpoint of the
object, in the line of formal causality which is immediately from
the intellect, and mediately from God.” The same author writes (De
gratia, p. 208): “Physical predetermination is rejected; and
premotion is admitted even in the supernatural order. Likewise the
motion of exercise is distinguished from the motion of
specification; the former is attributed immediately to God, the
latter mediately to God and immediately to the intellect proposing
the object under a favorable light.” Again, (ibid., p. 204):
“Then the will, of which the adequate object is the Highest Good, is
directed spontaneously and infallibly toward a particular object in
which a certain nature of the Highest Good is reflected.” How could
the word “infallibly,” which we have italicized, ever be justified?
CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF THIS SYNCRETISM
To anyone who
has spent a lifetime in the study of these problems under their
various aspects, it is easily apparent that this new syncretism,
like its predecessor, seeks an impossible mean between two
contradictory propositions, between the predetermining decrees of
genuine Thomists and the scientia media of the Molinists: God knows
future contingencies infallibly, either before or not before His
predetermining decree. If the new syncretism does not return to
predetermining decrees, which it has discarded, it is led perforce
to scientia media presented under another name and must reply
to all the difficulties it raises. The exigencies of the principle
of contradiction must not be forgotten.
We shall here formulate the objections which
we have already presented in the Acta Academiae romanae S. Thomae,
193-40, pp. 35-37. They seem to us absolutely irrefutable. The only
reply they have ever received was a dismissal of the case; this is
hardly scientific.
I. This syncretism maintains that God is the
cause of our free determination mediately only through the judgment
of our intelligence which deliberates. Assuredly there will never be
a free choice without a foregoing judgment; but at the end of the
deliberation it depends on our free will (which accepts or rejects
the right direction of the intelligence) that such and such a
practical judgment should be the final one. (See no. 21 of the
twenty-four Thomistic theses approved by the Sacred Congregation of
studies.) Thereupon, since the new syncretism admits that God moves
the will, as to exercise, toward this choice, in the case of a
salutary choice does God will eflicaciously that it should be a
salutary volition rather than a nolition, an impious refusal or a
culpable omission? If so, then God by moving the will toward this
choice efficaciously and infallibly as to exercise, brings it about,
together with the will, that such and such a salutary practical
judgment should be the final one. In that case we are dealing with
genuine Thomism and are presupposing the predetermining divine
decrees from which this motion as to exercise derives.
2. Otherwise, by this motion in respect to
exercise required for a salutary choice as well as for the contrary
refusal, God would not cause the good act to any greater extent than
the evil act, and He would not be even the mediate nor, above all,
the infallible cause of the salutary choice as to specification; for
the precept which comes from Him does not draw the will infallibly;
even under the aspect of a good it did not infallibly attract the
good thief who obeyed, while the other disobeyed.
3. Accordingly, God would not be the cause of
what is bast in the merits of the saints nor of what was best in the
merits of Christ and His holy Mother. This is contrary to the words
of St. Paul: “For who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that
thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou
glory as if thou hadst not received it?” Therefore does St. Thomas
often repeat: “Whatever of reality and perfection there is in our
salutary acts derives from God, the source of every good.” In other
words, as stated in Ia, q. 20, a. 3 and 4: “Since the love of God is
the cause of the goodness of things, one thing would not be better
than another if God did not will greater good to one than to the
other.” “Thus some things are better for the reason that God loves
them better.” This is the principle of predilection which clarifies
the whole doctrine of predestination: No one would be better than
another were he not loved and helped more by God. “What hast thou
that thou hast not received?”
4. Finally, God in His foreknowledge would be
passive or dependent with respect to our free salutary determination
which would not derive from Him and which, at least as possible in
the future, would impose itself upon Him infallibly since He would
know it infallibly. Thus we are back again, whether we will or not,
at mediate knowledge under another name, with all the difficulties
which flow from it. The dilemma that cannot be solved ever
reappears: God either determines or is determined; there is no
middle course. Every theory that denies the predetermining divine
decrees — call it mediate knowledge or not — comes to grief when it
strikes against this dilemma.
We must therefore return to certain and
revealed principles. Even in the psalms we find, as Hincmar observed
at the Council of Toucy in 860,
terminating the controversy raised by the writings of
Gottschalk: “Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath done, in heaven, in
earth” (Ps. 134:6). Hincmar added: “For nothing is done in heaven or
on earth except what He graciously does or permits to be done in His
justice.” This means that every good, whether easy or difficult,
natural or supernatural, comes from God, and that no sin takes
place, or takes place in one man rather than in another, without a
divine permission. This extremely general principle obviously
implies a multitude of consequences. Thomists see in it the
equivalent of the principle of predilection: “No one would be better
than another were he not loved and aided more by God.” This last
principle must be balanced by that other formulated by St. Augustine
and cited by the Council of Trent (Denz., no. 804): “God does
not command the impossible, but by commanding He teaches thee both
to do what thou canst and to ask what thou canst not”; this is the
Augustinian affirmation of the will for universal salvation.
According to these principles, what answer does
the Christian mind offer to the following questions: Did God from
all eternity efficaciously will the free acts of Christ the
Redeemer, Mary’s fiat consenting to her motherhood of the Savior,
the conversions of Mary Magdalen, of the good thief, of Saul? Did
God will efficaciously all that is good in each of these acts,
especially what is best in them: their free determination which
distinguishes them from evil acts and whereby the just man is
distinguished from the sinner?
The Christian
mind replies to these questions in the affirmative: Yes, God from
all eternity efficaciously willed these salutary acts which took
place in time; He efficaciously willed their free determination
wherein a good act is distinguished from sin. Otherwise God would
not be the source of all good, and what is best in the merits of the
saints would not derive from Him; “in the affair of salvation, not
everything would come from God, that is, not the origin of the free,
salutary determination.” St. Augustine repeatedly affirms this
doctrine, basing it upon the words of Jesus: “Without Me you can do
nothing” in the order of salvation, and on those of St. Paul: “What
hast thou that thou hast not received?”
Did St.
Thomas preserve this teaching, so simple in its sublimity, which
becomes more and more the object of the contemplation of the saints
above and beyond all controversy? To be convinced of the Angelic
Doctor’s adherence to this doctrine, it suffices to read in order
the articles of the Summa relating to these questions.
According to
St. Thomas, God is omniscient because He knows in a comprehensive
manner all that He is, all that He can do (all possibilities), all
that He wills and does (all that has been, is, and will be, as far
as it is real and good), and all that He permits (all sins, their
kind, number, and the exact moment when they occur); this includes
all that is knowable. Nothing positive, nothing good, can in fact
exist outside of God, without a relationship of causality or of
dependence with respect to Him; and sin would not happen if God did
not permit it — that is a condition sine qua non — and if He
did not permit it to happen under a given form and at a given time.
Thus the Pharisees were powerless to put our Lord to death before
“His hour” had come, the hour predetermined by God with an
infallible predetermination, but not necessitating the free acts of
the Savior or of His persecutors, and moreover predicted by the
prophets. This is traditional teaching in all its lofty simplicity
and all its strength. Does St. Thomas retain it? Assuredly he does.
Otherwise, as Bossuet says with reference to Molina’s mediate
knowledge, “all idea of a first cause is thrown into confusion.”
St. Thomas
writes (Ia, q. 14, a. 8): “The knowledge of God is the cause of
things inasmuch as His will is united to it.” He has just observed:
“Since the intelligible form confronts two opposite alternatives
(whether to produce it or not) and since the same knowledge relates
to opposites, it would not produce a determined effect unless it
were determined in one direction by the will.”
Again (ibid.,
a. 13): “But the knowledge of God is measured by eternity which
encompasses the whole of time”; hence it attains intuitively to all
futurities as presents, without any dependence in relation to them;
nor does it know them any better when they take place in time. But
the conversion of St. Paul would not be infallibly present to God
from all eternity had He not willed it efficaciously. Otherwise it
would be present to Him not as a contingent truth but as a necessary
truth. This is manifest, provided one is willing to understand it.
And the presence of future contingencies in eternity is not the
medium of foreknowledge but the condition of its being intuitive and
not subsequently perfected when the future comes to pass in time, as
in the case of a prophet who sees his prediction accomplished.
Ia, q. 19, a.
4: “The will of God is the cause of things, and determined effects
proceed from His infinite perfection according to the determination
of His will and intellect.” And in God, as in man, “the free will,
accepting the direction of the intellect, does whatever is final in
the practical judgment,” provision being made for virtually
distinguishing several decrees in God; cf. ibid., ad 4. That
is the decree of the divine will. In the same question, St. Thomas
concludes the answer to the first objection of article 6: “Whatever
God wills absolutely is done, although what He wills antecedently
may not be done.” Thus from all eternity God willed antecedently
Peter’s fidelity during the Passion, at the same time permitting his
denial; but He willed absolutely that Peter should be converted, and
infallibly he is converted. In the same way from all eternity God
willed absolutely and efficaciously to save the good thief
(predestination to glory), and for this reason He also willed to
grant him the efficacious grace of a happy death, and the good thief
was converted.
Ibid., a. 8: “The divine will imposes
necessity on some things willed but not on all. . . . This depends
on the efficacy of the divine will. For when any cause would be
efficacious in acting, the effect follows the cause, not only with
respect to what is done but even according to the mode of doing or
being. . . . To certain effects God adapted contingent causes.” God
moves creatures according to their condition; His motion is not
passively determined by us, but He moves our will to determine
itself by deliberation in the direction of the commandments. Ibid.
ad 2: “From the very fact that nothing resists the divine will, it
follows not only that those things are done which God wills should
be done, but also that they are done contingently or necessarily as
He so wills.” He actualizes human liberty. He willed efficaciously
that the good thief should be converted freely. What could be more
absurd than to say that it cannot happen because God willed it?
Ia, q. 20, a. 3, 4: “No one would be better
than another were he not better loved by God.” Ia, q. 23, a. 5:
“Whatever there is in man ordaining him to salvation is wholly
included under the effect of predestination, even the preparation
for grace. And likewise, Ia, q. 105, a. 4: “It is proper to God to
move the created will, but most of all by inclining it interiorly.”
Ia IIae, q. 10,
a. 4 ad 3: “If God moves the will toward anything, it is
incompatible with this position that the will should not be moved
thereto. But it is not absolutely impossible. Hence it does not
follow that the will is moved by God of necessity. Ia IIae, q. 112,
a. 3: “Since the intention of God cannot fail, according to
Augustine, those who are rendered free by the beneficence of God are
most certainly rendered free. Hence if it is in the intention of God
who moves that the man whose heart He moves should receive
[sanctifying] grace, he will infallibly receive it.” Bañez has said
no more than this. Many other texts might be cited, particularly
Contra Gentes, Bk. III, chaps. 91, 92, 94; De veritate,
4.22, a.8, 9; De malo, q.6, a. I ad 3; Comment. in
Perihermenias, Bk. I, lect. 14, etc. To the mind of St. Thomas
what could have appeared more absurd than the claim that by
actualizing liberty in us God destroys it?
REFUTATION OF
THE OBJECTIONS
The new
syncretism holds that in St. Thomas the determination to one always
necessitates. This is true of a faculty which by its very nature is
determined to one. In that case it is necessitated to act only in
that direction; man cannot use his sight for hearing but only for
seeing. But it is not true of the motion, efficacious in itself,
whereby God actualizes our liberty, infallibly leading our will,
specified by the universal good, to determine itself toward some
particular good, toward obeying some commandment rather than
disobeying it.
St. Thomas
says in fact, Ia IIae, q. 10, a. 4: “Since the will, then, is an
active principle not determined to one but applying itself
indifferently to many objects, God so moves it that He does not
determine it to one of necessity, but that its motion remain
contingent, not necessary, except in those things to which it is
moved naturally.” In this sentence the expression “not . . . of
necessity” should be emphasized, for the negative refers to “of
necessity” and not to “He . . . determines it to one.” Throughout
this question in fact, in the preceding articles, St. Thomas writes:
“God does not move of necessity” in the sense of: “God moves, but
not of necessity.” Obviously, efficacious, salutary divine motion
infallibly leads the will to determine itself to obey a given
command rather than to disobey it. The proof is that in this very
article 4 (ad 3) we read: “If God moves the will toward anything, it
is incompatible with this position that the will should not be moved
thereto.” The text is clear to anyone who reads it without any
preconceived idea. Moreover it is certain that efficacious grace
which was resisted in fact would no longer be efficacious.
Msgr. Parente
has attempted to show
by several texts of St. Thomas that the determination to one always
necessitates. But the texts presented refer to determination to one
of a faculty which, like that of seeing, is determined by its very
nature to one act; they do not refer to the divine motion which
actualizes freedom and produces in it even the free mode (which is
of its essence), leading the will infallibly to determine itself to
obey a given precept rather than to disobey.
To make this
evident it suffices to quote in full the texts presented. De
malo, q. 6, a. I ad 3: “God moves a certain will immutably [or
infallibly] on account of the efficacy of His moving power which
cannot fail;
but because of the nature of our will which applies it-self
indifferently to various objects, necessity is not introduced and
liberty remains. So also in all things divine providence operates
infallibly, and yet from contingent causes effects proceed
contingently inasmuch as God moves things proportionately, each
according to its mode.” He actualizes freedom by leading it
infallibly to meritorious obedience as He causes the tree to
blossom; and just as the tree spontaneously produces its natural
flowers, the just man freely obeys in a meritorious way under the
grace which causes him to obey.
Without any
more justification, we are confronted with the text De potentia,
q. 3, a. 7 ad 13: “The will is said to have dominion over its act,
not to the exclusion of the first cause, but since the first cause
does not so act in the will as to determine it of necessity, as it
determines nature. And therefore the determination of the act is
left in the power of the reason and the will.” Assuredly, since God
by His efficacious, infallible motion leads us to free
self-determination through deliberation to obey a given commandment
rather than to disobey it; and when the just man obeys thus, it can
be said that God had willed it so, efficaciously, from all eternity,
even if it is a question of a facile act. It remains true, as St.
Thomas says, De veritate, q. 22, a.8, that “just as the will
can change its act into another, so, to a much greater extent, can
God,” and Contra Gentes, Bk. III, chap. 91, no. 3: “A man
always chooses what God operates in his will.” Do we not read in
Prov. 21:1: “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord:
whithersoever He will He shall turn it”?
The testimony
of Father Congar O.P., in the Revue des sciences Phil. et
théol., 1934, pp. 369 ff ., is also invoked. But it must not
be forgotten that he concludes as we do: “Nothing can free us from
the unavoidable dilemma: God either determines or is determined. God
‘determines all things and is not determined by any’ (St. Thomas,
III Sent., dist. 27, q. I, a. 2 ad I).”
Finally it is
objected that St. Thomas has never spoken of non-necessitating
divine predetermination. It suffices to reply that he spoke of it
clearly with reference to the divine decree by which Providence
determined the hour of Christ’s passion: “The Son of man indeed
goeth, according to that which is determined” (Luke 22:22); cf. Acts
3:18. St. Thomas in his Commentary on St. John’s Gospel (2:4), “My
hour is not yet come,” says in fact: “The hour of His passion is
here meant, not as of necessity, but as determined by divine
providence.” Likewise (ibid., 7:30): “ ‘They sought to
apprehend Him and no man laid hands on Him, because His hour was not
yet come,’ not of fatal necessity but as prescribed by the whole
Trinity.” And again (ibid., 13:1; 17:1): “Not the hour of
fatal necessity but of His ordination and good pleasure . . .
determined by providence.”
All these
texts are manifestly concerned with a predetermining, infallible
divine decree bearing upon the hour of Jesus and thereby even upon
the free act which He was to perform infallibly by willing to die
for our salvation. Herein is also concerned the permissive decree
referring to the sin of Judas, of Caiphas, of Herod, of Pilate, of
all those who, until that hour, were powerless to do any harm to our
Lord.
Not to admit
this teaching, especially with respect to the positive
predetermining decrees relating to salutary acts, is to affirm that
what is best in the merits of the just, the free determination which
distinguishes them from sinful acts, does not derive from God. And
thus, of two men in the state of grace one of whom performs a
meritorious act and the other sins mortally, that which comes from
God in both cases would be only their faculties, habitual grace, the
infused virtues, the commandment, actual grace which draws them
morally (but not infallibly) after the manner of an object, and the
motion as to exer-cise, from which the sinful refusal can proceed
just as well as the meritorious volition. Then, what is best in the
merits of the just, even in those of Christ and His holy Mother, —
their meritorious, free determination in its first beginning — would
not derive from God, contrary to the words of St. Paul: “What hast
thou that thou hast not received?”
St. Thomas’
teaching is quite otherwise. As Scheeben has justly remarked,
the efficacious divine motion
which the Angelic Doctor speaks of, is not to be compared to the
influence of a mechanical order whereby one man assists another to
row a boat, nor to that of a qualitative order by which heat revives
life, but to the vital influence in a plant, for example, of the
parent stem upon the branches causing them to blossom and fructify,
and even more to the influence of the human will, enlightened by the
intelligence, upon the hand, directing it as it writes. Moreover the
handwriting varies in excellence; sometimes it becomes scarcely
legible on account of the tremor brought on by old age. Then the
will of the writer is not responsible for the defective result; no
more is God for the disorder of sin which proceeds from the evil
disposition of the defective and deficient will. Excluding the
faults in the penmanship, all that is written proceeds from the hand
as proximate cause and all, at the same time, from the writer as
higher cause. This, however, is only an analogy to sustain the
imagination and aid the intelligence. Thus our will, with the
infused virtues, is secondary cause of whatever in the effect does
not exceed its powers when set in operation, and it is instrumental
cause of whatever exceeds its powers, as would be the case under a
special inspiration of the Holy Ghost received through the gifts, as
inspiration to which the just man freely consents. Let us also
remark the teaching of Leo XIII that liberty remains under the
motion which constitutes biblical inspiration.
Once the
Thomistic doctrine has been accepted, the more faithful the soul is
the more it grasps, as Scheeben says, “its mystical profundity.” It
has less confidence in itself, more in the efficacy of grace; and
this increases its generosity and docility to the Holy Ghost. Thus
the saints even enter upon the ways known as passive, wherein merit
certainly does not diminish, when God acts more and more in them,
substituting, through inspiration received with docility, His own
very sublime, very simple thought for their complicated
ratiocination, His strength for their weakness. The saints realize
then that God must be-come for them another self, as it were, more
intimate than their own; and they finally reach the point of
declaring with St. Paul: “I live now, not I, but Christ liveth in
me.” The influence of efficacious grace thus actualizes their
liberty more and more; far from destroying it, grace vitalizes,
transforms, and establishes it in good.
If the
objection is raised: “But I wish to find something to cling to in my
free will, and I cannot reconcile it with that abandonment to
grace.” Bossuet replies: “Proud contradictor, do you wish to
reconcile these things or rather to believe that God reconciles
them? He reconciles them in such a way that He wills, without
releasing you from your action, that you attribute to Him ultimately
the entire work of your salvation. For He is the Savior who has
said: ‘There is no savior besides Me’ (Isa. 43:11). Believe firmly
that Jesus Christ is the Savior, and all the contradictions will
vanish.
This confidence in God, the author of grace, produces peace in
abandonment. It goes so far as to declare with St. Paul: “When I am
weak, then am I strong”; for then I no longer put my trust in self,
but in God the author of salvation.
Such has been the teaching of the greatest
Thomists. To indulge the liberty of disdaining them they must first
have been understood; involves; one must not confuse the divided
sense of St. Thomas and his true disciples with that of Calvin,
which is manifestly heretical. It is a source of regret for us to
have been obliged to call attention to this confusion.
The important thing is to hold firmly to the
principle that the best part of our salutary, meritorious actions
(their free determination) comes from God, that the just man does
not distinguish himself by himself from the sinner: “For who
distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received?”
(I Cor. 4:7.) We must ever return to the principle set forth by the
Council already quoted which put an end to the discussions aroused
by the writings of Gottschalk:“‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased He hath
done, in heaven, in earth‘(Ps. 134:6). For nothing is done in heaven
or on earth unless He either graciously does it (that is, a good) or
permits it to be done in justice (that is, an evil permitted for the
sake of a greater good).” At such heights as these we find peace.
The best spiritual writers have always spoken thus, particularly
when dealing with the free act of love of God which the Lord Himself
causes to spring forth from our hearts. This efficacy of grace was
especially manifest in the martyrs, giving them the fortitude to
resist the most frightful torment. one cannot afford to remain in
ignorance of all that the question in confusion.
CONCLUSION
The essence of Molinism and of the
theories related to it is to be found in a definition of created
liberty which implies the denial of the intrinsic efficacy of the
divine decrees and of grace and which requires the admission of
mediate knowledge in spite of its manifest disadvantages. The
opponents of Molinism refuse to accept this definition of free will
which, in their estimation, is begging the question.
The
definition referred to as formulated by Molina, Concordia, p.
10, is as follows: “Free will is the faculty which, given all the
requirements for acting, can either act or not.” According to Molina
this definition does not mean that, under efficacious grace, liberty
preserves the power to resist without ever willing, under this
grace, to resist actually; it means that grace is not efficacious of
itself but only through our consent foreseen by mediate knowledge.
As Molina says, ibid., p. 318: “It was not in the power of
God to foresee anything else by His mediate knowledge; however the
divine foresight would have been otherwise had the choice of the
created liberty been different.” Thus the divine foresight depends
on the choice which a man would make and will make, supposing him to
be placed in given circumstances. Hence there is passivity or
dependence in God, according to the unsolvable dilemma: God either
determines or is determined; there is no middle ground. Moreover man
distinguishes himself; it is hard to see how the words of St. Paul
are safeguarded: “What hast thou that thou hast not received?”
On the
contrary it must be affirmed that every good comes from God, and
especially what is best in our salutary, meritorious acts, the free
determination which distinguishes an act of obedience from one of
disobedience, by which our love of God is distinguished from
indifference or hatred. “Convert us to Thee, O Lord, and we shall be
converted.” Such should be our prayer.
V. HABIT AND
ACT ARE SPECIFIED BY THEIR FORMAL
OBJECT: THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRINCIPLE
State of the question. All Scholastics recognize this teaching
of Aristotle which St. Thomas expresses in the following terms:
“Just as every natural thing has its species from its form, so every
action has its species from its object, just as motion from its
term” (Ia IIae, q. 18, a. 2). The reason for this, as explained in
Ia Ilae, q. 54, a. 2, is that “whatever is said to be ordained
toward something is distinguished according to the distinguishing
marks of that toward which it is ordained.” But operative powers,
operative habits, and operations themselves, or acts, are said to be
ordered (by a transcendental relationship) to an object. Therefore
they are specifically distinguished according to the distinguishing
marks of their objects; in other words, they derive their species
and unity essentially from an object. This principle is invoked very
frequently in the treatises on grace and on the virtues. Hence
special attention should be given to it.
The foregoing principle, which Thomists have
always upheld, was nevertheless assailed by Scotus, Durandus, the
Nominalists, Molina, Lugo, and many others, In fact, its
universality has but recently been denied. Some writers have held
that “the generally admitted principle, ‘an act is specified by its
formal object,’ is not generally valid.” It is indeed valid, so they
maintain, “where the formal object differs specifically; then, the
corresponding act differs specifically. For instance, the mode of
operation with respect to the same material object varies according
as it is visible (seeing), true (understanding), or good (willing).
. . . Likewise the formal object of human intellection (the
intelligible in sensible objects) differs from the formal object of
angelic intellection (the created intelligible in itself), and these
from the formal object of divine intellection (the uncreated
intelligible); further human, angelic, and divine intellection are
essentially diverse in their ontological perfection. . . .
“Therefore in this example a difference in mode
of operation can be concluded from a difference of formal object,
and ultimately a difference of ontological perfection.
“If it were
generally valid that any difference of ontological perfection was
based on a difierence in mode of operation with respect to the
material object, it would follow that a different ontological
perfection would necessarily require a different formal object. But
this is not true. For the act of seeing in an irrational animal and
that in a man (supposing the man not to have attained the use of
reason yet) differ essentially in their ontological perfection; but
their mode of operation or of reaching their object does not so
differ and hence their formal object is also held to be the same.
The statement is therefore not generally valid, that wherever there
is diversity of ontological perfection there is also diversity of
operation and of formal object.”
In the same way, the formal
object of infused faith would not be distinct from the object of
acquired faith in the truth of the Gospel confirmed by miracles.
Having read
this explanation of the foregoing principle, many Thomists conclude:
then, if the commonly admitted principle, “acts are specified by
their formal object,” is not generally valid, it must be incorrectly
formulated. It should not be stated generally that acts are
specified by their formal object, but only that certain acts, not
all, are specified by their formal object. In other words, if a
difference of formal objects is given, then there is indeed a
specific difference in the acts; but the converse is not true, that
is, not every specific difference in acts corresponds to a
difference in formal objects. It must therefore be discovered
whether the aforesaid principle is universal for Aristotle, St.
Thomas, and their disciples, or whether “it is not generally valid.”
Most
assuredly a person would not preserve the sense of the proposition,
men are rational animals, were he to say: all rational animals are
indeed men, but not all men are rational animals. Similarly it may
be asked whether it is true to say: all acts formally, as they are
acts, are specified by their formal object, for instance, sight as
sight, hearing as hearing; although from another aspect, that is,
not as acts but as properties of such and such a nature, they may
have another specification, for example, sight, not as sight, but as
leonine, equine, or aquiline, or even sight as it is in a man rather
than in a child or in a woman.
Cajetan had already said when explaining this
principle, In Iam, q. 77, a. 3, no. 6: “Keep in mind here
that we can speak of the powers of the soul from two standpoints;
from one aspect inasmuch as they are powers (ordained to an act and
an object), and it is with this that we are entirely concerned at
present; from the other aspect inasmuch as they are properties of
such and such a nature; to this we are not referring. For from this
standpoint they differ according to the diverse natures in which
they reside, as Averroes remarks, I De anima, comment. 53:
The members of a man are different specifically from those of a
lion.” Herein perhaps lies the solution of the problem.
Let us first consider whether the foregoing principle is universal
for Aristotle and St. Thomas, in other words, whether it is really a
principle.
THE
UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRINCIPLE ACCORDING TO
ARISTOTLE AND ST. THOMAS
In his De
anima Aristotle had already thus distinguished sensation from
intellection: sensation is ordered to perceiving sensible qualities,
sight to visible color, hearing to sound; whereas intellection is
ordered to intelligible being. And it is utterly impossible for even
the highest sense faculty to attain to intelligible being or to the
reasons of the essence of things. This is the basis of the
demonstration of the spirituality and immortality of the rational
soul. Again, Aristotle distinguished intellect ordained to the true
from appetite ordained to the appetible, and rational appetite
specified by the universal good from sense appetite ordained toward
a sensible good which is not universal.
By the same principle, Aristotle distinguished
various sciences, as can easily be observed in the sixth book of the
Metaphysics, chap. I, so far as speculative science is
ordered only to cognition of truth, practical science to works.
Likewise there are three principal speculative sciences (physics,
mathematics, and metaphysics) , each specified by its object.
Physics by mobile being according to the first degree of
abstraction, that is, from singular matter; mathematics by quantity
according to the second degree of abstraction, that is, from
sensible matter; and metaphysics by being as being according to the
third degree of abstraction, that is, from all matter. Similarly, in
the Ethics Aristotle distinguishes four cardinal virtues, and
likewise the virtues annexed to them and their acts, according to
their objects; for example, prudence as right reason applied to
practice.
Hence this
principle is given by Aristotle as entirely universal: acts are
specified by their objects; not indeed by their material object
around which many acts converge, just as the various senses round
about the same sensible body, but by their formal objects.
Nowhere has Aristotle set any
limit to the universality of this principle rightly formulated
regarding an act not materially but formally as it is an act, a
habit as a habit, or a power as a power.
St. Thomas
recognized the universality of this principle no less than
Aristotle. In fact, he penetrated its doctrine even more deeply, and
more clearly saw its extension and universal application to
supernatural acts. From this principle, that “powers, habits, and
acts are specified by their formal object,” St. Thomas deduces that,
both in angels and in the human soul, essence is really distinct
from operative power inasmuch as essence is ordained to being,
operative power to an act and its object, Ia, q. 54, a. 3; q. 77, a.
I. He likewise deduces from this that there are several faculties in
the soul specified by diverse objects. Thus, enunciating the
universality of our principle, he says, Ia, q. 77, a. 3: “A power
inasmuch as it is a power is ordained to an act. Hence the reason or
nature of a power must be drawn from the act to which it is
ordained, and consequently the nature of a power is diversified as
the nature of the act is diversified. But the nature of an act is
diversified according to the diverse nature of the object. For every
act is that of either an active or a passive power. However, the
object is related to the act of a passive power as principle and
moving cause; thus color is the principle of vision inasmuch as it
moves the organ of sight. But the object is related to the act of an
active power as term and end; thus the object of an augmentative
virtue is perfect measure which is the end of the increase. And from
these two, that is, from the principle and from the term or end, the
act receives its species. For calefaction differs from refrigeration
according as the former proceeds from something hot, that is
actively so, to the production of heat, but the latter from
something cold to the production of cold. Hence necessarily powers
are diversified according to their acts and objects.” It is
therefore universally true to declare that every act, formally as an
act, is specified by its formal object.
St. Thomas
also applies this principle to the specific differentiation of
operative habits; cf. Ia IIae, q. 54, a. 2: “Habits must be ordained
to something. But whatever is said to be ordained to something is
differentiated according to the differences in the thing to which it
is so ordained. Now a habit is a certain disposition ordained to two
objects, namely to the nature and the operation following upon that
nature.” Operation is then specified by its object.
St. Thomas
again insists upon the universality of this principle when he
declares, with reference to infused faith and the loss of it by the
denial of one single article of the creed, IIa IIae, q. 5, a. 3:
“The species of any habit depends on the formal reason of the
object; which being withdrawn, the species of the habit cannot
survive.” He does not say that certain operative habits and certain
acts are specified by their object, but all of them; the principle
is entirely universal, otherwise it would not be a principle.
Thereupon St.
Thomas demonstrates from this universal principle that the infused
moral virtues are distinct in species from the correlative acquired
moral virtues. For he says, Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4: “It is manifest
that the mode which is imposed upon such desires by the rule of
human reason has a different reason from that which is imposed by a
divine rule. Consider the matter of taking food. . . . Thus it is
evident that infused and acquired temperance differ in kind,”
according to the “specific, and formal reasons of the objects,” as
declared in the same article.
Again, St.
Thomas distinguishes between infused faith and acquired faith as it
exists in the demons, of whom it is said that they “believe and
tremble” (Jas. 2:19). For he writes in De veritate, q. 14, a.
9 ad 4: “The demons do not assent with their wills to the things
which they are said to believe, but impelled by the evidence of
signs by which they are convinced of the truth of what the faithful
believe; although these signs do not cause what is believed to
appear in such wise that they could thence be said to have a vision
of what is believed. Hence the term ‘belief’ is used equivocally of
the faithful and of demons; nor does faith in the latter proceed
from any infused light of grace as in the faithful.” It is a
question of “believing” as it is an act, and of faith as it is a
habit.
It is evident
that for St. Thomas infused faith and this acquired faith of the
demons are differentiated in kind even formally as habit and as act
and, consequently, on the part of their formal object. For he says,
IIa IIae, q. 5, a. 3: “The species of any habit [or act] depends on
the reason of its formal object; which being withdrawn, the species
of the habit cannot survive.” But as has been said: “the term
‘belief’ is used equivocally of the faithful and of demons”;
therefore these two acts have not the same formal object, but only
the same material object. The faithful believe revealed mysteries on
account of the authority of God who reveals them, that is, of God
the author of grace; whereas the demons know naturally God the
author of nature and believe in revelation on account of the
evidence of signs, as said previously. Thus they attain to revealed
mysteries materially, that is to say, not formally according as they
are essentially supernatural mysteries of the intimate life of God,
but to the extent that they are utterances of God confirmed by
evident miracles, in the same way that God reveals even the natural
truths of religion or future contingencies of the natural order,
such as the end of a war, for example.
Likewise,
explaining the words of St. Paul (I Cor. 2:14): “The sensual man
perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for it is
foolishness to him, and he cannot understand,” the Angelic Doctor
likewise declares: “Just as sense perception cannot estimate the
things which pertain to the intellect and similarly neither sense ’
nor human reason can judge of those things which pertain to the
Spirit of God, so it remains that such things are estimated only by
the Holy Ghost” (Commentary on I Cor. 2:14, lect. 3). And further,
on Matt. 13:14, concerning the words: “By hearing you shall hear,
and shall not understand: and seeing you shall see, and shall not
perceive,” St. Thomas says: “From the withdrawal of grace it follows
that the mind is not enlightened from on high to see rightly.” We
have quoted elsewhere innumerable analagous texts of St. Thomas.
Moreover, St. Thomas thus shows that, on the
part of the formal object, prophecy itself is inferior to infused
faith, for he writes (III Sent., dist. 24, q. I, a. I ad 3):
“Although prophecy and faith deal with the same matter, such as the
passion of Christ, they do not do so under the same aspect; for
faith considers the Passion formally with respect to its underlying
eternal truth, inasmuch as it was God who suffered, although it
nevertheless considers the temporal aspect materially. But prophecy
does just the opposite”; that is, prophecy considers the temporal
aspect formally and what is eternal materially.
In the same way acquired faith in the truth of
the Gospel, confirmed by miracles, attains only materially to that
which is formally attained by infused faith. All the commentators of
St. Thomas’ school agree on this principle.
Just as a dog hears human speech materially, that is with regard to
what is sensibly perceptible in it, so the demon hears the word of
God materially, that is, with regard to what is naturally knowable
in it.
This
interpretation receives strong confirmation by reason of the end
toward which infused faith is ordered. For infused faith would be
useless if its formal object (quo et quod ) were already
attained by acquired faith. Moreover, if acquired faith could attain
to the formal object of infused faith, then, contrary to what St.
Thomas affirms, Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4, acquired temperance could also
attain to the formal object of infused temperance, at least since
the external presentation of Christian revelation; again, the
natural good will to which the Pelagians referred could, under the
same conditions, attain to the formal object of infused charity. But
in that case, of what good would be infused faith, infused
temperance, infused charity, or any of the infused virtues? They
would be useless de jure, although, in a measure, useful
de facto, since it is declared by the Councils: “for believing
and hoping, etc. as is necessary to salvation.” But why should they
be necessary for believing “as is necessary for salvation” if the
formal object of infused faith and likewise of charity can be
attained without these infused virtues? As Lemos, the Salmanticenses,
John of St. Thomas, and, indeed, Suarez declare, once the foregoing
principle is withdrawn, the whole structure of philosophy and
theology falls into ruins.
Hence neither
Aristotle nor St. Thomas nor the Thomists have set any limits to the
universality of our principle. Never have they asserted that “it was
not generally valid,” but on the contrary they have taught that it
extended to all acts. Since St. Thomas, however, many theologians
(such as Durandus, Scotus, the Nominalists, Molina, Lugo and several
others) have held that infused faith does not have a formal object
which is inaccessible to acquired faith; and yet it differs
specifically from acquired faith. They are thus led to deny the
universality of our principle, “habit and act are specified by their
formal object,” although, according to St. Thomas, this principle
clarifies all the problems of faculties, habits, and acts, as can
easily be seen from innumerable texts of his, or by consulting those
at least which are cited in the Tabula aurea of his works under the
heading: “Objectum,” nos. 2-6.
WHETHER THE
UNIVERSALITY OF THE PRECEDING PRINCIPLE CAN BE DENIED OR DEMANDS
LIMITATION
The reply
is in the negative, since this principle deals with power, habit,
and act according as they are formally power, habit, and act and
according as they are essentially ordained to their object by a
transcendental relationship. This fundamental reason is admirably
expressed by St. Thomas, Ia, q. 77, a. 3, when he says: “Power,
inasmuch as it is a power, is ordained to an act. . . . But the
nature or reason of an act is diversified according to the diverse
reason or nature of the object”; and again toward the end of the
body of the article: “It is not simply any difference in the objects
which diversifies the powers of the soul, but that particular
difference to which the power directly relates and therefore the
sensitive power of color, that is, sight, is one thing and the
sensitive power of sound, that is, hearing, is quite another.”
Commenting on
this article, Cajetan (no. 4) offers the following profound
explanation: “The basis of this is what has previously been accepted
in the text, that is, power, according to that which is, is to or
for this act and is the act; in other words, power according to its
entity is not an absolute thing, separated from its act and object.
. . . But powers and habits by their essences are essentially
ordained toward acts in such wise that they are unintelligible
without them. . . . Their differences are derived from ordination to
their acts, an ordination which, I say, is not that of a
predicamental but of a transcendental relationship. And this is the
primary and ultimate root of the solution, both in the present
matter and in similar matters, such as motion, prime matter, action
and passion, habit, etc. Once this is established, the whole text is
clear.”
But if act,
formally taken as act, is specified by its formal object, this is
universally true of every act ordained toward an object; just as, if
man, formally as he is man, is a rational animal, then this is
universally true of all men without exception, although the exercise
of reason may be impeded in certain cases. A universal is a single
note capable of inhering in many things, and the nature of the
universal is prior in conception to its universality. In the same
way, the necessity of any principle is prior in conception to its
universal extension.
Thus the
sense of sight in a lion, formally taken as an act, does not differ
specifically from the sense of sight in a child, for both are
essentially ordained toward sensible light and color visible in act
by that light, and by these are they specified. If there are certain
differences in these two senses of sight, so far as they are acts,
such differences are accidental and material on the part of the
disposition of the organ, somewhat as there are accidental
differences in the sense of sight among men, so that some are
nearsighted, others farsighted, etc. There is also a certain
material difference between the eyesight of men and of women.
How, then,
are we to solve the objection cited above: “The act of seeing of an
irrational animal and that of a man (supposing him not yet possessed
of the use of reason) differ essentially in their ontological
perfection; but their mode of operation or of attaining their object
does not so differ, and hence the formal object is also held to be
the same. . . . Therefore the principle is not generally valid which
asserts that wherever there is a difference of ontological
perfection, there is also a difference of operation and of formal
object.”
Cajetan had
already answered this objection, In lam, q. 77, a. 3, no. 5,
as follows: “Keep in mind that the powers of the soul may be
considered from two aspects; from one standpoint, inasmuch as they
are powers, and the present discussion refers to this alone; from
another, inasmuch as they are properties of a given nature, and we
do not refer to this aspect here [this would not be speaking
formally but materially]. For they are thus distinguished according
to the diversity of the natures in which they inhere, as Averroes
remarks (De anima, comm. 53): ‘The members of a man are
different in kind from the members of a lion.’”
St. Thomas
speaks in similar terms, Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4 c: “Soundness of body
in a man is not of the same kind as in a horse because of the
diverse natures to which they are ordained.” Thus, as a property of
such and such a nature the faculty of vision in a lion is different
from that of a horse or an eagle, just as their members are; the
shoulder, for instance, or the leg. But from that standpoint the
faculty is no longer being considered formally as an operative
power, act, and habit. Similarly, in man the two superior faculties
are termed human inasmuch as they are properties of his soul; but as
faculties they are distinguished on the basis of their objects and
are therefore two and not one. St. Thomas himself made this
distinction in classifying habits, Ia IIae, q. 54, a. 2. His
classification may thus be presented:
Does it not follow that infused
virtues are specifically distinguished from acquired only on the
part of the radical principle from which they proceed, and not on
the part of their object? In other words, are not these principles
of specification more than merely distinct, separable in fact?
By no means;
for virtues, as they are operative habits essentially ordered toward
operation, are specifically differentiated, in the same way as the
operations themselves, by their formal object. Therefore St. Thomas
says (Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4), of acquired and infused temperance that
they differ “according to the specific, formal reasons of their
respective objects” according as the former is directed by a human,
the latter by a divine rule. And the Angelic Doctor’s meaning is
that, athough a man may know the gospel historically, as confirmed
by miracles, and the rule of temperance it contains, he nevertheless
cannot attain to this superior rule merely by acquired temperance.
For if this were possible, infused temperance would be usless except
for acting with greater facility, as the Pelagians contended.
However, if
acquired and infused temperance are specifically dis-tinguished on
the part of their formal object, in like manner acquired faith in
the truth of the gospel confirmed by miracles is distinguished from
infused faith formally as a habit and as an act by reason of its
object. Otherwise infused faith would be useless, were its formal
object already accessible to acquired faith. Finally, the formal
object of charity, presupposing external revelation, would be
accessible to natural good will, as the Pelagians maintained. As we
have seen, these untenable consequences have been recognized by
Thomists and even by Suarez.
Thus, even by
reading the Gospel, “the sensual man perceiveth not these things
that are of the Spirit of God; for it is foolishness to him, and he
cannot understand” (I Cor. 2:14). On the other hand, as St. Thomas
shows, IIa IIae, q. 2, a. 2, c and ad I, the believer, by means of
infused faith, with one and the same act
believes God revealing and in God revealed. That is, through infused
faith he adheres to God revealing as formal motive, and by the same
act, on account of this motive he believes in God revealed, for
example, in the triune God and in God incarnate. Nor is this a
vicious circle. Its opponents declare it to be so: “If the authority
of God revealing is believed, it is believed either on account of
another revelation and thus ad infiniturn, or on its own account,
whence results a vicious circle and reasonable credibility is
lacking.”
We answer (De
revelatione, I, 507)~ with Cajetan, the Salman-ticenses, and
many other Thomists: The authority of God revealing is believed on
its own account without any vicious circle resulting, just as light
is visible of itself, just as evidence is self-evident, just as
human speech manifests itself and what it affirms simultaneously.
For
divine revelation in revealing the Trinity reveals itself. And
although divine revelation thus believed is obscure, it does not
lack rational credibility from signs confirming the revelation. Our
opponents insist: If infused faith had a specific formal object, it
would fall under experience.
We reply (ibid.,
p. 509): It does in fact fall under experience in a certain sense,
but not clearly, just as the spirituality of our intelligence and
its specific distinctness from the imaginatibn are not clearly
manifest experientially, or again the specific difference between
the will and the sensitive appetite. Thus, as St. Thomas shows, Ia,
q. 87, a. I, and De veritate, q. 10, a. 8, every man
“perceives that he has a soul according as he observes that he feels
and knows,” but from this experiential knowledge the spirituality of
the soul is not clearly evident, so that some men are materialists.
Metaphysical analysis is required to prove the spirituality of the
soul.
With still
greater reason, experience does not render clearly manifest the
essential supernaturalness of the formal motive of faith, nor
differentiate distinctly between the supernatural act of faith and
concomitant natural acts. As St. Augustine says, “The school in
which God is heard and teaches is far removed from the senses. We
see many coming to the Son, for we see many believing in Christ; but
where and how they heard this from the Father and learned it, we did
not see. This grace is exceedingly hidden.”
Hence the believer cannot discern clearly whether he is acting from
a purely supernatural motive, so that he is not entirely certain of
the supernaturalness of his faith, although he may have grounds for
strong conjecture. Furthermore St. Thomas says of prophets:
“Sometimes the prophet’s attitude before that which he knows by
prophetic instinct [and not by perfect prophecy] is such that he
cannot fully discern whether he thought of it with some divine
instinct or with his own mind.”
Therefore the essential supernaturalness of an act of infused faith
and its motive, like the spirituality of the soul, is not known with
certainty except through metaphysical analysis by virtue of the
principle, that acts are specified by their formal object.
If infused faith did in fact make use of
infused species, its distinctness from acquired faith would be
clearly evident experientially; and some seem to consider that
infused faith which would make use of infused species would be
specifically different from infused faith which uses species
abstracted from sensible objects.
However,
speaking formally, our infused faith is certainly not specifically
distinct from the infused faith which wayfaring angels had with
infused species. This difference of species with respect to the
thing present is only a material difference, and the infused faith
of wayfaring angels was specified by the same formal object (quo
et quod) as our faith. They believed God to be triune on the
authority of God revealing; God the author of grace, of course, not
merely of nature.
Therefore the
commonly admitted principle, “powers, habits, and acts are specified
by their formal object,” is generally, indeed universally, valid;
otherwise it would not be a metaphysical principle. Moreover, if it
were not valid generally or universally, it would have no validity
at all but would have to be rejected, since it would not be true of
potency formally as it is potency, nor of habit formally as it is
habit, nor of act formally as it is act. If, on the contrary, this
commonly admitted principle is precisely formulated by Aristotle and
St. Thomas, it is true of potency formally as such, and likewise of
habit and act, and is accordingly universal with metaphysical
universality, without any exception, just as the principle, that “an
act is multiplied and limited by the power into which it is
received.”
More concisely, St. Thomas writes: “Just as a natural thing derives
its species from its form, so does an act from its object, as a
movement from its term.”
“For whatever is said to be ordained toward something is
distinguished according to the distinction of that to which it is
ordained.”
Observations. P. C. Boyer, S. J.,
proposed the following objection to me: “I certainly agree with the
thesis expounded. However, I should like to propose a problem which
occurs among the writings of Cajetan on Ia IIae, q.54, a.2, where
the great commentator concedes that habits as forms are
distinguished according to the diversity of their active principles;
from which it follows that two habits having the same formal object
could differ specifically.
It may be
said, if you will, that this difference is material, not formal. But
with this difference, whatever it may be, how can the argument be
safeguarded by which the thesis is demonstrated: an act is specified
by its formal object? For the argument is based on the proportion
between a power and its own act; but here we have two powers (two
habits) with the same act and yet they difier specifically. If they
so differ, do they not have a difference of proportion to their own
act? And why, then, can it not be concluded that a natural act and a
supernatural act of love are distinct in species only because they
proceed from principles differing in species?”
Reply.
Cajetan concedes that habits as forms are distinguished according to
the diversity of their active principles; for example, infused
prudence inasmuch as it is infused by God and acquired prudence
inasmuch as it is acquired by a repetition of acts. But it does not
follow from this that two habits with the same formal object can
differ specifically. If infused prudence had the same formal object
as acquired prudence, it would only be accidentally infused, but not
necessarily infused (like infused geometry). The specification of a
habit as a form is essentially connected with its specification by
its object; they cannot be separated in an operative habit. By no
means do we have two habits with the same act, unless it were a
question of a habit accidentally infused; and when infusion is
accidental it does not specify, as is obvious in the case of
geometry accidentally infused.
The natural
and supernatural acts of love differ therefore specifically, both on
the part of their eliciting principles and on the part of their
formal objects toward which the eliciting principles are ordered
(cf. Ia IIae, q. 63, a. 4). Cajetan affirms this positively with
reference to Ia IIae, q. 54, a. 2: “Since habits are both forms and
habits, and each may share the differences of the other, that is,
their own respective forms and habits, and there may not remain with
distinction of the former a lack of distinction in the latter;
wherefore in the proposition the distinctions of both concur, that
is, of the acts and of the formal objects. . . . Nor is it necessary
in adducing the one always to adduce the other.” We do not say that
the formal difference is material; whatever would be a material
distinction would hold only with respect to the subject, as, for
instance, the difference between in-fused faith in men and in angels
who make use of infused species.
P. M. Brown,
O.P., professor at the Angelicum, has made this excellent
observation: With entire approval of what has been said, there may
perhaps present itself here a certain application (not new but
rarely called to mind) of this doctrine in sacred theology, which
may be helpful in solving a problem frequently discussed among
theologians. For it is known that in the theology of the sacraments
there is great dispute over the matter and form of certain of the
sacraments. Some theologians assert that in this matter the only
criterion for the solution should be liturgical history which
teaches us what the usage was at the beginning with regard to matter
and to form; otherwise they think there would be an admission that
the specific nature or substance of the sacrament was subject to
change, which is impossible. Whatever of great moment may be said of
liturgical history with re-gard to the elucidation of the question,
it seems worthy of remark that, in the case of at least some of the
sacraments, their specification or constitution in their own
specific nature should be considered in the same way as the
specification of other intentionals as act, habit, and faculty.
Accordingly the specific nature (which is given by the final
formative actuality) is constituted by its ordination toward that
grace (and, in some, toward that character) for the conferring of
which the sacrament is ordained. This specific nature can be
conceived as remaining the same, even presupposing the power
conferred upon the Church of determining the so-called form or
matter of the sacrament.
VI. THE
SUPERNATURALNESS OF FAITH AND
ITS INFALLIBLE CERTAINTY
In recent times
there has been a re-examination of the problem of the
supernaturalness and infallible certainty of infused faith.
In particular, the question
is asked: Whether, according to St. Thomas, believers adhere
supernaturally and infallibly to the formal motive of faith, that
is, to the authority of God revealing and, thereupon, to the
mysteries revealed, by an adherence which vastly surpasses the
rational knowledge of the motives of credibility, or the conclusion
of all apologetic arguments, whence arises at least a moral
certainty of revelation ipso facto.
The question is not one of minor importance;
it concerns that faith which is “the gift of God,” that strong
certitude of faith for which the martyrs suffered indomitably.
Christ frequently spoke of this faith, declaring: “He that believeth
in Me, hath everlasting life,”
that is, incipiently, so far as “faith is the substance of things to
be hoped for”
and a certain beginning of eternal life. Concerning it, St. John
says in his First Epistle (5:4): “This is the victory which
overcometh the world, our faith”; it should therefore be strong
against all errors, seductions, sophistries, temptations,
persecutions. This must be stressed particularly today, for nothing
can resist the exceedingly pernicious errors of materialism and
atheism which are disseminated among all nations today unless it be
the Christian, Catholic faith. It is obvious that Protestantism,
succumbing under its own errors, is inadequate to the task. But in
order to resist effectively, the faith of Catholics must be strong
and deep. St. Paul thus characterizes it: “When you had received of
us the word of the hearing of God, you received it not as the word
of men, but (as it is indeed) the word of God, who worketh in you
that have believed.”
And therefore he gives warning elsewhere: “But though we, or an
angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have
preached to you, let him be anathema.”
State of the question. We shall present
briefly the two contrary opinions. Although all theologians admit
that Christian faith, in spite of its obscurity, is firmly
established in certainty, not all of them explain this certainty in
the same way. There are two schools of thought in particular: the
one does not hold that the believer knows infallibly, by this very
infused faith itself, the formal motive of faith; the other has
affirmed and defended this opinion for centuries as the apple of its
eye.
First
opinion. In the Middle
Ages numerous theologians, especially the Nominalists and their
satellites, maintained that infused faith resolves itself into
acquired faith whereby we believe the Church to be ruled by the Holy
Ghost and that the motives of this faith are the signs of
revelation, particularly miracles which are naturally recognizable.
Thus Durandus, III Sent., dist. 24, q. I, qc. 3; Gabriel Biel,
III Sent., dist. 23, q. 2, and thereafter several others.
In fact, the same opinion is
now held by many apologists and even theologians who rather consider
the act of faith externally without investigating the inner nature
of infused faith. They assert that the believer naturally knows the
fact of revelation from the manifest signs by which it is confirmed,
especially miracles and prophecies fulfilled, and they even know
naturally that God does not err nor can He err. And this suflices
for the certainty of Christian faith based on divine testimony thus
confirmed.
Criticism.
The great commentators on St. Thomas, such as Capreolus, Cajetan,
Ferrariensis, Bañez, Lemos, Alvarez, John of St. Thomas, the
Salmanticenses, Gonet, Billuart, Gotti, and more recent Thomists
have always rejected this opinion.
They recognize that the
certainty of infused faith does indeed resolve itself materially and
intrinsically into the evidence of miracles and other signs, but its
formal, intrinsic resolution should be reducible to something
higher. In the same way, metaphysical certainty of first principles
does indeed resolve itself materially and extrinsically into
sensible evidence, but formally and intrinsically it is resolved
into something higher of the intellectual order. Otherwise the
supernatural certainty of essentially infused faith would be greatly
diminished, for it would be reduced to an inferior certainty of the
natural order.
This
difficulty presents itself at once: Few indeed are the faithful who
saw the miracles with their own eyes or who could have examined them
with sufficient care to enable them to judge of their supernatural
origin. Hence the majority of the faithful have naturally only a
moral certainty of the signs of Christian revelation through the
medium of human testimony often known in an uncritical way.
Therefore, as
many other theologians declare, if the certainty of Christian faith
were ultimately based upon this moral certitude of the fact of
revelation confirmed by various signs, such certitude of faith would
not be solid and infallible, but only hypothetical; that is,
supposing it to be certain, in another way, on the word of another,
that God Himself revealed the Trinity, the redemptive Incarnation,
and the infallibility of the Church in propounding these mysteries;
supposing, of course, that the preaching of these mysteries does not
proceed from any natural evolution of the religious sense in the
subconscious mind of the prophets and of Christ, as affirmed by the
Modernists, according to whom the assent of faith ultimately depends
upon a mass of probabilities (Denz., no. 2079). Thus the certainty
of faith would not be absolutely infallible since it would be
resolved into a moral certainty of the fact of revelation.
To this the
aforementioned theologians reply that natural knowledge, morally
certain of the fact of revelation and of the motive of Christian
faith, is not the cause but only an indispensable condition of the
certainty of faith, which therefore can still be something higher
and more solid. Moreover, the moral certainty of the fact of
revela-tion already referred to is confirmed by grace whence the
will to believe is derived, assuming that there are sufficient signs
of divine revelation.
This answer
is judged inadequate by many theologians, especially by Thomists,
since the knowledge of the formal motive of faith is more than an
indispensable condition of the infallible certainty of faith; it
pertains to its cause, for the formal motive of faith does not move
one to believe infallibly in the redemptive Incarnation or the
Trinity, for example, except as it is known and infallibly certain.
That is, unless the mind of the believer adheres infallibly to this
motive, as St. Thomas repeats often in the texts to be cited below.
Similarly in metaphysics, if the principles of causality and of
finality were not certain metaphysically, but only physically or
morally, the conclusion deduced from these principles would not be
metaphysically certain. Hence moral certainty of the fact of
revelation does not suffice even when confirmed by grace and the
will to believe. Further, in this case infused faith would not be an
essentially supernatural virtue, since its formal, specifying motive
could be known and be attained naturally. In other words, infused
faith would then be no more supernatural than prudence naturally
acquired and thereafter confirmed by grace. It would be no more
supernatural than a rational judgment of credibility confirmed by
grace.
Second opinion. Therefore
Thomists, and Suarez as well to a certain extent, hold a distinctly
opposite opinion, namely, that infused faith is essentially
supernatural and is specified by the essentially supernatural formal
motive of the authority of God revealing, to which believers adhere
supernaturally and infallibly with an adherence that is not
discursive but quite absolute and firm and which greatly surpasses
the already at least morally certain conclusion of apologetics, that
is, the conclusion regarding the evident credibility of the
mysteries of faith or the fact of revelation confirmed by certain
signs. This opinion is defended by St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and
by Thomists, classical as well as contemporary, such as Capreolus,
Cajetan, Cano, Bañez, Lemos, Alvarez, John of St. Thomas, the
Salmanticenses, Gonet, Gotti, Billuart, Lepidi, Zigliara, Gardeil,
Del Prado, Szabo, Scheeben, and recently even by several theologians
of the Society of Jesus, including Fathers Mattiussi,.Petazzi, De la
Taille, Rozwadowski, and Boyer.
Explanation and proof of the Thomistic opinion.
Two points must first be considered. 1.What precisely is the formal
motive of infused faith in its essence? 2. How does the mind of the
believer adhere to this motive, according to the opinion we are
discussing? To begin with, it should be observed that Thomists aim
at considering the act of faith not merely as it is a fact of
interior experience, but its nature and the nature of the infused
virtue of faith; whereas, on the contrary, the Nominalists never
consider the nature of things in themselves, for they consider it to
be unknowable and base their reasoning only on facts. Thus in the
present case, they never consider the very nature of the infused
virtue of faith nor the principle which would elucidate the whole
question, to wit, habit and act are specified by their respective
formal objects quo et quod, that is, by the formal object
toward which they are essentially and immediately ordained or
primarily and per se.
I.
What precisely is the motive of faith per se as directly
infused?
a. We are not here concerned with the motives
of credibility as found particularly in miracles which are knowable
naturally and which, if true, most certainly confirm the fact of
revelation and thereby establish the evident credibility of the
mysteries of faith.
b. Nor are we concerned with the formal motive
of faith whereby only the natural truths of religion would be
believed as revealed by God, such as the existence of Providence in
the natural order descending even to particulars or the immortality
of the soul. God could indeed thus have revealed only the natural
truths of religion, confirming this revelation by miracles. Such a
revelation would be supernatural only with respect to the mode of
its production, not with respect to its substance or essence, that
is, not on the part of its specifying object. Accordingly God would
then intervene only as author and ruler of nature, for as such, God
can perform miracles (raise the dead, for instance) to confirm the
revelation of any religious truths of the natural order. In that
case, revelation would be ordained merely to the attainment of
natural beatitude, that is, not to the beatific or im-mediate vision
of the divine essence but to the mediate knowledge of God reflected
in His creatures and the rational love of God above all things. And
for those who were capable of arriving at a philosophical
demonstration of these natural truths of religion, faith, as thus
conceived, would not be necessary for salvation. In other men, not
grasping such a demonstration, faith would be infused accidentally,
as we speak of infused geometry or the infused gift of tongues.
c. We are concerned with the formal motive of
faith per se or essentially infused by which we believe the
essentially supernatural mysteries of the most holy Trinity, the
redemptive Incarnation, the Eucharist, the life of grace, and
eternal life. This faith, essentially infused, was present in the
wayfaring angels and in them, as in us, it was essentially
supernatural.
But what is
this formal motive? According to the Vatican Council (Denz., no.
1789), it is the authority of God revealing, or as St. Thomas says,
IIa IIae, q. I, a. I, it is “first truth,” namely, first truth
revealing or in speaking according as it presupposes the first truth
in understanding, which is itself ontologically based on first truth
in essence. Briefly, this formal motive is the authority of God
revealing, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
But it is not
only a question of God the author of nature, for instance, of the
nature of the human soul, nor merely a word about God the author of
miracles, since He can perform these inasmuch as He is author and
ruler of nature. It is strictly a question of God author of grace
and glory, for we are now speaking of God who revealed the
essentially supernatural mysteries of the most holy Trinity, the
redemptive Incarnation, and eternal life; and the order of agents
should correspond to the order of ends. God as author of nature
cannot reveal the essentially supernatural mysteries of His intimate
life. In short, we are here concerned with supernatural revelation
not only with respect to its mode of production but with respect to
its substance, that is, by virtue of its speculative object. For,
when God reveals the supernatural mysteries of the life of grace and
glory, He intervenes not only as Creator and Lord, but properly as
adoptive Father of angels and men, calling them to a participation
in His own inner life. Hence the formal motive of essentially
infused faith is the authority of God the heavenly Father revealing
the mysteries of the kingdom of God.
Such
revelation is involved in the words of Christ: “I confess to Thee, O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones”
(Matt. 11:25); “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and
blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father who is in heaven”
(Matt. 16:17); “Although I give testimony of Myself, (John 8:14).
Again, St. Paul says: “But to us God hath revealed them, by His
Spirit. For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of
God” (I Cor. 2:10), that is, even the essentially supernatural
mysteries of the intimate life of God, which vastly exceed the
natural knowledge of all men and angels, not merely created but
capable of being created.
2. How,
according to the Thomistic opinion, does the mind of the believer
adhere to this formal motive of infused faith?
Reply.
Essentially supernatural divine revelation as proceeding from God
the author of grace is that by which and what (quo et quod) we
believe
supernaturally or infallibly believed with the mysteries, although
under a lower aspect, the fact of revelation, together with the
miracles by which it is confirmed, is known naturally with at least
moral certitude so far as it is supernatural with respect to mode.
Bases of
the Thomistic opinion.
Let us see whether this answer is based on principles enunciated by
St. Thomas and in his own words.
There are
three particular arguments, as follows:
1. by reason of the absolute infallibility of
faith;
2. by reason of the essential supernaturalness
of the motive of faith;
3. by
reason of the essential supernaturalness of infused faith per se.
The first argument by reason of the
absolute infallibility of faith is reducible to this: The fact of
revelation is not merely proposed with moral certitude by history
recounting the preaching and miracles of Christ; it is proposed
infallibly by the Church, which has defined this revelation to be
strictly supernatural, not proceeding naturally from the
subconscious minds of the prophets, and confirmed, not by deceitful
tricks drawn from myths, but by miracles in the strict sense,
concerning which the Church pronounces final judgment with a
certainty superior to any natural certainty (Denz., nos.1785, 1813,
2078). But whatever is thus infallibly transmitted by the Church is
to be supernaturally believed by all. Therefore the faithful should
believe revelation supernaturally at the same time as the revealed
mysteries; that is, they must believe simultaneously in God
revealing and God revealed; otherwise they would not possess, with
regard to the mysteries revealed, absolutely infallible certainty
essentially superior to all natural certainty, as the certainty of
infused faith is, according to St. Thomas (IIa IIae, q. 4, a. 8). In
spite of the obscurity of mysteries, the certitude of faith should
exclude all deliberate doubt, even amid violent temptations or the
tortures of martyrdom, and it does so since it proceeds from the
infused virtue of faith which, under efficacious actual grace,
perfects the intellect so that, as St. Thomas declares, “the
intellect tends infallibly toward its object” (ibid., a. 5).
If the formal motive of faith were known merely naturally, through
the medium of human testimony, the certainty of faith would be
infallible only hypothetically but not absolutely; that is, on the
supposition that it is really God Himself who revealed these
mysteries, or more specifically, supposing it to be certain from
some other way that the revelation of the mysteries proceeded from
God and not naturally from the subconscious of the prophets or of
Christ, in accordance with the evolution of the religious sense, as
the Modernists declared. Then the words of St. Paul would not be
infallibly verified:
“When you had received of us the word of the hearing of God, you
received it not as the word of men, but (as it is indeed) the word
of God, who worketh in you that have believed” (I Thess. 2:13).
Then
the formal motive of faith does not move us unless it is known and
it does not move us infallibly unless it is infallibly united to our
intellect, producing its formal effect therein. Just as the musical
sense responds to the beauty of a symphony that is heard, so does
infused faith respond to the word of God contained in the Gospel
according as it utterly surpasses human speech. Hence we read in St.
John’s First Epistle (5:10): “He that believeth in the Son of God,
hath the testimony of God in himself.”
Confirmation. Human
reason can err, not in natural cognition of first principles, but in
forming conclusions, and is all the more apt to do so the more
remote the conclusions are from the principles. For it is not
always easy to distinguish a true miracle from a diaboli-cal fraud:
“There shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show
great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even
the elect” (Matt. 24:24). Nor is it always easy to verify the
historical authenticity of the narrative in which the miracles are
reported. In fact such investigation is not possible to great
numbers of the faithful who know the signs of revelation only from
the testimony of their pastors or parents. On the other hand, the
Church, like the prophets of former times, judges infallibly of the
existence of revelation and proposes it as doctrine, just as she
proposes her own in-fallibility, otherwise confirmed by miracles and
manifestly worthy of belief.
According to
St. Thomas there is no incompatibility between knowing naturally a
fact of revelation as it is supernatural modally, and simultaneously
believing supernaturally in revelation under a higher aspect, as it
is supernatural substantially or essentially, in the same way as the
supernatural mysteries themselves. For the supernaturalness of the
mysteries exceeds natural cognition and transcends the
supernaturalness of naturally knowable miracles. Thus for St. Thomas
(IIIa, q. 55, a. 2 ad I and 2, and a. 5 c, ad 2 and 3), the
apostles, at the same time, knew naturally the resurrection of
Christ as man, visibly restored to life as miraculous, just as they
recognized the resurrection of Lazarus, and supernaturally believed
in it as the mystery of the self-resurrection of the Word incarnate.
This first argument from the absolute
infallibility of faith is confirmed by many texts of St. Thomas
especially where he speaks of the certainty of infused faith which
cannot be subjected to falsehood. Cf. IIa IIae, q. I, a. 3: “Nothing
comes under any power or habit or even act except by means of the
formal reason or aspect of the object. Thus, color can be seen only
through light, nor can a conclusion be known except through the
medium of demonstration. But it has already been said that the
formal reason of the object of faith is the First Truth (revealing);
hence nothing can come under faith except as it comes under first
truth, under which no falsehood can stand.” Ibid., q. 4, a.
8: “As to the cause of certainty, faith is more certain than any
cognition of natural wisdom, knowledge or understanding of first
principles, since faith rests on divine truth, whereas the three
forms of cognition just mentioned depend upon human reason. . . .
Thus faith is absolutely more certain than they are [in us], but
under a certain aspect it is less certain, that is, in relation to
us [on account of the obscurity of the object which we do not attain
to so completely as to an evident object].” Cf. De revelatione,
I, 469-81, for several other texts from St. Thomas.
The second
argument is taken from
the essential supernaturalness of the motive of faith as follows:
That which is essentially supernatural cannot formally as such be
known naturally, not even by the highest angels created or capable
of being created, since it pertains to the order of God’s intimate
life which surpasses any natural cognition, even that of angels,
just as the proper object of the divine intellect exceeds the proper
object of any created intellect. Otherwise the pantheistic confusion
of the nature of divine and created intellects would result; by its
nature the created intellect would already be a formal participation
in the divine nature or Deity in the same way as sanctifying grace;
there would be a confusion of the two orders. Wherefore whatever is
supernatural essentially is supernatural cognoscitively; for truth
and being are convertible.
But the
formal motive of per se infused faith is essentially
supernatural, as has been said; for it is the authority of God
revealing and indeed of God the author of grace and glory, since
only as such can God reveal the essentially supernatural mysteries
of the Trinity, the redemptive Incarnation, and eternal life, which
utterly transcend the natural truths of religion knowable by natural
means. Therefore this formal motive of infused faith, formally as
such, cannot be known naturally even by the angels but
supernaturally only. Hence the faithful adhere to it supernaturally
and most firmly at the same time as to the mysteries. This formal
motive of faith is no less supernatural and inaccessible to nature
than the formal motive of infused hope or charity.
This is
affirmed in many texts from St. Thomas which I have quoted
elsewhere; only the principal ones will be indicated here. IIa IIae,
q. 5, a. I: Whether the angel in his first state had faith. Reply:
“In the object of faith there is something formal, as it were, that
is first truth existing above all natural cognition, and something
material, namely, that to which we assent by adhering to first
truth. With respect therefore to the first of these, faith generally
resides in all who have a knowledge of God, not yet attaining to
future beatitude, by adhering to first truth. But with respect to
those things which are proposed materially for belief, some are
believed by one person which are manifestly known by another. Hence
the wayfaring angels possessed infused faith.
Likewise IIa
IIae, q. 6, a. I: Whether faith is infused in man by God [or
acquired after learning about revelation confirmed by miracles, as
the Pelagians held; and further whether the beginning of faith is
infused, contrary to the Semi-Pelagians]. The answer to the doctrine
of both Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians is as follows: “It is false
because, when a man is raised above his nature by assenting to the
truths of faith, this must needs be in him from a supernatural
principle moving him interiorly, which principle is God”; similarly
in the answer to the third objection. Again, commenting on the First
Epistle to the Corinthians with reference to the words, “The sensual
man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for
it is foolishness to him, and he cannot understand” (2:14), St.
Thomas declares: “Just as sense perception cannot examine into
matters which pertain to the intellect, and neither sense nor human
reason can judge of those things which are of the Spirit of God, so
there remain some things of a kind which are examined only by the
Holy Ghost. . . . Therefore a man is said to be spiritual: in one
sense with respect to his intellect, illuminated by the Spirit of
God . . . , in another sense with respect to the will, inflamed by
the Spirit of God.” In the same way, the beauty of a Beethoven
symphony is not perceived by a person lacking in musical sense, even
if he learns in some other way that this particular symphony is very
beautiful in the judgment of ex-perts. For there must be a
proportion between the object known and the cognitive faculty. Hence
anything essentially supernatural, such as the formal motive of
infused faith which is the revelation of the heavenly Father,
formally as such cannot be known naturally; just as the formal
motive of infused hope or charity cannot be attained without these
infused virtues.
The third
argument is drawn from
the essential supernaturalness of per se infused faith. It is
revealed that faith is “the gift of God” (Eph. 2:6) so far as it is
“the substance of things to be hoped for” (Heb. 11:1), as it were, a
certain beginning of eternal life; Christ frequently said: “He that
believeth in Me, hath everlasting life” (John 6:47; cf. ibid.,
40,55); and the Vatican Council defined as follows (Denz., no.
1789): “The Catholic Church professes this faith, which is the
beginning of human salvation (cf. no. 801), to be indeed a
supernatural virtue by which, under the inspiration and help of
God’s grace, we believe whatever is revealed by Him to be true, not
on account of the intrinsic truth of the matter perceived by the
light of natural reason, but on account of the authority of God
Him-self revealing, who can neither deceive nor be deceived”; and
canon 2: “For according to the testimony of the Apostle, faith is
the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that
appear not” (Heb. 11:1). Hence per se infused faith is an
essentially supernatural virtue.
But habit and
act are specified by their respective formal objects (quod et quo)
of the same order. Therefore the formal object (quo) or
formal motive by which per se infused faith is specified is of the
same essentially supernatural order. Accordingly this formal motive
can be attained only by faith, as light whereby colors are seen is
known only by sight; for light is that by which we see and what we
see. Analogously, revelation is that by which one believes and what
one believes, or is believed with the revealed mysteries, when the
believer “by one and the same supernatural act believes God
[revealing] and in God [revealed]” according to the very words of
St. Thomas, IIa IIae, q.2, a.2.
Otherwise, if
the formal motive of faith could be attained without grace, infused
faith would be unnecessary except for believing more easily and
firmly, as the Pelagians held. Moreover, faith would then be no more
supernatural than acquired prudence or temperance, which in the just
man are under the dominion of charity and are ordained by it to a
supernatural end; but they remain acquired virtues, essentially
natural and not infused.
Lastly,
if the formal motive of infused faith could actually be attained
without grace, without the infused light of faith, the formal motive
of hope and even charity could likewise be attained by natural good
will; and thus infused faith and charity would not be necessary for
salvation, as the Pelagians declared, and they would be of no higher
order than the natural and ineffectual desire of seeing God in His
essence, referred to by St. Thomas, Ia, q. 12, a. 1.
The true doctrine of
tradition is far superior to the foregoing. It is thus expressed in
the language of apologetics by Father Lacordaire who was speaking,
as it were, from experience about converts to the faith: “What takes
place within us when we believe is a phenomenon of superhuman,
interior light. I do not say that exterior things (such as miracles)
do not act upon us as rational motives of certitude; but the act
itself of this supreme certitude of which I am speaking affects us
directly as a luminous phenomenon, nay more as a translucent
phenomenon (above rational evidence). . . . We are affected by a
light . . . which is translucent (the infused light of faith). . . .
Otherwise what proportion would there be between our adherence,
which would be natural, rational, and an object which surpasses
nature and reason? . . .
“A convert
will tell you: ‘I read, I reasoned, I desired, but I did not attain
to it. Then one day — I cannot explain how — I was no longer the
same: I believed; and what happened at the moment of final
conviction was totally different in nature from what preceded. . .
.’ Recall the episode of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus.”
“Thus a sympathetic intuition sets up a bond between two men in a
single moment which logic would not have produced in the course of
many years. So at times does a sudden illumination enlighten the
genius.”
“There may be a scholar who studies Catholic teaching without
rejecting it bitterly; he may even say frequently: ‘You are
fortunate to have the faith; I wish I had your faith, but I just
cannot believe.’ But some day this scholar gets down on his knees;
conscious of man’s wretchedness, he raises his hands to heaven,
saying: ‘From the depths of my misery, O my God, I have cried unto
Thee.’ At that moment something takes place within him, the scales
fall from his eyes, a mystery is accomplished, and he is a changed
man. He has become meek and humble of heart; now he can die, for he
is master of truth.”
A mystery has indeed been accomplished: the infusion of the light of
faith which is “the gift of God.” “There is at the same time an
inarticulate certitude which does not come from reasoning, nor from
history or literature or science, the certitude which a poor laborer
or a child may possess more and better than a scholar.”
I confess to Thee, O Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast revealed these things to
little ones.
As a matter
of fact, this Thomistic opinion is admitted at least implicitly by
all theologians inasmuch as they hold infused faith to be not only
hypothetically but absolutely infallible and essentially
supernatural. Assuredly whatever is proposed infallibly by the
Church as revealed by God should be infallibly and supernaturally
believed by the faithful. But the Church proposes not only the
mysteries revealed but also the fact that they are truly revealed by
God and not the result of any natural evolution of the religious
sense in the subconscious of the prophets. Therefore revelation
itself is infallibly believed together with the mysteries in one and
the same act, although from a lower aspect these may be known
naturally from miracles but in a manner that is not infallible,
since it demands a long, complicated process of reasoning wherein
our intellect is subject to error and which not all believers are
capable of.
Finally it
ought to be carefully observed that, should there be an admixture of
error in the presentation of revealed doctrine, for example, on
account of the ignorance of a preacher, then, by virtue of the
infused light of faith, the mind of the believer adheres only to the
divine word and does so infallibly. But to the errors mingled with
it the imagination and intellect of the believer adhere in no sense
by the infused light of faith but in a merely natural, human
erroneous way, correcting it thereafter as much as possible.
Wherefore the infused light of faith and the divine word are
intimately and infallibly connected. Just as a magnet attracts iron
but not wood even if the dust of iron and wood are mingled together,
so does the virtue of infused faith adhere to the divine word alone,
not to the errors acci-dentally mixed with it.
First objection. Then one must admit
with Suarez that belief is first in the veracity of God, secondly in
revelation, thirdly in the Trinity or the Incarnation. But it is
impossible to believe with divine faith in the veracity of God
before believing in revelation.
Reply. All Thomists, from the time of
Capreolus, reply: Revelation is believed together with the mysteries
in one and the same act. St. Thomas himself says, IIa IIae, q. 2,
a. 2 ad I: “By these three: believing God, believing in a God, and
believing in God, different acts are not signified.” Thus by one and
the same supernatural, infallible act we believe God revealing and
in the triune God revealed, and this in an order which vastly
surpasses the rational conclusion of apologetic argument.
Second
objection. But the demons
also believe in the supernatural mysteries of the Trinity and the
redemptive Incarnation without in-fused faith, which they lost, but
only by acquired faith. The latter therefore, although not
essentially supernatural, can attain to these supernatural
mysteries.
Reply.
Thomists generally reply: The demons attain to supernatural
mysteries and the formal motive of infused faith only materially,
not formally so far as they are supernatural. They attain to them as
something declared by God (like the natural truths of religion) and
confirmed by miracles; wherefore “they believe and tremble” as if
compelled by the evidence of miracles and not formally on account of
the authority of the heavenly Father. Consequently St. Thomas says
of them: “They see many manifest indications whence they perceive
the doctrine of the Church to be from God. . . . Their faith is, so
to speak, forced upon them by the evidence of signs. . . . Hence
the faith residing in the demons is not a gift of grace, but they
are all the more constrained to believe on account of the
perspicacity of their natural intellects” (IIa IIae, q. 5, a. 2 ad I
and 2). In the same way a person who lacks musical sense hears a
Beethoven symphony materially as far as the sounds are concerned,
but does not perceive its beauty.
Third
objection. One who
believes may occasionally undergo a prompting to doubt, but not one
who understands the first principles of reason or a conclusion
clearly demonstrated. Therefore infused faith is not more certain
than any natural certitude.
Reply.
St. Thomas answers, IIa IIae, q. 4, a. 8: “Faith is absolutely more
certain than clear, natural knowledge, but relatively it is less
certain. Thus certitude may be regarded in two ways: in one way on
the part of the cause of certainty, wherefore that which has a more
certain cause is said to be more certain. And in this respect faith
is more certain than the three preceding, since it rests upon divine
truth, whereas these three (that is, the understanding of
principled, knowledge, and wisdom) depend upon human reason.
“In another
sense certitude may be regarded from the standpoint of the subject,
and thus that is said to be more certain which is more fully grasped
by man’s intellect. In this respect, because the articles of faith
are beyond the mind of man, whereas the objects of the
aforementioned three are not, faith is, from this standpoint, less
certain. But since anything is judged absolutely by its cause, but
relatively according to a disposition on the part of the subject, it
follows that faith is more certain absolutely but the others are
more certain relatively, that is, with respect to us.” At one and
the same time the infused vir-tue of faith and its formal motive
produce their formal effect in our mind. Hence faith is more certain
in itself and in us, but not to us, according as an obscure object
is not grasped so completely as a clear object. Thus any certain
metaphysical principle, such as the principle of causality, may be
less certain relatively for some men who are not inclined toward
metaphysics than the formal existence of colors outside the mind;
and yet the former is more certain absolutely as to itself, for the
extra-mental existence of colors is proved by this principle.
Conclusion.
Our conclusion can be expressed in these words of St. Thomas, which
are generally admitted by Catholic theologians: “The believer holds
the articles of faith absolutely by his adherence to first truth,
for which man stands in need of being assisted by the [infused]
habit of faith,” IIa IIae, q. 2, a. 2. “We believe God [revealing]
and in God [revealed] in one and the same act,” just as we see light
and colors with the same sight, the light as that by which we see
and that which we see simultaneously with the colors.
The Church proposes infallibly not only the
revealed mysteries, but the truth that they are revealed by God and
did not proceed from the subconscious minds of the prophets.
Therefore the faithful infallibly believe in both simultaneously
with a certitude which sur-passes the natural certitude of a
conclusion in apologetic argument, This is generally expressed by
Thomists briefly as follows: “First truth revealing is at the same
time that by which we believe and what we believe, that is,
infallibly believe together with the mysteries.” Thus revelation is
revealed by itself just as light manifests itself while showing
forth colors. Therefore the certitude of our faith resolves itself
formally and intrinsically into uncreated revelation as infallibly
believed, and only materially and extrinsically into the evidence of
the signs of revelation, particularly miracles. Similarly in the
natural order metaphysical certitude of the real validity of first
principles does indeed resolve itself materially and extrinsically
into sensible evidence or sensation, but formally and intrinsically
into the intellectual evidence of the truth of those principles as
laws governing extra-mental being. Otherwise superior certitude
would be reducible to the inferior as in sensationalism or
empiricism for which the Nominalists of the Middle Ages, such as
Ockham and Nicholas of Utrecht, prepared the way.
In this
question as in others the profound investigations of sacred theology
find their way back to the higher certainties of the teaching of
faith expressed in Sacred Scripture, which in its eminent simplicity
surpasses all the ratiocination with regard to the nature of faith
itself and the manner in which it attains to its formal object (objectum
formale quo) or motive. This very intimate, sublime, and highly
simplified manner whereby infused faith attains to its formal motive
is gradually purified more and more of every imperfect element in
the passive purification of the spirit, called by St. John of the
Cross the dark night of the soul. In this dolorous darkness the
formal motive of faith, that is, first truth revealing, is more and
more detached from every other secondary and inferior motive which
is then dolorously carried away, for instance, from the harmony of
the supernatural mysteries with truths about God naturally known or
our own aspirations. This harmony is no longer amply apparent in the
course of such purification, but it still remains certain that even
the very obscure mysteries of eternal punishment and gratuitous
predestination are revealed by God, and that it would be a grave sin
of infidelity deliberately to entertain a doubt about them.
Then the
formal motive of infused faith, the authority of God revealing,
shines forth in this dark night in all its loftiness, above every
secondary motive accessible to natural reason and at that time
enshrouded by a mist. In other words, first truth revealing appears
as a star of the first magnitude in this night of the spirit; and
therefore infused faith is purified of every imperfection and,
soaring above all temptations and indeliberate vacillations, the
human intellect finds an immutable stronghold in this authority of
God revealing, to which it adheres infallibly beyond all discursive
reasoning, always entreating the bestowal of actual grace for a
still firmer salutary and meritorious adherence. Then, as the best
directors of souls thus purified affirm, is not the time for
rereading one’s apologetics, but for the most humble, confiding
prayer.
There is a
similar passive purification of hope and charity, the formal motives
of which are likewise increasingly detached from every inferior
motive in which sentimentality or unconsciously inordinate self-love
were mingled. The formal motives of the three theological virtues :
first truth revealing, omnipotence assisting, and infinite goodness
lovable above all things for its own sake, are thus, as it were, the
three highest stars in the dark night of the spirit, when these
three theological virtues reach the heroic degree, as perfecting
virtues or in perfected souls, to which St. Thomas refers in Ia IIae,
q. 61, a. 5.
Thus the
mystical experience of the saints confirms the assertion of
theologians as follows: The formal motive of any theological virtue
cannot be anything created; it cannot be a miracle or any truth
naturally known. It is a perfection of the uncreated God belonging
to His intimate life which accordingly surpasses all the natural
cog-nitive faculties of any intellect created or capable of being
created.
VII. THE
SPIRIT OF ADOPTION OF SONS OF GOD
At the end of
this tract on grace, by way of recapitulation, it is fitting that we
should examine from the point of view of spirituality what is meant
by the spirit of adoption of sons of God, inasmuch as this adoption
is accomplished by sanctifying grace which is “the grace of the
virtues and gifts.” “The Spirit Himself giveth testimony to our
spirit, that we are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:16). This is especially
apparent in the liturgy of Pentecost.
The time of
false peace in which we are living shows by contrast the magnitude
and necessity of these graces. It is a difficult, sorry time, yet
one which teaches many practical lessons if we meditate in our
hearts before God. This false and merely external peace finds no
place in minds or hearts or wills. It is full of deceptions and thus
provokes a lively desire for true peace both interior and exterior
such as only God can give.
The present
state of things contains the proof by reductio ad absurdum of
the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. The Lord is
allowing men to see what they arc capable of doing alone when they
try to work without divine assistance: “Without Me you can do
nothing.” This sad situation manifestly arises from the fact that
many nations have repudiated Christian principles. They descended
first to liberalism which refuses to come to any conclusion either
for or against Christian truth, so that it is inadequate to effect
any action and merely indulges in protracted discussions ad
infiniturn.
When action
became necessary, many nations then plunged from liberalism into
radicalism by way of negation. Subsequently several peoples arrived
at socialism and finally at materialistic, atheistic communism. The
downward course was accelerated, as in the gravitation of a falling
body, and it is not to be wondered at that this descent should lead
to increasingly complex, insoluble problems, since minds no longer
recognize true principles.
Amid the
general confusion, God safeguards and directs His Church, offering
and bestowing upon us graces for a meritorious reaction against
error and evil. How are we to rise once more after such a decline?
How recover unity of thought and life amid the diversity and
complexity of insoluble problems? It is clear that for such a
restoration we must return more and more to Christian principles;
especially must priests and religious live their lives in accordance
with them. The Holy Ghost and His seven gifts are given to us for
this end. St. Thomas afirms that under difficult circumstances we
stand in need of these seven gifts that we may be docile to the
inspirations of the Holy Ghost, conferred to aid the virtues, which
are too human in their mode of operation and lack sufficient
promptitude in the service and love of God.
In difficult
circumstances such as present-day conditions, Christian faith must
not only be a firm supernatural adherence to revealed supernatural
truths, not only must it be rendered living by charity informing it,
but it must be illuminated by the gift of knowledge so as to
recognize more keenly the vanity of earthly things and the
in-effectualness of human expedients. Our faith should also be
enlightened by the gift of understanding so as to penetrate through
dogmatic formulas into the mysteries themselves of the Incarnation
and Redemption, by which the just man should live, in such a way
that these mysteries may be in us the very truths of life inspiring
all our actions.
Our hope, in
avoiding presumption, should become an increasingly certain tendency
toward salvation. Toward this end, “the Spirit Himself giveth
testimony to our spirit, that we are the sons of God.” Our charity
likewise should grow under the light of the gift of wisdom whereby
we judge of all things connaturally with respect to God as our last
end and as loved efficaciously above all things. Especially in more
difficult situations is it essential that Christian prudence should
be perfected by the gift of counsel, religion by piety, fortitude by
the gift of fortitude, and chastity by that of filial love.
What great
spiritual treasures, what sources of energy! But how are we to draw
from these seven gifts the power to live in that unity demanded by
the interior life amid such diversity of virtues to be practiced and
complexity of faults to be avoided? There are more than thirty
virtues which must be cultivated; and almost any one of them is
either between or above two opposing vices. With the infused virtues
we also possess these seven gifts. They are present in us as long as
we are in the state of grace, since they are connected with charity
in accordance with which the Holy Ghost is given to us. These seven
gifts are for us as the seven sails of a ship, capable of receiving
the impulsion of a favorable wind.
But in us the
gifts are often like furled sails so that they cannot spread or
yield to the force of the wind. The seven gifts are tied and knotted
by a host of venial sins, scarcely conscious, which fasten our souls
to external things and to our own egotism. Then our course is not
directed by the Holy Ghost, but by ourselves, by our reason which
clings to its own judgment unconformed to the judgment of God; it is
directed by our will, tenacious of self-will, inordinate self-love
and caprice. Hence, although in the state of grace, we hardly live
under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Thus we confuse merely
natural simplicity, which depends on our tetnperament, with
supernatural simplicity which is completely different, and we
likewise confuse our impulsiveness with the inspirations of the gift
of counsel. And this procedure assuredly does not suffice to resist
the profound errors of the present day nor to re-ascend after such a
descent, nor to discover the unity of life amid the multiplicity and
complexity of insoluble questions, without the grace of God.
To this end
it is essential that we live deeply according to some very simple,
sublime, and fruitful truth such as that we are the adopted sons of
God. This is the spirit of Pentecost. St. Paul says to the Romans
(8:14-16): “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they6 are the
sons of God. For you have not received die spirit of bondage again
in fear; but you have received the spirit of adoption of sons,
whereby we cry: Abba (Father). For the Spirit Himself giveth
testimony to our spirit, that we are the sons of God.” And, as St.
Thomas remarks, He gives this testimony by the filial affection
toward God which He awakens in us through special inspiration, for
“not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God” are we born, by the grace of adoption. This is the
spirit of adoption of all the seven gifts whereby the unity of life
is preserved amid the complexity of problems in the upward return to
God. But this fundamental truth must be a vital truth in us, not
merely preserved in the memory but directing all our activity.
A certain excellent missioner from Mesopotamia
recently described to me how he had arrived at this conviction. “I
happened one day,” he said, “to enter an Arab village which had been
destroyed by some enemy tribe, and from one of the almost ruined
houses a little boy of six emerged and said to me: ‘They killed my
father and mother and all my brothers and sisters: I am all alone.
But I am a Christian; be so kind as to take me with you, Father, to
the mission.’” The missioner interrogated the boy to see if he was
really a Christian. The boy replied correctly to the first questions
in the catechism. So the missioner was moved to pity and adopted
him, taking him to the mission where he was educated and became a
splendid Christian. But whenever he saw the boy going about, he
would say to himself: “I adopted this boy and must fulfill my
obligations toward him as adoptive father. Now I understand better
that I, too, am an adoptive son of God who, when I was destitute,
bestowed upon me grace, a participation in the divine nature, and
the seed of glory or eternal life. I should therefore ever live more
and more as an adopted son of God.”
This is the simple, sublime, practical, and
most fruitful truth whereby we can and ought to live profoundly
through faith illuminated by the gifts with great spontaneity and
unity of life. This is the truth which Christ desired to impress
upon the minds of His apostles when they were disputing among
themselves, which of them was greatest. He warned them: “Amen I say
to you, unless you be converted and become as little children, you
shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). Pride,
ambition, detraction can impede our entrance therein forever.
To live as a son of God according to the spirit
of adoption, the Christian’s attitude toward God must be that of a
child toward his parents; indeed the distance between God and us is
immeasurably greater than between parents and their children. Now a
child usually possesses certain native qualities: simplicity devoid
of duplicity, a consciousness of his weakness disposing him to
humility; moreover he firmly believes whatever his mother tells him,
especially when she speaks to him of God; he also has absolute
confidence in her and loves her with all his heart more than all her
flattering caresses. The true adoptive son of God possesses these
qualities with respect to God and through them lives willingly by
the seven gifts in great unity of thought and love, in spite of the
multiplicity of virtues to be practiced, and vices to be avoided.
The child of God is simple, devoid of
duplicity. Why? Because his glance turns directly to God. Thus are
verified the words of Scripture: “If thy eye be single, thy whole
body shall be lightsome” (Matt. 6:22). If your intention is simple,
pure, and straightforward, without any duplicity, your entire life
will be luminous, like the candid face of a child. Thus the simple
soul always loo!rs toward God and tends to see God in all persons
and events. Whatever may occur, that soul recognizes that it is
willed by God or at least permitted for the sake of a greater good.
In this simplicity, which is eminently superior to simplicity of
nature or temperament, there is frequent exercise of the gift of
wisdom, the highest of all the gifts.
Like the child, an adoptive son of God is also
conscious of his weakness. He feels that of himself he is nothing.
Through the gift of knowledge he clearly understands the words of
our Lord: “Without Me you can do nothing” in the order of
sanctification and salvation. He is so inclined toward humility that
he does not indulge in unnecessary self examination, does not speak
of himself, nor seek the esteem of others in his regard. Moreover,
since he feels his weakness, he is inclined to seek continually the
help and direction of God his Father, as a little child looks to his
mother for help. Thus is the spirit
of prayer rendered more perfect.
Faith, too, is greatly increased. As the child
firmly believes what his mother tells him, the son of God relies
completely on divine revelation. Jesus has declared this to be true,
whether immediately in the Gospel or through His Church: that
suffices; there is no room for doubt. And what is the result? How
blessed a one for the soul! Just as a mother delights in instructing
her little one more and more as she finds him more eager to learn,
so does Christ our Lord gladly manifest the deep simplicity of the
mysteries of faith to the humble who hear them with great faith.
Therefore He said: “I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent,
and hast revealed them to little ones.” Thus faith becomes
penetrating, delectable, contemplative, radiant, practical, the
source of manifold excellent counsel. So does the spirit of faith
grow with the frequent exercise of the gifts of understanding,
wisdom, and counsel.
Even if God permits the dark night to overtake
him, the child of God traverses it, his hand in that of his Father,
as a little one holds his mother’s, knowing that she will take care
of him. As a consequence, hope increases and becomes firm
confidence, since it rests upon God’s love for us, His promises, His
omnipotence, and the infinite merits of the Redeemer. Hope is
therefore ever more certain in accordance with the certainty of the
tendency toward eternal life. As the little child trusts his mother
with the greatest assurance, knowing her love for him, so does the
son of God entrust himself most securely to God, never doubting the
fidelity of Him who said: “Ask and you shall receive.”
Nor should
our frailty discourage us. As the little one assures himself:
“Because of my weakness my mother always watches over me,” so the
child of God recognizes that Christ ever watches over the poor and
weak who invoke Him. The Holy Ghost, too, willed to be called “the
father of the poor.” Confidence thus remains intact even in the
gravest hours, when the Son of God says to His heavenly Father in
the words of St. Theresa: “Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou canst
do all things, and Thou lovest me.” I recently met a certain lady of
the Polish aristocracy who was deported to the northernmost part of
Siberia. As she entered the prison she felt the sustaining presence
of God, which never ceased as long as she remained in that
prison. When she was liberated, however, the presence of God was no
longer sensible, although she retained the memory of this
exceptional assistance of God.
Finally, charity increases greatly if we live as
true children of God. This way is not a special one for certain
souls only; it is the ordinary way which all the sons of God should
follow. Each one should ask himself: “Which dominates in me: the man
of self-love, the egotist, or the son of God?” The little child
loves his mother with all his heart and lives by her. Likewise the
true son of God loves God more and more for His own sake, because of
the infinity of His perfections in which we participate. The real
child of God is not self-seeking, but loves God Himself more than
his own personal perfection, more than the consolations of prayer.
His is a generous love which asks itself: “What can I do to please
God and help my neighbor on the way of eternal salvation ?”