De auxiliis divinae gratiae et humani arbitrii viribus et libertate

ON THE HELPS OF DIVINE GRACE AND ON THE POWERS AND FREEDOM OF HUMAN FREE CHOICE, AND ON ITS PROPER HARMONY WITH THE EFFICACY OF THOSE SAME HELPS.

The First Book.

IN WHICH THERE ARE SET FORTH BEFOREHAND

Certain preliminary discussions of matters to be treated in this entire work.

BY THE MOST REVEREND LORD, FRIAR DIDACUS ALVAREZ

Metimnensis, Archbishop of Trani and Salpi, chosen from the Province of Spain, of the Order of Preachers.

PREFACE IN WHICH THE DIVISION OF THE ENTIRE WORK

is touched upon, and the rationale for the order of its parts is given in part and explained.

As we are about to treat the helps of divine grace, with confidence in divine help, so that we may gather within certain bounds all those matters concerning this subject that are disputed in various places of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas or in other Opuscula by different writers, arrange them in due order in this volume (which contains twelve books), and explain our opinion briefly and clearly, insofar as it shall have been divinely granted to us, it is necessary to set forth beforehand a general division of those same helps, so that afterward we may proceed step by step to the particulars to be discussed in their proper places.

The helps of divine grace, then, are of two kinds, as is clear from the common opinion of the Scholastics.¹ Some are extrinsic, because, speaking formally, they posit nothing in created free choice; they exist only in God himself or in another subject external to that free choice. Thus predestination is not in the person predestined, but in God who predestines, as St. Thomas teaches 1. par. q. 23. ar. 2.. For since, according to St. Augustine, predestination is the foreknowledge and preparation of God's benefits, by which all who are delivered are most certainly delivered,² and since foreknowledge and preparation are not in the things foreknown but in the one who foreknows and prepares, it follows that predestination is formally in the one who predestines, not in the one predestined. It is clear, moreover, that predestination is wholly gratuitous, as will be shown below, and consequently must be reckoned among the divine gifts.³ Likewise, the love and election by which the predestined are chosen and loved by God are an extrinsic gift to those loved and chosen. Sacred Scripture⁴ bears witness with the clearest testimonies that this is a gratuitous gift: God loved the predestined not for any merits of ours that came before, but through his mercy; and from the many infected by the mass of perdition he chose them by his sheer will, which may be hidden but is not unjust. For the Apostle says: Before they had been born or had done anything good or evil, so that God's purpose according to election might stand—not from works but from the one who calls—it was said to her: “The elder shall serve the younger,” as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”⁵ Hence St. Tho. 3. par. q. 7. art. 13. ad 1. says that Augustine there, that is, in lib. On the Predestination of the Saints, cap. 15, calls grace the gratuitous will of God, freely bestowing benefits. From God's love, as the same St. Thomas observed, all good things come to creatures.⁶ Moreover, love is an act of the divine will, and so is election, as St. Thomas teaches 1. p. q. 23. ar. 4.. Therefore it must formally be in God, not in the intellectual creatures who are loved and chosen; and for this reason it is called an extrinsic gift, because it formally implies nothing inhering in a creature. The sacred Scriptures also belong among the extrinsic helps, for they teach us what we ought to embrace and what to avoid; so too does the example our Savior left us, the preaching of the Gospel, and tribulations, by which people are drawn back from evil and led to good; as do creatures, which show forth the divinity of their one Creator, as the Apostle says: For the invisible things of God, understood through the things that have been made, have been seen since the creation of the world: his eternal power and divinity as well, so that they are without excuse.⁷ More will be said about this prompting in disp. 75, n. 1.

Intrinsic helps, which are more properly called helps, are those that formally imply something inhering in intellectual creatures, whether on the part of the intellect, the will, or another rational power. And these, as St. Thomas often says, are of two kinds. Some are habitual helps, such as justifying grace, the habit of charity, and the other infused habits. Others are actual helps, such as a motion received in the intellect and will, by which God moves free choice to the act of faith, hope, and charity, and to other supernatural acts. ^{8 9}

Therefore, since the extrinsic gifts, which are in God himself, precede the intrinsic helps in the order of nature and causality, the right order of teaching requires that we treat first the extrinsic gifts, and afterward the helps inhering in created free choice. Since in God knowledge, which pertains to the intellect, precedes in the order of reason and is understood as prior to matters pertaining to the will—for nothing is willed unless it is foreknown—we must first discuss God's foreknowledge, before his will and general concurrence. Afterward we shall speak of providence and gratuitous predestination, so that in due order we may proceed to explain the intrinsic helps by which rational creatures can reach, or in fact do reach, the supernatural end. Next we must treat reprobation and the reprobate, who fall short of that same end. Finally, we shall establish the proper harmony of free choice with divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination, and also with the efficacy of the helps of grace, noting what will be better suited to explaining that same harmony.

But before all these things, it is necessary to set forth certain preliminary discussions that open the way to an easy understanding of this subject.

First, we must determine what the error of the Pelagians was concerning the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice.

Second, we must explain which assertions constitute the Semi-Pelagian position, and how in some matters they depart from the error of Pelagius, Celestius, and Julian, although on the principal question—which the holy Father Augustine, the preacher and defender of grace next after the Apostle Paul, disputed against Pelagius and Celestius—they fell into their condemned heresy. Here the error of Faustus and Cassian concerning the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice is laid open.

Third, what the Lutherans and Calvinists held concerning the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice.

Fourth, what certain more recent theologians thought concerning the necessity of that same grace and the natural powers of free choice, and concerning the harmony of free choice with divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination.

Fifth, how much authority the opinion of St. Augustine has concerning the matter of predestination and grace, and whether it is permissible to depart from it. Here the authority of the teaching of St. Thomas is also discussed.

Whether the Pelagians ever admitted that some inward grace or some supernatural help from God is given for salvation or for fulfilling the precepts of the law.

I. Some said that Pelagius admitted no inward grace, whether on the part of the intellect or on the part of the will; rather, by the name of grace, which he inserted frequently in his writings, he understood only free choice freely created by God; or the external law and teaching, that is, the preaching of the Gospel, through which he shows us what we ought to do and what we ought to avoid; or even the example of Christ the Lord, as Augustine reports in his book On the Grace of Christ Against Pelagius and Celestius, ch. 2, where he says: They are accustomed to tell us that Christ provided help for not sinning in this respect: that, by living justly and teaching justly, he himself left an example. These authors also affirm that Pelagius denied every actual concurrence of God, not only that which precedes the operations of secondary causes but also that which accompanies them, even with respect to natural acts; and that he admitted only that, at their creation, God conferred on them a power by which afterward they could act by themselves, without God's operation and cooperation. All these claims can be supported by the following arguments.

First. Because St. Augustine, speaking of the Semi-Pelagians, says: But these brothers of ours, for whom your pious charity is solicitous, have come to believe with the Church of Christ that the human race is born subject to the sin of the first man, and that no one is freed from this evil except through the righteousness of the second man. They also admit, concerning infants, that human wills are preceded by God's grace, and agree that no one can suffice for himself for any good work, whether to begin it or to complete it. These retained points, then, at which they have arrived distinguish them greatly from the error of the Pelagians.¹ In these words he teaches quite plainly that the Pelagians denied all prevenient grace and asserted that, for every good work, not only one to be begun but also one to be completed, a person's free choice suffices for itself without God's grace. For he says that in this respect the Semi-Pelagians differ greatly from the Pelagians; they would not differ if the Pelagians had conceded that God's prevenient grace is needed for a good work, whether to begin it or to complete it.

II. Second. Pelagius denied that the grace is necessary which the Supreme Pontiffs, the sacred Councils, and the holy Fathers—especially Augustine and Jerome—taught to be necessary when condemning Pelagius's error. But in condemning Pelagius's error they taught that an inward, prevenient, supernatural grace is necessary. Therefore Pelagius professed no inward, actual, supernatural, prevenient grace.

This is confirmed. For in the Council of Carthage it is said of Pelagius and Celestius: They leave no room for the grace of God by which we are Christians. And again: They claim that God's grace is to be reckoned in this: that he established and created human nature such that, by its own will, it could fulfill God's law.² Likewise, in the Council of Milevis it is affirmed: These men say that one can attain such perfection of righteousness without the help of the Savior's grace that it is unnecessary to say, “Forgive us our debts.”³ Again, Augustine, speaking of the Pelagians, says: They say that the grace of God, without which we can do nothing good, is nothing other than free choice, which our nature received from him without any preceding merits of its own, with his help directed only to this: that through his law and teaching we learn what we ought to do and what we ought to hope for; but not through the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that we do what we have learned ought to be done.⁴

III. Third, the argument is as follows. Pelagius denied the grace given to us through the ministration of the Spirit, as St. Augustine reports in book 1 of On the Grace of Christ, ch. 2, where he says that Pelagius thought we are saved with help, not through any ministration of power, but by the powers of our own will. And in ch. 34 he adds: Nor could I anywhere find that he, namely Pelagius, professed this grace, by which not only the natural capacity of the will and action—which he says we possess even when we neither will nor do what is good—but also the will and action themselves are helped through the ministration of the Holy Spirit. And in Letter 95, which is from the five bishops to Pope Innocent: For whether he said that grace is free choice, or that grace is the remission of sins, or that grace is the precept of the law, he says nothing that pertains, through the ministration of the Holy Spirit, to conquering desires and temptations. Therefore he admitted no inward grace, but only nature freely created, external preaching, the law, and other such things, which can come about without the ministration of the Spirit.

This is confirmed. For Pelagius asserted that grace is given according to our merits, as is clear from what Augustine writes against him.⁵ Therefore he admitted no true grace. The consequence is clear, for it is contrary to the nature of grace that it be given on the basis of merits, as is clear from the passage in Romans 4: To the one who works, the wage is not reckoned according to grace but according to debt.⁶ And in chapter 11: But if it is by grace, then it is no longer from works; otherwise grace is no longer grace.

Fourth, it is proved that Pelagius denied the necessity of God's actual concurrence even for the works of nature. For St. Jerome, in Against the Pelagians, tacitly reports the Pelagian error under the name of Christobulus, arguing as follows: If we must use God's help in each thing we do, then unless God helps us we will be unable to trim a pen for writing, smooth it with pumice once trimmed, fit the hand to the letters, be silent, speak, sit, stand, walk, run, eat, fast, weep, laugh, and do the other things of this sort.⁷ And in his Letter to Ctesiphon, against the Pelagians, reporting their error, he says: They place God's grace in such a way that we do not rely on his help and are not guided by it in each act, but refer the matter to free choice and the precepts of the law, setting down that saying of Isaiah: “For God appointed the law as a help”; so that thanks are to be referred to God on the ground that he made us such that by our own choice we can both choose good and avoid evil. Those who say this do not understand that the Devil hisses an intolerable blasphemy through their mouths. And a little later: Listen, I ask you, listen to the sacrilegious man: “If, he says, I wish to bend a finger, move a hand, sit, stand, walk, run about, spit, clear the mucus from my nostrils with two fingers, relieve my bowels, or pass urine, will God's help always be necessary for me?” After a few intervening words: Free choice itself, as we have said, leans on God's help and needs his aid at every step, which you do not want; rather, you want the person who once has free choice to need no help from God.⁸

IIII. The resolution of this difficulty must be drawn principally from St. Augustine's writings against the Pelagians. To explain it, we must assume first that although Pelagius admitted some inward grace, whatever it may be, he ultimately destroyed it in fact, since, as St. Augustine reports, he asserted that grace is given according to our merits. For if it is from works, then grace (as the Apostle says) is no longer grace; but specifically, in book On the Grace of Christ Against Pelagius and Celestius, ch. 31, Augustine says: You say that grace, whatever you think it may be, is given to Christians themselves according to their merits, ⁹

Second, it must be observed that the heresy of Pelagius had four stages. In the first he denied every supernatural help and every inward grace of the supernatural order, both sufficient grace, which grants the ability, and efficacious grace, which infallibly grants pious action; he affirmed that the natural powers of free choice suffice for fulfilling all the commandments and for meriting and attaining eternal salvation. In the second stage he admitted that God's grace is bestowed on people to do his commandments; yet he asserted that this help consists in the external law and teaching, or even in Christ's example, and that it is necessary only so that a person might fulfill more easily through grace what he could do simply by nature. St. Augustine reports these two stages: The heresy of the Pelagians, he says, is the most recent heresy of our time, having arisen from the monk Pelagius, whom Celestius followed as his teacher so closely that their followers are now called Celestians.¹⁰ They are strenuous enemies of the grace of God by which we have been predestined to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, and by which we are rescued from the power of darkness so that we may believe in him and be transferred into his kingdom;¹¹ for this reason he says, ‘No one comes to me unless it has been granted to him by my Father’; and of the love that is poured into our hearts so that faith works through love.¹² They are such enemies of it that they believe a person can do all the divine commandments without this grace, although, if that were true, the Lord would seem to have said in vain, ‘Without me you can do nothing.’¹³ Finally, Pelagius, rebuked by the brothers for attributing nothing to the help of God's grace in doing his commandments, yielded to their correction to this extent: he did not place grace before free choice, but with faithless cunning put it beneath free choice, saying, ‘Grace is given to people for this purpose: that what they are commanded to do by free choice they may fulfill more easily through grace’.

By saying that they may do it more easily, he certainly wanted it to be believed that people can, though with greater difficulty, still carry out God's commands without grace. But they say that the grace of God without which we can do nothing good is nothing except free choice, which our nature received from him without any preceding merits of its own, solely for this purpose—with his help through his law and teaching—that we may learn what we ought to do and what we ought to hope for; but not through the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that we may do what we have learned must be done. And so they confess that knowledge is given to us by God, by which ignorance is driven away; but they deny the love of God, by which one lives piously. Thus, although knowledge, which without love puffs up, is God's gift, they claim that love itself is not God's gift, even though it builds up so that knowledge may not puff up. ¹⁴

V.

The third stage of the Pelagian heresy was this: after long disputes with St. Augustine and the other Fathers, Pelagius at last admitted an inward grace that grants ability, namely, an internal illumination of the intellect and an internal prompting of the dormant will. Yet he always denied the grace by which God would bring it about that we will, and he always remained in the same error, believing that the inward grace he admitted as granting ability was not absolutely necessary, but only enabled a person more easily to fulfill the divine commandments through it. This third stage will become clear from what is to be set out in the first and second points concerning the Pelagian heresy.

The fourth stage of the Pelagian heresy was the one it had under Celestius. For, as will be clear in the third point, he admitted that the inward grace which Pelagius conceded in the third stage as granting ability was absolutely necessary—not indeed for beginning works of virtue, but for completing them. In this respect he moderated Pelagius's error to some extent; nevertheless, because he wished no inward grace to be necessary for beginning, he did not depart from the doctrine of Pelagius, who asserted that grace is given according to our merits.

Thus Pelagius, in certain statements, explained his final opinion, although concealing himself in hiding places by covering the old heresy with deceptive words rather than professing the true grace of Christ. Hence, by cleverly equivocating, he misled the judgment of many bishops at the Council of Palestine, as Augustine reports: He deceived the Palestinian judgment, he says, and for that reason there he seems to have been cleared. But he could not deceive the Roman Church in any way, where you know he is very well known. Although he tried both things, as I have said, he did not succeed at all.¹⁵ And again he says: The more artfully he explains these matters, the more secretly he deceives the judges.¹⁶ And after a few intervening words he adds: Finally, observe how he answers, and see how the hiding places of ambiguity prepare refuges for falsehood, casting darkness over the truth, so that even we, when we first read these things, almost rejoiced that they were right or corrected.¹⁷

And in book 1 of On the Grace of Christ Against Pelagius and Celestius, ch. 37, he reports these words of Pelagius.

Let them also read, he says, what we wrote in the East to the holy virgin of Christ, Demetrias, and they will find that we praise human nature in such a way that we always add the help of God's grace.

Considering this, St. Augustine says there: I certainly read that, and it had almost persuaded me that he professed this grace at issue, although in many places of that little work he seemed to contradict himself. But when other writings came into my hands, which he composed later and at greater length, I saw how he could have named grace even there, hiding what he thought beneath an ambiguous generality; yet by using the word “grace” he broke down hostility and avoided offense. ¹⁸

Hence Pelagius, as the same Augustine noted, exalted himself and boasted arrogantly and deceitfully that he had been cleared of his errors at the Council of Palestine. Yet it is absolutely certain that he covered himself by means that were more false than true, denying some things and turning others through false interpretation.¹⁹ Sometimes, too, as St. Augustine reports, he complained in letters about the Catholics, which he sent to Pope Innocent of blessed memory, saying that people were defaming him by claiming that he denied the sacrament of Baptism to infants and promised the kingdoms of heaven to some without Christ's redemption.²⁰ That crafty man did this so that he could easily answer the charge brought against him while preserving his own doctrine. But setting aside Pelagius's craftiness, let us set out his statements by which he seemed to cloak his heresy.

VI.

First, Pelagius conceded that an inward grace sent by God illuminates the intellect by showing what should be done and what should be avoided, and, on the part of the object, awakens a stunned will by attracting and persuading it. Nevertheless, he denied that this grace is absolutely necessary for fulfilling the precepts of the law; he said it gives a person only this: to fulfill more easily through grace what he could, simply though with difficulty, fulfill by nature. This is shown only from Pelagius's own words, which survive in St. Augustine's books. For Augustine reports that Pelagius says in one place: Here the most ignorant of men think that we do an injury to divine grace because we say that it does not bring holiness to completion in us without our will, as though God had commanded something of his grace but did not also supply the help of his grace to those whom he commanded, so that what people are commanded to do by free choice they might fulfill more easily through grace. And, as if about to explain what he means by grace, he went on and added, saying: We confess that grace is not, as you think, in the law alone, but also in God's help.²¹ Considering these words of Pelagius, St. Augustine says: Who would not want him to show what he wishes grace to be understood as? For above all, for this reason we ought to expect him to say what he says: that he confesses grace to be not only in the law. But while we are held in suspense by this expectation, observe what he has added. “God helps us,” he says, “through his teaching and revelation, when he opens the eyes of our heart; when he shows us future things, so that we are not occupied with present things; when he lays bare the snares of the Devil; when he illumines us with the many-formed and ineffable gift of heavenly grace.”²² Then, concluding his opinion with something like an absolution, he says: “Does the one who says this seem to you to deny grace? Or does he confess both human free choice and God's grace?”²³ From these words St. Augustine concludes that Pelagius professes the grace by which God shows and reveals what we ought to do, not the grace by which he gives and helps us to do it.²⁴ And elsewhere Pelagius says: He works in us the willing that is good, the willing that is holy: when he sets us, devoted to earthly desires and loving only present things like mute animals, on fire with the greatness of future glory and the promise of rewards; when, through the revelation of wisdom, he awakens the dormant will to desire God; when he persuades us of everything good—which elsewhere you do not hesitate to deny.²⁵ By these words he plainly concedes a grace that illuminates the intellect and moves the will by persuasion. That he is speaking of inward illumination, which comes from the Holy Spirit, is clear: for in the following chapter 11, when St. Augustine explains the Apostle's words, Lest the greatness of my revelations should exalt me, a thorn in my flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan to buffet me,²⁶ and that saying, Charity is not jealous, it is not puffed up,²⁷ he says: This charity, then, is still being renewed day by day even in the holy Apostle, surely to be perfected where it could no longer be puffed up. But then his mind was still in a state where it could be puffed up by the greatness of revelation, until it was filled by the solid structure of charity; for he had not yet grasped, by arriving at it, that toward which he was running through being perfected. By these words the holy Doctor refutes what Pelagius had said: namely, that God works in us to will and to bring to completion when, through the revelation of wisdom, he awakens the dormant will to desire himself, and when he persuades us of everything good. Augustine concludes that this revelation would also have puffed up the Apostle Paul unless charity had built him up. He therefore holds that Pelagius admitted an inward revelation of wisdom by which God himself shows what must be done and what avoided, but denied the grace by which he gives and helps us to do these things. Hence, in chapter 10 of the same book, St. Augustine says: It pertains to teaching also when wisdom is revealed; it pertains to teaching when one is persuaded of everything good. And if there seems to be some difference between teaching and persuading—or rather, exhorting—even this is included within the general meaning of teaching, which is conveyed in any words or writings. For the sacred Scriptures both teach and exhort; and human activity can also play a part in teaching and exhorting.²⁸ There he teaches clearly enough that inward revelation, by which the Holy Spirit inwardly shows what should be done and avoided without human ministry or activity, is included generally under the name of teaching. He also shows this in his writing to Vitalis and against Pelagius, arguing as follows: If, then, God were to prepare and work the human will in such a way that he applied only his law and teaching to that person's free choice, and did not by that high and secret calling so move his understanding that he directed his assent to that same law and teaching, then without doubt it would suffice to read it, or to understand it by reading, or even to explain and preach it.²⁹ But this argument would prove nothing against Pelagius unless he had conceded a revelation of wisdom not only external, through reading or preaching, but also internal, which comes immediately from God alone. For the meaning would be: If God worked in us to will only by persuading us through external teaching, it would suffice to read it, understand it through external reading, or likewise explain or preach it externally. It is clear that this argument would contain a useless repetition, by which St. Augustine would attack the same thing by means of itself.

VII. This is established still more explicitly by what the same Augustine wrote against Pelagius and Celestius in the same book, chapter 41. For, among other things that must be considered, he says: The help itself, by which he claims that natural capacity is helped, he places in the law and teaching, which he admits is also revealed to us by the Holy Spirit; for this reason he grants that the Holy Spirit ought to be worshiped.³⁰ From these words the strongest argument is drawn. Adoration is not owed to one who reveals the law and teaching only externally, for this can be done through the ministry of a human being or an angel. Since Pelagius confesses that the Holy Spirit is to be worshiped because he has revealed the teaching to us, it follows that he is speaking of an inward revelation, by which God alone teaches inwardly what we ought to do and what we ought to avoid. A little earlier in the same chapter Augustine had said: But in these four books too, whatever he seems to say in favor of grace, by which we are helped to turn from evil and do good, he says it in such a way that he never leaves the ambiguity of his words, which he can explain to his disciples so that he believes there is no help of grace by which natural capacity is helped except in the law and teaching. Thus he thinks that prayers themselves, as he most plainly affirms in his writings, are employed for no other purpose than that teaching be disclosed to us also through divine revelation, not so that the human mind be helped to complete through love and action what it has learned should be done. Let us examine the words “also through divine revelation”: they clearly indicate that Pelagius admitted an inward divine revelation. Hence Augustine himself concludes against Pelagius and Celestius as follows: Let them, then, read and understand, consider and acknowledge that God works in human hearts not by a law and teaching sounding outwardly, but by an inward, hidden, marvelous, and ineffable power—not only true revelations, but also good wills.³¹ Let us also examine the words “not only true revelations,” for they assume that Pelagius admitted true revelations and denied that good wills are brought about by God through the help of grace, making people willing instead of unwilling. This will become clearer from what is said below.

VIII. Second, Pelagius admitted an inward grace superadded to nature that grants ability. St. Augustine reports this; after citing some words of Pelagius, he explains his meaning as follows: Whenever we read or hear him confess the help of divine grace, so that we may turn from evil and do good, whether in the law and teaching or wherever else it has been established, let us understand what he is saying, and not err by understanding him otherwise than he thinks. For we must know that he does not believe either our will or our action is helped by divine aid, but only the capacity for willing and acting, which alone among these three he affirms we have from God, as though this were something weak that God himself placed in nature. But the other two, which he wanted to be ours, are so firm and strong and sufficient in themselves that they need none of his help; and so he does not help us to will, nor help us to act, but only helps us to be able to will and act.³² And in chapter 14 of the same book he adds: Pelagius places the ability to come in nature, or even, as he has now begun to say, in grace, whatever he may understand it to be. In the preceding words, to attack this teaching of Pelagius, he had set forth the following argument: For if this grace helped only our ability, the Lord would have said: “Everyone who has heard from the Father and learned can come to me.” But he did not say this; rather, he said: “Everyone who has heard from the Father and learned comes to me.”³³ In this Augustine clearly assumes that Pelagius admitted a grace that confers ability and denied the grace that confers coming to Christ and doing good. Moreover, the same point is proved as follows: in book On the Grace of Christ, ch. 25, St. Augustine proves against Pelagius and Celestius that God helps us by his grace and grants us not only the ability to do good but also the willing and the doing themselves. And in ch. 26 he says: Let him distinguish thought and love as they are to be distinguished, since knowledge puffs up and charity builds up, and knowledge does not puff up when charity builds up. And since both are God's gifts, though one is lesser and the other greater, let him not elevate our righteousness above the praise of our justifier, attributing to divine help what is lesser of these two, but what is greater let him claim as his own by human free choice. And in ch. 11 of the same book, On the Grace of Christ, explaining what grace Pelagius must confess if he does not wish to depart from the teaching of the Catholic Church, St. Augustine says: But we want them at last to confess that grace by which the greatness of future glory is not only promised but also believed and hoped for; wisdom is not only revealed but also loved; and not only is everything good recommended, but people are also persuaded of it. And below: Whose faith it is, and who are persuaded to come to him, he himself showed clearly enough when he said: “No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” And a little later, when he was speaking of those who do not believe: “I told you,” you say, “that no one can come to me unless it has been given to him by my Father.”³⁴ Pelagius ought to confess this grace if he wishes not only to be called a Christian but also truly to be one. And in ch. 47 the same Augustine, identifying the difference between himself and Pelagius concerning the help of grace, speaks as follows: If, then, he agrees with us that not only a person's ability—even if he neither wills nor does good—but the will and action themselves are helped by God, so that without that help we will and do nothing good; and that this is the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, in which he makes us righteous by his righteousness, not ours, so that our righteousness, which comes to us from him, is true righteousness, then, as far as I can see, no controversy between us will remain concerning the help of God's grace. Therefore it is a sign that Pelagius admitted inward grace that grants ability, but denied the help by which God brings it about that we will.

IX. Third, Celestius, Pelagius's disciple, said that grace which confers ability is absolutely necessary for the works of nature to reach the completion of virtue; by this means, moderating Pelagius's error to some extent, he thought he preserved a place for grace. This is clear from St. Augustine, who says: They thought this was to be brought against us: that we say God inspires in a person who is unwilling and resisting the desire not merely for any good, but even for good itself in its imperfect form. Perhaps, then, at least in this way they preserve a place for grace: they think a person can have a desire for good, though imperfect, without it; but that a desire for perfect good is not merely had more easily through it, but cannot be had at all except through it. Yet even so they say that God's grace is given according to our merits, a claim which Pelagius condemned in the East for fear of being condemned by ecclesiastical proceedings. For if desire for good begins in us by ourselves, without God's grace, the beginning itself will be a merit to which grace comes as help due, as if by debt; and thus God's grace will not be given freely, but our merit will be paid.³⁵ And elsewhere, arguing against Julian, who located the beginning of a good work in nature but attributed its perfection and completion to grace, Augustine says: Since, then, a person is helped by God, he is helped not merely to attain perfection, which is what you posited—wanting, of course, it to be understood that he himself begins without grace what grace completes—but rather in the way the Apostle speaks: “May he who began a good work in you bring it to completion to the end.” For in the very respect in which you would have a person, as you put it, be stirred by impulses of a generous heart to something praiseworthy, you do not want him to boast in the Lord but in free choice; and in this way he gives first so that it may be repaid to him, and grace is no longer grace, because it is not given freely.³⁶³⁷ Nevertheless, as was said above, although at the third stage of his heresy Pelagius admitted an inward illumination and prompting of grace that grants ability, he never wished to concede that it was absolutely necessary for fulfilling the commandments, but only that it made this easier. St. Augustine expressly attests this in book 2 of Against the Two Letters of the Pelagians, ch. 8, when he says: These men, namely Julian and Celestius, want the desire for good to begin in a person by that person himself, so that the merit of this beginning may obtain even the grace of completing it—if indeed that is what they want. For Pelagius says that what is good is fulfilled more easily if grace helps. By this addition—that is, by adding “more easily”—he indicates that this is his view: even if the help of grace is absent, a person can fulfill what is good through free choice, though with greater difficulty.

X. Hence, wherever St. Thomas reports Pelagius's error, he explains it only by saying that Pelagius thought the beginning of acting well comes from us, but its completion and perfection come from God, as may be seen in 1. p. q. 23. art. 5. in corp. 2. 2. q. 6. art. 1. in corp. 3. contra Gent. c. 149. quodl. 1. art. 7. in corp. ad Rom. 7. lect. 3. in fin. et 2. ad Cor. 3. lectione 1. in fin. et ad Ephes. 1. lect. 1. etiam fine. ³⁸

XI. Fourth, the Pelagians, at least Julian, admitted divine grace as help subsequent to the determination of created free choice, in such a way, namely, that a person begins first in the order of nature and the help of grace follows later in the order of nature, through which the person is helped by God in the very act. This is proved from Julian's own words, which St. Augustine reports: We defend man as the work of God, and say that he is not compelled by that power to begin either evil or good, but by his own will either to do good or evil; in a good work, however, he is always helped by God's grace, while in evil he is incited by the Devil's suggestions.³⁹ In reply, the holy Doctor says: But you think a person is helped by God's grace in a good work in such a way that you believe that God does nothing in arousing his will to that very good work, as your own words make clear. For why did you not say that a person is stirred by God's grace to a good work, just as you said he is incited to evil by the Devil's suggestions? Instead, you said that in a good work he is always helped by God's grace, as though a person who began a good work by his own will, without any grace of God, were now helped divinely in the work itself on account, evidently, of the merits of his good will, so that grace owed is repaid, not given as an unowed gift; and thus grace is no longer grace.⁴⁰ The same point is clear from other words of those same Pelagians, which the same St. Augustine reports in book 2 of Against the Two Letters of the Pelagians: These, he says, are your words: we confess that Baptism is necessary at every age, and that grace also helps each person's good purpose, but does not instill zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no favoritism with God.⁴¹ And again he says: They say that they confess that grace also helps each person's good purpose, but does not instill zeal for virtue in one who resists. They say this as though a person has a good purpose and zeal for virtue from himself, without God's help, and by the preceding merit of these is worthy to be helped by the grace of God that follows.⁴²

XII. From these points the Pelagians inferred their fifth dictum, namely, that this causal proposition is true: because I first willed, God willed; because I will, God helps me.⁴³ But this proposition is false: because God wills, I will; because God helps a person, the person wills. In this way they always assign the prior role to free choice and leave the later role to God. St. Augustine reports this dictum in writing to Vitalis, when he says: You recognize, I think, that among the things I said we know, I did not wish to mention everything pertaining to the Catholic faith, but only those things that pertain to this question about God's grace being debated between us: whether this grace precedes or follows the human will—that is, to put it more plainly, whether it is given to us because we will, or whether through it God also brings it about that we will.⁴⁴ Hence, attacking this Pelagian assertion in book 3 of the Hypognosticon, he says: In every holy work, then, God's will is prior and free choice's is later; that is, God works and the human being cooperates. But if you say, as you are accustomed to say, “Because I first willed, God willed,” you already make this a merit, so that grace is no longer grace from works, but a reward. As will be clear below, the Semi-Pelagians also maintained this causal proposition.⁴⁵ In what sense they understood it will be explained in disputations 99 and 100.

XIII. Pelagius's sixth dictum is this: if it is asserted that God's grace precedes human merits and makes the unwilling willing, then by such grace the freedom of human choice is destroyed and fatal necessity is introduced. Pelagius often brought this objection against St. Augustine, as is clear from book 2 of Against the Two Letters of the Pelagians, ch. 5, where St. Augustine replies to Pelagius's calumnies: We do not assert fate under the name of grace, because we say that God's grace is preceded by no human merits. A little later, after repeating some words of the Pelagians cited above, he adds: From these words of theirs I understood why they either think or want others to think that we assert fate under the name of grace: because we say God's grace is not given according to our merits, but according to his own most merciful will, who said, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will show compassion to whom I am compassionate.”⁴⁶ Speaking against Julian, he says: You say that we claim people are made good by fatal necessity under the name of grace. A little later he adds: You falsely accuse me of saying that no effort should be expected from the human will, contrary to that Gospel where the Lord says: “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you.”⁴⁷⁴⁸ And Jerome, writing to Ctesiphon, says: As for your tossing about the claim that we destroy free choice, hear in reply that those destroy the freedom of choice who misuse it against the benefaction of the giver.⁴⁹ Who destroys choice? The one who always gives thanks to God and refers whatever was in his own little stream back to its source? Or the one who says, “Depart from me, because I am clean; I do not need you: for you once gave me the freedom of choice to do whatever I wish”? Why do you thrust yourself in again, so that I can do nothing unless you complete your gifts in me? You fraudulently put forward this pretext so as to refer God's grace to man's creation and avoid seeking God's help in each work, lest you seem to lose free choice, while, scorning God's support, you seek the help of men.

This was always the Achilles of all the Pelagians, by which they boasted that they triumphed over the defenders of grace and by which they tried to cloak their heresy: under the pretext of defending the rights of human freedom, they declared an internal war against the grace of God through which we are freed from death. But how ineffective their argument is will become clear below.

XIIII. Pelagius's seventh dictum is this: when the Apostle says that God works in us both to will and to accomplish, this is understood as an operation through the illumination of the intellect and the awakening of a stunned will, by which God persuades it of what is good. This is proved only from Pelagius's explicit words, which St. Augustine reports in his book On the Grace of Christ Against Pelagius and Celestius, ch. 10, where he says: For in another place, after asserting at length that a good will is produced in us by ourselves, not by God's help, Pelagius posed a question against himself from the Apostle's letter and said: “And how will that saying of the Apostle stand? For it is God who works in us both to will and to accomplish.”⁵⁰ Then, to resolve this objection, which he saw was strongly contrary to his doctrine, he went on and added: “He works in us the willing that is good, the willing that is holy: when he sets us, devoted to earthly desires and loving only present things like mute animals, on fire with the greatness of future glory and the promise of rewards; when through the revelation of wisdom he awakens the dormant will to desire God; for he persuades us of everything good—which elsewhere you do not hesitate to deny.” Pelagius interprets other similar passages of Scripture in the same way, passages in which the conversion of a human being is attributed to God, such as John 6: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.⁵¹ And Isaiah 26: You have done all our works for us, and other such passages.

XV. From this dictum the Pelagians inferred that God works in us to will as far as lies in him; but to consent or dissent to him is so much our own that, if we will, it happens, whereas if we are unwilling, we bring it about that God's operation benefits us in no way. St. Augustine reports this dictum in referring to and refuting the Pelagian error, saying: What, then, is the meaning of the Apostle's saying, “God works in us both to will and to accomplish”? You reply that God works through his law and Scripture so that we will, through the Scripture that we either read or hear. But our consenting to it or not consenting is so much our own that, if we will, it happens; if we do not will, we make God's operation of no use to us. For he works, you say, as much as lies in him, so that we will when his sayings are known to us; but if we do not wish to acquiesce in them, we make his operation of no benefit to us. If you say this, you surely contradict our prayers. ⁵²

XVI. The Pelagians' eighth dictum was that the cause of divine predestination is on our side, namely, merits foreseen and begun by the powers of nature. St. Augustine attributes this error to the Pelagians, saying: He foresaw, therefore, (Pelagius says) who would be holy and spotless through the free choice of their will; and therefore, before the foundation of the world, in his own foreknowledge he chose those whom he foresaw would be such. “He chose them,” he says, “before they existed, predestining as sons those whom he foresaw would be holy and spotless”; he himself did not make them so, nor foresee that he would do so, but foresaw that they would be so.⁵³ And St. Thomas, reporting the same error of the Pelagians, says: There were others, then, who said that merits existing beforehand in this life are the reason and cause of the effect of predestination. For the Pelagians held that the beginning of doing good comes from us, but its completion comes from God; and so it happens that the effect of predestination is given to one person and not another, because one made a beginning by preparing himself and the other did not.⁵⁴ It is true that Pelagius asserted that the effect of predestination is bestowed on the predestined because of a foreseen future good use of free choice arising from the faculty of nature alone, and not from the efficacious help of prevenient grace. Yet in the end he admitted inward teaching and revelation through which God would persuade a person what ought to be done and what ought to be avoided, as was said above.

All these matters will be refuted below, and the mind of the Pelagians will at the same time be made clearer.

XVII. The ninth dictum contains the twelve articles charged against Pelagius at the Synod of Palestine; if he had not anathematized them, he himself would surely have been anathematized. The first is that Adam would have died whether he sinned or did not sin. The second, that Adam's sin harmed Adam alone and not the human race. The third, that newborn infants are in the state in which Adam was before his transgression. The fourth, that neither through Adam's death or transgression does the whole human race die, nor through Christ's resurrection does the whole human race rise again. The fifth, that even unbaptized infants have eternal life. The sixth, that baptized rich people, unless they renounce everything, are not credited with any good they may seem to do and cannot possess the kingdom of God. The seventh, that God's grace and help are not given for each individual act, but consist in free choice or in the law and teaching. The eighth, that God's grace is given according to our merits. The ninth, that people cannot be called children of God unless they have been made entirely without sin. The tenth, that free choice does not exist if it needs God's help, since each person has it in his own will to do something or not to do it. The eleventh, that our victory comes not from God's help but from free choice. The twelfth, that pardon is not given to those who repent according to God's grace and mercy, but according to the merit and labor of those who through penance have become worthy of mercy. St. Augustine reports these errors of Pelagius in Letter 106, where he also shows that such assertions contradict the teaching the Catholic Church has always held, as will become still clearer from the course of this work.

In reply to the first argument, it is answered that Pelagius did indeed admit an inward grace that conferred a certain ability, but denied that it was absolutely necessary for fulfilling the divine commandments. Pelagius's followers, Julian and Celestius, however, as was shown above, conceded that this inward illumination of the intellect and awakening of the will were absolutely necessary for the perfection of a work. Nevertheless, there still remains that in which the Semi-Pelagians, of whom Augustine spoke in ch. 1 of On the Predestination of the Saints, are distinguished from them.

For the Pelagians, as was said above, placed in nature the first beginning of faith and good works, attributing only their completion and perfection to divine grace. But the Semi-Pelagians distinguished between faith and the good works that follow faith, and said that the first beginning of faith comes from us but the beginning of good works comes from grace—which they nevertheless asserted is given to believers on account of the merit of faith. This is clear from St. Augustine in the same book On the Predestination of the Saints, where he expressly shows against the Semi-Pelagians that even the first beginning of the faith by which we are Christians comes from God, not from us.⁵⁵ They also differ in this: the Semi-Pelagians, as Augustine says in ch. 1 of the same book, confessed with the Church of Christ that the human race is born subject to the sin of the first man, and that no one is freed from this evil except through the righteousness of the second man. Pelagius and Celestius, however, stubbornly denied this, as Augustine himself makes clear in the books published against them. In these matters, then, Augustine teaches that the Semi-Pelagians differ greatly from the error of the Pelagians. But this will be discussed more fully in the next disputation, where we shall report the statements of the Semi-Pelagians.⁵⁶

In reply to the second point, the distinction assigned concerning the four stages of Pelagius's heresy must be applied. Against the first stage, the Councils and Fathers determined that grace must be admitted as necessary for salvation, and that nature alone does not suffice to fulfill all God's precepts. Against the second stage of the same heresy, they taught that the help of grace by which God helps us to fulfill his commandments does not consist in the law alone, or in external teaching, or in the example Christ the Lord left us, but that inward grace must be admitted. Against the third stage, they determined that this inward grace is necessary absolutely, not merely for a better state or for acting more easily. Against the fourth, they decreed that inward grace is absolutely necessary, not only to show and teach what should be believed or done, but to grant and help us to do it. St. Prosper calls this grace pre-operating grace;⁵⁷ in common usage it is called efficacious prevenient grace, through which God actively and properly causes us to will and to act piously, and from these points the answer to the confirmation is clear. But there is still an argument: the Councils and Fathers say that Pelagius admitted no true grace. Yet inward grace that illuminates the intellect and awakens the stunned will is true grace. Therefore Pelagius did not admit it.

The reply is that, since Pelagius asserted that grace is given according to our merits, even while conceding an inward grace that illuminates the intellect, awakens the will, and helps the ability itself, he truly admitted no grace. Indeed, even if he had admitted efficacious grace, or grace that helps the willing itself, by saying that grace is given according to our merits he would have destroyed the whole nature of grace; for if it is from works, as the Apostle argues, it is no longer grace.⁵⁸ Hence Augustine says in his book On the Grace of Christ Against Pelagius and Celestius, ch. 31: Whatever he thinks grace to be, he says that it is given to Christians themselves according to their merits. By these words Augustine signifies that any grace Pelagius conceded is destroyed if it is asserted that it is given according to our merits.

XIX. In reply to the third point, it is answered that in the first stage of his heresy Pelagius denied the grace given to us through the ministration of the Spirit; but in the second or third stage he admitted an inward grace by which the intellect is illuminated and the will awakened, as was said above. A second answer is that inward grace by which God shows and reveals what we ought to do, but does not give and help us to do it, pertains to the law and teaching, even if they are inward, as St. Augustine shows in the passages cited above; it does not pertain to the ministration of the Spirit, which Pelagius intended to deny.⁵⁹ For although inward revelation and teaching, which shows what we ought to do and what to avoid, takes place in us through the Holy Spirit, who teaches a person knowledge, nevertheless it is included under a certain general heading, under the letter that kills, not under the Spirit who gives life.⁶⁰ But the grace that helps our weakness and gives strength to the will, so that we do what we have learned must be done, pertains to the ministration of the Spirit. Of it the Apostle says: The Spirit helps our weakness, for we do not know what we ought to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us, that is, makes us pray, as St. Thomas explains,⁶¹ with inexpressible groanings.⁶² By these words he plainly indicates that the grace which not only teaches what we ought to ask for or do, but also grants that we ask and do, pertains to the ministration of the Spirit. Pelagius always denied this grace, as was said above. Therefore, when Augustine says that Pelagius denied the grace given to us through the ministration of the Holy Spirit, he is speaking of the grace by which God not only shows what we ought to do, but also gives and helps us to do it. This explanation follows from the very context, especially from those words of Augustine cited in the third argument, in which he asserts that Pelagius thought people are saved with help, not through any ministration of power, but by the powers of their own will. If these words are joined to those of St. Augustine also cited in the same argument—namely, that which pertains through the ministration of the Spirit to conquering desires and temptations—it will be clear that grace given through the ministration of the Spirit means the same as grace that supplies strength to conquer desires and temptations. But illumination, or teaching alone, even when inward, and the awakening of a stunned will, which Pelagius admitted, do not give the will strength to fulfill the divine commandments, because they move it only on the part of the object, by proposing and teaching what it ought to do. Hence they do not pertain to the grace given through the ministration of the Spirit. This can be explained by a very apt example. If someone were asleep and also infirm, with no feet, and thus had absolutely no power to walk, and were in great danger from which he could escape only by fleeing, then simply waking him by another person and warning him of the danger so that he might flee and run from imminent death would supply him no strength to flee; with respect to the power of walking, he would remain just as unable to run as if he had not been awakened from sleep and taught about the danger. We must think proportionately about the inward illumination and awakening on the part of the object that Pelagius admitted. This is what St. Augustine meant when he said Pelagius had never conceded a grace by which not only the natural capacity of the will and action, but the will and action themselves, are helped by the ministration of the Holy Spirit. From these words it is quite clear that Pelagius did not deny every kind of grace, but the grace given to us so that we do the good we know:

XX. But there is an argument against this solution. It follows that habitual grace, and likewise the habit of charity, does not pertain to the grace given through the ministration of the Spirit, but to the law and teaching. The consequence is proved as follows: through such habits God does not cause us to act, nor does he work so that we act, since a habit does not determine a power to act. Therefore, if only the grace by which God gives and causes us to act pertains to the ministration of the Spirit, the habits of grace and charity will pertain to the law and teaching, and not to the grace given through the ministration of the Spirit.

The consequence is denied. For through grace and charity the Holy Spirit dwells in us, according to what Christ the Lord says through John: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.⁶³ Although through habitual grace alone, or through the habit of charity, God does not cause us to act, nevertheless he causes us to have spiritual life and grants a sufficient efficient principle of supernatural operation. For through habitual grace he makes us children of God, and through habitual charity he makes us lovers of God; therefore they pertain to the grace given through the ministration of the Spirit.⁶⁴ But the illumination of the intellect and the awakening of the will that the Pelagians admitted accomplish none of these things, nor do they give the will strength, as will be clear in Disputation 75; hence the cases are not similar.

Second, I answer that although habits of grace and charity do not determine a person to act piously, nevertheless, in the very infusion of grace and charity, God moves that person's free choice with efficacious help, so that the person consents and freely cooperates with God, disposing himself by his own act toward his justification, as St. Thomas teaches in Prima Secundae, q. 113, art. 8. Hence habitual grace and charity do not pertain to the oldness of the letter, or to the law and teaching, but to the life-giving⁶⁵ and renewing Spirit.

In reply to the confirmation, I answer: I conclude that the confirmation of itself establishes effectively that Pelagius's opinion involves a contradiction in what he says: since he asserted that grace is given according to our merits, he destroyed the true nature of grace, which, as was said above, he placed in the illumination of the intellect and the inward awakening of the will.⁶⁶ St. Augustine noted this or a similar contradiction in Pelagius's writings, in book On the Grace of Christ, ch. 37, when he says: That letter, certainly, namely the letter to Demetrias, I read, and it had persuaded me that he confessed this grace at issue, although in many places of that little work he seemed to contradict himself. And in ch. 31 of the same book he says: Whatever grace he thinks it to be, he says that it is given to Christians themselves according to their merits. And below: It is clear that he says grace is given according to merits, whatever it may be or whatever he means by it, although he does not express it openly. It is as if he said more plainly: whatever grace Pelagius proposes, he ultimately destroys it when he asserts that it is given according to our merits.

XXI. In reply to the fourth point, it is answered that Pelagius never denied that, for acts of the natural order, God, as author of nature, must exercise his influence together with us when we wish to act. He denied only the necessity of God's help by which God works so that we may work, because he thought the freedom of choice would be destroyed if a person could do nothing unless God moved him beforehand and acted beforehand.⁶⁷ For Pelagius knew very well that if God's help and concurrence were posterior in the order of nature to the determination of created free choice—in such a way, namely, that this causal proposition were true: “Because a person acts, God cooperates”—the freedom of that free choice would not be harmed. From the words of St. Jerome cited above, it is concluded only that Pelagius denied the necessity for our acts of the help by which God works in us and with us so that we may act. This is clearly gathered from the very context, especially the words cited in the sixth dictum: for the Pelagians were calumniating Jerome and Augustine because they said that all our good works must be referred to God as their first author and source, on whom they first and principally depend, and because they preached that a person can do nothing unless God completes his gifts in him. This is clear from those words of the Pelagians reported by St. Jerome: Why do you thrust yourself in again, so that I can do nothing unless you complete your gifts in me? By these words he was trying to remove that help of God from consideration by which God completes the operative power of created free choice, moving and applying it to the exercise of the act; this will be treated expressly in Disputation 18 and the four that follow. The words of St. Jerome in the same letter also indicate this, when he says: They place grace, namely, the Pelagians, in such a way that we do not rely on his help and are not guided by it in each act. And again: Do you think an injury is done to you and the freedom of choice destroyed if you always have recourse to God as author, depend on his will, and say, “My eyes are always toward the Lord, for he will draw my feet out of the snare”?⁶⁸ Hence you even dare to say with reckless tongue that each person is ruled by his own choice. If he is ruled by his own choice, where is God's help? If he does not need Christ as guide, how does Jeremiah write, “A person's way is not in himself, and a man's steps are directed by the Lord”?⁶⁹⁷⁰

From these points it is clear that Pelagius did not deny that the simultaneous concurrence of the First Cause is necessary for the things we do, but only denied the necessity of God's prior help for each of our acts, namely, God's direction and governance—the very thing the Church asks for when it says: Deign, Lord God, King of heaven and earth, to direct and sanctify, rule and govern today our hearts and bodies, our senses, words, and acts in your law and in the works of your commandments, so that here and forever, with your help, we may merit to be always safe and free. For he thought that free choice was injured if it were ruled and governed not by itself but by the Lord.

Hence many learned men, most deeply versed in the teaching of St. Augustine—including Gaspar Casalius of Coimbra, who attended the sacred Council of Trent, in book 1 of On the Fourfold Justice, ch. 36—explicitly admit that Pelagius never denied God's general influx. Casalius's words are these: Pelagius did not deny general influx. A little further below: Pelagius did indeed confess the grace of creation: among human beings, human nature, human will, and the general influx of God common to all agents. And a little later: Did he perhaps deny that general influx is necessary for human beings to act well?

This has not yet been learned, nor is it believed of him himself; for he could not have thought so unless he had first been foolish. How can a secondary cause act without the concurrence of the first cause?⁷¹ Even granting, but not conceding, that Pelagius did not admit God's general concurrence, there can nevertheless be no doubt that he admitted God's subsequent concurrence, or help, after the determination of the created will, as is clear from the passages of St. Augustine cited in n. 11 of this disputation. Hence, in the Enchiridion to Laurentius, ch. 32, Augustine clearly presupposes that the Pelagians thought that this was said for this reason: “It is not of him who wills or of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy”; because it comes from both, that is, from the human will and God's mercy, and so forth. It is as if one were to say: the human will alone does not suffice unless God's mercy is also present. And in the same place the holy Doctor argues that something more must be attributed to grace. This will be treated in Disputation 97, especially n. 6, where we shall examine St. Augustine's words more fully.

What grace the Semi-Pelagians admitted as necessary for salvation, and in what respect their view agreed with the Pelagian error or departed from it.

I. The common error of the Semi-Pelagians, as some more recent theologians have rightly observed, consists in this: although they acknowledged against Pelagius that God’s grace was necessary for performing works of holiness, meriting glory, and obtaining the fitting disposition for the remission of sin, they nevertheless reserved some beginning of salvation to free choice, so that a person’s own salvation would lie in his power. They therefore said that it was necessary for a person to begin by some good movement, which God would afterward advance and perfect. In this good movement they thus placed the first cause of salvation on our side, and said that it was the merit of every supernatural grace. What merit they meant will become clear below. They also asserted that faith, at least as regards its beginning, was not God’s gift but was in us from ourselves, and that on its account God granted the other gifts necessary for salvation. This is clear from the letters of Prosper and Hilary to St. Augustine and from Augustine himself, in On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance. In reply to Prosper’s and Hilary’s letters, he proves in detail, with the clearest testimonies of sacred Scripture, that not only perfect faith but even faith begun, and every beginning of it, comes from God and from the help of prevenient grace. But, to turn to particulars and explain how far the people of Marseilles went in professing grace, and what grace beyond that St. Augustine insisted must necessarily be acknowledged, it must be observed that the leader of the Semi-Pelagians was Faustus, bishop of Riez. Maxentius reports and refutes his error in his reply to Pope Hormisdas’s letter, where he declares Faustus’s books heretical and sharply reproves those who defend them as Catholic—especially a certain African bishop called Possessor.¹ In chapter Sancta Romana Ecclesia, Distinction 15, Pope Gelasius counts among the apocrypha the works of Faustus of Riez in Gaul. Hence Peter the Deacon, in Fulgentius’s On the Incarnation and Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, chapter 8 at the end, says: Having been instructed in the teaching of all these holy Fathers, we anathematize Pelagius and Celestius, and also Julian Edanensis and those who share his way of thinking; especially the books of Faustus, bishop of Gaul, who came from the monastery of Lérins, which were undoubtedly written against the doctrine of predestination. In these books, coming into conflict not only with the teaching of these holy Fathers (that is, Augustine and his disciples) but also with the Apostle’s own contrary assertion, he subordinates the help of grace to human labor.² Hence those who count Faustus among the Fathers are not to be heard, since he must be counted not among the Fathers but among the enemies of Christ’s grace. Faustus set out his view concerning the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice in two books On Free Choice, which he published and which are found in the Library of the Holy Fathers; anyone who wishes can read his view explained there at greater length.³

II.

Cassian also presents in his writings, especially throughout Conference 13, the view of these same Semi-Pelagians and sets out many of their statements. St. Prosper reports and refutes his teaching in the book he composed Against the Collator. There, with very many testimonies of Scripture, very firm and very penetrating arguments, and very elegant words, he shows how Cassian and the other remnants of the Pelagian heresy, while loudly proclaiming that they were far removed from Pelagius’s error, ultimately fell into it. Cassian acquired the name “Collator” from the Conferences of the Fathers that he wrote. We must therefore draw from the books of Faustus of Riez and Cassian what they and the Semi-Pelagians themselves thought, gather from the writings of Prosper and Maxentius the true sense in which their doctrine was condemned, and finally turn to the holy Father Augustine, who by divine inspiration rather than human effort penetrated, exposed, attacked, and overcame the errors of both Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, and labored greatly to extirpate this destructive heresy. Thus, writing to Innocent: It is not, then, he says, a single Pelagius—who may already have been corrected, and would that this were so—but so many others who argue noisily, dragging along weak and unlearned souls as though they had been defeated, while wearing down by their contentiousness those who are firm and steadfast in the faith, that everything everywhere is now filled with them.⁴ To proceed clearly and distinctly, we must first collect from Faustus’s books the statements in which he disclosed his mind; then we shall collect Cassian’s statements from his writings as well, so that at last it may become clear in what the Semi-Pelagians agreed among themselves and with Pelagius, and in what one differed from another, or even from their leader Pelagius.

Faustus’s error concerning the natural capacity of free choice and the necessity of grace is explained.

As Sixtus Senensis noted⁵, Faustus wrote books On Free Choice against the teaching of St. Augustine, with Augustine’s name suppressed;⁶ Peter the Deacon also teaches this clearly in the passage cited above. First, to appear far removed from Pelagius’s error, he rebuked that man’s blasphemous opinion that human nature alone suffices for attaining salvation: I believe, he says, that the freedom of choice by itself could not suffice without the support of grace, even before its privilege was violated by transgression. How, then, can it now suffice by itself, when its presumption is addressed with the words: “Without me you can do nothing”?⁷ And when the divine word is directed against its self-confidence: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain”?⁸ What is denied to pride without grace is granted to humility with grace.⁹ Hence Maxentius, observing Faustus’s craftiness in his reply to Hormisdas’s letter, says: For while shrewdly refuting the view of that same Pelagius and reproaching him, as it were, for having wholly denied Christ’s grace, and also refuting those who acknowledge with the Apostle that God’s grace is given to people without any preceding merits, Faustus himself, as though he were a most wise and prudent new apostle of a new perversity, attempts to teach that God’s grace is given according to the merit of faith and labor, so that God’s grace is no longer grace.¹⁰

IIII. Second, he says that not everything is to be attributed to grace, but something must be left to human effort. For he maintained that the gift of grace must be subordinated to human exertion and labor, and that it is granted by God to those who ask, seek, and desire. Faustus’s words are: Here, then, two errors contend with one another: one advocates following grace alone, the other labor alone, each straying from the path and measure of truth. They differ in kind but are alike in impiety; with different aims, they hiss with the spirit of one serpent. One—the preacher of grace alone—at first conceals its poison beneath the appearance of piety; the other—the advocate of labor—immediately reveals its swelling pride by its shameless arrogance. This profession of labor alone is detestable by its very name; that other is all the more to be feared beneath its religious guise.¹¹ Near the end of the same chapter he adds: Rightly did the divine word display the force of its authority, or reproof, against this presumptuous arrogance.¹² “No one,” he says, “comes to me unless the Father draws him.”¹³ And again: “It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.”¹⁴ Whoever has established his salvation in his own will and power with Pelagius will rightly judge this to have been said of himself. But it need not be directed against someone who does not presume on labor alone, but recognizes that he must implore God’s daily mercy and abiding grace for his efforts, and beseeches the Lord’s help with constant prayer. In chapters 4 and 5 he attacks those who maintain that everything, they say, belongs to grace alone; while he himself admits that grace is necessary for all, but only so that we judge that the exertion of human diligence must in every way be joined to it. He teaches the same in chapters 6 and 10. These words show that Faustus thought the efforts of nature precede prevenient grace, and that by them free choice implores, asks, and desires God’s continual grace. This is also clear from canon 6 of the Council of Orange, where this error of Faustus and other Semi-Pelagians is condemned: If anyone says that divine mercy is bestowed on us when we believe, will, desire, and so forth, and knock, without the grace of God—but does not say that mercy is bestowed so that we may believe, will, or be able to do all these things as we ought—or subordinates the help of grace to human humility or obedience, and does not confess that it is the gift of grace itself that we are obedient and humble, he resists the Apostle who says, ‘What do you have that you did not receive?’ and, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’¹⁵

V. Third, he says that grace and free choice are joined together in matters pertaining to salvation, and that grace is a companion, not a forerunner, of human merits.¹⁶ Faustus says this in the cited Book 1, chapter 5, where, explaining Romans 4, If Abraham was justified by works, he has glory, but not before God, and 1 Corinthians 3, Each will receive his own reward according to his labor, he says: According to the Catholic rule, works of the Law that are done according to the letter are set aside, while those things are affirmed that are to be done after grace, with grace accompanying. By these words he admits grace as a companion; and in chapter 18 he admits cooperating grace. But Faustus explains this statement specifically in chapter 17 of the same book, in these words: And thus these two are joined together: the power of the one who draws and the disposition of the one who obeys. It is as when a sick man tries to rise, but his strength does not follow his mind, and so he begs another to extend a hand. The will cries out, for weakness knows not how to lift itself by itself. Thus the Lord invites the willing, draws the desiring, and raises the one who strives. In Book 2, chapter 4, explaining 2 Timothy 2¹⁷, The laboring farmer ought to receive some of the fruits; See, he says, how divine and human things are joined in a wondrous exchange: labor belongs to obedience, but the fruit of labor belongs to grace. Hence Maxentius, reporting Faustus’s error in his reply to Pope Hormisdas’s letter, says: Since no one obeys or labors unless willing, and no one is willing unless he knows what it is fitting for him to do, Faustus, after knowledge and will—or obedience—joins the help of grace to human labor, so that grace and human labor together may complete the remaining works. He asserts that the capacity for this labor is naturally present in everyone, not through that same grace; and he claims that he can defend this view.¹⁸ St. Prosper also attributes this third statement to the remnants of the Pelagian heresy when, recalling them in his letter to Augustine, he says: They do not consider that they subject the grace of God—which they wish to be the companion, not the forerunner, of human merits—to those very acts of will which, according to their fantasy, they do not deny were preceded by grace. To understand this statement, it should be observed that when Faustus says grace is the companion, not the forerunner, of human merits, he is plainly speaking of efficacious grace, not of grace that arouses and enlightens. For he admits that the latter precedes meritorious work and other works of piety, as will be clear from the next statement.¹⁹ I say “works of piety,” because, like the other Semi-Pelagians, he attributed faith to the powers of nature, as is clear from Augustine’s On the Predestination of the Saints and from what we shall add in statement 12: they acknowledged that, by the merit of this faith, free choice obtained the prior helps of grace. What merit they meant will be explained below.

VI. Fourth, he says that prevenient grace is required for meritorious works leading to eternal life and for human salvation. St. Augustine calls it “help without which the thing is not done” in On Correction and Grace, chapter 12. This is clear: in the cited Book 1, chapter 1, Faustus says: I believe that freedom of choice by itself could not suffice without the support of grace, even before its privilege was violated by transgression. How can it now suffice by itself, when its arrogance is addressed with the words, “Without me you can do nothing,”²⁰ and the divine word is directed against its presumption: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain”?²¹ What is denied to pride without grace is granted to humility with grace. And in chapter 11 he adds: Whoever presumes to claim for himself either the beginning or the end of a work is rightly told: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.”²² In chapter 14, throughout, he teaches the same, saying among other things: The Prophet asserts the capacity of one’s own will when he says of himself, “I inclined my heart to do your ordinances”;²³ yet he understands that nothing is to be presumed from his own powers alone, since he cries out to God, “Incline,” he says, “my heart to your testimonies, and not to covetousness.”²⁴ That he places this grace in the enlightenment of the intellect and the stirring of the will will become clear in the fifth statement. Hence St. Augustine, speaking of the Semi-Pelagians and attributing this fourth statement to them, says: These brothers of ours, for whom your pious Charity is concerned, have come to believe with the Church of Christ that the human race is born liable to the sin of the first man, and that no one is freed from this evil except through the justice of the second man. They have also come to acknowledge that human wills are preceded by the grace of God, and to agree that no one is sufficient of himself for any good work, whether to begin it or to complete it. These positions, then, which they have reached and retained, distinguish them greatly from the error of the Pelagians.²⁵ St. Prosper also noted this in his letter to Augustine, saying: Some of them, however, depart so little from the paths of the Pelagians that, although compelled to acknowledge the grace of Christ, which precedes all human merits, lest it be called grace in vain if it is rendered for merits, etc.²⁶ These words make it quite clear that the Semi-Pelagians admitted some prevenient grace as necessary not only for completing good works but also for beginning them. It is true that they posited no grace as necessary for faith, since they thought faith was not God’s gift but was in us from ourselves, as will become clear below:

VII. Fifth, he says that the grace which precedes human wills is that by which the intellect is enlightened by God and the will is stirred; and on account of this enlightenment he admits that everything must be attributed to grace. But because, he says, everything must be referred to the author of grace, we read: He who teaches man knowledge; or, The Lord enlightens the blind; and again, Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death; and, Blessed is the man whom you instruct, Lord, and whom you teach from your law. He also says: What is it to draw, if not to preach, to stir by the consolations of Scripture²⁷, to deter by rebukes, to set before us what is to be desired, to threaten what is to be feared, to warn of judgment, and to promise a reward? Hear the Lord drawing not with harsh bonds but with hands and inviting with the arms of love, as the Prophet says: ‘I drew them with the cords of charity’; and, ‘We run after you, drawn by the fragrance of your perfumes.’²⁸ Therefore he says, ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you,’²⁹ so that no one can excuse himself as excluded when he is proved to have been invited.³⁰ Thus in chapter 11 of that same first book he teaches that both the beginning and the end of a good work are to be attributed to God, because he himself begins it by enlightening the intellect and stirring the will. Explaining Psalm 126, Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, he says: Yet even while the servant must labor through all this, even to enduring every evil and losing his life, the result of his labor must always be referred to the Lord. Whoever presumes to claim for himself either the beginning or the end of a work is rightly told: ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.’³¹ In Book 2, chapter 6, explaining Romans 9, Not of works, but of him who calls, he says: When you hear ‘of him who calls,’ understand one who invites, not one who compels: that is, one who moves efficaciously. For he thought this could not happen without coercing the will. Since he had said above that grace and free choice, joined together, complete our salvation, lest anyone think this teaching prejudices divine grace, he adds the following statement.

VIII. The sixth statement is that we must assign the first place to grace alone in the work of our salvation. He says this in Book 1, chapter 6, where, explaining 1 Corinthians 15, By the grace of God I am what I am, etc. he says: In pious submission I have assigned the first place to grace alone; the teacher of obedience has assigned all the intermediate steps to labor. And in chapter 9 he says: In saying these things, we do not make labor equal to grace, but place grace altogether above it, beyond comparison. Hence Maxentius: But the grace, he says, to which Faustus assigns first place here is not that grace which comes through the Holy Spirit, so that we give assent and become obedient when the word of God thunders outwardly. Rather, he says it is the preaching of the divine words: that is, it belongs to grace that the divine words are preached to us, but it belongs to us to assent to that preaching.³²

IX. Seventh, he says that God waits for our will, for us to wish to be cleansed and to run. In the end of Book 1, chapter 7, Faith, he says, he expects from little ones; from those established in the faith he also requires works. And in chapter 10 If, he says, the will of the one who runs is not to be awaited, why then is it said, ‘I therefore run in such a way, not as into uncertainty’?³³ And again, ‘I have finished the race, I have kept the faith’?³⁴ In chapter 11: Just as the devotion of unwearied service is to be expected from a person, so the perfection of completed work is to be credited to the Lord. In chapter 19 he adds: Moreover, by reason of justice he does not accomplish the result by himself, because he waits for the will of the one who is to be cleansed. And in Book 2, On Free Choice, chapter 10: You impose the burden of condemnation on a person against his will, when he shows a remedy of satisfaction and expects diligent service from him.³⁵ In what sense Faustus understood God to await our will for us to wish to be cleansed will appear in Disputation 95.

X. Eighth, he admits that a companion grace is necessary for salvation, describing it under various names: sometimes he calls it cooperating grace, sometimes the help of grace. Thus in Book 1, On Free Choice, chapter 5, he says: According to the Catholic rule, works of the Law that are done according to the letter are set aside, while those things are affirmed that are to be done after grace, with grace accompanying. In chapter 11 he says: God promised the heavenly kingdom to those who keep the divine commandments through the duties of laborious service, with cooperating grace. In chapter 13: For when a person has begun through grace to be a vessel of election and honor, he must be vigilant so that the honor he has received may be preserved by divine cooperation. A little farther down: And whenever a person, with grace helping, turns toward better things after rejecting worse ones, each time he is made a vessel of honor from a vessel of dishonor. Just before that he had said: Let us show that it is possible to pass from a vessel of dishonor to a vessel of honor through God’s help and one’s own effort. At the end of Book 2, chapter 4, he concludes: But you, do not begrudge divine goodness if I have performed a work well with his help, or even if I have lost what I received.³⁶ And in chapter 10, explaining Romans 9, not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, etc. Here, he says, he plainly marks out and reproves the person who thinks he is sufficient for himself alone, without the hand of one who helps. Near the end he says: Rather, with cooperating help,³⁷ let him also be worthy through his own work, and blessed with a good conscience.

XI. Ninth, he says that it belongs to God that we are called, but to a person that he obeys, seeks, asks, and knocks. Explaining Hebrews 11, He is the rewarder of those who seek him; How well, he says, he has joined the Lord’s office and the servant’s, saying, ‘He is the rewarder of those who seek him.’ For just as the giving of reward belongs to God, so the devotion of seeking belongs to a person.³⁸ Near the end of chapter 10 he says: Those who pray and keep watch are aided by the kindness of mercy, which is bestowed on those who knock more on account of devotion than predestination. He also says: For just as it is his own fault that he avoids the eyes of a merciful Father, so it is his own devotion that, deliberating and rising through the good implanted within him, he returns to his father’s embrace.³⁹ Elsewhere he teaches that seeds of good will are implanted in a person, proving it from the words, If you are willing, the commandments will preserve you.⁴⁰⁴¹ In chapter 16 he says: At whatever time someone has sought God, he has found him; and whoever seems not to have found him did not seek him. In chapter 17 he adds: Thus the Lord invites the willing, draws the desiring, and raises the one who strives. And so, just as being drawn is shown to belong to grace, following is shown to belong to obedience. He plainly intends that our following should belong only to us, not to divine grace except insofar as grace has invited us. A little later he says: But the one whom you see drawing also requires in every way that the commandments be kept, so that through a certain handle of the will the one who is called may be grasped and be able to be drawn. If you think he draws the unwilling, you impose the burden of injustice on heavenly justice. In chapter 19: Just as it belongs to God to summon and exhort, so it has been reserved to human obedience to follow.⁴² In Book 2, chapter 28, explaining Mark 10, What do you want me to do for you? and John 5, Do you want to be made well?, he says: You see that the gift of salvation is granted only after the desire of the will is first questioned. Even when someone comes to baptism, the will of the person approaching is first examined, so that the grace of the one who regenerates may follow. And in the case of Cornelius the Centurion, because his will preceded grace, grace also came before regeneration.⁴³ A little later: It belongs to God’s goodness that a person is called; it belongs to his own will that he promptly obeys. Explaining Matthew 7, Seek, and you will find, in chapter 9, he says: When the human mind opens its eyes in order to see, the light it seeks at once presents itself to the one who desires it. Explaining Psalm 69, O God, come to my aid, in chapter 10, he says: The very word ‘aid’ requires the service of one who labors. Thus ‘aid’ indicates two things: one who works and one who cooperates; one who asks and one who promises; one who knocks and one who opens; one who seeks and one who rewards. This alone is ours: since we are not capable on account of our weakness, let us at least find favor through our persistence in seeking and knocking. A little later: Unless the devotion of obedience has come first, the offering of grace becomes worthless; and it is a source of shame to the one who rewards if an idle person is honored and an ungrateful one rewarded.

XII. Tenth, he says that a person can believe by the capacity of nature, so that faith is in us and from ourselves, while its perfection comes from God. Explaining The elder shall serve the younger; In the elder, he says, the arrogance of the Jews is rejected; in the younger, the faith of the Gentiles is chosen.⁴⁴ In chapter 7, explaining Ephesians 2, You have been saved by grace through faith, he says: The time of grace, in which we were redeemed, did not wait for human merits; it did not seek works at all. God was content with the devotion of our faith alone, according to the Apostle’s words: ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’⁴⁵ At the end of the same chapter Faith, he says, he expects from little ones; from those established in the faith he also requires works, but in such a way that he increases the disposition to believe in those who are making progress and stands by those who labor as their daily helper. He attributes this same completion of virtue to grace in Book 1, chapter 11, saying: Just as the devotion of unwearied service is to be expected from a person, so the perfection of completed work is to be credited to God. At the end of Book 2, chapter 6: You see that the good of believing is not a new privilege but an old one: from the very beginnings of the world’s formation the human mind was endowed by its supreme creator with faith as well as understanding and reason. In chapter 8 he says: Why is unbelief reproached, unless because the capacity to believe was readily available? The principle of free choice makes the believer worthy of reward and the unbeliever worthy of condemnation. In his reply to Hormisdas’s letter, Maxentius attributes this error to Faustus and adduces Faustus’s words from Book 1, chapter 15. There Faustus argues against those who say that the gift of believing is not general but particular, and speaks as follows: But you say, he says, that it is not given to everyone, that the capacity to believe is a personal gift, and that only those to whom God has specially given the gift of believing have the power to believe. That is not so. The Lord does not yet⁴⁶ require it even of unbelievers; you demonstrate that it has been implanted in everyone. Who lacks the capacity to believe even by the law of nature, since even demons believe and tremble?⁴⁷ By these words Faustus proves that faith is in us and from us, since demons believe and tremble without any help of grace whatsoever. But it is clear that this proof is empty, because, as St. Thomas teaches, the faith of demons is not praiseworthy faith but is compelled by the evidence of signs; nor does it rest on divine revelation as the formal reason for believing through a pious disposition of the will.⁴⁸ Hence it is not true faith, as Christian faith is, whose beginning, whatever it may be, must be attributed to divine grace, as will become clear in Disputation 49.

XIII. Eleventh, he posits certain seeds of good will in nature, saying: Among these matters, we must diligently ask the heretics whether a person cannot do good, or is unwilling to do so, when the seeds of good will have been implanted in a person. He clearly assigns this, saying: ‘If you are willing to keep the commandments, they will preserve you.’⁴⁹⁵⁰ A little later: We therefore see that the consent of the human mind can pass both toward the good and toward the contrary. He also says: Just as he gave every person a hand, an eye, and a step, so likewise he granted every person a will, so that he might turn it in either direction. Justice, then, is not a personal gift in a person but God’s general and public gift, the way to attain salvation.⁵¹ Nevertheless, he teaches that these seeds of good will, which he places in nature, are brought to perfection and completion through God’s grace, as is clear from the passages cited in the preceding statement.

XIIII. Twelfth, he says that God grants his grace and mercy to one who does what lies within him by the powers of nature—believing, asking, seeking, knocking, and obeying the divine commandments. This is clearly gathered from what he says in Book 1, chapter 15. Explaining Romans 9, I will have mercy on whom I will, he says: This saying is to be understood in this way: ‘I will have mercy on whom I will,’ that is, on the one whom I recognize as just, whose ready faith I see, whom I perceive obeying my commandments, and whom I have found to do my will. In chapter 16: At whatever time someone has sought God, he has found him; and whoever seems not to have found him did not seek him. In Book 2, chapter 8, he says: In the case of Cornelius the Centurion, because his will preceded grace, grace thus also preceded regeneration.⁵² In chapter 19, explaining Matthew 7, Seek, and you will find, he says: When the human mind has opened its eyes to see, the light it seeks at once presents itself to the one who desires it.

XV. He moderates this assertion, however, by saying that human labor and good works which precede the helps of grace do not merit that same grace. Thus in Book 1, chapter 17, he says: But before all else, let us flee the arrogance of labor and claim nothing for ourselves on the score of its merits, lest we seem, with deadly insistence⁵³ and presumption, to imitate the Pharisee. For although he spoke the truth without hesitation when he prayed, ‘I fast twice a week; I give tithes of everything I possess,’⁵⁴ he emptied⁵⁵ the truth of its force because he mixed vanity with truth. It is therefore not the activity but the haughtiness of heart that must be avoided.⁵⁶⁵⁷ Cassian applies the same qualification, as will become clear below, numbers 26 and 28.

XVI. Thirteenth, he says that God predestined or reprobated no one before foreknowledge of the good or evil use of created free choice; otherwise a fatal necessity would be introduced, freedom of choice removed, and God would be unjust. Faustus remains constant in this assertion. He establishes it and often repeats it as the chief foundation of his view. For in Book 1, On Grace and the Choice of the Human Mind, chapter 4 at the end, he says: Just as an enemy might suddenly appear under the displayed guise of a pretended citizen, or as the deceitful cunning of an enemy might transform itself into an angel of light, so beneath the appearance of piety the evil of paganism—and within the name of grace a hidden fatal decree—lay concealed. If, then, as they claim, one person has been assigned to life and another to destruction, then, as one of the saints said, we are born not to be judged but already judged. Nor can any fairness of judgment stand according to this view. For if God gave nothing to his servant, what does he demand from the servant? In chapter 9: Nor does predestination draw in one direction when the choice of either side is offered. In chapter 10, explaining Then he will repay each according to his works,⁵⁸ he says: Observe that when he says ‘according to his works,’ the giver of grace places human salvation not in the predestination of the maker but in the activity of the servant. In chapter 11 he adds: When the destroyer of free choice declares that everything has been established and defined by predestination in either direction, he also empties even the highest remedies of repentance through a conception of reckless impiety. At the end of chapter 10, explaining For God is able to establish him,⁵⁹⁶⁰ he says: He plainly shows that a person’s condition can change in different directions, not by God’s determination but by the freedom of choice. In chapter 13, arguing against his own view from I will have mercy on whom I will,⁶¹ from which the predestination or predetermination just mentioned is inferred, he says that this passage is to be understood as: I will have mercy on whom I will, that is, on the one whom I recognize as just. By these words he plainly presupposes foreknowledge of the good use of free choice before the decree by which God determines to save a person. In chapter 16 he adds: If, as impious blasphemy asserts in its madness, some seem to have been ordained to death and others predestined to life, Christ had no reason to come, and had no necessity to die of the kind his goodness found. The new remedy, then, could accomplish nothing if an ancient decree had fixed human affairs before the ages. In Book 2, chapter 2 at the beginning, he says: They understand God’s foreknowledge and predestination wrongly when they assert that the cause of human actions arises from them. A little later: But you turn back and say, ‘Foreknowledge and predestination have fixed and stirred the causes of human actions and merits.’ That is not so; rather, the order of foreknowledge is derived from the origin of the human will. A few lines later: But you still say that human works and wills begin at the nod and impulse of heavenly foreknowledge. That is not so. Rather, understand this: God’s foreknowledge takes its beginning from the material of human actions. What God must determine and ordain about us with respect to the future consists in a person’s progress and failure. In chapter 3, after many words in which he teaches that foreknowledge of future consent precedes predestination, he concludes: And so, unless foreknowledge has first examined the matter, predestination decides nothing. In chapter 6, explaining So that God’s purpose according to election might stand—not from works but from him who calls, etc.⁶², he calls the opinion of those who say that God elects one person and reprobates another in such a way that there is no consideration of labor or devotion between two lost people a pagan impiety. A little later, speaking of the difference between the elect and the reprobate, he says: Yet amid this diversity of classes, many are chosen from among the reprobate Jews, and many are reprobated from among the elect Gentiles, so that you may understand that the just judge observes merits, not decrees, in either people.

XVII. But you say: “Although they had done nothing good or evil, they were already assigned to predetermined positions.” What is surprising, if he marked out the end of those whose actions he foresaw? Thus, just as it was clear that they had determined the course of their life according to their own choice, so they are foreknown by God’s power and ordained by his justice. All this is foretold about them, not decreed.⁶³ At the end of chapter 7 of the same book he concludes: Therefore the general judgment excludes the special decree you assert. Hence St. Prosper attributes this opinion to the Semi-Pelagians in his letter to Augustine, saying: For this is their definition and profession: Every person sinned when Adam sinned, and no one is saved by his own works but by the grace of God in rebirth. Yet the reconciliation offered in the sacrament of the Blood of Christ is set before all people without exception, so that whoever wishes to approach faith and baptism may be saved. God knew before the foundation of the world who would believe and who would remain in that faith in which, by God’s grace, they would thereafter be helped⁶⁴; he predestined to his kingdom those whom he foresaw would, though called freely, prove worthy of election and depart this life with a good end. A little later: Accordingly, all diligence is removed and the virtues are abolished, if God’s decree precedes human wills, and under the name of predestination a kind of fatal necessity is introduced, or the Lord is called the creator of different natures, if no one can be other than he was made to be.

Cassian’s error concerning the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice is brought to light.

XVIII. BEFORE we set out Cassian’s statements, we must note that in Conference 13 of Abbot Cheremon he disclosed that same Abbot’s mind concerning grace and free choice. Since Cassian does not reject Cheremon’s view, he seems to follow it; for this reason St. Prosper attacks him vigorously in the book he composed Against the Collator and proves with the clearest arguments, drawn from sacred Scripture and Augustine’s writings, that he does not depart from the paths of the Pelagians. Hence in Distinction 15, chapter Sancta Romana, Pope Gelasius counts among the apocrypha John Cassian’s book called The Shepherd. The Louvain Doctors, who are deeply learned in Augustine’s teaching, also appended certain notes and a censure of various statements of Cassian at the end of the Antwerp edition of 1578.

Cassian’s first statement, then, is that a person in fallen nature has a natural judgment for recognizing good and evil, and a natural capacity to embrace either one. His words are: One must not believe that God made a person such that he would never wish or be able to do good. Otherwise he did not grant him free choice, if he granted him the will and ability to do evil alone, but did not grant him by himself either to will or to be able to do good.⁶⁵ A little later he proves that the human race did not lose knowledge of the good after Adam’s transgression, citing Romans 2: For when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, etc. He says: Therefore, after his transgression Adam conceived a knowledge of evil which he had not had, but he did not lose the knowledge of the good which he had received. Finally, the Apostle’s sentence most clearly shows that the human race did not lose knowledge of the good after the transgression: ‘For when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires.’⁶⁶ A little farther down he adds: Finally, to show that the capacity exists in them, rebuking the Pharisees: Why, he says, do you not also judge for yourselves what is right?⁶⁷ He would certainly not have said this to them unless he knew that by natural judgment they could discern what is just. Hence we must be careful not to refer all the merits of the saints to God in such a way that we attribute to human nature nothing except what is evil and perverse. A few lines later he says: Free choice always remains in a person, by which he can either neglect or love the grace of God.

XIX. Second, he says that a person naturally has certain seeds of virtue, which nevertheless cannot reach perfection without grace: There can therefore, he says, be no doubt that seeds of virtue are naturally present in every soul, implanted by the Creator’s kindness; but unless these are stirred by God’s help, they cannot reach the increase that brings perfection, because, according to the Apostle, ‘Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.’⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰ And in chapter 8: When God has seen in us the beginning of a good will, he immediately enlightens, strengthens, and urges it toward salvation, granting increase to that which he himself either planted or saw emerge through our effort.

XX. Third, he says that a person can have charity through the sole capacity of free choice. This assertion is gathered from what he says in Conference 13, chapter 14, explaining Deuteronomy 13, The Lord your God is testing you, so that it may be made clear whether you love him with all your heart and all your soul, or not.⁷¹ He says: But the Lord’s justice would not have permitted them to be tested unless he knew that an equal power of resistance was present in them, by which they could be judged guilty or worthy of praise with equitable judgment on either score. The same is gathered from chapter 10, where he admits that seeds of virtue are naturally present in every soul, among which he also includes charity, since he speaks absolutely of virtues. Hence St. Prosper attributes this statement to Cassian, saying: According to him, free choice has such integrity or capacity that it possesses charity—the foremost of all virtues—not as a gift from God but from the will alone.⁷² This will be treated in Disputation 51.

XXI. Fourth, he says that a person in fallen nature has sufficient strength to resist even very severe temptations and overcome every difficulty. He says this in Conference 13, chapter 14, where, speaking of Job’s temptations, which were extremely severe, he says: But since after the conflict the slanderous enemy does not dare to repeat any such complaint, he confesses that he was overcome not by God’s strength but by Job’s. Although we must believe that God’s grace was not wholly absent from him—for it granted the tempter as much power to tempt as it knew Job had strength to resist—it did not protect him from the enemy’s attack in such a way as to leave no room for human virtue.⁷³ A few lines later: Why, then, would it be necessary for those to be tempted whom the Lord knows to be so weak and fragile that they cannot resist the tempter by their own virtue? The Lord’s justice would certainly not have permitted them to be tempted unless he knew that an equal power of resistance was present in them, by which they could be judged guilty or worthy of praise with equitable judgment on either score. In Conference 7, chapter 7, when Germanus says, Resisting them, (namely, the dreadful temptations of adversaries) we would believe impossible, especially for this fragile flesh, unless we were encouraged to this belief by your statements, as by heavenly oracles: Cassian replies in chapter 8 of the same conference: Accordingly, just as there is in them that abundance of instigation, so too the power of resisting or the freedom to yield has been granted to us. Hence, in chapter 14 he explains God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tempted beyond what you are able as referring to the power to resist temptations by the capacity of nature. He says: God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to endure it.⁷⁴ When he says, ‘Let whoever stands see that he does not fall,’⁷⁵ he makes the freedom of choice vigilant; he knew that, once grace had been received, it could either stand through willing effort or fall through negligence. A little later: God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tempted beyond what you are able—he certainly does not pray that the Lord may never permit them to be tempted, but they will be tempted only up to what they are able to endure. The former shows the capacity of human choice; the latter shows the grace of the Godhead in moderating the endurance of temptations.

XXI.⁷⁶ Fifth, he says that God awaits our efforts and sometimes precedes us.⁷⁷ Cassian sets out the first part of this statement in so many words in Conference 13, chapter 13, where he says: Thus the grace of God always cooperates with our free choice toward the good and helps, protects, and defends it in all things, so that at times it even demands or awaits from it certain efforts of good will, lest he seem to bestow his gifts on one wholly asleep or dissolved in idle indolence, as though looking for occasions when, after rousing human sluggishness from its torpor, the generosity of his munificence might not appear unreasonable. And in chapter 12 he says: He waits for us, as it is said through the Prophet Isaiah: ‘Therefore the Lord waits, that he may have mercy on us.’⁷⁸

As for God sometimes preceding us, he affirms this in the same chapter 12, saying: The mercy of the Lord therefore precedes a person’s will, of which it is said, ‘My God, his mercy will precede me.’⁷⁹ And again, when the Lord withdraws and in a certain way holds back beneficially in order to test our choice, our will precedes him, as it is said, ‘My prayer will precede you in the morning.’⁸⁰ In chapter 17 he teaches that God sometimes incites the course of certain willing and thirsting people to greater fervor, but sometimes compels even the unwilling and resistant. He repeats the same in chapter 18, where he says: Some he receives when willing and running, but others, unwilling and resisting, he drags along and compels to a good will.

XXIII. Sixth, he says that not everything is to be attributed to grace in such a way that no praise or effort is left to free choice. For he says: It would be a matter of no praise or merit if Christ accomplished in someone what he himself had bestowed; otherwise he would have said, ‘I did not give so great a faith in Israel.’⁸¹ St. Prosper also attributes this assertion to Cassian, saying: He holds an impious view who thinks the person to whom God has given nothing is more blessed than the person to whom he has given everything.⁸² This will be treated in Disputation 63, no. 6; Disputation 97, no. 7; and Disputation 100.

XXIIII. Seventh, he says that a person can by natural capacity seek a physician and desire health: For, he says, a person does not enjoy health simply by willing it, nor is he freed from the disease of illness at the wish of his own choice. What does it profit him to have desired the grace of health, unless the Lord, who grants the use of life itself, also imparts the strength of well-being?⁸³ St. Prosper attacks these words, saying: You therefore teach that a person cannot obtain health by himself,⁸⁴ but that he has from himself the desire for health and comes to the physician solely of his own will; you do not say that it is also the physician’s doing that he comes. This statement will be attacked in Disputation 55.

XXV. Eighth, he says that grace is given to a person who strives by natural powers to do what lies within him, and that by this grace God directs the good efforts of nature, strengthens them, and stirs the will toward salvation. But lest he seem to agree with Pelagius, he qualifies this assertion by saying that such efforts are not meritorious of grace and are not always necessary. He affirms that grace is given to a person striving by the powers of nature in Conference 13, chapter 8, where he says: When God sees in us a certain beginning of good will, he immediately enlightens, strengthens, and urges it toward salvation, granting increase to that which he himself either planted or saw emerge through our effort. And in chapter 11: For when God sees that we are turning our will toward good, he comes to meet us, directs us, and strengthens us; at the sound of your cry, as soon as he hears it, he will answer you.⁸⁵

XXVI. He asserts that those efforts are not meritorious of grace in chapter 16 of the same Conference, immediately at the beginning, saying: Let no one suppose that we have said these things to establish that the sum of salvation lies under the control of our faith, according to the profane opinion of certain people who, assigning everything to free choice, determine that God’s grace is dispensed according to each person’s merit. And in chapter 13, after saying that God sometimes demands or awaits certain efforts of good will, he adds: Nevertheless, the grace of God always remains free, since with immeasurable generosity he bestows so great a glory of immortality and so great gifts of eternal blessedness in return for certain small and meager efforts. A little later: However strenuously human frailty may have labored, it cannot be equal to the reward to come; nor does it so diminish divine grace by its labors that grace does not always remain free.

XXVII. He affirms that those efforts are not always necessary in the cited chapter 13, saying: And thus the grace of God always cooperates with our free choice toward the good and in all things helps, protects, and defends it, so that at times it even demands or awaits from it certain efforts of good will. “At times,” he says, not always. And in chapter 17: By these examples that we have brought forward from the Gospel records, we can most clearly observe that God provides for the salvation of the human race in diverse and countless ways and by inscrutable paths: sometimes he invites the course of certain willing and thirsting people to greater fervor, but sometimes he compels even the unwilling and resistant. At one time he helps fulfill what he sees we have rightly desired; at another he also inspires the beginnings of a holy desire, or grants the beginning of a good work or perseverance. By saying, sometimes he invites the course of certain willing and thirsting people to greater fervor, but sometimes he compels the unwilling, he sufficiently indicates that prior efforts of good will are not always necessary for a person to receive the help of grace.

XXVIII Ninth, he says that prevenient grace depends on the works of nature and that this causal relation is real: because a person offers the beginning of good will, God has mercy on him. This is clear from Conference 13, chapter 1, at the beginning, where he says: These things are thus, in a certain way, mixed and confused without distinction, so that there is much debate among many people over which depends on which—that is, whether God has mercy on us because we have offered the beginning of good will, or whether, because God has mercy, we obtain the beginning of good will. For many, believing each of these points and asserting them all the more strongly, have become entangled in errors that contradict one another. Throughout that same Conference he teaches that at times God has mercy on us because we offer the beginning of good will, and at other times we obtain the beginning of good will because God has mercy. He plainly indicates that the help of prevenient grace is given on account of that good use of our will. The same may be gathered from the same Conference, chapter 9, where he understands the Apostle’s words God will repay each according to his works⁸⁶ as referring to works of nature that precede grace. Hence St. Prosper attributes this assertion to Cassian, saying: How do you fail to notice that you fall into that condemned opinion, and whether you wish it or not are proved to say that God’s grace is given according to our merits, when you assert that some good work must first come from people themselves, on account of which they obtain grace?⁸⁷ Cassian qualifies this statement, as he does the preceding one, by saying that grace is not given because those works are merits, but as though they were merely an occasion. This is clear from Book 12 of the Institutes, chapter 14, where he says: For he is ready, (that is, God) to bestow all these things, when only the occasion of good will has been offered to him by us. By these words he excludes from the works of nature every merit, both condign and congruous, since he says that those works are only an occasion upon which God grants the prior helps of prevenient grace. And in the same chapter he expressly excludes condign merit, for among other things he says: For we say, according to the Savior’s saying, that it is indeed given to those who ask, opened to those who knock, and found by those who seek; but our asking, knocking, and seeking are not condign, unless God’s mercy grants what we ask. Hilary, in his letter to Augustine, seems to have understood the error of the Semi-Pelagians in this sense, when he reports their assertion: Nor is grace denied if such a will is said to precede it, one that merely seeks the physician but is not yet itself capable of anything. The Council of Orange speaks in the same sense in canon 6: If anyone says that mercy is divinely bestowed on us when we believe, will, desire, and knock without God’s grace. “Mercy,” it says, for the people of Marseilles acknowledged that the helps of prevenient assisting grace are given from mercy, rather than from a debt of justice, to those who ask, seek, and knock through the capacity of nature, although God bestowed them on the occasion of these efforts of nature.

Some more recent theologians, among those who deny that God by actual assisting grace premoves, applies, or efficaciously predetermines the created will to consent, acknowledge that this was the same sense held by the Semi-Pelagians. They confirm it by the authority of the holy Fathers, especially Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter 2, who says: See whether anything is being done now except that grace is given in some way according to our merits, and so grace is no longer grace. They emphasize the phrase “in some way,” since it extends merit to every possible kind of merit.

XXIX. Finally, he says that God’s predestination is general with respect to everyone and not gratuitous with respect to some. This is clear from Conference 13, chapter 7, where he says: When its kindness has seen even the smallest spark of good will shine out—or one that it itself has struck from the hard flint of our heart—it cherishes and rekindles it; strengthening it with its inspiration, it wills all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.⁸⁸ A little later: For if he does not will that one of the little ones should perish, how can he, without grave sacrilege, be thought to will not that all universally, but only some, be saved for the sake of all? Other matters relating to Cassian’s errors will be discussed below in the particular controversies. For now, this general account of the error of the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians is enough. From it anyone can easily gather how the Semi-Pelagians differ from the Pelagians or agree with them. This one point must be noted at the close of this disputation: Faustus and Cassian, like Pelagius as was said above, admitted prevenient grace of whatever sort or kind, yet in practice denied it, since they asserted that it is given to us according to the merit of faith. Hence Maxentius, speaking against Faustus, who had promised in his book to prove against Pelagius that grace is not given according to our merits, says: But afterward, forgetting his promise, he is shown to empty grace altogether and more fully.

What the Manichaeans of old, and the Lutherans and Calvinists of our day, thought about the necessity of grace and the natural powers of our free choice.

I. To explain this difficulty, and to keep Catholic doctrine from being confused with the error of the Manichaeans, Lutherans, or Calvinists, but to make clear the dogma for which these heretics were condemned by the holy Council of Trent, we must observe that, as St. Thomas noted, many heretics, while wishing to avoid certain errors, fell into contrary errors.¹ Thus Arius, while wishing to avoid Sabellius’s error of confusing the persons of the Holy Trinity, fell into the contrary error of dividing the divine essence. Similarly Eutyches, while wishing to avoid Nestorius’s error of dividing the person of God and man in Christ, established the contrary error, confessing that there was one nature of God and man. And when some wish to avoid Origen’s error—that all punishments after death are purgatorial—they fall into the contrary error of saying that no punishment after death is purgatorial. In like manner the Pelagians, to persuade simple people of their destructive dogmas, pretended to depart from the error of the Manichaeans, as if it were enough for a Catholic to attack one ancient heresy without also taking care to avoid every other extreme and to cling to Catholic truth, which lies in the middle. So, too, the Lutherans and Calvinists, wishing to depart from Pelagius’s heresy—that grace is given according to our merits and that a person can perform works of piety by the natural power of free choice—denied, with the Manichaeans, the freedom of that created choice and consequently removed all merit, proclaiming that a person can do nothing freely and that free choice is an empty name, a title without substance. The Council of Sens, held against Luther, also noted this in these words: Luther fell into the error of the Manichaeans by avoiding Pelagius too anxiously and scrupulously. For, fearing to exalt free choice too much with Pelagius, he attributed every good work in a person to God and divine grace, and nothing at all to free choice. Thus, removing free choice altogether, Luther became a Manichaean while fleeing from being a Pelagian. Yet Luther ought to have known from the Apostle that divine grace is so necessary for acting well that, with grace, free choice nevertheless performs a good work.² Therefore, just as Luther, wishing to avoid Pelagius, removed free choice, so Pelagius, wishing to establish free choice against the Manichaeans, left no place for the grace of Christ. Hence St. Augustine, replying to a certain letter of Julian and other Pelagians who, under the pretext of defending freedom of choice, attacked the grace of Christ with hostility, Why is it necessary, he says, to refute even those things that do not contain the treacherous poisons of their doctrine, but only seem to call to their aid, or in support of the Catholic faith against the impiety of the Manichaeans (as they call it), the confession of the Eastern bishops? They strive for nothing else than that, with the dreadful heresy held up as a charge, whose opponents they pretend to be, they may hide as enemies of grace beneath praise of nature.³⁴ Who has ever raised a question against them on this point? Or which Catholics are displeased with them because they condemn those whom the Apostle foretold would depart from the faith, having a seared conscience, forbidding marriage and abstaining from foods they consider unclean, though they do not believe that all things were created by God?⁵ Who ever compelled them to deny that every creature of God is good and that there is no substance which the supreme God did not make, except God himself, who was made by no one? It is not these things in them, which are agreed to be Catholic, that are reproved and condemned. The Catholic faith detests the excessive, foolish, and harmful impiety of the Manichaeans, and so do all heretics who are not Manichaeans. Thus these Pelagians do one thing well: they anathematize the Manichaeans and oppose their errors. But they do two evil things for which they too must be anathematized: one, that they accuse Catholics of being Manichaeans; the other, that they themselves introduce a new heresy. For people are not therefore sound in the faith because they do not suffer from the Manichaean disease. Disease is not of one kind, either in bodies or in minds. Just as a physician of the body does not at once pronounce a patient free from danger of death because he has denied that he is dropsical, if he has found him afflicted with another deadly disease, so the truth does not congratulate these people for not being Manichaeans if they rave in another kind of perversity. Therefore it is one thing that we anathematize along with them, and another that we anathematize in them. We detest along with them what rightly displeases them too, but in such a way that we detest in them the things for which they themselves rightly displease us. And a little later: Let the Pelagians cease to object to Catholics what they are not, and cease to wish to be considered lovable merely because they oppose the hateful error of the Manichaeans; let them rather recognize that they are deservedly hateful because they do not turn away from their own error. Two errors can be contrary to each other, but both must be detested because both are contrary to the truth.⁶ For if the Pelagians are to be loved because they hate the Manichaeans, the Manichaeans too must be loved because they hate the Pelagians. But may it never be that the Catholic Mother, on account of hatred for one side, chooses to love the other, when she warns us—and, with the Lord’s help, must do so—to avoid both and desires to heal both. So that it may become clearer than light how sound Catholic doctrine proceeds between two extreme errors—those of the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians on one side, and those of the Manichaeans, Lutherans, and Calvinists on the other—the reader, I think, will welcome the statements of the Manichaeans and other heretics who adhered to them or held their heresy, following the errors of the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians that we noted in the preceding disputation.

III.

The Manichaeans, as St. Augustine says, arose from a certain Persian called Manin. Although he too began to be called by the name of his insane doctrine—for before that he was called Urbinus—his disciples in Greece, avoiding the name of insanity, as though more learned and more deceitful than he, doubled the letter n and called him Manichaeus, as though he were pouring forth manna, instead of Manicheus, that is, ‘insane.’⁷ Writing against Faustus: You swear, he says, by your lord Manichaeus, who was called Manes in his native language. But to avoid the name of insanity among the Greeks, as though you had changed and lengthened the name, you added a kind of fusion, so that you might be more greatly freed. One of you explained to me why he was called Manichaeus: namely, so that in Greek he might seem to pour forth manna, since in Greek χεῖ means ‘to pour.’ I do not know what you have done, except that you seem to us to dream insanity even more plainly. For you did not add one letter at the beginning of the name so that Manes would be recognized as ‘manna’; you added two syllables at the end, not calling him Manes but Manichaeus, as though nothing else came to sound through his long and empty speeches than the pouring forth of insanity.⁸

IV.

These men, besides very many other fables that do not pertain to the present question and that St. Augustine also recounts at length under heresy 46, asserted many erroneous dogmas that agree with the Pelagians and others that paved the way for the Lutherans and Calvinists.

First, Manichaeus set up two principles, different and opposed to one another, both eternal and coeternal—that is, existing always—and, following certain other ancient heretics, he held that there were two natures and substances, namely good and evil. He asserted according to his dogmas that these were at war and mixed together, that the good was purged of the evil, and that the good which could not be purged was condemned to eternity with the evil. He tells many fables, all of which it would take too long to weave into this work. ⁹

Second, they held that sinners are evil by nature and produced by an evil principle, and that they are not evil by the freedom of their own choice. Augustine reports this in these words: That discussion, namely, On Free Choice, was undertaken because of those who deny that the origin of evil is derived from the freedom of the will and intend to blame the Creator of all natures, if indeed that is so. In this way they wish, according to the error of their impiety—for they are Manichaeans—to introduce a certain unchangeable nature of evil, coeternal with God. To oppose this error, while he was still living at Rome, St. Augustine wrote three books On Free Choice, as he himself attests in Book 1 of the Retractions, chapter 9. ¹⁰

Third, as the same saint reports, the Manichaeans said: The carnal desire by which the flesh lusts against the spirit is not an infirmity present in us from the nature corrupted in the first man, but they say that it is a contrary substance, so inherent in us that when we are freed and cleansed, it is separated from us and itself lives immortally in its own nature. ¹¹

Fourth, they assert that baptism in water brings no one any salvation, and they think none of those whom they deceive should be baptized. ¹²

V.

Fifth, they said that an evil person cannot become good, nor can a good person become evil by his own freedom. Jerome reports this, recalling that the Manichaeans, among other heretics, asserted: Human virtue and knowledge can attain perfection—and I do not say likeness, but equality with God—so that they claim that when they have ascended to the summit of perfection, they cannot sin even through thought or ignorance. ¹³

Sixth, they say that a human being does not have free choice but does everything by fatal necessity. Jerome reports this in the cited preface, where he says: It is characteristic of the Manichaeans to condemn human nature, take away free choice, and remove God’s help. Augustine reports the same in his work Against Fortunatus the Manichaean; so do Chrysostom, Homily 45 on John, and Socrates, Book 1, chapter 17. These are the points relevant to our purpose, which, together with very many others, St. Augustine also gathers into one place, comparing the Manichaeans with the Pelagians and showing that the Catholic Church refutes both and opposes their errors and inventions; for he says: ¹⁴

VI.

The Manichaeans say that the good God is not the Creator of all natures. The Pelagians say that God is not the cleanser, savior, and liberator of people of every age. The Catholic faith rebukes both: against the Manichaeans it defends God’s creation, so that no creature is denied to have been established by him; against the Pelagians it insists that human nature, lost in every age, be sought out. The Manichaeans blame the desire of the flesh not as an accidental vice but as a nature that has been evil from eternity. The Pelagians praise it as no vice but a natural good. The Catholic faith rebukes both: it tells the Manichaeans that it is not nature but vice; it tells the Pelagians that it is not from the Father but from the world, so that both may allow it to be healed like an illness—one ceasing to believe it incurable, the other ceasing to proclaim it praiseworthy. The Manichaeans deny that the beginning of evil in a good person came from free choice. The Pelagians say that even an evil person has free choice sufficient to do a good commandment. The Catholic faith rebukes both: to the Manichaeans it says, ‘God made man upright’;¹⁵ to the Pelagians it says, ‘If the Son sets you free, you will be truly free.’¹⁶ The Manichaeans say that the soul, a fragment of God, has sin from its mixture with an evil nature. The Pelagians say that a just soul, though not a fragment but a creature of God, has no sin even in this corruptible life. The Catholic faith rebukes both: to the Manichaeans it says, ‘Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.’¹⁷ This would not be said to a person who by nature could not act, unless sin were vice and not nature. To the Pelagians it says, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’¹⁸ Manichaeans and Pelagians contend with these contrary diseases: they have different wills but similar vanity, separated by differing opinions but close in their perverse minds. Indeed, they attack Christ’s grace together, nullify his baptism together, and dishonor his flesh together, though in different ways and for different reasons. The Manichaeans say that help is owed by the merits of good nature; the Pelagians say it is owed by the merits of a good will. The former say, ‘God owes this to the labors of his members’; the latter say, ‘He owes it to the virtues of his servants.’ Therefore for both, the reward is not credited according to grace but according to debt. The Manichaeans profanely contend that the laver of regeneration—that is, water itself—is superfluous and does no good. The Pelagians assert that what is said to expiate sins in holy baptism does not help infants, since they have no sin. In baptizing little children, then, as far as the remission of sins is concerned, the Manichaeans destroy the visible element, while the Pelagians destroy even the invisible sacrament. The Manichaeans dishonor Christ’s flesh by blaspheming the Virgin’s childbirth; the Pelagians do so by making the flesh of those to be redeemed equal to the flesh of the Redeemer. For Christ was born not in sinful flesh, but in the likeness of sinful flesh, because the flesh of other people is born sinful. The Manichaeans, then, detesting all flesh, take away from Christ’s flesh its evident reality; the Pelagians, asserting that no sinful flesh is born, take away from Christ’s flesh its proper dignity. Elsewhere, continuing the same comparison, after listing five dogmas asserted by the Pelagians, he adds: But since in these five matters I have set forth—where they seek hiding places and weave their accusations—they are exposed and refuted by divine teachings, they have devised the hateful name of the Manichaeans to frighten the uninformed, as many as they can, so that they will not lend their ears to the truth against their most perverse dogmas.¹⁹ For the Manichaeans blasphemously condemn the first three of these five, saying that neither human creation, nor marriage, nor the Law was established by the highest and true God. But they do not accept what the truth says: that sin began from free choice, and that every evil, whether of an angel or a human being, came from it. For, straying very far from God, they preferred to believe that the nature of evil is always evil and coeternal with God. They also attack the holy patriarchs and prophets with as many curses as they can. Behold the means by which these new heretics think that, by casting the name of the Manichaeans as an accusation, they can evade the force of truth. But they do not escape it, for the truth pursues and overthrows both the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. A person, when born, rebukes the Manichaean and praises the Creator insofar as he is something good, in that he is human. But insofar as he bears original sin, he rebukes Pelagius and has need of a Savior. For the very claim that this nature must be healed strikes back at both: it would need no medicine if it were sound, which is against the Pelagian; nor could it be healed at all if it were an eternal and unchangeable evil, which is against the Manichaean. Likewise, when we say that the desire of the flesh is not to be attributed to marriage, which we praise as established by the Lord, our view opposes both the Pelagians, who list it among goods, and the Manichaeans, who attribute it to an evil nature, whereas it is an accidental evil of our nature—not to be separated by God’s distinction but to be healed by God’s mercy. Likewise, when we say that the holy, just, and good Law was established not to justify the impious but to convict the proud of transgression, our view opposes the Manichaeans, since the Apostle praises the Law, and the Pelagians, since according to the Apostle no one is justified by the Law.²⁰ Thus, for those to be justified whom the letter kills—that is, whom the good Law, by commanding, makes guilty through transgression—the Spirit of grace freely gives help. Likewise, our saying that free choice to do evil must be liberated by God’s grace in order to do good opposes the Pelagians; our saying that evil, which did not exist before, arose from free choice, opposes the Manichaeans. Likewise, our honoring the holy patriarchs and prophets with the praise due to them in God opposes the Manichaeans. But our saying that the Lord’s propitiation was necessary even for them, though they were just and pleasing to God, opposes the Pelagians. The Catholic faith therefore finds both of them, like the other heretics, opposed to it, and refutes both by the authority of divine testimonies and the light of truth.

VII. The Lutherans and Calvinists agree in part with the Manichaeans and in part with the Pelagians, although they differ from both groups in many of their assertions. They agree with the Manichaeans in removing free choice and asserting that the origin of evil proceeds not from the free choice of the will but from God himself. They agree with the Pelagians in accepting the inference: for the latter, on being convinced by it, denied preoperating grace and removed the eternal, absolute, and efficacious decree of the divine will by which God determined all things to be done in time. Thus they followed the same path into contrary and mutually conflicting errors and departed from the Catholic faith. The assertions of the Lutherans and Calvinists in which they agree with the Manichaeans are the following.

ASSERTIONS OF THE LUTHERANS AND CALVINISTS CONCERNING GRACE AND FREE CHOICE.

VIII. BEFORE we report the assertions of the Lutherans, we must note that they often contradict not only Catholic truth but also themselves, now advancing and now denying what they had taught in earlier writings, as Jodocus Coccius demonstrates at great length with many examples in his Catholic Treasury, Book 8, On the Signs of the Church, articles 7 and 8. Philip Melanchthon also frankly admits his own inconsistency on this point, saying: In the Apology we change many things daily, for they must continually be changed and adapted to circumstances.²¹ A theologian should therefore not assume that Luther, Calvin, or their followers wholly retracted or corrected their errors just because they said the opposite elsewhere. Rather, their craftiness should be execrated: to deceive the simple minds of Catholics and capture the sheep of the Lord Christ, they covered themselves with a sheep’s skin and Catholic words, although they were wolves, and most rapacious wolves, as will become clear from what follows.

The first dogma of the Lutherans and Calvinists, then, is that a person does not truly have free choice, but that free choice in him is a title without substance, a thing that exists only in name. The impious Luther asserted this: Free, he says, choice after sin is a thing in name alone, and when a person does what lies within him, he sins mortally. Free choice is a fiction in reality, a title without substance, since no one has it in his power to think anything good or evil; rather, as Wycliffe, condemned at Constance, rightly teaches, everything happens by absolute necessity. The poet also wished this when he said, ‘Let all things happen under a fixed law.’²² Elsewhere he says: It is an error, he says, to say that free choice has activity in a good work when we are speaking of an inward work.²³ For willing—that is, believing, hoping, loving, as we have already said—is a motion, a being carried along, led by the Word of God, and a kind of continual purification and renewal of the mind and understanding from day to day in the knowledge of God, even if that passion is not always equally intense; nevertheless it is always a passion. ‘Behold,’ Jeremiah says, ‘as clay in the potter’s hand, so are you, house of Israel, in my hand.’²⁴ I ask you, what activity does clay have when the potter shapes it? Is it not purely passive? Elsewhere he says: God foreknows nothing contingently; rather, by an immutable, eternal, and infallible will he foresees, proposes, and does all things. From this he infers: God’s foreknowledge therefore directly conflicts with free choice.²⁵ How invalid this inference is, by which Pelagians and Lutherans alike have been deceived, will appear below when we explain the agreement of free choice with God’s absolute decree.²⁶

IX. Calvin agrees with the passages cited above, especially in Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 3, section 7; his words will be reported at number 17.

There is nevertheless a difference between Luther and Calvin. Luther asserted that free choice has no activity in an inward good work, but cooperates only passively by receiving a motion produced by God alone, as his words quoted above show. Calvin, however, moderated Luther’s error to some extent. He admits that our free choice does not act purely passively, like some lifeless thing, but cooperates actively and by a spontaneous movement in its own operations—though not freely. Hence in Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 5, section 14, Foreign to the question, he says, is that comparison with which he unfairly burdens us. For who is so foolish as to claim that human motion differs in no way from the throwing of a stone? Nor does anything like this follow from our doctrine. We assign to the natural faculties of a human being the powers to approve, reject, will, refuse, strive, and resist: namely, to approve vanity, reject solid goodness, will evil, refuse good, strive toward wickedness, and resist justice.

X. Philip Melanchthon held the same error. In his second edition, on chapter eight of the Epistle to the Romans, while attacking free choice in man, he says: Since our will is so far from being free that it is carried only where it is driven by God, there is no contingency among things, but necessity, according to God’s declaration. And in Book 2 of the Commonplaces, chapter “On Free Choice,” he says: What then, you will ask: is there no contingency in human affairs? Nothing of chance, nothing of fortune? Scripture teaches that all things happen necessarily. Although contingency may seem to you to exist in human affairs, here the judgment of reason must be overruled. And a little later: Who could have concealed Scripture’s teaching on predestination, when Scripture takes away the freedom of our will through the necessity of predestination, etc. If you refer the human will to predestination, there is no freedom in either external or internal works; rather, everything happens according to divine predestination. If you refer the will to external works, some freedom seems to exist by nature’s judgment; but if you refer the will to the affections, there is absolutely no freedom, even by nature’s judgment.

XI. This heresy of Luther and Calvin, which denies free choice, was an old one among many heretics. For, besides the Manichaeans cited above, Simon Magus (as Clement of Rome reports) held that nothing happens by human choice, but everything by fate.²⁷ The Priscillianists (as Pope Leo I and St. Augustine report), following the doctrines of the Manichaeans, asserted that men are bound by the stars of fate.²⁸ Finally, the Albigensians (as St. Antoninus reports) maintained that sin does not belong to free choice.²⁹ John Wycliffe, Trialogue 2, chapter 13: God, he says, necessitates each active creature to each of its acts, and in Dialogue 3, chapter 9: Can a creature impede God’s determination and make the eternal truth proceeding from God’s purpose concern something that will not happen? As if the divine purpose and eternal truth depended on them. And a little later: God’s purpose must necessarily be fulfilled, and thus every future event will happen necessarily. How these heretics, however, drew from this principle—God has predestined, decreed by an efficacious decree, and ordained from eternity all good acts that take place in time, and impels and moves the created will to elicit them—the false and flimsy argument that the will is not truly free in its operations will become clear below.³⁰

XII. A second heresy, akin to the preceding one, held by the Lutherans, asserts that nothing is future contingently, but that everything happens from absolute necessity. This is clear from the passages cited in the preceding number. But it is explicitly followed by Philip Melanchthon, Book 2 of the Commonplaces, chapter “On Free Choice”; Theodore Beza, in the Summary of Christianity, pages 17, 177, and 186, All things, he says, happen so necessarily from God’s immutable decree that, according to it, Judas necessarily betrayed Christ; Herod and Pilate necessarily condemned Christ; the reprobate sin and perish necessarily; Adam necessarily fell, although he was created good for a time, but in such a way that, by God’s inevitable decree, God knowing and ordaining it, he would fall—since he could not fall in that way except by God’s decree, will, and ordination. And in The Eradication of Nestrusius’s Calumnies, answering the first calumny concerning God’s providence: Not only all things, he says, but also each particular thing is done and happens by God’s decree, and by a decree of such a kind that it can in no way fail. If we consider God’s decree, Judas betrayed the Lord necessarily at that very moment. Herod also and Pilate necessarily condemned Christ (as the Apostles say), since they came together to do whatever the Lord’s hand and counsel had determined beforehand should be done.³¹ And in his book On the Secret Predestination of God against Castalio, folio 359: We say that Adam fell indeed of his own accord and by his own fault, yet not by chance, but as God’s determinate plan, providence, and hand had justly determined things should happen.

XIII. Luther’s third heresy asserts that God’s commandments cannot be kept even through grace, but are altogether impossible for man. Luther says so in his Refutation of Latomus’s Argument: So many, he says, testimonies of Scripture prove that the commandment is impossible for us that nothing is clearer. And in his reply to the dialogue of Sylvester Prierias: You do very badly in denying that the Savior commanded impossible things; you do much worse in daring to call this falsehood. In this life we cannot fulfill God’s commandments. Philip Melanchthon, in the first edition, on chapter 4 of the Epistle to the Romans: When the Law commands that God be loved, it commands something just as impossible as if it ordered us to fly across the Caucasus. And Calvin, Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 7: Let it be beyond dispute that fulfillment of the Law is impossible in this flesh. Finally, John Monheim, Dialogue 3: No one, he says, however perfect, can accomplish what the Law commands.

XIV. The fourth heresy of the Lutherans, the most impious and blasphemous of all, asserts that God is the cause and author of sin, and works evil deeds in us just as he works good ones. For Luther speaks as follows: How can a man prepare himself for good, when it is not even in his power to make his ways evil? For God also works evil deeds in the wicked, as Proverbs 16 says: ‘The Lord has made all things for himself, even the wicked for the evil day.’ Who dares deny that even in evil deeds he is driven or compelled to do something other than what he had thought?³² And elsewhere he says: If God foresaw that Judas would be a traitor, Judas necessarily became a traitor; it was not in Judas’s hand, nor in that of any creature, to act otherwise or change his will, although he did it willingly and without compulsion. But willing was his act, which God moved by his omnipotence, just as he does all other things.³³

XV. Calvin followed the same error, in his book against Pighius and Book 3 of the Institutes, chapter 23, sections 7 and 8; Philip Melanchthon, on chapter 8 of Romans in the first edition and on chapter 9 of the same epistle; and Zwingli, in his sermon on providence, chapter 6. Other ancient heretics were infected with this error too, but especially Marcion, who (as Tertullian and Irenaeus report) asserted that God is the cause of evil.³⁴ The Persians likewise (as Agathias reports, Book 2, chapter 12), together with the Manichaeans, posit two first principles: one good and productive of all the best things, and the other wholly opposed to these. Among the ancient philosophers, too, there were authors of this same error. For Chrysippus the Stoic (as Plutarch reports in On the Stoics’ Contradictions) God, he says, works wars and wickedness by inciting and perverting men. Simon Magus (as Vincent of Lérins says) dared to call God the author of our evils, that is, of our crimes, impieties, and misdeeds; for he claims that God creates human nature with his own hands in such a way that, by a certain movement of its own and the impulse of a necessary will, it wants nothing other than to sin.³⁵

XVI. Their fifth heresy asserts that our will, unless bent by God’s grace, is naturally inclined to evil. Thus Calvin, Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 3, number 8, says: It is by sheer grace that we begin to will the good, since by nature we are wholly inclined toward evil. And in number 9, from Solomon’s words, The Lord inclines our heart toward himself (1 Kings 8), he concludes: This shows the perversity of our heart: by nature it exults in rebellion against the divine Law unless it is bent.

XVII. Their sixth heresy is that God begins and completes a good work in us by moving free choice in such a way that our will does not cooperate freely, but only follows the divine motion by a spontaneous movement. Thus Calvin, Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 3, section 7, says: But perhaps there will be those who grant that the will, averse to good by its own disposition, is converted by the Lord’s power alone, yet in such a way that, once prepared, it then has its own part in acting, as Augustine teaches: grace precedes every good work, with the will accompanying, not leading, it, following, not preceding. Peter Lombard improperly twists to this purpose what the holy man did not express badly. I, however, contend that both in the Prophet’s words I cited and in other passages two things are clearly signified: the Lord corrects—or rather abolishes—our depraved will and substitutes for it a good will from himself. Insofar as it is preceded by grace, I allow you to call it following; but since it is the Lord’s work once it has been reformed, it is wrongly attributed to man that he obeys prevenient grace with a following will. Therefore Chrysostom was wrong to write that neither grace without the will nor the will without grace can do anything, as if grace did not also work the will itself, as we recently saw from Paul.

XVIII. The seventh heresy of the Lutherans asserts that God’s grace is efficacious of itself in such a way that our will does not cooperate with it freely, but only spontaneously, willingly, and without compulsion. Thus Calvin, Book 2 of the Institutes, chapter 3, number 11: Christ’s saying, ‘Everyone who has heard from my Father comes to me,’³⁶ can be understood in no other way than as teaching that God’s grace is efficacious of itself, as Augustine also agrees. Those who wrote against Calvin understood his words in this way, especially Stapleton in the Catholic Promptuary, Friday of the first week of Lent, number 4, where he says: Grace is not efficacious of itself (as Calvin puts it), working the whole thing alone, with which we do not cooperate freely.³⁷ Hence Calvin himself says in number 12: Once we have been tamed by the Lord’s power into the service of righteousness, we proceed willingly and are inclined to follow the action of grace; for it is most certain that where God’s grace reigns, there is such readiness to obey. He says “proceed willingly,” not “freely,” because he always denied that the will freely follows the motion of efficacious grace. In this Calvin erred, though not in recognizing that prevenient grace is truly efficacious.

These and other fictions and errors of the heretics, by which Calvin separated himself from the unity of the Catholic Church, will be refuted below, especially in Disputation 22, number 31; Disputations 24 and 25; Disputation 97, number 11; Disputation 98, number 10; and Disputation 121, especially number 10. There it will be made clear that God’s eternal decree and the efficacy of divine grace that acts beforehand in no way prejudice the freedom of our free choice, but rather perfect, establish, and strengthen it.

What certain Catholic Doctors think about the natural powers of free choice and its harmony with divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination, and the efficacy of the helps of grace.

Here the account of this same harmony is presented, and the foundations on which they rely, together with the principal assertions they derive from them, are reported.

I. There are four most important foundations by which certain theologians think they have explained exactly and clearly the harmony of free choice with the gifts of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination, and reprobation; and through that account have opened an easy way by which both Pelagians and Lutherans might reach the unity of the Church and the sincerity of the Faith. They do not doubt that this same harmony would have been approved by Augustine and the other Fathers by unanimous consent, had it been presented and explained to them.

The first and most important foundation is that a certain knowledge must be posited in God, intermediate between purely natural and purely free knowledge.¹ Through it, before any decree of his will predetermining the future act, God knows what a created free choice would do by its innate freedom if it were placed in such circumstances and moved by such an excitation. For they say that three kinds of knowledge must be distinguished in God. One is purely natural knowledge, which therefore could not in any respect have been otherwise in God; through it he knew all things to which divine power extends, whether immediately or through the intervention of secondary causes: both the natures of individuals and their necessary combinations, and also contingent things—not as to whether they would or would not be future in any determinate way, but as things that could indifferently either be or not be, which necessarily belongs to them and therefore also falls under God's natural knowledge. Another is purely free knowledge, by which, after a free act of his will and without any hypothesis or condition, God knew absolutely and determinately, from all the combinations of contingent things, which would in reality be future and which would not. Finally, the third is middle knowledge, by which, from his highest and inscrutable comprehension of each free choice, God saw in his essence what it would do by its innate freedom if it were placed in this or that—or even in infinitely many—orders of things, although it could, if it wished, actually do the opposite. If one asks whether this middle knowledge should be called free or natural, they answer that it partly has the character of natural knowledge, insofar as it precedes a free act of the divine will and it was not in God's power to know something else; and partly has the character of free knowledge, insofar as its being knowledge of one thing rather than another comes from this: that free choice, on the supposition that it were created in one or another order of things, would do one rather than the other, although it could indifferently do either. Therefore it is not wrongly called middle knowledge, though some say it should be reduced to the knowledge of simple intelligence, others to the knowledge of vision, and still others call it conditional knowledge, or knowledge of conditional futures. This will be treated in Disputation 7.

They posit this middle knowledge as the chief foundation of that harmony so that from it, as if from a first root, they may derive the certainty and infallibility of divine providence and predestination with regard to the attainment of their effects. For since they teach that predestination is not certain by the order and causality of the means, and that the helps by which the predestined reach eternal life are not efficacious through the real and intrinsic power they have as coming from God, but are efficacious depending on the free cooperation of created choice with them, if such certainty were not drawn radically from middle foreknowledge, no solid foundation would remain on which the infallibility of predestination could rest. For they think that the predefinitions and predeterminations of the efficacious divine will, and the existence that future contingents have in eternity before they are brought into existence in time—on which Thomists say the aforementioned certainty must be based—are incompatible with freedom. Hence they conclude that without middle knowledge the freedom of our choice cannot remain intact.

II. From this they infer, first, that the knowledge by which God foresees, before he decides to create a will, what it would do on the supposition that it were placed in that order of things depends on the fact that the will itself, by its freedom, would do this or that, and not conversely. Consequently, they affirm that something is future not because God knows it will be future; rather, because it will be future through free choice, it is therefore known by God before it happens. This must be examined in Disputation 6. ²

Second, they infer that the certainty and infallibility of divine foreknowledge with respect to future contingents cannot be drawn from the real existence they have in eternity before they are brought into existence in time, or in any other measure proper to them. For they think that such existence in eternity takes away the freedom of choice, but their arguments will be answered in Disputations 8 and 9. ³

Third, they infer that God does not know future acts of free choice certainly and infallibly by a decree, or by an absolute and efficacious predetermination of his divine will.⁴ For they think that such predetermination, prior to foreknowledge of the future determination of free choice on the supposition that it is placed in such an order of things, greatly prejudices the freedom of choice. This will be treated in Disputations 10 and 11.

Fourth, they infer that the order of causes and means established by divine providence, once middle foreknowledge is set aside, imposes absolutely no necessity on free choice—not only no necessity of the consequent, but not even of the consequence. This will be discussed in Disputations 25, 30, 31, and 32. They teach the same about predestination: namely, that it is not certain with respect to the attainment of its effects by the certainty of the order and causality of the means, but only by the certainty of that middle foreknowledge on which, according to these same authors, the certainty of predestination depends at its root. Some of them do indeed admit that providence and predestination are certain even by the certainty of the order and causality of the means, provided this certainty presupposes the certainty grounded in middle foreknowledge. This will be discussed at greater length in Disputation 41. ⁵

They reason in the same way about the certainty of the predestination of infants. They say that predestined infants attain eternal life not through the certainty of the means and the effect of predestination, which is not in itself certainly future, but through the certainty of divine foreknowledge, by which God, in the depth of his intellect, knew with certainty to be future what is uncertain in itself and can fail to be. Therefore, they say, apart from the certainty of divine foreknowledge there is no certainty in the means or effect of the predestination of infants that they will attain eternal life. This will be treated in Disputation 41.

Fifth, they infer that the good use of free choice, foreknown by God through middle knowledge, is a condition without which the plan of the ordering of means to a supernatural end, pre-existing in the divine mind, would not have the character of predestination with respect to such a person, but would retain the common character of supernatural providence. This will be discussed in Disputations 37 and 38. ⁶

III. The second foundation is that God's general concurrence is not an immediate influx into the secondary cause, nor does it premove or apply that cause to acting; rather, it is an immediate influx with the secondary cause into its action and effect.⁷ They add that the influx into the cause, which Thomists posit so that secondary causes may be applied and moved to act, is fictitious and entirely unnecessary. They extend this teaching to God's general concurrence with free choice in works of the natural order. For they say that just as God's general concurrence with a cause acting through a transitive action—for example, fire producing heat in water—is not God's influx into the fire but into the water, where the effect is received, produced jointly by God and the fire, so God's general concurrence with a cause acting through an immanent action, such as the intellect producing understanding or the will producing an act of willing, is not an influx of God into the cause insofar as it is an agent, as if it acted after first being moved and excited by him. Rather, God acts with the cause insofar as it is an agent upon the cause itself insofar as it is a patient, receiving within itself an effect produced jointly by that cause and God through the partial influx of each. They hold the same about God's general concurrence in supernatural acts. For they assert that there is no immediate concurrence in free choice as a cause, as though, first moved by that concurrence and applied by God to acting, it elicited such acts; instead, there is God's immediate influx into the acts themselves together with free choice and prevenient grace. Their chief reason for being convinced of this is that they think these premotions and applications of secondary causes to their operations greatly prejudice the freedom of our choice. They reason in the same way about the actual help of assisting grace, insofar as it helps and cooperates: they say that there is no immediate influx into free choice as a cause, but an immediate influx together with free choice into its operation. They nevertheless admit that God's concurrence through exciting grace is an influx into free choice as a cause, and gives it strength by which, if it wills, it can perform acts that by its own natural power alone it could not produce.⁸ In this respect they assign two differences between God's general concurrence and the special concurrence of exciting grace. The first is that God's general concurrence in natural acts is not a concurrence of God in free choice as the cause of those acts, as though free choice first received a motion within itself and were thereby applied and made able to exercise causal influence upon the act; rather, it is an immediate influx together with free choice into the act. But the help of prevenient grace, insofar as it is prevenient, is God's influx into free choice: it moves and excites it, and makes it able, so that, moved in this way and already possessing within itself an efficient principle of supernatural acts, it may further produce them by its own influx at the same time. The second difference arises from the first: God's influx with free choice through general concurrence in natural acts precedes the influx of free choice into those same acts neither in time nor in nature; rather, they depend on one another, exist altogether at the same time in reality, and are joined in one and the same action and effect. Prevenient grace, however, insofar as it is prevenient, ordinarily precedes the influx of free choice into a supernatural act, either in time or in nature.

IV. From this second foundation they infer, first, that God's general concurrence is of itself indifferent, so that, according to the differing influx of the secondary cause, an action of one kind rather than another follows. Accordingly, they say that from the varying influx of free choice comes the fact that an act of willing rather than an act of rejecting follows, and that the willing is for an honorable rather than a shameful object. Consequently, they affirm that the actions of free choice, like those of any other secondary cause, do not get from God's general concurrence the fact that they are this or that particular kind of action, nor therefore that they are virtuous or vicious; rather, they get this from free choice itself. ⁹

They speak in the same way about the special help of assisting grace: they think that it is in itself indifferent, or equally disposed to concur with human free choice in works of piety if the person himself wishes to cooperate.

Second, they infer that God, before foreknowing the cooperation that free choice would give on the supposition that it were placed in such an order of things, cannot—without prejudice to the freedom of that choice—truly and efficiently, or physically, predetermine it to any operation, even a supernatural one, either by an extrinsic decree of his will or by some help inhering in free choice. For they think that such predetermination is repugnant to the freedom of choice. I speak with respect to the exercise of the act, since, as we observed above, with respect to the kind of action they admit that the concurrence of free choice is determined through the influx of assisting grace; for from that same influx the consent of free choice gets its supernatural character and the quality required for salvation. ¹⁰

Third, they infer that the free influx, or cooperation, of choice, insofar as it emanates from choice itself, is not efficiently caused by another external cause, even by God, but by choice itself freely determining itself and, according to its innate freedom, flowing jointly with God into this particular act rather than its opposite, although it could indifferently choose either if it wished. ¹¹

Fourth, they infer that the good use of free choice, considered in the way described above, is not to be counted among the effects of predestination, but is to be presupposed for predestination on our part as something God requires from us, so that our works may be free and therefore worthy of praise or blame. ¹²

Fifth, they infer that the help of grace is not efficacious of itself, or by the real power it has as coming from God; consequently, the common division among theologians of grace into efficacious and inefficacious help is to be drawn from the effect, which depends jointly on the freedom of choice, not from some real power present in efficacious help and absent from sufficient, or inefficacious, help. Accordingly, they affirm that sufficient help, whether greater or lesser in itself, is called efficacious when free choice, by its own freedom, converts with it, although it could have failed to convert, since nothing in that help prevented it. Conversely, help is called inefficacious when free choice does not convert with it, although it could have converted if it had wished. ¹³

V. Sixth, they infer that whether the helps of prevenient and assisting grace, which are conferred on wayfarers in the ordinary course, are efficacious or inefficacious for conversion¹⁴ or justification depends on the free consent and cooperation of our choice with them. Therefore it is in our free power either to make them efficacious by consenting and cooperating with them in the acts by which we are disposed for justification, or to make them inefficacious by withholding our consent and cooperation, or even by eliciting a contrary dissent.

Seventh, they infer that all the passages of Scripture and the holy Fathers in which it is asserted that God makes us act, works so that we work, turns our hearts, and the like, insofar as these things are attributed in some way to God alone, are verified only by reason of exciting grace, which moves morally or metaphorically toward consent: by alluring, inviting, or in any other way, even by inwardly persuading a person morally to do good in those circumstances in which God foreknows that the person would consent, on the supposition that he is excited in the way described above. ¹⁵

Eighth, they infer that the actual help by which God moves our will to free acts of the supernatural order is subject to the power of that same will with regard to its use, just as the habits we use are subject to it when we wish, although by divine foreknowledge the future consent of free choice is certain and infallible. ¹⁶

Ninth, they infer that after God has preceded a person with his exciting grace, he waits for the created will to consent. This will be treated expressly in Disputation 95. ¹⁷

Tenth, they infer that the created will is in some way the first root and cause of its own determination, although it cannot bring that about without God's influx and cooperation, as we shall see in Disputation 89. ¹⁸

From the same foundation they infer the third foundation, together with its attendant assertions, which we shall set out at once.

VI.

The third foundation is that God and free choice are partial causes of the same act, even a supernatural one, just as two people pulling a ship are partial causes of that ship's motion. In what sense these same authors understand this will become clear in Disputation 85, where the nature of this foundation will be treated expressly. ¹⁹

From this foundation they infer exactly the same assertions as from the preceding one, and also others that are closely connected with the third foundation. They are as follows.

First, they infer that unequal effort and influx by free choice can result in this: when God gives two people equal help of assisting grace, one of them acts more intensely and disposes himself better for justifying grace than the other; and when he gives them unequal helps, they may act equally, or sometimes the person supported by the lesser help may act more. Their reasoning is that when two partial causes concur in producing one and the same effect, the more intensely or vigorously one of them acts, the more perfect the effect they produce; and if one of them does not act, no effect follows whenever the effect itself depends intrinsically on both. This will be treated in Disputation 62. ²⁰

Second, they infer that, when two people have entirely equal helps—both external and internal—of prevenient grace, it can happen, and in fact will happen, according to the freedom of each, that one is converted, perseveres in grace, and is saved, while the other persists in sin and is condemned, because one wished to cooperate with those same helps and the other did not. This will be discussed at greater length in Disputation 108. ²¹

Third, they infer that although each of these acts of believing, hoping, and loving is a single action, it nevertheless has three parts of one complete cause, from which the whole action proceeds in such a way that it also proceeds as a whole from each of the parts, by the partiality (as they call it) of a cause, though in different ways.²² For from God acting through general concurrence alone, it proceeds as from a universal cause; and consequently from him it derives its being an assent of faith or sorrow for sins no more than its being the opposite act or an act of any other faculty. But from the influx of free choice, together with the necessary knowledge and other things needed for the act to be produced in its substance, it derives, as from a particular cause, that in its substance it is rather an assent of faith or sorrow for sins than some other, different act. From prevenient grace, however—or from God insofar as through it, as through his instrument, he acts together with free choice in the same act—it derives its being a supernatural act, specifically distinct from the purely natural act of believing or grieving over sins that free choice would elicit by its own powers alone if prevenient grace did not act together with it.

VII. Fourth, they infer that a supernatural habit of faith need not be posited on the ground that the intellect might assent easily despite its hardness, or assent discerningly despite its errors, nor that the act of assent might be certain and firm with a certainty and firmness on the part of the believer. For, they say, a heretic can assent more firmly in that way not only to the articles of faith but also to his own errors than many of the faithful assent through infused faith to Catholic truths. Rather, such a habit must be posited because, for these acts to be elicited in a way suited to a supernatural end and as required for salvation, they must be elicited either through the inspiration and particular help of the Holy Spirit or through the concurrence of a supernatural habit. ²³

From this they also infer, fifth, that free choice, with only God's general concurrence, can elicit an assent of faith as regards only the substance of the act, that is, a purely natural assent: an assent by which one assents to all the mysteries of faith as revealed by God, and does so because they have been revealed by God, so that by such assent the precept of faith is fulfilled and the sin of unbelief avoided. This will be treated in Disputation 49, especially no. 19. ²⁴

Sixth, they infer that by the natural powers of free choice alone and God's general concurrence, a person can elicit an absolute, purely natural act of love of God above all things, which is in no way sufficient for justification; and, by the same reasoning, an absolute resolution to keep all the commandments in general, especially when all occasions and difficulties are absent. This will be treated in Disputation 31. ²⁵

Seventh, they infer that with only God's general concurrence a person can, in view of divine goodness, elicit an act of natural contrition with an absolute resolution not to sin mortally again. They say the same of attrition: the faithful sinner grieves over all the sins he has committed because of the punishments of hell or the shamefulness of sin, with hope of pardon and an absolute resolution not to sin mortally again. ²⁶

Eighth, they infer that in fallen nature a person can, with only God's general concurrence, resist any temptation, however grave, at every moment of time. For they pose the question whether, so long as the judgment of reason is not overwhelmed, the same free choice retains, with only God's general concurrence, the freedom at every moment not to consent to any grave temptation and to overcome any great difficulty that must be overcome in that instant alone in order to observe the natural law. They answer affirmatively. ^{27 28}

From this, as a ninth consequence, they affirm that there is no particular morally good work that is purely natural which a person in fallen nature cannot perform with only God's general concurrence. They give this reason: if a person can do what is most difficult, such as undergo death rather than tell a lie, then all the more can he do the other things, in which the difficulty is far less. ²⁹

Tenth, they infer that with only God's general concurrence and without any other gift or help of grace, a person can perform a morally good work that is suited to his natural end and, in comparison with that end, is truly good and a work of true virtue. ³⁰

VIII. The fourth foundation is that God has established a certain law: whoever does all that lies within him by the powers of nature alone is given helps of prevenient grace by which he may carry it out as required for salvation. From this they infer the following. ³¹

First, they infer that whenever free choice, by its natural powers, tries or is ready to try all that it can do of itself, both in learning and embracing what faith teaches and in grieving for sins and seeking justification, God confers prevenient grace and helps by which it may do these things as required for salvation³²—not because that effort makes it worthy of such helps or merits them in any way, but because Christ obtained this for us by his merits. Among the laws that Christ and the eternal Father established concerning the helps and gifts Christ merited for us, to be conferred entirely gratuitously, one law—and one especially consonant with reason—was that whenever we tried by our natural powers to do what lies within us, helps of grace would be at hand to enable us to do those things as required for salvation. In this way, while we are on the way, our salvation would always lie in the hand of our free choice, and it would be our own fault if we did not turn to God.

Second, they infer that just as God is always at hand to free choice through general concurrence, so that it may naturally will or reject as it pleases, he is likewise at hand through sufficient grace whenever it wishes, by its natural powers, to undertake some work pertaining to justification, so that it may perform it as required for salvation. They say that God the Father established the aforesaid law with the Son chiefly for this reason: otherwise, they think, the assertion that man has been placed by God in the hand of his own counsel could not be maintained, nor could the assertion that salvation has been placed within the power of his choice, unless by doing all that lies within him through the powers of nature alone he could obtain the helps of prevenient grace, aided by which he would be able to attain eternal life. ³³

They infer other propositions, which for now we deliberately omit, both because they are reducible to the preceding ones and because they will be presented below when they are to be discussed.

IX. From these four foundations, together with their appended assertions, they think the agreement of free choice with divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination, as well as with the efficacy of the helps of grace, is made intelligible and easy; and that all the arguments by which the Pelagians and their remnants tried to eliminate the necessity and efficacy of grace, while the Lutherans and Calvinists tried to eliminate freedom of choice, are easily dissolved. Both sides alike relied on the erroneous principle that the efficacy of grace cannot coexist with freedom of choice, and consequently that one of two things must be chosen: either to deny the efficacy of grace or, if it is admitted, to eliminate freedom of choice. For when the Pelagians object that, given predestination as taught by St Augustine, it follows that a predestined person must necessarily be saved and a reprobate cannot be saved but must necessarily be damned whatever he does, and that this plunges people into despair and makes prayers and exhortations useless, they appeal to middle knowledge, explained in the first foundation, and to its appended propositions. They argue that it does not follow that a predestined person must necessarily be saved or a reprobate necessarily damned unless middle knowledge is presupposed, together with the supposition that the former will cooperate with the helps of grace or the latter will dissent. Since this supposition follows upon the free concurrence of the created will, it does not eliminate but rather presupposes its free use. They answer in the same way the arguments by which the necessity of grace and its efficacy are attacked by those same Pelagians, who proclaim that they cannot coexist with the freedom we experience.

For they say that the efficacy of grace presupposes middle knowledge of the future cooperation of free choice on the hypothesis that it would be excited by such grace in such circumstances. Consequently, by that same grace our will is not predetermined to consent to the divine call, and thus remains free to consent or dissent, as will be said in Disputations 7 and 110.

X. By these same foundations they try to answer the principal arguments by which the Lutherans and Calvinists try to eliminate freedom of choice. When they argue that a person has no free choice because he can act only as God wills and when God wills, the authors reply that a person is truly free and has free choice in his acts: God never wills by an absolute and efficacious will that a person perform a particular act unless middle knowledge is presupposed, by which God foresaw that, from his innate freedom, the person would cooperate and will such an object on the hypothesis that he were placed in such circumstances and excited and moved by such helps, which do not predetermine his will to either alternative, as is clear from what was said under the first and second foundations. Therefore, if a person placed by God in those circumstances consents, he will consent freely; if he dissents, as he truly can, he will dissent freely. When heretics again attack freedom of choice on the ground of the necessity of the helps of grace—because a person, especially in fallen nature, cannot perform any work of piety or merit eternal life unless God in his mercy excites and helps him with a special help, and therefore such a work is not within his power to perform whenever he wishes but only when God wishes to help him—they reply, on the basis of what was said under the third and fourth foundations, that by the powers of nature a person can perform any good work, even of faith, hope, and charity, with respect to its substance. If a person does all that lies within him by his own powers, producing those works, or any one of them, in whatever way he can, God will, by a certain law, freely give him helps of exciting and assisting grace by which that work may be performed as required for salvation. Consequently, the same work truly lies within the free power of the person. But if he is unwilling to do what lies within him, he also freely omits that supernatural work, because he was unwilling to produce it with respect to the substance of the act.

XI. ³⁴ In the same way they answer arguments drawn from the infallibility of divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination, by which the Lutherans and Calvinists attack the same freedom of choice, as will become clear below in the proper places. For they say that the infallibility of future contingents does not conflict with the freedom of choice by which a person can truly produce or not produce them. They give this reason: as is clear from the first proposition appended to the first foundation, something is going to happen through free choice not because God foresaw that it would happen; rather, conversely, because it was going to happen through the free determination of created choice, it is foreseen by God before it happens. Therefore God's foreknowledge imposes no necessity to act or not to act on that choice. Likewise, they say, divine providence and predestination impose no necessity on free choice to act. To defend this, they appeal to the second and third foundations stated above: namely, God's actual concurrence, by which he moves free choice to attain the end established by divine providence or predestination, is not an immediate influx into choice itself as a cause, nor does it predetermine choice to act. Rather, it is an influx that is indifferent in itself and acts immediately together with free choice upon its operation, so that God and free choice concur together in producing one and the same effect as two partial causes, in the way that two people pulling a ship concur in the ship's motion. Hence, they judge, future events that truly are contingent have no necessity other than that which is drawn from the middle knowledge established for the first foundation, or which presupposes that same middle knowledge and originates radically from it, as will be made clear in Disputations 25 and 41.

XII. This much is most certain (and the authors with whom we must dispute do not deny it): if the four aforesaid foundations do not stand, what has been built upon them must collapse, and another way must be sought and established against the Pelagians and Lutherans for reconciling free choice with grace—namely, the way founded on the omnipotence and efficacy of the divine will, which, before any foreknowledge of the future cooperation of our will, predetermines all the good free acts that occur in time, as will be made clear in Disputation 121. But if those same foundations, together with their appended assertions, are true, the account of reconciling freedom of choice with divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination that rests on them must be considered legitimate and highly suited to refuting the errors of the Pelagians and Lutherans; through it, an easy path should be considered opened by which both sides may return to the unity of the Church and the sincerity of the faith. Whether the former way or rather this latter one securely attains the end intended by the Catholic authors of both opinions, the pious and prudent reader will readily gather from the course of this work, if he reads attentively and weighs carefully the passages of Sacred Scripture, the supreme pontiffs, the councils, and the holy Fathers, especially St Augustine, St Prosper, and St Thomas, which we shall adduce in confirmation of our teaching.

How much authority the opinion of St. Augustine has concerning predestination, and grace; and whether it is permissible to depart from it.

I.

There have been some who, wishing to weaken St. Augustine’s authority concerning predestination and grace, have said that his teaching on this matter is that of one particular Doctor, from which one may therefore depart. They add that they greatly admire his teaching in all other matters, accept it, and gladly hear it; yet they claim that the doctrine he follows concerning the predestination and grace of Christ is not suited to resist the heretics of our time, nor consonant with the Greek Fathers who lived before Augustine. This objection was once advanced by the Semi-Pelagians against the teaching of that same holy Doctor, as St. Prosper reports in these words:¹ To him (namely Augustine), amid so many triumphs in battle, amid so many crowns of victory, shining for the illumination of the Church and the glory of Christ, by whom he himself was illumined, some of our own people (and this is all the more grievous because it is they themselves) oppose him with secret but not unknown whisperings. Whenever they find certain ears susceptible and receptive to their harm, they defame his writings in which the Pelagian error is attacked, saying that he utterly removes free choice and preaches fatal necessity under the name of grace. They add that he wants us to believe in two masses and two natures of the human race, so that impiety of the pagans and Manichaeans may be attributed to a man of such great piety.² And St. Hilary says: But I certainly must not keep silent, (he says), about this: they say that they admire your Holiness in all your actions and words, except for this.³ St. Fulgentius also noted the same thing in these words: You know that even in the past some Gauls objected to that most luminous work of St. Augustine, which he wrote On the Predestination of the Saints. They judged that Blessed Augustine, in asserting divine predestination, said that sinners were predestined not only to judgment but also to sin. Because he was overtaken by an early death before he could answer them, Prosper, a learned and holy man, rightly defended him in a faithful and ample discourse.⁴ In defense of that same holy Doctor, St. Prosper brought forth very many golden words in different places. I have decided to gather them together, so that everyone may see how great the authority of St. Augustine is in the doctrine of grace and predestination.

II. In the cited letter to Rufinus, he speaks of St. Augustine as follows: When the judgments of the Eastern bishops, the authority of the Apostolic See, and the vigilance of the African councils had detected the wiles by which the sons of darkness sought to transform themselves into the likeness of the sons of light, Blessed Augustine too—up to this time a most distinguished portion of the Lord’s priests—overthrew them copiously and beautifully in many disputations in his books. Among the many gifts of God with which the Spirit of truth filled him most abundantly, he also had, through God’s love, this power of knowledge and wisdom: to wage war with the invincible sword of the word not only against this heresy, still palpitating in its mutilated remnants, but against many heresies that had come before.⁵⁶ A little later he concludes: But you, my dearest and most venerable brother, if you truly desire to be instructed in these questions, as you ought to desire, devote yourself to learning the disputations of Blessed Augustine himself, so that in defining God’s grace you may attain the most refined and salutary understanding of the evangelical and apostolic teaching.⁷ Elsewhere he says: Some have thought to criticize the teaching that Bishop Augustine of blessed memory asserted in apostolic fashion and committed to writing for many years against the Pelagians, enemies of Christ’s grace and deceivers concerning free choice—either because they did not understand it or because they did not wish it to be understood. They offered those guided by their judgment what they called a shortcut to knowledge: they published brief chapter headings listing what they claimed to have found condemnable in the books of that man, so that by such a contrivance they might secure both the detestation of the man they attacked and turn the frightened reader’s attention away from what they had defamed.⁸ Therefore, lest anyone rashly accept this persuasion and think that the Catholic Doctor’s writings contain the meaning that his unjust accusers display, to each chapter they marked with a heading I answer with a brief and unqualified profession, departing in no respect from the course of the definitions contained in the disputations of that holy man. Thus even a reader of modest diligence may readily see how unjustly the memory of the Catholic preacher is assailed by reproaches, and into what sin those fall who, moved by another’s prompting, are quicker to blame a writer of celebrated name than to know him. Before his prose work Against the Ungrateful, he also composed certain verses in defense of Augustine and praise of his teaching. In them he shows that it is sound and that his opponents attack it irrationally.

III. Nor was Prosper alone: several Supreme Pontiffs also approved the teaching of that same Augustine and declared it Catholic.⁹ For Pope Celestine: Augustine, (he says), we have always held, a man of holy memory, in our communion because of his life and merits; no rumor of sinister suspicion has ever touched him. We remember that he was once a man of such great learning that even my predecessors counted him among the best teachers. All therefore rightly thought well of him in common, since everywhere he was beloved and honored by all. Hence we must resist such men as we see growing in wickedness. Religious souls must not suffer this; when they are afflicted, we too ought to be distressed, since they are our members. Yet the promised blessedness awaits those who are found to endure persecution for the sake of righteousness, and the following passage declares what the Lord promises them in the future. The cause is not that of those involved alone; the universal Church is assailed by any such novelty, let us understand that the very things displeasing to us displease you as well. We shall be able to prove this only if, once the wicked have been silenced, complaint about this matter ceases henceforth.¹⁰ Immediately afterward, restraining the insolence of those who barked against St. Augustine’s teaching, he adds: Because some who boast of the Catholic name linger in the condemned opinions of heretics, whether through wickedness or ignorance, they presume to oppose the most pious disputants. Although they do not hesitate to anathematize Pelagius and Caelestius, they nonetheless revile our teachers as though they had gone beyond what is necessary. They claim that they follow and approve only those things which the most sacred See of the blessed Apostle Peter decreed and taught against the enemies of God’s grace through the ministry of its bishops. It was necessary to investigate carefully what the rulers of the Roman Church judged concerning the heresy that arose in their times, and what they decreed should be thought concerning God’s grace against the most harmful defenders of free choice.¹¹

IV. What Celestine said in defense and commendation of St. Augustine’s teaching ought surely to have sufficed to prevent the Massilians, who had not yet attained perfect knowledge, from rising against the doctrine of a most excellent master and Doctor of the Church. Yet, because remnants of the Pelagian heresy in Gaul contended that although the Supreme Pontiff had commended St. Augustine’s teaching, he had not specifically approved the books On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance—in which, answering the letters of Prosper and Hilary addressed to him, Augustine confirmed his doctrine of gratuitous predestination with the clearest testimonies of sacred Scripture and attacked and defeated the Semi-Pelagian error—after Celestine’s time, while the faction of the Gauls had not yet quieted, St. Leo I wrote to Nicetas, Bishop of Aquileia. He again condemned the followers of the Pelagian heresy who attacked St. Augustine’s teaching, saying among other things: Your Charity must therefore take care and provide with great diligence that through such men scandals long extinguished are not revived and that no shoot of the same evil grows in your province from a doctrine once cut down; lest not only it grow from its roots, but also infect the offspring of Holy Church with the poison of its stench. Those who wish to be seen as corrected must clear themselves of every suspicion and prove by obeying us that they are ours. If any of them should refuse to comply with salutary precepts, whether cleric or layman, let him be expelled from the fellowship of the Church, lest a destroyer of his own soul plot against another’s salvation.¹² Leo therefore transcribed certain chapters from St. Augustine’s books on grace and free choice word for word, approved and defined them, and sent them to the Council of Orange, so that the bishops of that council might sign and receive them, as they did.¹³

V. Later, Pope Gelasius wrote several decretal letters in detestation of the Pelagian heresy and of those in Gaul who had attacked St. Augustine’s teaching.¹⁴ In particular, in Letter 3, addressed to Honorius, he says: The mournful, dreadful, and scarcely credible report has so overwhelmed us as to confuse, wound, and afflict our mind. For we have been told that in the regions of Dalmatia some have sown the tares of a renewed Pelagian plague, and that their blasphemy has so prevailed there that they deceive simple people by insinuating a deadly madness. This error is impious indeed, and all the more pernicious in its theft because it is more cunning in its deception through a color of plausibility. With the Lord’s help, the pure truth of the Catholic faith is at hand, the concordant judgment drawn from all the Fathers, to expose the subtle poison of deadly perversity¹⁵ and supply, from the remedy prepared from the Scriptures, medicine for the salvation of the human race. Let it therefore in no way trouble hearts not yet abounding in discernment of these matters, until both the hidden wound becomes apparent and the unique salvation shines forth; for with whatever art of deception the spirit of perdition arms itself, it is both exposed and slain by the holy sword of the ruling Spirit.

And a little later: Is it permissible for us to undo what the venerable Fathers condemned and to reopen the impious doctrines they cut down? Why, then, do we take such great care lest the ruin of any heresy once overthrown be brought back for examination? If we strive to restore matters that our ancestors knew, discussed, and refuted long ago, are we not (God forbid—and the Catholic Church will never endure this) setting an example for all the adversaries of truth to rise against us? Where is what is written, ‘You shall not move the boundaries your fathers set,’¹⁶ and, ‘Ask your fathers, and they will tell you; your elders, and they will explain it to you’?¹⁷¹⁸ Why, then, do we reach beyond what our ancestors defined? Or why should it not suffice us, if in our ignorance we wish to learn what the Orthodox Fathers and elders ordained about each matter—what must be avoided and what must be adapted to Catholic truth? Why are these things not approved by their decrees? Are we wiser than they, or can we stand with firm stability if we undermine what they established?¹⁹ Or perhaps you do not know that this heresy of which we speak was long ago struck down by the Apostolic See in continuous and unceasing judgments through Innocent of blessed memory, then Zosimus, Boniface, Celestine, Sixtus, and Leo;²⁰²¹ and that it was condemned not only by the laws of the Catholic Church but also by the ordinances of the Roman emperors, so that its followers were allowed no place to live anywhere in the world? All this is shown both by the Church’s records in the several regions, which attest to their perversion, and by public decrees. Behold how Catholic ears of all sorts hear this doctrine, entertain questions, handle its snares, and patiently admit its blasphemies! If only they would study the books and replies of our ancestors against them, they would see in every way that absolutely nothing raised by these men has not already been shattered by those Fathers in magnificent truth.

In another letter to the same Honorius, Gelasius urges him to be vigilant lest the Pelagian heresy, which Augustine crushed, sprout again.²² In Letter 5 to all the bishops throughout Picenum, refuting the three chief tenets of the Pelagian heresy, he says: What would such pontiffs do if (God forbid) some new and previously unknown plague broke out, or sacrilegious utterances of blasphemy were produced by men endowed with keener intellects and crafty notions, or cunning through some expertise in secular learning, when they neither recall nor reject the worn-out inventions of so ancient an error, refuted both by the earlier teachers of the Churches and in our own age, and do not spurn them when put forward by the unlearned and foolish?

Near the end of the same letter, commending St. Jerome, Augustine, and their teaching in particular, he adds: A still greater crime is growing: under the eyes and in the presence of the priests, a dying fly, destroying the sweet-smelling oil (as it is written),²³ would try to tear at Jerome and Augustine of blessed memory, those lights of the Church’s teachers. Finally, the same Gelasius, in the decree on apocryphal writings issued with seventy bishops, expressly approved the works of Blessed Augustine, Prosper, and Hilary,²⁴ and among the apocryphal books that are not to be received he condemned the works of Cassian, a priest of Gaul, and the works of Faustus, Bishop of Riez, which are known to have been written against St. Augustine’s teaching.²⁵ Finally, John II, in a letter to certain noble Roman senators, commending St. Augustine’s teaching, says: St. Augustine, whose teaching the Roman Church follows and preserves according to the statutes of my predecessors.²⁶

Thus, as certain grave authorities have noted, the Apostolic See issued its judgment not only once, but a second and third time, against the remnants of the Pelagians, in favor of the defenders of grace and predestination, which Augustine drew from sacred Scripture. His teaching should therefore now be called not the opinion of one particular Doctor, but the faith of the Catholic Church.

V. From all this one may infer how careful a theologian ought to be not to attempt to introduce anything new, but to follow, explain, and defend the ancient teaching received from the holy Fathers. Bishop Capreolus of Africa, in the name of the other African bishops, likewise admonishes us in these words in a letter to the most blessed Fathers of the Council of Ephesus, which that council received and approved: Therefore, venerable brothers, I wish to ask your Holiness again and again: with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, whom we do not doubt will be present in your hearts in everything you undertake, may you, armed with the strength of ancient authority, root out new doctrines—doctrines hitherto unfamiliar to Christian ears. Resist all new errors with holy constancy and courage, lest the authority of the Apostolic See and the united severity of the priests, under some pretext of dispute, appear to have allowed those doctrines long ago overcome by the Church, now sprouting again, to revive a doctrine long since proscribed.²⁷ If some new controversy should arise, it ought to be submitted in due time to examination, so that what is rightly said may be confirmed, or what deserves condemnation rejected.²⁸ Hence the Apostle also says: For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.²⁹ He introduced nothing on his own authority, but handed on what he had received and preached what he had learned from the Lord. He urges Timothy to teach the same, saying: O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding profane novelties of words and the oppositions of falsely named knowledge, which some professing have fallen away from the faith. Vincent of Lérins observes here: He did not say, ‘Avoid antiquities’; he did not say, ‘Avoid old things.’ Rather, he plainly showed what must be followed in their place. For if novelty must be avoided, antiquity must be held; and if novelty is profane, old tradition is sacred.³⁰ The Apostle teaches us to avoid not only new doctrines but also novelties of words, so that we may all think and speak the same thing, with no schisms or disputes among us. For he says: I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all say the same thing and that there be no schisms among you, but that you be perfected in the same mind and in the same judgment.³¹ He does not say only that you should think or believe the same thing, but that you all say the same thing, so that just as all the children of the Church agree in the same mind and Catholic judgment, they may also use the same words, as far as possible, to explain and defend it. For us, therefore, (as Tertullian says), it is permissible to introduce nothing on our own authority, nor to choose anything that someone else has introduced on his own authority. We have as our authors the Lord’s Apostles, who themselves chose to introduce nothing on their own authority, but faithfully handed on to the nations the teaching they had received from Christ.³² Therefore, even if an angel from heaven were to preach a different gospel, we would call him anathema.³³

HOW MUCH AUTHORITY the teaching of St. Thomas has, especially concerning predestination and grace.

VI. St. Augustine, the holy Father, compared the sacred teaching and unshaken truth and strength of the Catholic Church to an island, saying: Why is the Church an island? Because it is barked at by the waves of every temptation. But although an island can be battered by waves crashing all around it, it cannot be broken; rather, it breaks the waves that come against it more than it is broken by them. So too, the churches of God springing up throughout the whole world have endured persecutions from the unbelievers roaring on every side, and behold, the islands stand, and the sea is now calm.³⁴³⁵ What of Simon Magus? What of Arius, Sabellius, Pelagius and Caelestius, and the other heretics? Were they not the waves of a raging sea, spewing out their confusions, persecuting the truth, and raising their voices against the Catholic faith? The rivers have lifted up, O Lord (says the Prophet), the rivers have lifted up their voice, the rivers have lifted up their waves; from the voices of many waters. Wonderful are the swellings of the sea: Yet they could not prevail against the island of the Church, because the Lord is wonderful on high,³⁶ and because your testimonies have been made exceedingly credible, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.³⁷ Thus the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas conformed his teaching in every respect to that of the Catholic Church. Though many have attacked it, it has never been overcome; it has always remained the same and, like an island battered by rising waves, has grown stronger and brighter. It could never be broken by its attackers, nor will it be, but will remain firm to the end of the age. According to some reports, at the University of Paris many Parisian theologians rose up against the holy Doctor soon after his death. Envious of the authority of his teaching, they condemned many of his propositions as erroneous. As a result, the Bishop of Paris rashly issued a sentence of excommunication against the followers of those propositions. But these waves soon broke. For in the year of our Lord 1325, Stephen, then bishop there, together with all the Doctors of Theology, the Church, and the University—seventy-two in number—held a long consultation about St. Thomas’s propositions and examined them with great care. They judged every one of them to be Catholic and spoke these words in praise of the holy Doctor’s teaching: St. Thomas was a shining light of the universal Church, a radiant jewel among clerics, a fountain of Doctors, the brightest mirror of our University of Paris, and a distinguished, gleaming lamp by which all who walk the paths of true life and holy doctrine see the light. He shone like a splendid morning star, bright with the clarity of his life, the renown of his fame, and the brilliance of his knowledge. A little later those Doctors decree that St. Thomas, by God’s grace, thought, taught, or wrote nothing contrary to sound faith or good morals.³⁸

In a sermon in praise of St. Thomas that begins Behold, one greater than Solomon is here, Innocent VI commends his teaching in these words: Above all other teaching (except the Canonical Scriptures), this Doctor’s teaching has precision of words, a fitting manner of expression, and truth of conclusions. Thus no one who has held it is found to have strayed from the path of truth, while whoever has attacked it has always been suspected of departing from the truth. ³⁹

VII. John XXII, who enrolled Blessed Thomas in the catalogue of the saints, also spoke these words about him in the bull of his canonization: St. Thomas wrote the elementary arts, natural and moral philosophy, commentaries on both Testaments, and many other works for the praise of God and the exaltation of the faith, with clarity and learning,⁴⁰ not without a special infusion from God.⁴¹

In a certain sermon he preached on the firmness of this same holy Doctor’s teaching, taking as his theme the words of Psalm 4, Know that the Lord has made his holy one wonderful, he asserted that after the Apostles and the first holy Doctors, St. Thomas had illuminated the Church more than all others by his teaching.

As John Gerson reports, at the very canonization of the holy Doctor, that same John XXII said these or similar words in a full consistory of cardinals in praise of his teaching: Even if St. Thomas had shone with no miracles during his life or at his death, his teaching alone would have sufficed for him to be enrolled among the saints. For as many articles as he wrote, so many miracles did the Lord perform through him: each one is a miracle. ^{42 43}

Clement VI, in a certain bull issued at Avignon on February 5 in the second year of his pontificate, also commends the same teaching of St. Thomas, calling it unique and saying that the universal Church gathers the most abundant fruits of spiritual plenty from it and is refreshed and nourished by its fragrance.⁴⁴ This bull is also cited by Master Castillo.⁴⁵

VIII. Urban VI, in a bull to the Archbishop and Doctors of the University of Toulouse, issued at Montefiascone on August 30 in the sixth year of his pontificate, commends and approves all the works and writings of the Doctor. He also urges all the Doctors and Masters of that university to defend and teach his doctrine. For he says: Considering how greatly God endowed St. Thomas with knowledge, and how he illumined the Order of Preachers and the universal Church, we wish and by the tenor of these presents enjoin upon you that you follow the teaching of the said Blessed Thomas as true and Catholic, and strive with all your strength to extend it. ⁴⁶

Pius V, who designated St. Thomas the fifth Doctor of the Church, says in a certain bull issued in Rome on April 11, 1567:⁴⁷ St. Thomas illumined the universal Church by his teaching, destroyed innumerable heresies, and the heresies that arose after his death were overthrown by the teaching of this same holy Doctor.

Whose articles were transcribed more than once or twice in the sacred Council of Trent, and were drawn up and arranged as canons to be believed by all the faithful.

Finally, Clement VIII, in a special bull by which he granted St. Thomas to the city of Naples as its Patron and Protector, called him an interpreter of the divine will, and rightly so. For in his writings, with great depth and clarity, he explained more fully than all the other Doctors what pleases God and what displeases him.

The words of Isaiah certainly apply to him: The Lord has given me a learned tongue, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.⁴⁸ And, let our enemies be the judges, Theodore Beza, a Calvinist, affirmed that St. Thomas was the foremost of all scholastic theologians.⁴⁹ It is also reported that a certain heretic said: Let the writings of St. Thomas be removed, and I will not refuse to enter into a contest with all the other Doctors. A faithful witness, though one of his own school, is Ferrariensis. Wishing to explain the abundant fruit he drew every day from continually reading St. Thomas, he says: May I perish if I have ever read even a page he neglected that did not draw me into admiration of him. I have never met Thomas Aquinas without leaving more learned and more devoted to him.⁵⁰

IX.

But if men do not accept human testimony, behold the testimony of God, which is greater. For as the holy Doctor was praying in Naples, an image of the Crucified spoke to him: You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward, then, will you receive for your labor? The saint replied: Lord, none other than you. ⁵¹

In this work, therefore, I shall discuss, with as much brevity and clarity as I can, and with God’s help, above all those matters that concern the true understanding of the teaching of Saints Augustine and Thomas on the divine helps of grace and their efficacy. I shall do so in defense of those same saints, noting what agrees with the ancient doctrine and resolving the arguments of their adversaries. Together with Lord Cajetan I wish everyone to be convinced of this one point, and I solemnly entreat them: I intend in no way to oppose persons, but only opinions insofar as they disagree. ⁵²

The First Book Ends.