De gratia Redemptoris

It must be premised that the Church condemned the following propositions against Quesnel: Prop. 53: “Charity alone in a Christian manner performs (Christian actions) through relation to God and Jesus Christ”. — 54: “Charity alone is what speaks to God; it alone God hears”. — 55: “God crowns only charity: he who runs from another impulse and from another motive runs in vain”. — 56: “God rewards only charity: since charity alone honours God”¹. Hence it must now be said that it is not only acts elicited by charity that are meritorious. Nor does the Council of Trent restrict merit to acts of charity, but speaks universally of good works.

Some theologians hold that an act of virtue is not meritorious² unless it proceeds imperatively or virtually from an act of charity previously elicited. So several Thomists and Augustinians; besides St Bonaventure³, St Bellarmine⁴. But neither does the Council of Trent speak of this condition, though it indicated everything that is required for merit⁵. It requires the state of grace and good works. Can it be said that an act of virtue not commanded by charity is not a good work?

Hence preference is to be given to the view which is defended by very many theologians, and which Suárez states thus: “acts of the infused virtues performed by a man in grace are meritorious of condignity of supernatural beatitude by the force of their own goodness and connatural weight or relation to that end, without any other, so to speak extrinsic, relation accruing to them through a past or present act of charity”⁶.

This view corresponds perfectly to what the Council of Trent teaches, and adds no new condition to the conditions of merit established by the council. But if it is objected that the council requires works to be done “in God”, it must be answered that “in God” is not the same as “from charity”; the good works which are done by a just man under the influence of Christ, with the help of grace, are done in God. Nor does Sacred Scripture say that, for a work to be meritorious, it is required that it proceed from charity; cf. for example Matth 5 on the beatitudes. Therefore no other ordering “to the end of charity” is required in a meritorious work than that which consists in this, that the man who acts be in the state of grace and charity and, as an adopted son of God, do what God wills and what pleases God; thus in the work itself there is an ordering to the last end. If the condition which the other view establishes were so necessary that without it a work would not be meritorious, God would have made this clear.

Since the act of charity is the noblest act of the virtues and the most meritorious, it is plain that the acts of the other virtues are better the more charity influences them.