De natura et gratia libri III, cum Apologia contra Catharinum

Would that, holy, ecumenical, and in every way legitimate Synod of Trent, this fire stirred up from the North had not invaded the Church of God more violently and dangerously than [a fire] which it is now easy to resist. For I would not then have rushed so rashly into public, until I had weighed my own poverty with myself, consulted my weakness, and found out what my shoulders could bear. But when we, astonished, see that the world of Christians is now ablaze from so many quarters,¹ and that so many sparks have leaped from it that scarcely any corner remains which does not already smoke, about to catch the flame, I have indeed thought nothing else worth the effort, if each man, according to his strength and the talent divinely given him, hastens without choice to meet it in some improvised way, and we all bring help, so that if in some part it has already eaten into men’s marrow and reduced their hearts to ashes, and we cannot extinguish it, at least it may not continue to flash and sparkle more widely—that is, in fine, our effort. We especially who have been brought here to write on this matter. For to this purpose Caesar also sent my smallness to you, most holy Fathers, if perhaps I could render you any service whatsoever. But if all were obedient to the word of this sacred order, as Christians are bound in the highest right, they would surely have enough to have heard your most holy counsels, and to obey them obediently. For what is there that can be objected to an ecumenical council, legitimately both summoned and assembled? Where, according to the Holy Spirit, three most reverend legates from the chief men of the sacred senate preside, worthy indeed to discharge the office of Vicar of Christ. With whom also two other Cardinals of the same order, both most distinguished and most wise, sit as assessors. Where the princes of Christians have sent their envoys along with holy bishops. Where finally from all lands the most just and most prudent number of every rank and ecclesiastical dignity has been gathered. But among the errors of that Patriarch Luther there is this one,² the cause and fuel of all, and by far the most pestilent of all: that he admits no public judge for defining and terminating controversies of faith, whose authority and judgment all Christians should obey. And this has so settled into the minds of those Lutherans that, after thirty years spent in truces, assemblies and conferences with them, they have now despaired of preparing their minds beforehand for the council, and have taken up unspeakable arms³ against the sacred Majesty, the parent of his country, against the Church of God, against the truth of the Gospel. See, alas, most excellent Fathers, whither the obstinate blindness of one man has finally come. And what is greater and a more grievous marvel, never have any errors, so slight and slender, whether you look to holiness of life or to doctrine, had progenitors and patrons.⁴ For they are not even covered with a sheep’s skin, nor much instructed in art. And yet never have any been more destructive to the Christian commonwealth, never have any spread so widely with less effort, and so seized the minds not only of the unlearned crowd but of the nobles and princes of the Germans—a race truly most celebrated throughout the whole world for its illustrious deeds, and also, had it not received this blow, most Christian in the sanctity of its religion. But is it not a miracle where the natural cause is so ready to hand?⁵ They teach that whatever pleases is lawful. But I have resolved to admonish my brothers, not to provoke them; for charity does not act perversely. All whom Christ has regenerated with me in the same blood I embrace with the same charity. I congratulate some on recognizing the evangelical truth; for others I desire that they may no longer ignore it, and I pray the immortal God for it. Especially since I wish that our own corrupted morals and the dissipation of laws had not been the occasion these men seized for so great a separation. For whatever it was that drove the ship of Peter into these rocks, it was the storm of our own evils. And unless we take care that this be first calmed, you strive in vain, most ample Fathers, to settle the disturbance of affairs which we suffer, and to check the waves of heresies by which we are tossed. Yet the adversaries could have censured the errors of persons without injury to the public faith. For whatever the morals of private men and the abuses of laws may be, the truth of faith is nevertheless beyond all doubt true. For it is divine, and so firm and holy that to oppose it out of any hatred or pretext is a nefarious crime of impiety. Wherefore, to return to the beginning from which I digressed: I have by no means received five talents, nor indeed two, which I might be able to double further at interest (according to the Gospel); but so great has the necessity of these times seemed to me that a little fear has begun to move me somewhat, lest perhaps even the one which I have received according to my slender strength I now bury in the earth, and that be reckoned to me as wickedness on the day of the Lord. For this reason, after so many and such illustrious men who in these thirty years have happily contended with them on our side, I have prepared this little work On Nature and Grace,⁶ meditating whether perhaps my labor might avail to contribute something to this public cause. Moreover, I have not given it altogether a similar argument to the same title which Augustine wrote against the Pelagians. For he in the book On Nature and Grace⁷ intended only to demonstrate the weakness and poverty of wounded and injured free will, for which therefore the grace of Christ was altogether necessary. But I, most Reverend bishops, so as to set forth as it were a kind of apology for your most prudent fifth and sixth sessions, which are on original sin and on justification, have decided to repeat the matter from a higher source and to set it forth more broadly. For thus I judged that the controversies which we have with the Lutherans would be explained more clearly if I treated in order not precisely those controversies, but all the matters which can in any way serve this business. Namely, if I inquired universally what our nature in human offices can accomplish with the general influence of God, and what then it is that it cannot do without the special favor and help of grace. Therefore I have thought our nature should be distinguished into four states and conditions: namely, that I should depict man as conceived in thought in pure natural state, as truly created in original justice, as fallen from there into fault, and finally as afterward restored to grace. But the distribution of the work is into three related little books.⁸ In the first of these, which is on the transgression of man, we have dispatched the first three states. In the second, which is on justification, we have elucidated all the causes and finally the modes of human reconciliation. In the third, finally, we have added the last disputations on the faculty of the justified man and the certainty of grace. So that the first may be as it were a commentary on the fifth session, and the rest on the sixth. For with these things deliberated, we can fully understand both whence man was cast down by his free will and whither he was afterward recalled by divine grace. Moreover, in style and in the manner of proceeding and disputing, I have not much rejected the scholastic form,⁹ although I am not unaware that the name of the Scholastics is hateful and infamous to the Lutherans.¹⁰ For what did these men not designate from the beginning, from the time they began to wage this war against the Church? Moreover, as they feared every order of men the most, so, in order to disparage their authority against themselves, they began to attack them with the greatest hatred, to tear them with insults, and to assail them most bitterly with curses—and therefore to drive them from their conferences and assemblies as suspected enemies. For this reason they hiss out the scholastic theologians as a public pestilence. Because, as in Demosthenes’ fable, the herdsmen’s dogs¹¹ cannot, since they are the defenders of the flock, be not hateful to wolves. But if it please the gods, as if they themselves were the ones who ought to lay down laws for the world, so there are many among Catholics who, listening to them, put the schoolmen last, cast aside philosophy, and wish the banquet to be furnished with the dishes of languages alone, since by their knowledge and assistance they think that without a Theseus they can of themselves approach both the volumes of the holy Fathers and also of sacred Scripture. To this evil, certainly (as I declaimed before your holiness in the public synod), unless you publicly resist, and the universities hasten to consult better for themselves and for the public good, we shall soon grieve that the whole Christian world boils over with errors. Why not? As each man most impudently strives to become trilingual and has washed his lips at that fabulous fountain, so he comes forth with the greatest authority among the priests of the sacred mysteries, a very Thrice-great. There is nothing indeed that I wish to pretend in excuse of my lack of eloquence. For I frankly confess that I have pursued studies for another reason—namely, that I might cultivate languages most accurately; and if the other were to be desired, I would rather at present have a spirit near to the Christian [matter] than that eloquence nearest to Cicero be given me. Nor do I deny that the knowledge and cultivation of languages, to which our age applies itself more diligently, is of great use for understanding the sacred books:¹² Augustine reminds us of this in On Christian Doctrine 2. But nevertheless I contend, on the other hand, that this should be persuaded: that as an eye suffering from ophthalmia is not immediately torn from the head, but is cured with eye-salves for the sake of its excellent use, so the scholastic matter should be cut away—namely, purged both of the trifles of sophisms and of the vain monstrosities of the metaphysicians, with which it has been unworthily defiled by the filth of some authors—yet the greatest effort should be given that it not utterly perish, but rather be restored, unless we wish to have very many who bear the name, but very few who in reality are theologians. Not so expressly does this method of disputing through questions exist in the holy Fathers; but since they were the greatest philosophers,¹³ it is plain that they knew this Peripatetic form. And although it was not necessary among the narratives of the sacred utterances, it nevertheless frequently shows itself in Augustine and others. And since after that age it was received into the schools of the theologians, what is its business, if it is instituted by the way, reason and method, except that faith through this most healthful art (as Augustine says in On the Trinity 14)¹⁴ may be begotten, nourished, defended and strengthened? For what method of interpreting can be more perspicacious and more suitable, both for the sayings of the saints and especially for the utterances of the sacred writers, than that, when one passage is brought into question, the underlying matter, explained from its causes, may yield the true sense? As it is to be seen in Saint Thomas, Saint Bonaventure and the rest. For man is a rational animal,¹⁵ and therefore by no power does he prevail more, or by any way, for drawing out truth from every source and deducing it from its causes, than by reasoning and discourse. And so, in order to investigate the causes and natures of things, to judge consequences, to reconcile contraries, and finally to bring forth anything unknown from its deepest hiding places into the light, he is aided by nothing more than by conferences, if they are conducted in order, and the other scholastic exercises. Add that faith does not oppose nature (as these men think), but certainly perfects it.¹⁶ Wherefore they mutually pour themselves into each other with a borrowed light. For as faith has taught us very many secrets of nature previously inaccessible to philosophers, so in turn the knowledge of natural things greatly serves as a handmaid for understanding and explaining the mysteries of faith. Especially since, besides those hidden things of divine matters, all other things—namely, those which pertain to laws, to virtues and vices, to human offices, contracts, and the relationships of men (all of which are most necessary to be known in a Christian commonwealth)—are discussed and treated by the Scholastics alone, whose reasons philosophy supplies in large part. But they say that the schools of the philosophers have always been the workshops of heresies.¹⁷ I do not deny that this was so while faith was in its infancy in the cradle. For then those who thought themselves wise judged the things that were above them against nature. Hence Arius, Sabellius, and monsters of that kind came forth. For this reason philosophy has a bad name among the early orthodox. Yet unless there had been among them those who would conquer the philosophers even from philosophy itself, they would scarcely have overcome those beasts by the sacred testimonies which those men twisted into a sinister sense. For there had to be philosophers to explain that it was not a demonstration which Arius was thought to have most invincibly—namely, that if the individual essence is the Father, and the same is the Son, then the Father is the person of the Son. Berengar was refuted by philosophy, who denied that the accidents of the sacrament exist without a subject, because he hallucinated that this was repugnant to their very nature; and in that error many Germans are now held. But true philosophy is that which teaches that this is in no way repugnant. If it could be brought about that there were no false philosophers to beget heresies, perhaps no philosophy would be necessary for this use, to blunt the audacity of heretics. But because (according to Paul) there must be heresies,¹⁸ I would have judged it equally necessary that philosophy be cherished among theologians, by which, according to Peter’s word, they may be more ready to give a reason to everyone who asks about the hope that is in us.¹⁹ For it is the office of natural philosophy²⁰ not indeed to demonstrate the supernatural mysteries of faith (since they are received from divine testimonies alone), but nevertheless to explain them and to assert them against the philosophers, while it weakens and breaks their arguments, showing that they prove nothing against us. Hence Paul also admonishes the bishop²¹ to hold to the faithful word, so that he may be able to exhort by sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict. And indeed, the more Augustine exhibited the business of the Church by his dialectic and philosophy while he was a Manichaean, the more useful he afterward was against heretics. Philosophy is a theriac, a heavenly remedy most carefully provided by the senate, which cures the bites of the very vipers from whose flesh it is made.²² And to make an end at once: who are they who have set languages in a more cultivated way than the Germans? Who have spent more time in reading Augustine and the Fathers of that kind? Who have turned over more copies of sacred Scripture? What cause, then, remains to them for so many errors, except that they have neglected scholastic theology? From ignorance of it that all have flowed, it will be easy for one who weighs the matter to perceive. Indeed, among the same men there began at once both the cultivation of languages and contempt for scholastic reasoning, and a crowd of heresies. I know not, Fathers, whither the heat of speaking has stolen me further than I had thought. But do you, in your clemency, provide for the good, since I could not say in fewer words what I fear for the theological matter if scholastic treatments are removed from the midst. Yet that I may not longer deafen you, holy men, with this inept prolixity of my speaking, receive this little gift, whatever it is, examine it, chastise it, and reform it according to your supreme authority. For to whom other than you, the lights of the Church, should I dedicate the apology of your decrees? Act as you have begun. Be obedient to the Holy Spirit. Consult the honor of the apostolic see, where the most holy head of the Church resides. Provide for your family—I mean the Christian world—kept by the blood of Christ, which holds its faces fixed upon you and its hands outstretched, that you may stir up this remaining spark of faith; hear the Christian princes, who earnestly beg this of you, who sit as judges in this cause: let not the zeal and office of the most invincible Caesar²³ be defrauded through you of its most holy purpose. He has exposed not only all his fortunes, armies and kingdoms to this same cause, but also, that he might discharge the faith he had bound himself to Christ, he has set his life before you in the camp, with prodigious arms and indeed with sulphurous missiles, so that his fame may be eternal to the glory of the divine name. For if you leave the Christian commonwealth at this point, when faith cannot long endure in so great a danger, and the world cannot survive once it is extinguished, you cast us into certain fear that this departure, spreading so widely, is that very one about which the Apostle took care to write to us, foretelling the approaching end of things.