De natura et gratia libri III, cum Apologia contra Catharinum

The other member, which remains to be discussed concerning the human will, regards its freedom toward evil. For, as we began to relate above, the Lutherans deny freedom in both directions, namely toward good and toward evil. They deny it especially in those sins which are the punishment of preceding guilt. For so we reported from Luther, that it is not in our power to make evil ways, but God works evil works in the impious. To which Philip subscribes, asserting that it is God's own work, no less the betrayal of Judas than the calling of Paul. And Eucerus agrees on the epistle to the Romans, where Paul says that God handed the Gentiles over to a reprobate mind. Although Melanchthon in the second edition appears to have retracted. For this second member accumulates far more absurdity than the former: since it not only overturns free will, but attributes to God that he is the cause of sin, principally and effectively, as they say, by compelling us to sin.

Almost all the dogmas of these men are of such a kind that at their first utterance they fight more openly with common sense than that they need any other refutation. For to whom could it be made persuasive that God compels anyone to act against his own law? Indeed against his own will. For the law of God is nothing else than the sign and norm of his will. But if one wishes to expand and prolong the disputation, the first and also most lucid demonstration against this fiction is drawn from the nature of sin, which is a word, or deed, or desire (as Augustine is the author, Against Faustus, book 22)¹ against the law of God. But the law of God, which is the rule of our actions, is the same as his will. Since intellect and will are the same essence in God. Wherefore it is impossible for anything to be against the law of God without being against his will. Indeed for that reason it is against the divine will because it is against his rule. From these things this argument is established. God moves this man to sin, indeed even compels him effectively, as they say: therefore he moves him to act against his rule, and likewise against his will. But that God moves anyone against his will is a manifest contradiction. For if he moves and compels, he wills it to be done so. Indeed take another contradiction. If God wills me to do this (which he cannot deny who says that I am compelled by him) this is conformed to his rule (for God wills nothing that is not conformed to his rule); but if so, it is not sin. For sin is against the rule of God. And the argument is also confirmed. For this reason God cannot err or sin,² because to sin is to fall away from the rule: which the Almighty cannot do, since he himself is his own rule. As if the hand of the writer were the rule, and the hand of the painter were rectitude itself, whatever line he drew, he would write and paint rightly. Therefore by the same reason, whatever God moves efficiently and principally, he leads according to his rule and law. And for that reason it is a contradiction that anyone sins in that in which he performs an act from God. The argument can also be deduced otherwise.³ God (as Dionysius says) orders all things in himself,⁴ which he makes, and as to an end: but sin, when it is done, strays from that order: therefore it is not then done by him, although afterwards he draws good from it. Truly, unless they had so deliberately wished to be ignorant of theology, which reasons from the natures of things, they would never have collapsed into these precipices. For they would understand that there is as much opposition between what God does, whether through himself or through another, and sin, as between good and evil, and between what is loved by God and what is held in hatred by him. For as whatever God created in natural things, he saw that it was good, because it was consonant with his rule, so whatever he does in human wills. Hence when the Wise Man had pronounced, You love all things that are, and hate none of the things you have made:⁵ for neither hating did you establish or make anything, afterwards in ch. 14 he adds that the impious man and his impiety are likewise hated by God, signifying that sin is therefore hated by God because it is not his work.

Second argument.— The second argument is taken from the other quality of sin. For as virtue, so also sin's necessary condition is that it be voluntary. Concerning which something was said in ch. 12. And this is true to such an extent that no one of the holy Fathers ever failed to judge this to be the voice of nature. Hence the most ancient Tertullian, Against Marcion, book 2:⁶ Nor, he says, would the reward of good or evil be rightly weighed for him who was found to be good or evil by necessity, not by will. In this the law too was established, not excluding but approving freedom of rendering obedience spontaneously, or of committing transgression spontaneously. Thus on both sides the freedom of choice lay open. And in the book On Jacob, and the Happy Life, ch. 3, Ambrose has this:⁷ There is no reason why we should ascribe our guilt to anyone except our own will. No one is held to guilt unless he has turned aside by his own will. Those things do not have guilt which are brought upon the unwilling. And Augustine,⁸ in the second disputation against Fortunatus, says: I say that it is not sin unless one sins by one's own will. So much so that in the book On the Two Souls he defined sin as the will to retain or obtain what justice forbids, and from which it is free to abstain. And in On True Religion ch. 14, where he argues this matter properly, he concludes thus: Now sin is so far a voluntary evil that it is in no way sin if it is not voluntary. And this is indeed so manifest that no body of the learned, no crowd of the unlearned disagrees with it. Wherefore either it must be denied that sin is committed, or it must be confessed that it is committed by the will. See how Augustine judges that these are mutually contradictory: that there is any sin, and yet that it is not voluntary. And lest anyone except those sins which are the punishment of sin, he allows a handle for this too in book 1 of the Retractations ch. 15, saying that although concupiscence in us is the punishment of sin, nevertheless this sin, by which consent is given to concupiscence, is committed only by the will.

The Lutherans' evasion.— But they say that although every sin is committed by the will, not every sin is committed freely. But what is "by the will" except "freely, and not by compulsion"? For he who says that something can be done by the will, under the proper nature of will, and yet that the same person is compelled in this, does not know the meaning of the name. Hence Augustine immediately in the same place, where he says, For one does not sin except by the will, adds: But the will is a movement of the mind, with no one compelling, toward something, either not to be admitted or to be obtained. So Augustine. Since therefore it is so known through itself that there is no sin except a voluntary one, it follows manifestly that God imposes necessity on no one to sin. Otherwise it will not be sin.

Third argument.— But the third argument is still most urgent. For that someone should be compelled to sin by a demon or a human enemy would indeed be nothing worse than against the nature of sin. But that such compulsion should be from God, for a new reason, would avert the true nature of sin. For if it is not sin except what is against obedience to God, how will one whom God constrains to do something have sinned by his deed? But observe what refuge these men have fortified for themselves when they feel themselves overwhelmed by arguments of this kind. They say⁹ (as is to be seen in Bucer in the place cited on Paul) that in this question it is better to bid reason farewell entirely, and simply cling to the words of the Lord, where we read, God handed them over to their desires, and to a reprobate mind. For concerning this, he says, Paul says, Who are you, O man, to answer God? And, O the depth of the riches, etc. Because among men, says Bucer, no one sins in that which he cannot avoid, therefore the mind shrinks from attributing to God that he compels a man to sin. But there is one reckoning, he says, among men, and another between us and God. Why, Bucer, does your mind not shrink from thrusting upon God what it is most absurd to concede among men? Hear Augustine,¹⁰ against your warning that one should not argue from man to God in this place, book 83 q. 3: With God as author or willing it, no one becomes worse: because with no good man willing it, another becomes worse. To which I would add that the argument is much stronger concerning God. For if what someone commits by human compulsion is not sin, for the reason that it is not voluntary, far less will he sin who is compelled by God, since there is not only no freedom in it, but it is done by the impulse of God, against whom alone sin is committed. Or answer, I pray, if to do what God commands, or counsels, or admonishes is so far from sin that it is even a work of obedience, for the reason that God is the cause that it be done, when God not only commands or instigates us, but by an effective impulse (as you say) hands us over to our desires, which we cannot resist, what reason for disobedience or truly for guilt can underlie there? Paul indeed used to say that the most secret judgments of God are inaccessible to us, namely that he predestined one and loved him, but held the other in hatred. But that sin is entirely that which is against the law of God, and that one sins by freedom, God has openly shown us both by the light of nature and by faith. From which it is plainly gathered that no one sins when compelled, and much less is anyone driven into sin by God.

Fourth argument.— But in order that we may further aim a fourth argument against this error of yours. Has God not revealed to us that he is not himself a tempter to evil? Why therefore do you preach him not only as a tempter, but even as the author of evil? Behold what James testifies about this matter:¹¹ Let no one, when he is tempted, say that he is tempted by God. For God is not a tempter of evils: but he himself tempts no one. But each one is tempted, drawn away and enticed by his own concupiscence. Then concupiscence, when it has conceived, brings forth sin; but sin, when it is completed, generates death. Behold, I say, the Apostle, in the causes of sin, mentions not God, but plainly concupiscence and the consent of the will. But these men say,¹² that they too do not mention God, but indeed say that man by his own will is the cause, although he is compelled by God. Yet they answer nothing to the words of James. For he warned us against that error, lest we should lie, that God is a tempter to evil, because from that it would plainly follow that God is the author of sin: therefore, since to compel is more than to tempt, those who say that God effectively compels us to sin, how, I ask, do they escape making him necessarily the author of sin?

Indeed Augustine,¹³ whom these men claim favors them in this cause, book 8 q., draws from the words of James that irrefragable sentence, I say, to which all the schools of theologians subscribe, that with God as author or willing it no one becomes worse. And expressly in On the Merits and Remission of Sins, book 2, chapter 5: We are not helped by God to sin, he says, but to do what is just in every part. Yet these men say that we are made worse not only with God willing and helping, but even compelling. But in the book On Free Will, ch. 2, he says that in this question, namely concerning the cause from which we do evil, he was once vehemently exercised and wearied, and even driven and cast into the Manichees,¹⁴ so as to believe that there was one first principle that compelled us to evil, until that light shone upon him from heaven, by which he knew that all our sins are entirely to be referred to our own wills. But I do not know what difference these men have from the Manichees.¹⁵ For what they attributed to a false god, namely that he is the cause of sin, these men ascribe to the true God.

Fifth argument.— Finally (in order to weigh the mind of these men by a fifth argument) they say that either because of the sin of Adam, or because of other accumulated sins of ours, we are so given over by God himself to our desires, and handed over to a reprobate mind and to our desires, that we cannot avoid errors and resist desires. But if they understood that we cannot do this without the help and favor of God, which is nevertheless at hand for us and most present, they would profess nothing else than the Catholic truth. But because they hold that we are so abandoned that we necessarily succumb to errors and depraved affections, this is what we persist in fighting with the sacred utterances. For unless it were placed in our will always, with the most ready help of God, to avoid each evil, what is it that Paul reminds us of: Let not sin¹⁶ reign in our mortal body, so that we obey its concupiscence, but neither let us exhibit our members as weapons of iniquity to sin? And lest I be troublesome by recounting everything, why did Augustine publish three books On Free Will, in which he showed that neither God, nor a demon, nor any cause at all compels us to evil, but each one through his own will is the author of his own wrongdoing? And for that reason all good things are to be ascribed to God, but evils of guilt to our will alone, according to that, Your destruction, O Israel: only in me is your help.¹⁷ Concerning almost this same argument he also wrote the book On Grace and Free Will, where he taught and reminded us of the same truth, most received by all, that we sin only by our own will. Otherwise the so numerous order of precepts is in vain,¹⁸ that we should not commit murder or theft, that we should not serve concupiscences. And, Do not be overcome by evil. And, Do not become like the horse and mule. And, Do not withdraw from the discipline of the Lord. And, Do not neglect the law. And the sacred page is most full of very many of this kind. Finally, let us compare these Lutherans with the holy Apostles. James says that no one is tempted by God. Paul adds that God, who is faithful, does not permit us to be tempted beyond our strength.¹⁹ Nevertheless the Lutherans mutter that we are compelled into sin by God. Therefore most holy is canon 6 of our holy Council of Trent,²⁰ session 6: If anyone says that it is not in the power of man to make his ways evil, but that God works evil works, as he does good works, not only permissively but also properly and by himself: so that his own work is no less the betrayal of Judas than the calling of Paul, let him be anathema.