Tractatus de Gratia Divina Actuali

I. Jansenius, De Gratia Christi, Bk. IV, ch. 1, says: «The controversy among the more recent Doctors is not a small one, as to what that grace is by which God converts the heart of man and works good in him. For some think it is a holy thought; others, that it is certain indeliberate movements of love, fear, hope, or of some similar affection, by which the will is excited to love, fear, hope; others, that it is a physical predetermination of the power of the will to act... Whoever shall have determined to cleave to the footsteps of the most holy and most safe Doctor will not labor much in that difficulty which has so greatly exercised the industry of many recent authors. For he will see clearly, from all his works and from his passages agreeing with one another, that that medicinal grace of Christ the Savior, which the School calls efficacious, is nothing else than a certain heavenly and ineffable sweetness, or spiritual delight, by which the will is forestalled and bent to willing and doing whatever God has determined that it should will and do.» Having adduced proofs of this matter, he adds in ch. 6: «From these things it is now clearly understood that that grace of divine delight is so greatly necessary, when we fight with the temptations and delights of earthly things, that unless it be greater than the earthly one, by which our affection is held, it cannot but happen that we are overcome by the weakness of our own will. For a greater delight will surely never be overcome by a lesser delight, but the mind will follow that one which, by affecting it more, has enticed it with sweetness... Since therefore, for the doing of any work of justice whatsoever, it is necessary that it be born from a greater delight in justice, hence it comes about that Augustine is wont to adorn this grace of Christ with an epithet most proper to expressing precisely this and... efficacious. For he for the most part calls it the conquering delight, either by that very word or by another equivalent one.Furthermore, in Bk. IV, ch. 11, »Jansenius says that this delight or sweetness is partly an indeliberate affection of the soul, which is an actual complacency, partly also and often an indeliberate desire, by which the soul is sweetly and delightfully carried into the good to be sought after, so that the will may consent to it by a free act and love the good so much the more vehemently, the more strongly it is carried by those acts.»

But Jansenius declares the necessity of this help in this way, ch. 7: »Therefore in this struggle with temptations a great, and indeed greater and conquering, delight is necessary, so that the earthly delight may be overcome; because otherwise the will cannot apply so great powers of willing, or, as the School speaks, cannot will so intensely and so strongly, as is necessary that the temptation or opposed delight be overcome.» But why? Behold the reason: ibid., ch. 9, he says »the true reason why heavenly delight is necessary for good acts is to be sought from the nature of the medicine, or medicinal help. For the will, through the sin of the first man, has been cast headlong into the dominion of lusts, from which it comes about that in all actions before grace it is provoked by a certain lustful delight going before and titillating, by consenting to which it sins... (he had already established in Bk. II, De statu naturae lapsae, ch. 24, that all sins which are admitted by men in the state of fallen nature are perpetrated with concupiscence inciting and obtaining the assent of the will). And because, as long as we live in this life, being titillated on every side by earthly delights, we are called away from the love of the Creator to the love of creatures; hence that conflict of delights, of which we have spoken from Augustine, which cannot be lulled to rest, unless one has overcome the other by delighting and the whole weight of the soul inclines thither.»

1. That this grace cannot be resisted by man, and that it therefore never lacks its effect, he teaches in Bk. II, chs. 24, 25; just as man also cannot resist earthly delight, if it be alone or greater, he teaches in Bk. VIII, ch. 9. Therefore he teaches that by grace the will is fastened to one part — indeed, as he himself says, is made «most strictly bound», Bk. VIII, ch. 6 — and in this sense he employs those phrases, that the human will is moved by divine grace indeliberately and insuperably. De Gratia Christi, Bk. II, chs.

2. 5. Then, in Bk. VIII, about to reconcile freedom with grace of this sort, he first warns, ch. 3, that «although there is so great a discrepancy between physical predetermination, as it is wont to be defended by the Scholastics, and the medicinal help of Christ (certainly physical predetermination is in the genus of physical causes; Jansenian delight, properly, in the genus of moral causes; physical predetermination is maintained to be necessary for all actions of any cause whatsoever, while delight is maintained only for the acts of man in the state of fallen nature, etc. Cf. 1. c., the preceding ch. 2m.), in this nevertheless, as we have said, it agrees with it, that the office of physically predetermining the will truly belongs to it, and by that word, taken not abstractly but concretely, it can deservedly be called physical predetermination.» That is, this help «inclines, applies, determines the will, and because it forestalls the will's own determination, it also predetermines it, not only morally, but by a true, real, and physical determination. For moral predetermination (he adds) is said to be that which is related to the will only from the part of the object, just as he does who counsels, persuades, etc.; but this (the medicinal grace of Christ) is situated in the very power of the will, which it applies to willing by the magnitude of its own sweetness, and by applying determines it, inasmuch as it causes in it this very thing, that it determine itself, and therefore predetermines.» (Cf. Suarez, De Gratia, Bk. V, ch. 6, n. 17.) Then, in ch. 5 ff., proposing the manner in which the efficacy of grace is reconciled with freedom, which he thinks he gathers from Augustine, he reduces it to this one point: that the will under grace wills what grace makes the will will; because therefore the volition is immune from coercion, and therefore free; hence freedom remains together with grace, which makes us will, even though we will necessarily. For it is Jansenius's most certain opinion (De Deo creant., Th. IXXX.) that the freedom which belongs to the will in the state of fallen nature is not immunity from necessity, but only from coercion. Moreover, Jansenius teaches that this efficacious grace is the only one that is conferred on men in the state of fallen nature. De Gratia Christi, Bk. III.

III. Jansenius therefore establishes two things concerning the efficacy of grace: the one, that grace determines the will to one alternative by an antecedent necessity; the other, that this grace is a heavenly delight opposed to earthly delight, and greater than it and conquering. For Jansenius wishes, as we have seen, that the will be led and drawn by delight alone, and indeed by a prevailing or conquering delight; that is, that the will may will, there is necessary a prevenient delight, whether heavenly or earthly, which is either alone, or greater than the contrary one, and that it necessarily determines the assent of the will. And so the opinion of Jansenius is: the will of man in the state of fallen nature lacks the dominion of its act, or the freedom of indifference, and there remains to it only the power of acting spontaneously; but it wills that to which either earthly delight or heavenly delight draws it, so that the will always necessarily follows that delight which is greater from itself, not from some free determination of the same will, and therefore antecedently greater.

IV. Now as to what pertains to the first point, namely that grace determines the will to one alternative by an antecedent necessity, and that it is therefore free only insofar as it is immune from coercion — this opinion is rejected by those arguments by which the heresy of Calvin, of which it is a reinstatement, is rejected. And certainly this doctrine of Jansenius has been proscribed by the proscription of two of his propositions, namely the second and the third: «Grace is never resisted in the state of fallen nature» and «For meriting and demeriting in the state of fallen nature there is not required in man freedom from necessity, but freedom from coercion suffices.» For if grace can be resisted, if for meriting, which does not happen without grace, freedom from necessity is required, it is evident that grace is of such a kind that it does not impose necessity, that it does not determine the will to one alternative. The same doctrine is opposed to the definition of the Council of Trent, Sess. VI, ch. 5, and can. 4. For it is certain from those texts that man can cast away the grace of God and dissent, if he wills, and therefore freely receive the same, which is wholly opposed to the opinion of Jansenius, who maintains that grace indeclinably and insuperably subjugates free will to itself.

V. As to the other head of doctrine, namely that this antecedently necessitating grace is heavenly delight, we note 1) that an equivocation lies hidden in the name of delight. For it can first be understood as any indeliberate movement of the will, by which the will is disposed and allured to a deliberate act; it can then be understood as a certain indeliberate movement, by which the will, or man, is suffused with a certain sweetness, which movement is called delight in a stricter sense. Certainly we experience not

infrequently in ourselves indeliberate movements, by which we feel ourselves drawn toward the honest and the just, without being able properly to affirm that that delights us. Now Jansenius takes heavenly delight in this latter sense. For a) he opposes it to earthly delight, which is not for him any indeliberate movement toward what is not fitting, but a special indeliberate movement, namely of sensible concupiscence, by which, as he himself says, we are titillated and driven into dishonest things, from which he supposes all sins to arise. b) He himself, as we have already heard, does not wish grace to be any indeliberate movements of love, fear, hope, or of some similar affection, by which the will is excited to love, fear, hope, but only heavenly delight, which is either immediately and necessarily followed by charity, or which is the same as charity properly so called, whence it comes about that it is named by both appellations here and there by the Jansenists (cf. Gurlen, De Gratia Christi, Bk. IV, Diss. 1ª): Jansenius therefore takes the name of delight in a certain more proper and determinate sense. And certainly, since in the will of fallen man he saw nothing but the faculty of acting spontaneously, namely that which belongs also to the sensitive appetite of brutes, it was a consequence that he attributed to man also the same motive of acting which is proper to the brute, i.e., that he be carried to the act by delight; but the delight by which brutes are said to be moved is taken in a certain determinate sense.

We note 2. that any indeliberate delight, whether taken broadly or strictly, does not of itself impede the exercise of freedom, nor is the will necessarily carried into that toward which it is more affected indeliberately; for this is proper to the rational appetite, that, solicited by a twofold object and a twofold affection, it preserves the dominion of its act and can be carried into either one, and so can bring it about that what delighted less indeliberately may delight more deliberately, inasmuch as it chooses that before the other for the reason that it is the master of its act and therefore loves it more. Wherefore, although all theologians with Augustine have admitted and judged necessary the grace of the immediate inspiration of the will, situated in an indeliberate act, which must be a certain movement by which the will is formally allured and inclined to consent to God calling — which movement can therefore be called with Augustine a certain heavenly sweetness, joyfulness, delight — yet it has come into no one's mind to assert that such an inspiration imposes any necessity on the will.

From these observations it is evident that one would contend utterly without merit and falsely that the system of Jansenius follows from this, that a necessity of some indeliberate act in the will is asserted, by which it is allured to a free act. Does the destruction of freedom therefore follow from the asserted immediate inspiration of the will? The error of Jansenius is that he judged grace to be only a certain delight taken in the strict sense; that he judged a delight greater in the first act to carry with it necessarily, by a necessity not only moral but physical, so that therefore the consent of the will is impossible in the composite sense, and that with the same physical necessity the will can will nothing if both delights in the first act be equal; so that therefore under either delight there remains to the will no elective power, but only the faculty of spontaneously following the delight.

VI. Now it is certain, 1°, that the grace of Christ, as regards the will, is not only an inspiration of charity, or an inspiration of heavenly delight strictly taken, from which charity immediately follows. For a) it is certain by Catholic doctrine that faith, hope, and charity are three distinct virtues, and that for exercising their acts the prevenient grace of God is required; but faith and hope can exist and be exercised without charity: therefore there will also be an inspiration proper to faith and hope; b) it is established by the same Catholic doctrine that there are salutary affections — the fear of God and the detestation of sin from the fear of punishments and the baseness of sin, the desire of our beatitude, and the like (cf. Trid. Syn., Sess. XIV, ch. 6; Luc. XII, 5; Psal. CXVIII, 112); therefore for these acts too there are at hand inspirations which are not properly inspirations of charity, nor of that heavenly delight which charity itself immediately follows upon. But when Augustine, Cont. duas epistt. Pelagg., Bk. IV, ch. 5, says concerning the inspiration of love — that we may do what we know with holy love — that this is properly grace, he does not oppose the inspiration of love to the inspiration of other affections and pious acts of the will, but to the help of knowledge, which alone the Pelagians wished to concede. Therefore the grace proper to Christ, or to the Christian economy, is not only the inspiration of charity, but is universally interior grace, both habitual and actual, which latter is situated in any pious illumination and inspiration toward any salutary acts whatsoever. Therefore the heavenly delight, which charity either immediately follows or which is the same as charity, is not the only grace of Christ.

2. It is false that indeliberate delight, whether heavenly or earthly or of whatever degree, if it be alone, or if it be greater, when another opposed delight coexists with it, impedes the choice of the will, or imposes necessity. Indeed, this necessity of determination toward that which alone delights, or delights more, follows in that appetite which can be carried only by a spontaneous movement and is not free, of which kind the will of fallen man is in fact supposed to be by Jansenius. But if the will is free of itself, it cannot suffer necessity from a greater delight; for all these things — namely the greater delight and the lesser delight — pertain to the constitution of the first act: but it is proper to freedom that, being perfectly constituted in the first act, it preserve the dominion of its act and be able to will or nill whatever is proposed to it, to will this or that.

VII. And certainly this can also be demonstrated against Jansenius by an argument ad hominem. For the first man, as being immune from concupiscence, was free under grace with the freedom of indifference. But if Adam was free under grace, fallen man too can and ought to enjoy a like freedom under heavenly delight. For Jansenius teaches that either delight can be equal, so that the will stands in equilibrium. Let it be supposed, therefore, that heavenly delight is equal in efficacy to carnal delight: the will will be in equilibrium, i.e., it will behave as if it were allured by no delight, namely it will behave as the will of intact Adam. If, therefore, another degree of heavenly delight be added to that will constituted in equilibrium, this will behave toward that will as grace behaved toward the will of Adam; for the whole force of concupiscence is extinguished by the equal heavenly delight, and therefore it behaves just as if it were not. Therefore the new grace coming upon it, or another degree of delight, can and ought then to leave the exercise of the will free. But whenever grace obtains its effect, it is either heavenly delight alone or it is greater; therefore always, whenever fallen men act well, they can and ought to be immune from necessity. Cf. Stephanum Dechamps Haeresis Ianseniana L. III. c.5.