The Necessity of Actual Grace — Article 1: The Capacity of Mere Nature (Thesis III)

b) In appealing to the testimony of the Fathers the Jansenists were notoriously guilty of misinterpretation.

a) Origen plainly teaches that prayer before justification is a good work. “Though you are sinners,” he says, “pray to God; God hears the sinners.”¹ The seemingly contradictory text John IX, 31: “Now we know that God doth not hear sinners,”² is thus explained by St. Augustine: “He speaks as one not yet anointed; for God also hears the sinners. If He did not hear sinners, the publican would have cast his eyes to the ground in vain and vainly struck his breast saying: O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”³ Moreover, since there is question here of extraordinary works and signs only (viz. miracles), the text is wholly irrelevant in regard to works of personal righteousness. St. Prosper teaches: “Human nature, created by God, even after its prevarication, retains its substance, form, life, senses, and reason, and the other goods of body and soul, which are not lacking even to those who are bad and vicious. But there is no possibility of seizing the true good by such things as may adorn this mortal life, but cannot give [merit] eternal life.”⁴

β) Baius and Quesnel succeeded in veiling their heresy by a phraseology of Augustinian color but with implications foreign to the mind of the Doctor of Grace. Augustine emphasized the opposition between “charity” and “concupiscence” so strongly that the intermediary domain of naturally good works was almost lost to view. Thus he says in his Enchiridion: “Carnal lust reigns where there is not the love of God.”⁵ And in his treatise on the Grace of Christ: “Here there is no love, no good work is reckoned as done, nor is there in fact any good work, rightly so called; because whatever is not of faith is sin, and faith worketh by love.”⁶ And again in his treatise on Grace and Free-Will: “The commandments of love or charity are so great and such, that whatever action a man may think he does well, is by no means well done if done without charity.”⁷ We have purposely chosen passages in which the “Doctor of Grace” obviously treats of charity as theological love, not in the broad sense of dilectio.⁸ At first blush these passages seem to agree with the teaching of Baius, who says: “Every love on the part of a rational creature is either sinful cupidity, by which the world is loved, and which is forbidden by St. John, or that praiseworthy charity which is infused into the heart by the Holy Spirit, and by which we love God;“⁹—and with the forty-fifth proposition of Quesnel: “As the love of God no longer reigns in the hearts of sinners, it is necessary that carnal lust should reign in them and vitiate all their actions.”¹⁰ Yet the sense of these propositions is anything but Augustinian. Augustine upholds free-will in spite of grace and concupiscence, whereas the Jansenists assert that the carnalis cupiditas and the caritas dominans produce their effects by the very power of nature, i. e. necessarily and of themselves.¹¹

Besides this capital difference there are many minor discrepancies between the teaching of St. Augustine and that of Baius and Quesnel. Augustine, it is true, in his struggle with Pelagianism,¹² strongly emphasized the opposition existing between grace and sin, between love of God and love of the world; but he never dreamed of asserting that every act performed in the state of mortal sin is sinful for the reason that it is not performed in the state of grace. Scholasticism has long since applied the necessary corrective to his exaggerations. It is perfectly orthodox to say that there is an irreconcilable opposition between the state of mortal sin and the state of grace. “No one can serve two masters.”¹³ This is not, however, by any means equivalent to saying, as the Jansenists do, that the sinner, not being in the state of grace, of necessity sins in whatever he does. Augustine expressly admits that, no matter how deeply God may allow a man to fall, and no matter how strongly concupiscence may dominate his will, he is yet able to pray for grace, which is in itself a distinctly salutary act. “If a sin is such,” he says in his Retractationes, “that it is itself a punishment for sin, what can the will under the domination of cupidity do, except, if it be pious, to pray for help?”¹⁴ Compare this sentence with the fortieth proposition of Baius: “The sinner in all his actions serves the lust which rules him,”¹⁵ and you will perceive the third essential difference that separates the teaching of St. Augustine from that of the Jansenists. The former, even when he speaks, not of the two opposing habits, but of their respective acts, does not, like Jansenism, represent the universality of sin without theological charity as a physical and fundamental necessity, but merely as a historical phenomenon which admits of exceptions. Thus he writes in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: “If they who by nature do the things contained in the law, must not be regarded as yet in the number of those whom Christ’s grace justifies, but rather as among those whose actions (although they are those of ungodly men who do not truly and rightly worship the true God) we not only cannot blame, but actually praise, and with good reason, and rightly too, since they have been done, so far as we read or know or hear, according to the rule of righteousness; though were we to discuss the question with what motive they are done, they would hardly be found to be such as to deserve the praise and defense which are due to righteous conduct.”¹⁶

In conclusion we will quote a famous passage from St. Augustine which reads like a protest against the distortions of Baius and Jansenius. “Love,” he says, “is either divine or human; human love is either licit or illicit… . I speak first of licit human love, which is free from censure; then, of illicit human love, which is damnable; and in the third place, of divine love, which leads us to Heaven… . You, therefore, have that love which is licit; it is human, but, as I have said, licit, so much so that, if it were lacking, [the want of] it would be censured. You are permitted with human love to love your spouse, your children, your friends and fellow-citizens. But, as you see, the ungodly, too, have this love, e. g. pagans, Jews, heretics. Who among them does not love his wife, his children, his brethren, his neighbors, his relations and friends? This, therefore, is human love. If any one would be so unfeeling as to lose even human love, not loving his own children, … we should no longer regard him as a human being.”¹⁷ Tepe pertinently observes¹⁸ that St. Augustine in this passage asserts not only the possibility but the actual existence of naturally good though unmeritorious works (opera steriliter bona), and that the theory of Ripalda,¹⁹ is untenable, if for no other, that the quoted passage is cited in Pius VI’s Bull “Auctorem fidei.”²⁰

Readings:—On Pelagianism cfr. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, Vol. II, 2nd ed., § 60, Freiburg 1895.—H. Zimmer, Pelagius in Irland, Berlin 1901.—Warfield, Two Studies in the History of Doctrine, New York 1897.—Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, Vol. II, 2nd ed., Paris 1909 (English tr., St. Louis 1914).—Pohle in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XI, pp. 604-608. F. Klasen, Die innere Entwicklung des Pelagianismus, Freiburg 1882.—Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, Vol. II, 2nd ed., § 60, Freiburg 1895.—H. Zimmer, Pelagius in Irland, Berlin 1901.—Warfield, Two Studies in the History of Doctrine, New York 1897.—Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, Vol. II, 2nd ed., Paris 1909 (English tr., St. Louis 1914).—Pohle in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XI, pp. 703-706.

On Semi-Pelagianism cfr. Suarez, De Gratia, Prolegom., V, 5 sqq.—Livinus Meyer, De Pelag. et Semipelag. Erroribus.—Wiggers, Geschichte des Semipelagianismus, Hamburg 1835.—A. Hoch, Lehre des Johannes Cassianus von Natur und Gnade, Freiburg 1895.—*A. Koch, Der hl. Faustus, Bischof von Riez, Stuttgart 1895.—Fr. Wörter, Zur Dogmengeschichte des Semipelagianismus, Münster 1900.—Sublet, Le Semipélagianisme, Namur 1897.—Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, Vol. II, 2nd ed., Paris 1909 (English tr., St. Louis 1914).—Pohle in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XIII, pp. 703-706.

On Jansenism cfr. *Steph. Dechamps, De Haeresi Ianseniana, Paris 1645.—Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali, Vol. III: “Contra Baium et Baianos,” Cologne 1648.—Duchesne, Histoire du Baianisme, Douai 1731.—*Linsenmann, Michael Bajus und die Grundlegung des Jansenismus, Tübingen 1867.—A. Schill, Die Konstitution Unigenitus, ihre Veranlassung und ihre Folgen, Freiburg 1876.—Ingold, Rome et France: La Seconde Phase du Jansénisme, Paris 1901.—P. Minges, O. F. M., Die Gnadenlehre des Duns Scotus auf ihren angeblichen Pelagianismus und Semipelagianismus geprüft, Münster 1906.—Lafiteau, Histoire de la Constitution Unigenitus, 2 vols., Liège 1738.—Van den Peereboom, Cornelius Jansenius, Septième Évêque d’Ypres, Bruges 1882.—J. Forget in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VIII, pp. 285-294.