On the Spirit and the Letter 60–66

If this discussion suffices to solve that question, let it suffice. But if the answer is that we must beware lest anyone think that sin, which is committed through free choice, is to be attributed to God, if, in view of the saying, “What do you have that you did not receive?”, the will by which we believe is attributed to God's gift for this reason, that it arises from free choice, which we received when we were created, let him attend and see that this will is to be attributed to the divine gift not only because it is from free choice, which was created together with us by nature, but also because God acts by the persuasions of things seen, so that we may will and believe: whether outwardly, through the exhortations of the gospel, where the commands of the law too do something, if they remind a man of his weakness so that he flees by believing to justifying grace; or inwardly, where no one has in his power what comes into his mind, but to consent or dissent belongs to one's own will. When, then, God acts in these ways with the rational soul so that it may believe him (for it cannot believe anything by free choice if there is no persuasion or call for it to believe), certainly God works in man even the willing to believe, and in all things his mercy goes before us; but to consent to God's call or to dissent from it, as I have said, belongs to one's own will. This not only does not weaken what was said, “For what do you have that you did not receive?”, but even confirms it. For the soul cannot receive and have the gifts of which it hears this except by consenting; and therefore what it has and what it receives is God's, but to receive and to have certainly belongs to the one who receives and has. Now if anyone presses us to search that depth, why one is so persuaded that he is convinced, but another not so, only two things occur to me meanwhile that I would like to answer: “O the depth of the riches!” and, “Is there iniquity with God?” Let whoever is displeased with this answer look for more learned men; but let him beware lest he find presumptuous ones.

Let us at last conclude the book. Whether we have achieved anything by such great length I do not know: not with you, whose faith I know, but in the minds of those for whose sake you wanted me to write, who prefer to defend their own opinion, not against ours but (to speak more mildly, and not to say against his who has spoken in his apostles) certainly against not one sentence but so vehement, so intense and watchful a struggle of the great apostle Paul, rather than listen to him beseeching by the mercy of God and saying by the grace of God given to him: “not to think of oneself more highly than one ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith God has assigned.”

But you, notice what you put to me and what we have accomplished by this long work of discussion. You were certainly troubled at how it was said that it is possible for a man to be without sin, if his will does not fail, with divine aid helping, although no one of such perfect righteousness has been, is, or will be in this life. For I put this very thing thus in those books previously written to you: “If I am asked,” I said, “whether a man can be without sin in this life, I will confess that he can, by the grace of God and his own free choice, not doubting that free choice itself also belongs to the grace of God, that is, to the gifts of God; not only that it exists, but that it is good, that is, turned to doing the commands of the Lord; and so the grace of God not only shows what is to be done, but also helps so that what it has shown may be done.” But it seemed absurd to you that there should be no example of a thing that can be done. Hence arose the question of this book, and therefore it was our task to show that something can be done although an example is lacking. Hence we set down at the beginning of this discourse certain things from the gospel and the law, such as the camel passing through the eye of a needle, and the twelve thousand legions of angels who could have fought for Christ if he had wished, and those nations which God says he could have exterminated at once before the face of his people; none of which has happened. To these can be added also what is read in the book of Wisdom, how many new torments God could inflict on the ungodly, with creation serving him at his nod, which he nevertheless did not inflict; and also the mountain which faith would move into the sea, which we have never read or heard happened anywhere. For whoever says that any of these is impossible for God, you see how foolish he is and how he speaks against the faith of his Scripture. Many other things of this kind may occur to one reading or thinking, which we cannot deny are possible for God, although an example of them is lacking.

But since it can be said that those are divine works, while living righteously belongs to our works, I undertook to show that this too is a divine work; and I have done so in this book, perhaps more wordily than is enough. But against the enemies of God's grace I seem to myself to have said even too little; and nothing delights me to say so much as where his Scripture supports me most and the aim is that he who boasts should boast in the Lord, and that in all things we should give thanks to the Lord our God, having our hearts lifted up, whence, from the Father of lights, is every best gift and every perfect gift. For if it is not God's work because it is done through us, or because we do it by his giving, then neither is it God's work that a mountain be moved into the sea, since the Lord said it could be done through the faith of men, and attributed it to their work, saying, “If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and it will be done, and nothing will be impossible for you.” Certainly he said “for you,” not “for me” or “for the Father”; and yet a man in no way does this except by his giving and working. See how perfect righteousness is without example among men and yet is not impossible. For it would happen if as great a will were applied as suffices for so great a thing. And it would be so great if nothing of what belongs to righteousness were hidden from us, and if those things so delighted the mind that this delight overcame whatever other pleasure or pain hinders. That this is not so belongs not to impossibility but to the judgment of God. For who does not know that it is not in man's power what he knows, nor does it follow that what has been recognized as to be desired is desired, unless it delights as much as it ought to be loved? And this belongs to the health of the soul.

But perhaps someone may think that we lack nothing for the knowledge of righteousness, since the Lord, completing and shortening his word upon the earth, said that the whole law and the prophets hang on two commands, and did not keep them silent but set them out in the plainest words. “You shall love,” he says, “the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” What is truer than that, when these are fulfilled, righteousness is wholly fulfilled? Yet whoever attends to this should also attend to how in many things we all offend, while we think that what we do pleases, or does not displease, the God whom we love, and afterwards, warned by his Scripture or by certain and clear reason, when we have learned that it does not please him, we pray in repentance that he may forgive. Human life is full of such proofs. And why do we know less what pleases him, except because he himself is less known to us? “For now we see through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face.” And who would dare to think that, when we have come to what he says, “that I may know even as I am known,” the love of God in those who contemplate him will be only as great as it now is in the faithful, or that this can in any way be compared with that? Moreover, if the greater the knowledge the greater will be the love, then certainly we must believe that as much as is now lacking to love is lacking to the perfecting of righteousness. For something can be known or believed and yet not loved; but what is neither known nor believed cannot be loved. But if by believing the saints were able to come to so great a love, than which the Lord himself testified there can be no greater in this life, that they laid down their lives for the faith or for the brothers, when from this pilgrimage, in which we now walk by faith, we come to sight, which, not yet seen, we hope for and await with patience, without doubt love itself will be not only above what we have here, but far above what we ask and understand; and yet it cannot be more than with all the heart, all the soul, all the mind. For nothing remains in us that could be added to the whole, since if anything remains, that will not be the whole. Accordingly, this first command of righteousness, by which we are commanded to love God with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind, from which the other about loving the neighbor follows, we shall fulfill in that life, when we see face to face. But it is commanded us even now for this reason, that we may be reminded what we ought to ask by faith, where to send our hope ahead, and, forgetting what lies behind, toward what lies ahead we ought to stretch ourselves. And therefore, as it seems to me, he has made much progress in this life in the righteousness that is to be perfected who has learned by progressing how far he is from the perfection of righteousness.

But if a certain lesser righteousness fitting to this life can be spoken of, by which the righteous man lives by faith, although a pilgrim away from the Lord and therefore walking by faith, not yet by sight, it is not absurdly said that it also belongs to this one not to sin. For if there cannot yet be as great a love of God as is due to that full and perfect knowledge, this is not yet to be counted as a fault. For it is one thing not yet to attain the whole of charity, another to follow no desire. Therefore a man, although he loves God far less than he can love him when seen, ought nevertheless to seek nothing unlawful; just as, among the things that lie open to the bodily senses, the eye can delight in no darkness, although it cannot be fixed on the brightest light. But look, let us suppose a human soul in this corruptible body such that, although it has not yet absorbed and consumed all the motions of earthly lust by that most surpassing perfection of the charity of God, yet in this lesser righteousness it consents to that lust by no inclination to doing anything unlawful; so that to that life, now immortal, belongs “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength,” but to this, “Let sin not reign in your mortal body so as to obey its desires”; to that, “You shall not covet,” to this, “Do not go after your desires”; to that, to seek nothing more than to persist in that perfection, to this, to have what it does in action and to hope for the perfection of that as a reward; so that through that the righteous man may live without end in the sight which he desired in this, and through this the righteous man may live by faith, in which he desires that with a certain end. With these things established, it will be a sin for one who lives by faith at some time to consent to some unlawful delight, not only in committing those horrible crimes and shameful acts, but also in these lighter things, so that he lends his ear to some word that ought not to be heard, or his tongue to some word that ought not to be spoken, or in his very heart thinks something in such a way that he would prefer to be lawful what delights wrongly and is known through the command to be unlawful; for this too is consent to sin, which would certainly be carried out were it not that punishment frightens. Do such righteous people, living by faith, have no need to say, “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors”? And do they prove false what is written, “No one living shall be justified in your sight,” and, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,” and, “For there is no man who will not sin,” and, “For there is no righteous man on earth who will do good and will not sin” (for both these testimonies speak not of the past, that is, “has sinned,” but of the future, that is, “will sin”), and whatever else holy Scripture mentions to this effect? But since these cannot be false, I see that it follows that, whatever or however great a righteousness we may be able to define in this life, there is no one among men in it who has no sin at all, and that it is necessary for every man to give that it may be given him, to forgive that he may be forgiven, and, if he has any righteousness, not to presume that it is his own from himself, but from the grace of the justifying God, and still to hunger and thirst for righteousness from him who is the living bread and with whom is the fountain of life; who so works justification in his saints, who labor in the temptation of this life, that there is still something that he may generously add to those who ask and something that he may mercifully forgive to those who confess.

But let these people find, if they can, someone living under the burden of this corruption for whom he no longer has anything to forgive: unless they confess that he was helped to be such, not by the teaching of the law given, but also by the infused Spirit of grace, they will incur the charge not of some sin or other but of ungodliness itself. Although, if they take those divine testimonies properly, they cannot find such a person at all, yet it must in no way be said that God lacks the power by which the human will may be so helped that not only this righteousness which is from faith may be perfected in every respect in a man, but also that according to which we must afterwards live forever in the very contemplation of him. For if he now wished in anyone that even this corruptible should put on incorruption, and ordered him to live here among men who are to die, himself not to die at all, so that, all oldness utterly consumed, no law in his members would fight against the law of his mind, and he would know God, present everywhere, as the saints will know him afterwards, what madman would dare to affirm that he could not? But people ask why he does not do it, and those who ask do not notice that they are men. I know that just as there is no impossibility with God, so there is no iniquity; and I know that he resists the proud but gives grace to the humble; and I know that to him to whom, lest he be lifted up, a thorn in the flesh had been given, an angel of Satan to buffet him, when he besought once, twice, and a third time, it was said, “My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.” There is, then, something in the hidden depth of God's judgments, so that every mouth even of the righteous may be stopped in its own praise and opened only in the praise of God. But who can search out this something, who trace it, who know it? So unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out! “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has first given to him, and it will be repaid him? For from him and through him and in him are all things; to him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”