On Grace and Free Will (Against the Author of the Conferences) 12–14

But lest we seem to cling to suspicions and to probe the hiding places of meanings beyond the words, let what follows teach what is added to what we know. He, then, who at the beginning of his discussion had said: "Not only of good actions but also of good thoughts the beginning is from God, who both inspires in us the beginnings of a holy will and grants the power and the opportunity of carrying out what we rightly desire," now, wishing to prove that religious thoughts and holy counsels, conceived without any inspiration of God, can come forth from natural wisdom, sets out the words of Solomon, who says: "And David my father wished to build a house to the name of the Lord God of Israel; and the Lord said to David my father: Whereas you thought in your heart to build a house to my name, you did well in turning this over in your mind; yet you shall not build the house to my name" (1 Kgs 8:17–19). Then, to show how this is to be understood, the writer himself adds (Conference 13, chapter 12): "This thought, then, and this deliberation of King David, is it to be called good and from God, or bad and from man? For if that thought was good and from God, why is its accomplishment denied to him by the one by whom it was inspired? But if it was bad and from man, why is it praised by the Lord? It remains, then, that it be believed both good and from man. In this way we can also judge our own thoughts daily. For it was not granted to David alone to think good from himself, nor is it denied to us that we can ever naturally understand or think anything good." By no means can it be proved by this testimony and argument that godly thoughts arise from free choice alone and not from the inspiration of God. For David's will, which was certainly good, is not to be believed not to have been from God because the Lord willed the temple to be built for him not by David but by his son. We must ask, then, from what spirit the disposition of this will proceeded: surely from that Spirit of God in which he said: "If I enter the tent of my house, if I go up to the bed of my couch, if I give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids or rest to my temples, until I find a place for the Lord, a tabernacle for the God of Jacob" (Ps 132:3–5). When the prophet desired this, he was not unaware that the true and perfect temple was to be founded by him who, being the Son of God, also became the son of David; and who, seeing the temple built by Solomon, said: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." But he spoke of the temple of his body (John 2:19, 21). So, that this temple might be prefigured which was being arranged in Christ and in the church, it was fitting that not David but the son of David was chosen to build it; so that by the son of a man the Son of God and of man might be signified, and by a temple that could be destroyed the incorruptible tabernacle might be indicated; for the founding of whose image both David's will was approved and the work was transferred to the one whose person fitted that image better. And so it was from God that David willed this, and from God that Solomon did it. To make this clearer by examples, let us look for a case where God did not will to be done what men, with God willing it, willed to do. The Lord commanded the apostles, saying: "Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt 28:19–20). When the apostles heard this, they certainly did not receive bare words through bodily sounds with their outward ears only; but by the power of the living Word an inextinguishable flame of love was kindled in their hearts, by which they most ardently wished to preach the gospel of Christ to all nations. But when they were forbidden to speak the word in Asia, and when they tried to go into Bithynia and were prevented by the Spirit of Jesus (Acts 16:6–7), did they not have this will from God, that they wished to turn to the faith the hearts of these also, whom God, by a hidden judgment, did not then will to hear the gospel? Or when the church prays daily for its enemies, that is, for those who have not yet believed God, does it not do so from the Spirit of God? Who would say this, except one who does not do it, or who thinks faith is not a gift of God? And yet what is asked for all is not obtained for all. Nor is there injustice with God, who often does not grant what he has given men to ask. Good will, then, that by which one clings to God, must not be denied to be man's own, and must be confessed to be conceived by God's inspiration. For since "no one is good but God alone" (Luke 18:19), what kind of good will that be which has no good author? For in human nature, of which God is the creator, there remain even after the transgression its substance, its form, life, sense, and reason, and the other goods of body and soul, which are not lacking even to the wicked and vicious; but it does not have in them the grasp of the true good: by them they can make mortal life honorable, but they cannot confer eternal life. Nor is it unknown how the Greek schools, Roman eloquence, and the inquiry of the whole world, laboring with the keenest studies and the most excellent talents to find the highest good, achieved nothing except to become futile in their thoughts (Rom 1:21), and the foolish heart of those was darkened who used themselves as guides to know the truth. If, then, someone, ashamed of wretched vanities and deceitful follies, understands that whatever he embraced as light and life is darkness and death, and tries to draw himself away from them, this conversion is not from himself, though it is not without himself; nor does he strive toward the beginnings of salvation by his own strength; but the hidden and powerful grace of God does this, which, removing the ashes of earthly opinions and dead works, stirs up the firebrand of the buried heart and inflames it with desire for the truth; not to subdue the man against his will, but to make him desirous of subjection; not to drag him in ignorance, but to go before him as he understands and follows. For free choice remains, which God certainly created together with its name; and it is changed from the vanities and desires into which it flowed when God's law was neglected, not by itself but by the Creator; so that whatever in it is restored for the better is neither without the one who is healed nor from anyone but the one who heals; whose new creation and new making we are, "created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared that we should walk in them" (Eph 2:10).

Now let us see where the disputant's purpose is heading. "It cannot be doubted," he says (Conference 13, chapter 12), "that the seeds of the virtues are naturally present in every soul, implanted by the kindness of the Creator. But unless they are stirred up by the help of God, they will not be able to reach the growth of perfection; for according to the blessed Apostle, neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth. That freedom of choice lies open to man in either direction is also most plainly taught by the book called the Shepherd, in which two angels, a good one and a bad one, are said to attend each of us, while it rests with man's option to choose which to follow. And therefore free choice always remains in man, so that he can either neglect or love the grace of God." If it cannot be doubted that the seeds of the virtues are naturally present in every soul, implanted by the kindness of the Creator, then Adam alone transgressed, and in his sin no one sinned; we were conceived in no iniquities, and our mothers bore us in no sins (Ps 51:5); we were not by nature children of wrath, nor were we under the power of darkness (Eph 2:3); rather, since virtues remained in us by nature, we were born children of peace and light (Col 1:13). Far from the minds of the godly be the insidious deception of a deceitful teaching! Virtues cannot dwell with vices. "For what partnership," says the Apostle, "has righteousness with iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?" (2 Cor 6:14). For Virtue in the first place is God, for whom to have virtue is nothing other than to be virtue. When we share in him, Christ dwells in us, who is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24); faith dwells, and hope, love, self-control, understanding, counsel, strength, and the other virtues. But when we withdraw from this good, all the contraries arise for us from ourselves. For when beauty departs, what follows but deformity? When wisdom goes away, what remains but folly? When righteousness does not reign, what rules but iniquity? So the seeds of the virtues, which were implanted by the kindness of the Creator, were overturned by the transgression of the first parent, and they cannot be had except when he who gave them restores them. For human nature can be reformed by its former and is capable of the goods it had, so that through the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, in that very thing which remained to it, it can recover what it lost. What remained to it is the rational mind, which is not virtue but the dwelling of virtue. For by sharing in wisdom, righteousness, and mercy we are not wisdom, nor righteousness, nor mercy, but we are wise, righteous, and merciful. These goods, although our rational part has been occupied by vices, and, when we transgressed, an unclean spirit invaded the temple of God, can nevertheless flow back into that rational part through him who casts out the prince of the world (John 12:31), and binding the strong man plunders his goods (Mark 3:27), and, having put to flight the spirit of this world, gives the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things given to us by God (1 Cor 2:12). "But whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him" (Rom 8:9). I think that this man is deceived by a likeness to the truth and errs in the appearance of false virtues, while he supposes that the goods which can be had only by God's gift are found even in the souls of the ungodly; because, namely, many of them are followers of justice, temperance, self-control, and benevolence. They have all these not in vain nor uselessly, and they obtain from them much honor and glory in this life; but because in these pursuits they serve not God but the devil, though they have a temporal wage of empty praise, they do not belong to that truth of the blessed virtues. And so it is most plainly evident that no virtue dwells in the souls of the ungodly, but that all their works are unclean and polluted, since they have a wisdom not spiritual but unspiritual, not heavenly but earthly, not Christian but devilish, not from the Father of lights but from the prince of darkness; while they subject even what they would not have unless God gave it to him who first withdrew from God. He, then, who says that the seeds of the virtues are present by nature in every soul without any work of grace, what does he labor to show but that from these seeds certain shoots of merits sprout which precede the grace of God? Finally, so as to seem to have given something to grace, he says: "These seeds will not be able to reach the growth of perfection unless they are stirred up by the help of God"; so that, namely, the help of God is exhortation and teaching, while the mind, rich in the seeds of the virtues, uses the capacity it possesses, needing help only to grasp the summits of those virtues whose beginnings it knows are in it. According to him, then, the human soul will be built into the temple of God without receiving the foundation other than which no one can lay, which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor 3:11). But when is this foundation begun, except when faith is produced in the heart of the hearer? If faith was there by nature, nothing was begun there, but something was built on top. So it would seem superfluous … one who had faith before he believed. And this can also be said of the beginnings of the other virtues, which grace would have to increase because they exist, not give because they are lacking. But all the words of the holy Scriptures teach us otherwise. We read that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov 1:7), and we read that this virtue is a gift of God: "The fear of God," it says, "has set itself above all things; blessed is the man to whom it has been given to have the fear of God" (Sir 25:11–12). Since, then, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, what virtue can be had without wisdom, whose beginning is from fear? The blessed apostle Peter says: "Grace and peace be fulfilled to you in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has now given us by his divine power all things that pertain to life and godliness" (2 Pet 1:2–3). Does he say: who has stirred up in us by his help the seeds of the virtues which we had naturally implanted? No, he says: who has now given us all things that pertain to life and godliness. By saying this, what virtue did he place the beginning of in nature, which was not bestowed by him who gave all things? For this reason blessed Paul too says: "For what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?" (1 Cor 4:7). All things, then, that pertain to life and godliness we do not have through nature, which is damaged, but have received through grace, by which nature is repaired. Nor ought we to think that the beginnings of the virtues lie in nature's treasures because many praiseworthy things are found even in the talents of the ungodly. They do come forth from nature; but since they have withdrawn from him who created nature, they cannot be virtues. For what is lit by the light is light, and what lacks that light is night; because "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" (1 Cor 3:19). And so what is thought to be virtue is vice, since what is thought to be wisdom is foolishness. When can it happen that those who glory in the seeds of natural virtues, which this man extols, submit their very virtues, to be advanced, to the teaching which says: "If anyone among you seems to be wise, let him become a fool, that he may be wise" (1 Cor 3:18); and, "Since, in the wisdom of God, this world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe" (1 Cor 1:21)? What would that presumption of knowledge and wisdom judge more foolish and more laughable, unless the Spirit of God subdued the scorn of the proud and destroyed by the power of his grace those reasonings which fought with dog-like eloquence against the unknown truth, so that the earth of the heart, first furrowed, may conceive the seed of the word, and God's husbandry may produce fruits worthy of the eternal barns? After that testimony of no authority which he inserted into his discussion from the little book of the Shepherd, from which he wished to show that, between the contrary persuasions of the good and the bad angel, every man is so entrusted to natural judgment and his own discernment that he has no more protection from God than danger from the devil, he added the rule of his definition, saying: "And therefore free choice always remains in man, so that he can either neglect or love the grace of God." In this sentence, even what he says, that free choice always remains in man, does not hold in some part, since many thousands of infants, taken up into the kingdom of God or excluded from the kingdom of God, receive or lose the grace of God without any choice of their own will; and many who are senseless in everything and fools are rescued from the bonds of eternal death through the sacrament of regeneration. Yet let us take this saying as if this definition properly concerned those who can use a free will. Is this freedom so free that, as much as it has of itself the distaste to neglect the grace of God, so much it has of itself the delight to love it? Has no breath of noonday heat loosened that icy stiffness of old unbelief, and has the torpor of the bound mind grown warm from its own cold; and, when the Lord says, "I came to cast fire on the earth" (Luke 12:49), has no spark reached the cold heart, and has dead ash burst into the flame of love by itself? Nothing like this happened in those lovers of grace who experienced what they said: "Was not our heart burning when we were with him on the way, and he opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32). Nor was there done in them what was done in Lydia, the seller of purple of the city of Thyatira, who alone among the women to whom the Apostle preached there is shown to have believed then: "whose heart," it says, "God opened, to attend to what was said by Paul" (Acts 16:14). And according to this man, so great is the soundness and capacity of free choice that they have love, which is at the summit of all the virtues, not from God's gift but from their will alone. What, then, is repaired in the soul by its builder? Or by what generosity of grace will it become more adorned, if those things are its own without which the gifts cannot profit? But the Apostle, who declares that without love neither the working of miracles, nor knowledge, nor faith, nor prophecy, nor the giving away of riches, nor even the endurance of the cruellest tortures profits anything (1 Cor 13:2–3), does not keep silent about where love itself is had from: "Because the love of God," he says, "has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5); and, "Peace to the brothers, with love and faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph 6:23). Let the holy apostle John also instruct us from where we began to share in this good: "Beloved," he says, "let us love one another, because love is from God" (1 John 4:7). And lest we might think that love was said to be from God because this affection was sown in man's nature, a little later he says: "Not that we loved God, but that he loved us" (1 John 4:10); and again: "Let us love God, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Let human poverty recognize, then, that what is rightly said of any goods is said to it far more rightly of that without which all goods are of no profit: "For what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?" (1 Cor 4:7).

After this, having given man before grace as much as it is most fruitful to have through grace, he added some tangled and confused things to show the vigor of free choice; and from what it does with powers already given it, he wants to fortify what he defines as being in it by nature; so that what it has accomplished through God's help it would have begun from the freedom of free choice. But let us pass over these things as tolerable; for we too say that free choice has conceived the disposition of good will and the beginning of faith with grace at work, so that through these things, given to it with no merit going before, it may merit what has been promised to one who will work; always asking the power to do some good from him who says, "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Leaving these aside, then, let us go back over what he set down about the sufferings of holy Job. For he says (Conference 13, chapter 14): "We read that divine justice made provision for this also in Job, his most approved athlete, when the devil had asked for him for single combat. For if he had engaged the enemy not by his own virtue but with the grace of God alone protecting him, and, without any virtue of patience of his own, supported only by divine help, had borne those manifold masses of temptations and disasters sought out by all the enemy's cruelty, how would the devil not have repeated more justly against him that slanderous word which he had uttered before: Does Job worship God for nothing? Have you not hedged him and his house and all his substance round about? But take away your hand, that is, let him fight it out with me with his own strength, and he will curse you to your face (Job 1:9–11). But since the slanderous enemy does not dare to repeat any such complaint after the combat, he confesses that he was conquered by Job's strength, not God's. Although the grace of God is not to be believed to have been wholly absent from him either, which gave the tempter as much power as it knew Job had the strength to resist; not protecting him from that attack in such a way as to leave no room for human virtue, but only taking care that the most violent enemy should not, by making his soul mad and powerless in mind, overwhelm him with an unequal and unfair weight of combat." Who would believe that these things were preached by catholics among catholics, if what has often been defended in private conversations were not also read in writing? Has the sight of understanding grown so dark in all people, and has the spirit of knowledge and godliness so departed from all the children of the church, that they are not ashamed to thrust such dishonorable falsehoods on the judgment of readers? Grave man, wise doctor, truthful teacher, give us back the catholic definition with which, at the beginning of your discussion, you captured our ears and minds. You had pronounced the faith of the church with a Christian voice: "Not only of good actions but also of good thoughts the beginning is from God, who both inspires in us the beginnings of a holy will and grants the power and the opportunity of carrying out what we rightly desire. For every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who both inspires what is good, and carries it on, and completes it in us" (Jas 1:17); and by the solidity of this sentence you had shattered all the engines of the enemy remnants. Why, with your profession changed, do you build what you destroyed and attack what you defended? Why, deserting the citadel of most invincible truth, do you run down step by step to the Pelagian precipices? For you who had defined that the beginnings neither of holy thoughts, nor of godly wills, nor of good actions are from us, but that all good things in us are produced by the inspiration of God and the help of his grace and are brought to progress and perfection, a little later began to make the efforts of free choice equal to the gifts of grace, so as to show that man can have from himself the beginnings which you had assigned to God, saying: "That man can sometimes by his own movements stretch out toward the desire for the virtues, but always needs to be helped by the Lord"; and again saying: "That sometimes, even through the good of nature, which has been granted by the kindness of the Creator, the beginnings of good wills come forth, which yet cannot attain to the completion of the virtues unless they are directed by the Lord." And after this, to show that some are anticipated by grace, while in others you placed the cause of receiving grace in their merits going before, you said that it is doubtful "which depends on which: that is, whether God has mercy on us because we have offered the beginning of good will, or whether we obtain the beginning of good will because God has mercy." Lest you leave these two rules in doubt, you took care to fortify both with examples that seemed fit to you, confirming one by the forced conversion of Paul and Matthew, and strengthening the other by the willing faith of Zacchaeus and the thief, whose desire you say was so violent that they anticipated the special warnings of the call so as to storm the kingdom of heaven. Then, as the discussion advances, to make plain the soundness of the inner man, you affirm that Adam himself conceived the knowledge of evil which he did not have, but did not lose the knowledge of good which he had received. And when you had wished to prove this also by comparison with the ungodly, you slid so far as to proclaim that "we must beware of so referring all the merits of the saints to God that we ascribe nothing to human nature except what is evil." And lest we should believe that this nature lost any virtues in Adam's transgression, you defined that the souls of all human beings are by nature as sound as that of the first man was before sin, saying: "It cannot be doubted, then, that the seeds of the virtues are naturally present in every soul, implanted by the kindness of the Creator." Considering, then, these definitions of yours, it is not hidden how far you have departed from the soundness of that first sentence, in which, by deceitfully proclaiming what was to be attributed to grace, you wished to win for yourself the judgment of catholic ears, so that, made secure by the front of your opening profession, what followed might easily creep in, if the first things had pleased.