On Grace and Free Will (Against the Author of the Conferences) 7–11

But now let us see what the sobriety of this disputant brings in. To drive out vice with vice and cure error with error, he has confused definitions contrary to each other by a new art; and to offer this cup of his compound to unsuspecting hearers, he has tried to color what he mixed with examples. For he says (Conference 13, chapter 11): "For if we say that the beginning of good will is ours, what was there in Paul the persecutor? What in Matthew the tax collector? One of them, intent on the blood and torture of the innocent, the other on violence and public plunder, is drawn to salvation. But if we say that the beginnings of good will are always inspired by the grace of God, what shall we say of the faith of Zacchaeus, of the godliness of that thief on the cross, who, by their own desire doing a kind of violence to the heavenly kingdom, anticipated the special warnings of the call?" By this unlikeness of good beginnings, then, he tries to prove that some can do by free choice, without God's help, what others cannot do except with God working with them; and he wants this understood of the slower obedience of some and the readier consent of others. As though, where hard unbelief is subdued to God and suddenly yields to the gospel which it long attacked, there the right hand of the Most High works the change of the man (Ps 77:10); but where a docile hearer embraces a quiet exhortation or a mere report without the hesitation of distrust, the good of such a conversion belongs only to the human will. As though the power of God drew to the Son only those whom it has rebuked with a voice, or crushed with punishment, or made to tremble with terror, and brought nothing of its power to bear on the minds of those who ran with eager hope and avid desire to the promises of their Redeemer. But the Truth says: "No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). If, then, no one comes unless drawn, all who come in any way are drawn. So the contemplation of the elements, and the most ordered beauty of all that is in them, draws to God: "For his invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made" (Rom 1:20). Those who relate history draw; those who tell the praises of the Lord and his powers and the wonders he does (Ps 78:4) inflame the mind of the hearer. Fear draws: "For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov 1:7; Ps 111:10). Joy draws, since "I rejoiced at the things said to me: We will go into the house of the Lord" (Ps 122:1). Desire draws, since "My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord" (Ps 84:2). Delights draw: "How sweet are your words to my throat, more than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth" (Ps 119:103). And who could perceive or recount through what affections the visitation of God leads the human mind, so that it follows what it fled, loves what it hated, hungers for what it loathed, and suddenly, by a wonderful change, what had been shut to it becomes open, what was burdensome becomes light, what was bitter becomes sweet, what was dark becomes bright? "All these things one and the same Spirit works, distributing to each as he wills" (1 Cor 12:11). "For God, who said that light should shine out of darkness, has himself shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus" (2 Cor 4:6), that is, in the manifestation of his Son, who is in the glory of the Father. He, then, who shone in the heart of Matthew the tax collector and of Paul, then persecuting the church, also shone in the heart of Zacchaeus and in the heart of the thief crucified with the Lord; unless perhaps the Lord's voice was idle when he deigned to address Zacchaeus, who was seeking to see who Jesus was, saying: "Zacchaeus, hurry, come down, for today I must stay at your house" (Luke 19:5), and did not prepare for himself the soul of the man whose hospitality he chose. Finally, when all murmured that he had gone in to lodge with a sinful man, and Zacchaeus, now doing penance, gave half his goods to the poor and promised to repay fourfold what he had defrauded, the Lord said: "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham." And lest the cause of this salvation be hidden, he added: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost"; so that we might know that the one whom we recognized as saved had been anticipated by the one who sought him. In the justification of the thief too, even if no signs of grace at work could be discerned, would we not take him also as drawn, together with all believers? For the Lord says: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father" (Luke 10:22); and, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself" (John 12:32). That he was among all those either handed over or drawn, his own confession teaches; for after he had blasphemed Jesus Christ for some time, he was suddenly changed and said: "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42). But how so great a diversity of conflicting voices arose in one man, let the blessed Apostle instruct us and say: "No one speaking in the Spirit of God says, Anathema to Jesus; and no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12:3). So that we may not doubt that, in the will of the same man, his blasphemy was from himself and his faith was from the Holy Spirit. In vain, then, did this disputant try to fit the argument of his definition to the inscrutable variety of the one grace, so that a portion of the justified should be believed to come to Christ by the movements of their own will alone, while a portion, resisting, is dragged and compelled against its will; since it is God who works all things in all (1 Cor 12:6), whether he wills to draw some in this way and others in that, to whom no one comes unless he is in some way drawn.

After this he adds testimonies from sacred history, by which he shows that the keeping of God's commandments and the completion of the virtues are to be credited to divine grace (Conference 13, chapter 11), which we too most readily confess. And having recalled the examples of Balaam, whom God turned, when he wished to curse Israel, to words of blessing (Num 22–24); of Abimelech, who was not allowed to sin against Rebekah (Gen 26); and of Joseph sold by his brothers, whose evil will God turned to good (Gen 37), he goes back to confirming his definition, so as to take away, as far as he can, from one part of the human race the free choice which he says he joins to grace, and to establish it in another part, saying: "For these two, that is, grace and free choice, seem indeed opposed to each other, but both agree, and we gather from the principle of godliness that we ought to accept both alike, lest, by taking one of them away from man, we seem to have gone beyond the rule of the church's faith." The rule of the church's faith is, as the Apostle preaches: "No one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12:3). It is the church's rule: "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). It is the church's rule: "By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace in me was not in vain, but I labored more than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God with me" (1 Cor 15:10); and, "I obtained mercy to be faithful" (1 Cor 7:25). It is the church's rule: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the excellence of the power may be of God and not from us" (2 Cor 4:7). It is the church's rule: "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves, for it is the gift of God; not from works, lest anyone be lifted up" (Eph 2:8–9). It is the church's rule: "Be in no way frightened by your adversaries, which is to them a cause of destruction, but to you of salvation, and this from God; for it has been given to you for Christ's sake not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him" (Phil 1:28–29). It is the church's rule: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in us both to will and to work, for his good will" (Phil 2:12–13). It is the church's rule: "Not that we are sufficient to think anything from ourselves as from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God" (2 Cor 3:5). The Lord confirms this rule, saying: "No one can come to me unless it has been given him by my Father" (John 6:65); and, "All that the Father gives me will come to me" (John 6:37); and, "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5); and, "You did not choose me, but I chose you" (John 15:16); and, "No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal him" (Matt 11:27); and, "As the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he wills" (John 5:21); and, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matt 16:17). By this rule the will is taken away from no human being; for the power of grace does not work in wills so that they may not exist, but so that from evil they may become good, and from unbelieving, believing; and what in themselves were darkness become light in the Lord; what was dead is made alive, what lay prostrate is raised, what was lost is found. We believe that the grace of the Savior does this in absolutely all human beings who are rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God's love, without exception of any person. For, as this same man laid down acceptably but not steadfastly, we say and defend: "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 good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights (Jas 1:17), who both begins what is good, and carries it on, and completes it in us." If its author had remained in this opinion, he would not go beyond the church's rule, nor would he be at once hostile to free choice and ungrateful to the grace of God; for while he points to one of the two as working in Paul and Matthew and the other in Zacchaeus and the thief, he does not understand that he has taken away free choice in the former and grace in the latter.

Then he added: "For when God sees us wishing to turn toward the good, he meets us, directs, and strengthens us. For at the voice of your cry, as soon as he hears, he will answer you (Isa 30:19); and, Call upon me, he says, in the day of your trouble, and I will rescue you, and you shall glorify me (Ps 50:15)." Who does not see that this teaching assigns to free choice a merit by which grace is anticipated, so that grace serves it by paying a debt, not by bestowing a gift? This definition was condemned in the synod of the bishops of Palestine, with Pelagius himself anathematizing it. For in the one who begins to will the good and desires to depart from iniquity and error, we profess that the grace of God works this very thing. For "the steps of a man are directed by the Lord, and he will delight in his way" (Ps 37:23); and, "Every man seems righteous to himself, but the Lord directs the hearts" (Prov 21:2); and, "A man's steps are directed by the Lord; how then can a mortal understand his ways?" (Prov 20:24). And what the Apostle says: "For you did not receive the spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by which we cry, Abba, Father" (Rom 8:15). After this he goes on and says (Conference 13, chapter 12): "For God must not be believed to have made man such that he can never will or be capable of the good. Otherwise he did not grant him free choice, if he allowed him only to will and be capable of evil, but neither to will nor to be capable of good. And how will that sentence of the Lord, passed after the transgression of the first man, stand: Behold, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:22)? For he must not be thought to have been, before, such as to be wholly ignorant of good. Otherwise we should have to confess that he was formed like some irrational and senseless animal, which is quite absurd and altogether foreign to the catholic faith. Rather, according to the saying of the most wise Solomon, God made man upright (Eccl 7:29), that is, so that he might continually enjoy the knowledge of good alone; but they themselves sought out many thoughts. For they became, as was said, knowing good and evil. After the transgression, then, Adam conceived the knowledge of evil, which he had not had; but he did not lose the knowledge of good, which he had received." That the first man, in whom the nature of all human beings was created together, was created upright and free of every fault, it is not lawful to doubt; and that he received such a free choice that, if he did not forsake God who helped him, he could persevere in the goods he had received by nature, because he willed to, and by the merit of a willing perseverance could come to that blessedness in which he would neither will nor be able to fall into worse things. But by that same free choice, by which he remained good as long as he willed, he departed from the law laid down for him, and did not fear the punishment of the death announced to him; forsaking God and following the devil, rebelling against the Lord his preserver and obeying the enemy his destroyer. "Adam existed, then, and in him we all existed; Adam perished, and in him all perished." Blessed Ambrose said this as truly as the Truth himself says: "The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost" (Luke 19:10). For in that ruin of universal transgression neither its substance nor its will was taken away from human nature, but the light and beauty of the virtues, of which it was stripped by the fraud of the envious one. Once the things were lost through which it could have come to the eternal and unlosable incorruption of body and soul, what remained to it except what belongs to temporal life, which is wholly a life of condemnation and punishment? For this reason those born in Adam must be reborn in Christ, so that no one may be found in that generation which perished. For if the descendants of Adam acted by nature in those virtues in which Adam was before sin, they would not be "by nature children of wrath" (Eph 2:3), they would not be darkness (Eph 5:8), nor under the power of darkness (Col 1:13); in short, they would not need the grace of the Savior, because they would not be good in vain, nor be cheated of the reward of righteousness, having those goods by the loss of which our first parents deserved exile from paradise. But now, since no one can escape eternal death without the sacrament of regeneration, is it not most plainly evident from the uniqueness of the remedy itself into how deep an evil the nature of the whole human race has sunk by the transgression of him "in whom all sinned" (Rom 5:12), and whatever he lost, they lost? He lost first faith, he lost self-control, he lost love; he was stripped of wisdom and understanding, he was deprived of counsel and strength; and by impiously pursuing higher things he was cast down from the knowledge of the truth and the godliness of obedience; not even fear was left to him, so that he who would not abstain from forbidden things for love of righteousness might at least avoid them from fear of punishment. Free choice, then, that is, the spontaneous desire for what pleases it, when it grew weary of using the goods it had received, and, the safeguards of its happiness becoming cheap to it, turned a mad craving toward the experience of transgression, drank the poison of all vices and soaked the whole nature of man in the drunkenness of its intemperance. Hence, until by eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking his blood it digests that deadly surfeit, its memory slips, it errs in judgment, it staggers in its gait; nor is it in any way fit to choose and desire that good of which it deprived itself of its own accord; because it cannot rise again without God raising it, as it could fall without God pushing it. It was not rightly said, therefore: "For God must not be believed to have made man such that he can never will or be capable of the good." As though we said that this weakness of man was created by the Creator, and not contracted by man through the merit of sin. Whoever, then, thinks it follows that, if free choice is said to be blinded, the blindness itself is referred to the author of nature, wants to persuade us that free choice is as sound in Adam's descendants as it was in Adam before sin; which we hold to be quite foreign to the catholic faith. For what has been injured by sin, if that has not been injured by which sin was committed? Unless perhaps it is said that the punishment, not the guilt, passed to Adam's descendants; which is said altogether falsely, and for that reason perhaps is not said. For it is too impious to think this of the justice of God, that he willed those free from transgression to be condemned together with the guilty. The guilt, then, is plain where the punishment is not hidden, and fellowship in sin is proved by sharing in the penalty, so that what belongs to human misery comes not from the Creator's institution but from the judge's retribution. For what he linked to prove that free choice is unharmed is put foolishly and against the sense of all writers, when he says: "And how will that sentence of the Lord, passed after the transgression of the first man, stand: Behold, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:22)?" As though the devil had promised Adam true things, and Adam, by transgressing God's command, had advanced to the likeness of God, and God had declared that this had been conferred on him; whereas these words rather signify what he did not attain, who, having entered on the way of pride, lost what he had while he coveted what he had not received. Nor is the error less in the very conclusion of this line of thought, when it is said: "After the transgression, then, Adam conceived the knowledge of evil, which he had not had; but he did not lose the knowledge of good, which he had received." Adam had the knowledge of good then, when he kept the good and holy command of God with a faithful heart, and was righteous, remaining in the image of his Creator and not forgetting his law. But after he sold himself, that is, the image and temple of God, to his deceiver, he lost the knowledge of good, because he lost a good conscience. For iniquity drove out righteousness, pride destroyed humility, lust crushed self-control, unbelief snatched away faith, captivity took away freedom; nor could any portion of the virtues remain there, where so great a troop of vices had burst in. "For no one can serve two masters" (Luke 16:13); and, "Whoever commits sin is the slave of sin" (John 8:34); and, "By whatever a person is overcome, to that he is also bound as a slave" (2 Pet 2:19). No one serves except with some freedom, and no one is free except with some servitude, as the Apostle says (Rom 6:20–22): "For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness. What fruit, then, did you have at that time in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, freed from sin and made slaves of God, you have your fruit in sanctification, and the end, eternal life." So one who serves the devil is free from God; but one who, set free, serves God is free from the devil; so that it is clear that a bad freedom could be had from the failure of the human will, but a good freedom could not be received without the help of the liberator.

But lest this calamity of the first man should seem to have passed to his offspring, this teacher, intending to prove by the example of the gentiles with how sound a judgment the nature of all human beings remains, adds and says (Conference 13, chapter 12): "Finally, that the human race did not lose the knowledge of good after Adam's transgression is declared most evidently by the sentence of the Apostle, who says (Rom 2:14–16): For when the gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves; they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or even defending them, on the day when God will judge the secrets of men." If the Apostle is speaking of those who were called from the uncircumcision, and who, "when they were far off, have been brought near" (Eph 2:13), believing in him who now has mercy on those on whom he once had no mercy (1 Pet 2:10), and who, justifying the circumcision by faith and the uncircumcision through faith (Rom 3:30), "created the two in himself" and, having destroyed "the dividing wall of hostility" (Eph 2:14) between Jews and gentiles, made peace in one new man, "shutting up all things under unbelief, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe" (Gal 3:22); if, I say, the Apostle is speaking of those in whose hearts God writes the new covenant with his finger, that is, with the Holy Spirit, so that they carry out the fulness of the law and the works of love by nature, a nature, that is, reformed and renewed: how is the novelty of this most proud opinion helped by it, since the reconciliation of enemies can be ascribed only to the grace of the Mediator? "For all have sinned and lack the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace" (Rom 3:23–24). Grace, then, is the glory of God, not the merit of the one set free. "For who has first given to him, that he should be repaid?" No work of good comes from the dead, no righteousness proceeds from the ungodly; all their salvation is free, and therefore it is the glory of God, so that "he who boasts" may "boast" in him whose glory he lacked (Rom 11:35; 1 Cor 1:31). But if (as this disputant would rather have it understood) these words are said of those who, strangers to Christian grace, established by their own judgment certain things after the likeness of the commandments of the law, understanding that the morals of cities and the concord of peoples could not otherwise be maintained unless rewards were decreed for right deeds and punishments for sins, as was said by the very Wisdom of God, "I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and in every nation I held the first place; I sought rest in Jacob and found it": who, then, would doubt that this wisdom survives in the human race, for the advantage of temporal life, from the remnants of the nature created by God? For if the talent of the rational mind did not remain strong even for ordering these earthly things, nature would not be damaged but extinguished. Yet even if it is strong in the most excellent arts and in all the disciplines of mortal learning, it cannot be justified by itself; because it uses its goods badly, and in them, without the worship of the true God, it is convicted of impiety and impurity, and is accused by that by which it thinks it is defended. Since, then, Paul lays down that "by the works of the law no flesh is justified" (Rom 3:20), and that "in Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation" (Gal 6:15), why does this man equip the impious freedom of unbelievers with natural goods and want to justify it by its own principles? Why does he define the nakedness of a transgressing knowledge as fit for the renewal of a worn-out old age? As though this knowledge, whether obtained as a remnant from the resources of nature or sought from instruction in the teaching of the law, could by being grasped bring it about that we love to do what we know must be done; or as though there were any movement of good will except that which the breath of love, poured out through the Holy Spirit, has created. For "without faith it is impossible to please" (Heb 11:6); and, "Everything that is not from faith is sin" (Rom 14:23); and, "In Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love" (Gal 5:6).

After this, in the conclusion of the testimonies by which he wished to prove that those who are called deaf and blind in the prophetic rebuke can, by the capacity of nature, both open their ears to hear and their eyes to see (as though the Lord did not say of the same people: "And I will give them another heart, and I will give them a new spirit; and I will take away the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may walk in my commandments and keep my ordinances and do them," Ezek 11:19; 36:26), he adds and says (Conference 13, chapter 12): "Finally, to show that the possibility of good was in them, he rebukes them, saying: Why do you not judge even of yourselves what is right? (Luke 12:57). He would certainly not have said this to them unless he had known that they could discern what is just by natural judgment." Now he ascribes to free choice not only the will for good but also the ability, as though understanding were demanded of them and righteousness required precisely because they could bring these forth from the goods of nature without the gifts of God. But these things are commanded to man so that, from the very command by which what he received is enjoined on him, he may recognize that he has lost it by his own fault; and that the demand is not unjust because he is not able to pay what he owes; but that from the letter that kills he may flee to the life-giving spirit, and seek from grace the capacity he does not find in nature. If he does so, great is the mercy of God; if he does not, just is the punishment of sin. Then, to complete the foregoing discussion, he pronounces as a rule, saying (Conference 13, chapter 12): "Hence 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 perverse." What could have been defined more clearly, more expressly, by any of their disciples according to the invention of Pelagius and Caelestius? They say: "The grace of God is given according to our merits"; and they also say: "The grace of God is not given for single acts"; this man has enclosed both blasphemies within one sentence, saying 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 perverse. He wants, then, many merits to belong to human beings themselves, not bestowed by the generosity of grace, to which certain gifts from above are owed to increase the riches of nature. He wants us not to receive the grace of God for single acts, and so not always to pray for every good work. And so it will follow either that no merit is to be believed in God's gifts, since one whom God has always helped in everything is without merit; or, if some merits are placed even in what God bestows, it will be established that they too could have been acquired by one's own capacity; and so we need to be helped in some things in order that what was not impossible by nature may become more possible by grace. See: in this brevity of a few words there is already a numerous chain, not of two impieties only, but of many; and if it is handled with the discernment of a more scrupulous care, it will be shown to be loosed in no part from the chain of the condemned error.