Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 5, No. 3 (2007): 521–554 521
St. Thomas on Grace and Free Will in the “beginning of faith”:
The Surpassing Augustinian Synthesis
http://www.nvjournal.net/files/NovaetVetera5_3HUTTER.pdf
For full text and footnotes
REINHARD HÜTTER
Duke University Divinity School Durham, North Carolina
(This is an excerpt without footnotes from the original publication-Mike Albertson)
…. St. Augustine developed a profound account of the mystery of grace and free will. However, his account, with its ontology of participation remaining largely implicit, remained notoriously open to a variety of conflicting interpretations. The best example of such conflict, ostensibly based solely on the meaning of Scripture5—but with a philosophical background profoundly incompatible with Augustinian and Thomist forms of thought—is seen in the famous (or infamous) early sixteenth-century debate on free versus enslaved will… between Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. In light of this epochal debate,6 …. I should like to propose that by way of the pivotal Thomist axiom that grace presupposes as well as perfects nature—as substantiated by St. Thomas’s metaphysics of being, which climaxes in the surpassing beauty of divine transcendental causality—we can successfully avert the reductive alternatives of Erasmus’s theologically as well as Luther’s philosophically erroneous Augustinianism.
Hence, I will turn first to the epochal debate between Erasmus and Luther on free will; next, to the complex position of St. Augustine; and finally, to the profound account of St. Thomas.
Erasmus and Luther
Martin Luther was brought up philosophically and theologically in the via moderna, that is, the school of William of Occam, also called nominalism. As Étienne Gilson in his magisterial Philosophy in the Middle Ages argues:7
The essential characteristic of Occam’s thought, and of nominalism in general, [is] a radical empiricism, reducing all being to what is perceived, which empties out, with the idea of substance, all possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable subsistence of any of them, and ends by denying to the real any intelligibility, conceiving God Himself only as a Protean figure impossible to apprehend.8
(This is a huge mistake because, following Lonergan, the real is the intelligible. When you understand that Plato’s “Form” or “Idea” was the term that identified something as intelligible, the foundation of naïve realism and empiricism crumbles leaving what Lonergan calls a “Critical Realism.”)
[….Nominalism is] the dominant theological school in Germany in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries11—a position with which also many humanists, not least Erasmus, sympathized.12 Martin Luther received his philosophical and theological training in this school. However, under the influence of his intense study of the Apostle Paul and of the late Augustine,13 he began to reject, branch and root, his school’s theological account of grace and free will, rightly understanding its position to be incompatible with the teaching of St. Paul. But never rejecting the philosophical tenets of nominalism,14 Luther’s corrective move veered to the opposite extreme: God is not merely the first but the sole agent of the act of conversion, with the human in a state of utter passivity. For, according to Luther, the human free will is not simply held captive by sin, as St. Augustine would maintain …Rather, after the fall, “free will”—understood as the power to turn to God— becomes an “empty word.” According to Luther, we continue to use this empty word only because the human being once had it, before the fall, and through grace can have it again.
n the heat of polemic, in his response to the papal bull Exsurge Domine, (Arise, O Lord, and judge your own cause) Luther pushed this position one step further by claiming that free will— that is, now any form of natural, or created, freedom—is simply a fiction, because all things happen by absolute necessity. …
But with the extreme formulation of the Assertio—echoing and indeed at that point supporting a position held by Wyclif and condemned at the Council of Constance19—Luther made himself vulnerable to the charge of theological determinism. It is precisely this determinism, … that Erasmus intended to attack in his 1524 treatise On the Freedom of the Will (On Free Will)—emulating in title as well as intention an early treatise of St. Augustine.20 While rhetorically elegant, Erasmus’s treatise lacked the precise conceptual organization of the Scholastic discourse that his humanist tastes loathed. Even more fateful was the definition he offered of “free will,” or “natural freedom”: “By free choice . . . we mean a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them.”21 In light of the theological issue at stake and of St. Augustine’s own mature position, this definition was shockingly deficient, for it seemed simply to underwrite the nominalist Semi-Pelagianism Luther so vigorously opposed. We might not go completely wrong in assuming that Luther stopped reading Erasmus’s treatise at this very point, seeing his worst fears come true. It did not matter that later in the treatise Erasmus allowed grace to make an appearance in aiding the human will and offered a tentative nod in the direction of the late Augustine and the Thomists as positions possible to hold.22
In his 1525 response On the Bondage of the Will, Luther painted a picture of Erasmus as a humanist skeptic23 who disin- genuously offered a “probable” opinion about what for Luther was most central to the Christian faith and—worse—submitted a blatantly Semi- Pelagian definition of the free will, and this based on the alleged evidence of Scripture. Luther reacted most forcefully, and his theological intentions were undoubtedly Augustinian:24 “Rapt” (rapi) into communion by God, the human receives genuine freedom.25 But in an effort to set the record straight once and for all, Luther went too far: God is not merely the first and final agent of human salvation but its sole agent, with the human remaining purely passive.
We can observe this radical passivity in relationship to God in a central— albeit rhetorically overcharged—passage from Luther’s text, which has given rise to the (false) charge of Manichean tendencies in Luther’s thought:
In short, if we are under the god of this world, away from the work and Spirit of the true God, we are held captive to his will, as Paul says to Timothy (2 Tm 2:26), so that we cannot will anything but what he wills. . . . And this we do readily and willingly, according to the nature of the will, which would not be a will if it were compelled; for compulsion is rather (so to say) “unwill” [noluntas]. But if a Stronger One comes who over- comes him and takes us as his spoil, then through his Spirit we are again slaves and captives—though this is royal freedom—so that we readily will and do what He wills. Thus the human will is placed between the two like a beast of burden. If God rides it, it wills and goes where God wills. . . . If Satan rides it, it wills and goes where Satan wills; nor can it choose to run to either of the two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it.26
One might want to question the Satanology implied in this passage and also ask how any sensible account of personal responsibility for sin can be maintained under these proposed conditions.27 However, much more central to our present concern is the fact that the ontological link between natural, or created, freedom and the acquired Christian freedom in the act of conversion is severed. Luther’s legitimate Augustinian concern of rebutting even the subtlest form of (Semi-) Pelagianism is hampered by the burden of what looks all too similar to the formulation in the Assertio and hence all too much like theological determinism.28
The Erasmus–Luther exchange shows in a paradigmatic way that the twin problems of Semi-Pelagianism and theological determinism arise whenever theologians fail to uphold or straightforwardly deny the notion that divine providence operates infallibly by way of both necessity and contingency. The classical Thomist form of maintaining this notion was to insist on the real distinction between necessitas consequentis and necessitas consequentiae. In his De servo arbitrio, Luther explicitly dismissed this distinction as a sophistic wordplay; and this I regard as the most consequential philosophical error in Luther’s treatise.
The classical illustration for this distinction is that of Socrates sitting or standing. When Socrates sits, he sits necessarily, as long as he is sitting (this by necessitas consequentiae, or suppositionis), the reason being that it is impossible for him to sit and not sit at the same time. However, Socrates sits contingently, or freely (that is, not by necessitas consequentis), because it is always possible for him to stand. On the other hand, consider a puppet sitting on a chair. Unlike Socrates, the puppet must remain sitting on the chair until it is removed by another force (necessitas consequentis). Hence the crucial difference between the two types of necessity: Contingency is excluded only by absolute necessity, not by conditional necessity. St. Thomas offered a version of this example in De Malo and concluded: “And so as we most certainly see that Socrates is sitting when he is sitting, although it be not absolutely necessary on that account that he be sitting, so also the contingency of things is not taken away because God sees everything in itself that happens.” Most instructively, St. Thomas’s next point anticipates the thrust of the third and final part of our essay:
And regarding God’s will, we should note that God’s will universally causes being and every consequence of being, and so both necessity and contingency. And his will is above the ordination of the necessary and the contingent, as it is above the whole of created existing. And so we distinguish the necessity and contingency in things in relation to created causes, which the divine will has ordained in relation to their effects, namely, that there be immutable causes of necessary effects and mutable causes of contingent effects, not by the relationship of things to God’s will, which is their universal cause.29
(In order to understand the Thomist position it is necessary to recall that God, for Thomas, is outside of time. Therefore all things are present to God including what we call future events.)
I will argue later that it is precisely St. Thomas’s metaphysics of being that allows for the real distinction between necessitasconsequentis and necessitas consequentiae. Because Luther rejected this crucial distinction as a “playing with words,” he could not regard genuine contingency as the result of God’s will.30 Rather, he saw it as
fundamentally necessary and salutary for a Christian, to know that God foreknows nothing contingently, but that He foresees and purposes and does all things by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will. . . . From this it follows irrefutably that everything we do, everything that happens, even if it seems to us to happen mutably and contingently, happens in fact nonetheless necessarily and immutably, if you have regard to the will of God.31
Clearly, Luther had to exclude genuine contingency from consideration, because in his conceptual framework genuine contingency turns into a potential competitor with God’s creative power. Only by embracing the distinction between necessitas consequentis and necessitas consequentiae and hence the kind of metaphysics of being that was put aside by nominalism would he have been able to conceive of God’s creative power as genuinely transcendent, as a power that can operate through necessity as well as contingency and thus can very well effect even the free choices of humans. In his eagerness to undercut the Semi-Pelagian error once and for all, by likening the human to a beast of burden with either God or Satan as its rider, Luther seems to have accepted the price that in the act of conversion the human being has to be less than a human person, less than the creature to whom God has granted the gift of created freedom. McSorley rightly states that “a personal, free decision of faith is explicitly excluded by Luther’s over-extended concept of servum arbitrium.”32
Both Erasmus and Luther seem to have operated under the de facto influence of a new and increasingly dominant notion of human freedom promoted by intellectual forces as substantively different and internally diverse as nominalism and humanism.33 At the root of this new notion lay a libertarian account of spontaneity based on a concept of contingency operative on the same ontological plane as divine causality and hence in a competitive relationship with it. Erasmus seems to have entertained this notion of freedom in the human’s relationship to God, while Luther—in a vigorous (hyper-) Augustinian reaction—regarded it strictly as a divine attribute. The question of grace and freedom in the act of conversion thus became a strict “either-or.” Either the human turns to God freely, that is, by way of an act of spontaneous, self-determining freedom, and God subsequently comes to the human’s aid; or God irresistibly turns the human in an act in which the human remains completely passive. Thus the following picture emerges: For both Erasmus and Luther, to say that God and man act together in justification must mean that their joint action is analogous to that of two men drawing the same load. Consequently, the more one does, the less the other; whence, for Luther, realizing anew that grace does everything in salvation, it follows of necessity that man does nothing. But Erasmus desired to uphold the other aspect of tradition; that salvation is truly ours implies that we are ourselves active.34
Should one wonder what the impact of Occam’s razor—entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity—might have been in the centuries in which the via moderna unfolded?35 A rigorous nominalist conception of liberum arbitrium just does not fit well with the notion of divine operative grace. If both agents are to act, the first cause of any form of cooperation must lie with one or the other. Luther took the one side and, in good Augustinian but equally good nominalist fashion, deleted the unnecessary factor, the “empty word,” liberum arbitrium. Erasmus took the other side and, in good humanist but equally good nominalist fashion, defined liberum arbitrium competitively, as the sufficient first cause of its proper agency, God then joining as an auxiliary cause strengthening and eventually securing the human effort. Hence, what became unavailable to both Erasmus and Luther was the radical, non-competitive transcendent causality of God as upheld explicitly by St. Thomas and implicitly in the late works of St. Augustine—a causality that allowed genuine contingency to fall utterly under the infallible divine providence and hence illuminate the real distinction between the necessitasconsequentis and the necessitasconsequentiae, or suppositionis When we characterize Erasmus’s and Luther’s positions as two reductive Augustinianisms post-Occam, it would be false to assume that their respective accounts simply mirrored each other. The Erasmus of the On Free Will, while capturing the early Augustine and displaying remarkable familiarity with Origen’s account of human freedom, missed the central tenets of the late Augustine and remained disturbingly hospitable to the kind of Semi-Pelagianism that found a home among Occamist theologians as well as leading humanists. In other words, Erasmus’s Augustinianism was erroneous primarily in matters theological. Conversely, Luther’s account, while remaining fundamentally in accord with the central theological tenet of the late Augustine (and the St. Thomas of the second Parisian period) regarding the “beginning of faith”, was erroneous primarily in matters philosophical.
The epochal Erasmus–Luther exchange offers exemplary evidence of the fact that it is deeply problematic to discern the mystery of grace and free will ostensibly on the grounds of Scripture alone while leaving the implied philosophical conceptualities unaddressed. As we will see, both Erasmus and Luther could claim with some legitimacy to be Augustinians of sorts, Erasmus drawing exclusively upon the early Augustine up to and including On Free Will and Luther relying completely on the Augustine of the late Pelagian controversies. But how was it possible for both to see themselves as apologists of Augustine, especially on the matter of grace and free will?
St. Augustine’s Complex Position36
It is notoriously difficult to get a full grasp of the vast corpus produced by the preeminent “Doctor of Grace” during his long life. In his prolificacy he might be rivaled only by St. Thomas and Martin Luther. Throughout his life, St. Augustine maintained most of what he argued for in his relatively early work On Free Will .37 However, on one single—albeit theologically decisive—point, he corrected his position. In a nutshell: The early Augustine, prior to his elevation to the episcopate in 395, taught the same error he later refuted most vigorously, namely, the Semi-Pelagian error, which attributed the beginning of salvation (“beginning of faith”) to the human’s free will. This claim is precisely what St.Thomas, by the time he was composing Summa theologiae I–II, identified as the error of the early St. Augustine,38 what Erasmus submitted as his definition of “free will” in his De libero arbi- trio, and what Luther most intensely attacked in his De servo arbitrio.
St. Augustine’s mature position emerged in a complex process. Around the year 418, his doctrine of the divine operation of conversion, that is, of the interior operative grace, seems to have been in place. It was only around 426, when he began to compose his treatise On Grace and Free Will that he defended a second operative grace completing the first—the grace of perseverance.39 For our purpose, three aspects of his mature position, handily available in On Grace and Free Will, are most pertinent. First, he continued to hold that God has revealed to us through his Holy Scriptures that there exists free will, liberumarbitrium, in the human being.40 After settling the abundant scriptural evidence for this truth, he emphasized, second, that for an action of the free will to be genuinely good, the grace of God must precede and accompany it.41 Third, and most important, he argued that only after humans have received God’s grace do they begin to have good merits.42 It might be safe to say that St. Augustine’s theology of grace reaches its very peak in the axiom that these merits are themselves God’s gifts. And here we find the core of a theology of merit, sadly absent in the German pre-Reformation and early Reformation period: “If therefore your good merits are gifts of God, then God does not crown your merits insofar as they are your merits, but insofar as they are his gifts.”43 At the very core of this teaching of merit stands St.Augustine’s crucial distinction between two moments, or types, of grace: first, opera- tive grace (gratia operans), through which God gives the good will itself to perform good acts; and second, cooperative grace (gratia cooperans), through which God cooperates with the human free will in the actual performance of the good act. Hence, St. Augustine would maintain that God operates the good will in human beings without their assent, but when human beings will and do what is good, God cooperates with them. Put negatively, without God’s operative and cooperative grace, neither faith, hope, and love nor good works are possible.44
Lest Augustine’s teaching on the beginning of faith be dismissed as the bygone position of an all too dominant theological figure, and just that— the teaching of one theologian in the Church’s long tradition—consider the fact that St. Augustine’s teaching on the “beginning of faith” became the Church’s teaching, at the Second Council of Orange.
An Augustinian Excursus: The Second Council of Orange
In 529, after a lengthy period of complex disputes between Augustinians and Semi-Pelagians in the Gallic Church, the Second Council of Orange, arguably one of the most important provincial Church councils in the history of the Latin Church, declared Augustine’s teaching on the “beginning of faith” to be de fide—indispensable to the Christian faith. To cite, in only the briefest form the teachings from Orange II most relevant for our concerns:45
CANON III: “That the grace of God is not given at man’s call, but itself makes man call for it.”46
CANON IV: “That God, to cleanse us from sin, does not wait for, but prepares our will.”47
CANON V: “That the beginning of faith is not of ourselves, but of the grace of God.”48
CANON VI: “That without the grace of God mercy is not bestowed upon us when we believe and seek for it; rather, it is grace itself which causes us to believe and seek for it.”49
CANON VII: “That by the powers of nature without grace we are not able to think or choose any good thing pertaining to our salvation.”50
CANON IX: “Of the help of God, by which we do good works—It is of God’s gift when we think rightly, and keep our steps from falsehood and unrighteousness; for as often as we do good, God works in us and with us that we may work.”51
CANON XXII: “Of the things which properly belong to men—No man has anything of his own but falsehood and sin.”52 Which sounds like a quotation from Martin Luther, who would say: “Free will prior to grace is capable only of sinning.”53
The Second Council of Orange maintains time and again that liberum arbitrium exists; it was not annihilated by original sin. At the same time, “through the sin of the first man, free choice was so biased and weakened that no one can afterwards either love God as he ought or believe in God or work for God’s sake what is good, unless the grace of divine mercy prevents [e.g., goes before or precedes: R.H.] him.”54 These canons and definitions surely lack the conceptual sophistication and rhetorical brilliance of Augustine’s own theology; nonetheless, they constitute the normative inscription of fundamental tenets of Augustinian theology into the tradition of the Latin Church.55
The fate of the Second Council of Orange, however, was a curious one. As Henri Bouillard has convincingly argued, until about the eighth century its decrees were held in high esteem. Yet from the tenth to the middle of the sixteenth century, theologians seem to have been utterly unaware of the fact that there had been a Second Council of Orange and that it had produced these normative teachings, to the effect that Augustine’s late struggle against what was much later dubbed “Semi-Pelagian- ism” was lost on virtually all medieval theologians.56 Only at the Council of Trent were these decrees rediscovered and reaffirmed.57 Following Bouillard, Max Seckler and Joseph Wawrykow are inclined to think that St.Thomas probably did not have access during his Roman period to the acts of the Second Council of Orange, but quite likely did have access to the full text of such important treatises of the late Augustine as De gratia et “Free Will”, De correptione et gratia, De dono perseverantiae, and De praedestinatione sanctorum—texts that were otherwise either unavailable to most medieval theologians or, at best, selectively available in the form of various collections of Augustinian dicta.58 Hence, we should assume that St.Thomas, in his later life and antecedent to his second Parisian period, became a rare exception to the virtually collective medieval amnesia about St. Augustine’s late theology of grace.59 In a day and age when not a few post-Vatican II theologians are eager to dilute or even jettison the Church’s teaching on original sin, as well as prevenient grace, for the sake of an easier—but thereby misunderstood— evangelization, it is crucial to remember and reappropriate the canons of this council. Orange II’s unwavering insistence on prevenient grace, as well as the arrant impotence of the liberum arbitrium in matters of salvation, constitutes a small but critical bridge across the Reformation divide. To put the matter differently, had the canons of the Second Council of Orange been alive and well in late medieval theology, Luther would not have been in need of “rediscovering” Augustine against the nominalist theologians of the via moderna by rigorously appropriating, albeit in a new key, central tenets of Augustine’s late theology. But alas, only at the Council of Trent were the canons of Orange II fully reclaimed and reinstated, and this by way of a thorough retrieval of the theology of the doctor communis….
…. St.Thomas, free will must be part and parcel of creation all the way down…
Bernard Lonergan offers a succinct interpretation of St. Thomas’s argument: “Because God creates the soul, He alone can operate within the will; again, because the will tends to the bonum universale, this tendency cannot be the effect of any particular cause but only of the universal cause, God.”68 God causes the will—which is just one particular faculty of the soul, together with the soul itself—to be according to its own particular nature, that is, to tend to the bonum universale, whereby “inclinations of the will remain indeterminately disposed to many things”69 depending on what the intellect proposes to the will as a good to tend to. Hence, the will in its particular nature is a function of God’s dare esse:
What first moves the intellect and the will is something superior to them, namely, God. And since He moves every kind of thing according to the nature of the moveable thing, . . . He also moves the will accord- ing to its condition, as indeterminately disposed to many things, not in a necessary way. Therefore, if we should consider the movement of the will regarding the performance of an act, the will is evidently not moved in a necessary way.70
So also the external acts that result from deliberation (consilium) and choice (electio)—from the interplay between intellect and will71—that is, acts of genuine contingency, do not fall outside the divine giving of being and hence remain fully under the purview of divine providence: “And so it is not contrary to freedom that God cause acts of free choice.”72
What we have considered thus far pertains to nature, the effect of the dare esse, God’s first and fundamental gratuity ad extra. The “beginning of faith” does not, however, belong to this effect; rather, it is the distinctive effect of grace. Grace in the precise sense must be understood as a second, unfathomable, surpassing gratuity (always already presupposing the gratuity of the dare esse) and, in that, fundamentally different from nature by (1) being contingent in relationship to nature, and (2) efficaciously turning human beings from sin to God, directing, and moving them to their supernatural end. Lest the fundamentally and exclusively Christological and pneumatological character of grace be lost, let me stress that for St. Thomas “the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion is the way by which men obtain beatitude” (ST II–II, q. 2, a. 7, c.); specifically, “men become receivers of this grace through God’s Son made man, whose humanity grace filled first, and thence flowed forth to us” through the action of the Holy Spirit (ST I–II, q. 108, a. 1, c.). Consequently, grace is most intrinsically and hence constitutively the created effect in the human being of the Son’s and the Spirit’s saving mission (ST I, q. 43, a. 3).
Grace works by the logic of convenientia—a very Augustinian category—that is, by the logic of an unfathomable fittingness, calling forth praise and delight. But because nature is the “way of being,” grace always comes “on the way of being.”73 For everything is included in the act of being.74 Yet what does this mean for grace? Is grace to be understood as an intensification of being (esse), on the same scale as nature, just infinitely more? No. For if it were so, the act of being would not be perfect in and of itself but would require grace for its perfection. Is grace then extrinsic to the act of being, a second act, foreign to and superimposed upon the first? Grace cannot be that either, since everything is contained in the act of being, the actus ultimus. Rather, the instantaneous unfolding of the actus essendi into the order and hierarchy of beings entails that everything is generally ordered to God, who is the universal good. This ordering comes about by way of the ordering of each being to its own proper ends. As we will see, grace is the created effect of the gratuitous divine act—always coming on the way of being—that directs human beings to their supernatural end, that is, to God as their overarching specific end. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Remember that at present we are concerned exclusively with the initial conversion of the human being sub conditione peccati to God, an act that does not involve an infusion of habitual grace but solely the original and fundamental operation of God converting the soul to himself—in short, operative grace. Hence, it should not surprise that the “beginning of faith” is not the total conversion St.Thomas envisages but rather the very beginningof a comprehensive conversion in which the human—on the basis of habitual grace—increasingly takes part:
Every movement of the will towards God can be termed a conversion to God. And so there is a threefold turning to God. The first is by the perfect love of God; this belongs to the creature enjoying the possession of God; and for such conversion, consummate grace is required. The next turning to God is that which merits beatitude; and for this there is required habitual grace, which is the principle of merit. The third conversion is that whereby a man disposes himself so that he may have grace; for this no habitual grace is required; but the operation of God, Who draws the soul towards Himself, according to Lamentations 5:21: “Convert us, O Lord, to Thee, and we shall be converted.” (ST I, q. 62, a. 2, ad 3)
The conversion identified by St.Thomas in the third place is indeed the first and fundamental one, and the only one considered here.
Operative grace denotes the special act of God by which the human being is efficaciously ordered to God as his or her supernatural end, that is, his or her overarching particular end. Put differently, operative grace is nothing other than the divine initium of the second gratuity by which God brings about the returning to God of the actus essendi, as it comes to subsist as human being, a returning that comes about by way of a gratu- itous elevation of the human faculties of intellect and will. In order to understand the operation of grace correctly, we need to consider five distinctive, albeit closely interrelated, aspects of operative grace.
1. The orientation of the will. First, we need to call attention to the fact that in operative grace God acts on the will and not on the intellect. As Lonergan rightly avers: “The first act does not presuppose any object apprehended by the intellect; God acts directly on the radical orientation of the will.”75 Because the will is the efficient cause of all human acts and because it moves all the other powers of the soul to their acts, the will is the first principle of sin (ST I–II, q. 74, a. 1). And consequently, of all the powers of the soul, the will has been most fundamentally infected by original sin (ST I–II, q. 83, a. 3; De Malo, q. 4, a. 2, c.). For this reason, it is the will that first and foremost needs to be restored. However, operative grace does not merely restore the will but orients the will such that God becomes the overarching specific end to which the will tends. It is on the basis of this gratuitous reorientation that the will commands the intellect to the act of faith.76
The special motion of operative grace. Next we need to emphasize that St. Thomas distinguishes the special motion of operative grace very clearly from the will’s universal motion to the bonum universale: God moves man’s will, as the Universal Mover, to the universal object of the will, which is good. And without this universal motion, man cannot will anything. But man determines himself by his reason to will this or that, which is true or apparent good. Nevertheless, sometimes God moves some specially [specialiter] to the willing of something determinate, which is good; as in the case of those whom He moves by grace. (ST I–II, q. 9, a. 6, ad 3)
Lonergan rightly points out that while this grace may be a habitual grace, “it may also be an actual grace that is a change of will.”77 In order to substantiate this claim, Lonergan refers to De Malo, where St.Thomas states: “And an external cause alters free choice, as when God by grace changes the will of a human being from evil to good, as Proverbs 21:1 says: ‘The heart of the king is in God’s hands, and God will turn it whithersoever He willed.’ ”78 This changing of the will from evil to good comes always on the way of being and consequently does not violate or contradict the will’s proper operation. For “the will advanced to its first movement in virtue of the instigation [instinctus] of some exterior mover [exterior movens]” (ST I–II, q. 9, a. 4, c.), who is God himself (ST I–II, q. 9, a. 6, c.).Thanks to the divine instinctus,79 the appetitive inclination of the will tends to God himself as the overarching specific good.
2. God’s external, transcendental causality operating internally. St. Thomas uses the notion of an external cause to refer to God’s alteration of free choice. “External” is here distinguished from “internal,” where the latter is the proximate cause in the order of secondary causality. God as external cause is in no way extrinsic to the creature’s nature or existence but external only to the creature’s proximate causality. It is precisely the metaphysics of being that prevents this “externality” from being understood in the modern sense of a “first cause,” issued by a “highest” or “perfect” being—that is, infinitely superior to all other causes and beings but still on an ontic continuum and hence in a competitive relationship with them because it cannot transcend the ontological level of secondary causality. For St. Thomas, God’s external causality remains transcendent causality all the way down and hence is not competitive with the internal proximate causality of the will—whose first universal mover is also God.
3. Lonergan, in his interpretation of St. Thomas’s theology of operative grace, overcomes this nocuous modernist misunderstanding thanks to the “theorem of divine transcendence,” which he sees at work in St. Thomas: “The Thomist higher synthesis was to place God above and beyond the created orders of necessity and contingence: because God is universal cause, his providence must be certain; but because He is a transcendent cause, there can be no incompatibility between terrestrial contingence and the causal certitude of providence.”80
4. It would be a mistake, however, to create a competitive relationship between what Lonergan describes as a theorem and St. Thomas’s metaphysics of being.81 Rather, the theorem is consequent upon the cosmic emanation scheme operative in St. Thomas’s metaphysics so that the former presupposes the latter: “For an instrument is a lower cause moved by a higher so as to produce an effect within the category proportionate to the higher; but in the cosmic hierarchy all causes are moved except the highest, and every effect is at least in the category of being; therefore, all causes except the highest are instruments.”82 David Burrell brings Lonergan’s insistence upon God’s transcendent causality (that is, transcending necessity as well as contingency) succinctly to the point when he states:
So what freely comes forth from God in its very being can be brought to act freely by that same One who keeps it in existence. The how escapes us in both cases, of course, but using the language of “theorems” links us expressly to the originating activity, and so reminds us that just as the how of creation escapes us (it is not a motion), so does the manner in which God causes agents to cause by “applying causes to effects.”83
To summarize: Under the category of God as transcendent cause, operative grace is identical with the very act of the will willing God as supernatural end. Again quoting Lonergan: “God as external principle moves the will to the end, and in special cases He moves it by grace to a special end. Conspicuous among the latter is conversion, which is expressed entirely in terms of willing the end.”84
5. Divine instrumentality: The external cause moving internally. When St. Thomas responds to the question whether human beings can prepare themselves for grace without the external aid of grace, he emphasizes that the gift of habitual grace is the precondition for right operation and enjoyment of God. In other words, the very medium for right operation and enjoyment of God is the acquired Christian freedom. But what is the first cause of this acquired freedom? Remember that it is precisely in this context that St. Thomas introduces the concept of the divine instinctus. Is the first cause of this freedom internal, intrinsic to its own proper causality—leading to an infinite regress of causes? Or is it external—violating the very nature of free choice itself? We must conclude that the first cause moves internally, interior to the will itself, but as external cause—the divine instinctus. Clearly, it is only a genuinely transcendent mode of causality that can fulfill these conditions. Hence, the divine instinctus cannot be simply the first in a chain of secondary causality. Rather, the whole sequence of secondary causality must relate instrumentally to the transcendent first cause.
Let us attend to St.Thomas’s response at length:
Now in order that man prepare himself to receive this gift, it is not necessary to presuppose any further habitual gift in the soul, otherwise we should go on to infinity. But we must presuppose a gratuitous gift of God, Who moves the soul inwardly or inspires the good wish. For in these two ways do we need the Divine assistance, as stated above (aa. 2, 3). Now that we need the help of God to move us, is manifest. For since every agent acts for an end, every cause must direct its effect to its end, and hence since the order of ends is according to the order of agents or movers, man must be directed to the last end by the motion of the first mover, and to the proximate end by the motion of any of the subordinate movers; . . . And thus since God is the first Mover simply, it is by His motion that everything seeks Him under the common notion of good, whereby everything seeks to be likened to God in its own way. Hence Dionysius says (De Divinis Nominibus, IV) that “God turns all to Himself.” But He directs righteous men to Himself as to a special end [ad specialemfinem], which they seek, and to which they wish to cling, according to Psalm 72:28,“it is good for me to adhere to my God.” And that they are turned to God can only spring from God’s having turned them. Now to prepare oneself for grace is, as it were, to be turned to God; just as, whoever has his eyes turned away from the light of the sun, prepares himself to receive the sun’s light, by turning his eyes towards the sun. Hence it is clear that man cannot prepare himself to receive the light of grace except by the gratuitous help of God moving him inwardly.85
Note the crucial sentence: “Now to prepare oneself for grace is, as it were, to be turned to God” (Hoc autem est praeparare se ad gratiam, quasi ad Deum converti). To prepare oneself for the gift of habitual grace, for acquired freedom, is to be turned to God. Such is the grammatical instantiation of understanding God as transcendent cause to move interiorly as a genuinely external cause. In other words, one’s own act of preparation is caused by God without that act’s losing its integrity as the will’s proper operation, being drawn toward its end—but now being the special end of adhering to God. If this indeed obtains, there is no ontological difference between operative and cooperative grace; rather, they are to be understood as two moments of God’s actual grace simply differentiated according to their different effects.86
6. Operative and cooperative grace: “voluntas mota et non movens and voluntas mota et movens.” Let us now attend more specifically to the particular distinction between operative and cooperative grace. In order to appreciate this distinction, we need to grasp that it presupposes a pivotal distinction in the voluntary action itself:
Now, in a voluntary action, there is a twofold action, namely, the interior action of the will, and the external action: and each of these actions has its object. The end is properly the object of the interior act of the will: while the object of the external action, is that on which the action is brought to bear. (ST I–II, q. 18, a. 6, c.)
While the interior action is concerned solely with the end itself, the external action pertains to the means that lead to the end, means that can entail proper proximate ends of their own, which are respectively objects of interior acts of the will.
This distinction is put to work as St.Thomas considers how God converts the soul to himself by giving himself to the will as a special good to be desired:
Now there is a double act in us. First, there is the interior act of the will, and with regard to this act the will is a thing moved, and God is the mover [istum actum, voluntasse habet ut mota, Deus autem ut movens]; and especially when the will, which hitherto willed evil, begins to will good. And hence, inasmuch as God moves the human mind to this act, we speak of operating grace. (ST I–II, q. 111, a. 2, c.)
Hence, the operative grace of conversion is the very act of the will willing God as the overarching special good to be desired, that is, as willing God as the supernatural end.87 Lonergan explains:
The voluntas mota et non movens is the reception of divine action in the creature antecedent to any operation on the creature’s part. So far from being a free act, it lies entirely outside the creature’s power. But though not a free act in itself, it is the first principle of free acts, even internal free acts such as faith, fear, hope, sorrow, and repentance.88
Accordingly, the internal act of faith, arising from the new principle, is a free act, an act of liberum arbitrium: “Now the act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God, so that it is subject to the free will [liberum arbitrium] in relation to God; and consequently the act of faith can be meritorious” (ST II–II, q. 2, a. 9, c.).
How does St. Thomas account for the second aspect of the “twofold action,” the exterior acts by which the human person chooses (on the basis of the will’s consent with the intellect’s consil- ium) the means to attain the end?
Since [the exterior act] is commanded by the will, . . . the opera- tion of this act is attributed to the will. And because God assists us in this act, both by strengthening our will interiorly so as to attain to the act, and by granting outwardly the capability of operating, it is with respect to this that we speak of cooperating grace. (ST I–II, q. 111, a. 2, c.)
Consequently, as St. Thomas emphasizes: “God does not justify us without ourselves, because whilst we are being justified we consent to God’s justification [ justitiae] by a movement of our free will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace.”89 The difference between voluntas mota et non movens and voluntas mota et movens is the difference between willing the end and willing the means leading to this end. Voluntas mota et movens simply renders the actualization of acquired freedom in the efficacious choice of means, as the will’s proximate causality is now directed to its special end, God himself.90
Thus, cooperative grace is nothing but the grace of conversion, the willing of the supernatural end, but now as moving the will to will the means leading to this end.
What remained ontologically implicit in St. Augustine’s controversial concerns becomes explicit by way of St.Thomas’s metaphysics of being. Lonergan stresses rightly that
in both cases the same theory of instrumentality and of freedom is in evidence: the will has its strip of autonomy, yet beyond this there is the ground from which free acts spring; and that ground God holds and moves as a fencer moves his whole rapier by grasping only the hilt. When the will is mota et non movens, solus autem Deus movens, dicitur gratia operans. On the other hand, when the will is et mota et movens, diciturgratia cooperans. . . . In actual grace, divine operation effects the will of the end to become cooperation when this will of the end leads to an efficacious choice of means.91
Because it comes on the way of being (esse), operative grace, by way of the divine instinctus, is closer to the human will than the will to itself. Consequently, operative grace neither competes nor conflicts with the exercise of created freedom, or electio humana, as St. Thomas calls it. Rather, divine instrumentality and created freedom are the two sides of one and the same reality.
Now we have reached the apposite point to revisit the topic of necessity and contingency that drove the debate between Erasmus and Luther. Recall that Erasmus understood Wyclif ’s and Luther’s “necessitarianism” to imply that humans are only instruments in God’s hand, with their liberum arbitrium reduced to nothing and therefore their very humanity reduced to a subhuman form of existence. In an important sense, Luther agreed with Erasmus’s judgment, except that he regarded such a humiliation as the most appropriate medicine to destroy the worst pathogen of original sin, superbia. Neither Erasmus nor Luther was able conceptually to conceive divine transcendent causality in the way St.Thomas did. Thus the possibility of understanding instrumentality in a way that would encompass necessity as well as contingency was lost on them. While Erasmus even referred to the Scholastic distinction between necessitas consequentis and necessitas consequentiae in order to score a point against Luther’s position, he did not have the slightest clue how to put this crucial distinction to work conceptually.
Had he not despised the discipline of Scholastic argumentation and been thoroughly uninformed with regard to St.Thomas’s metaphysics of being, he might have been able to respond differently to Luther’s alleged necessitarianism. Luther, as we have noted, rejected the distinction itself on clearly nominalist grounds and therefore faced the problem of a potential account of contingency that would be inherently competitive with the infallibility of the divine will and thus had to be rejected as well.
We have seen that an account of divine causality that transcends as well as encompasses both necessity and contingency depends on a metaphysics of being concordant with the notion that “God’s will universally causes being and every consequence of being, and so both necessity and contingency.”92 Moreover, created freedom, the capac- ity to choose between alternatives and decide for or against a course of action, remains always intact, even sub conditione peccati, because the free will pertains solely to the interior act of deliberation in regard to the end(s), along with the electio of the external means to move toward the end(s). Regarding the end to which it is drawn, it is “wired” to the bonum universale. Under the condition of sin, this can take the form of whatever seems to be a good, even to a person fully habituated into malice.93 Only when the will’s inclination is reoriented by God’s particular operation of grace, the divine instinctus, to the special overarching end, indeed, the supernatural end per se— God himself—does the quality of the human’s electio fundamentally change. Nonetheless, because God as transcendent, external cause, by way of operative grace, moves internally, the ensuing change is the person’s own preparation.
So, my modest proposal is simply this: By way of his metaphysics of being, as it accounts for divine transcendental causality “all the way down,” St. Thomas offers a salutary way of preserving St. Augustine’s fundamental insight that grace and free will do not need to come into a conflictual competition in the mystery of the “beginning of faith”. On matters of grace and free will in the “beginning of faith”, St. Thomas is a profoundly Augustinian theologian. This is obvious. What is less obvious and in need of recovery is the fact that even his metaphysics of being, rightly understood, ultimately serves none but proper Augustinian ends and that by way of his metaphysics of being St.Thomas is capable of achieving a surpassing Augustinian synthesis of unparalleled depth and beauty. The ongoing evangelical and hence ecumenical significance of this synthesis is that it offers a potent prophylactic against the pathogens of (semi-) Pelagian as well as (quasi-) necessitarian accounts of the “beginning of faith”, numerously afloat in contemporary theology.94