Sect. 230Systems on the Efficacy of Actual GraceSystems on the Efficacy of Actual Grace

Free will and grace are, according to Catholic doctrine, the two factors which co-operate in the production of every salutary act. The beginning is made by grace, which enlightens the mind and moves the will. Under its continued influence the will is endowed with supernatural freedom, and freely gives its consent to the Divine inspiration. The adequate principle of salutary acts is, therefore, neither grace alone nor the will alone, but the will supernaturalized by and freely co-operating with grace. “Whenever we perform salutary works, God works in us and with us in order that we may work (Quoties bona agimus, Deus in nobis atque nobiscum, ut operemur, operatur)” (Council of Orange, ii. c. 9). St. Bonaventure says, “The will is so moved by God that it is also moved by itself, and hence every meritorious work is attributed to grace and to free will” (in 2 Dist. 26, q. 6). Such is the dogma. The Church has left it to the wit of theologians to explain how the human will, moved by grace, retains its freedom, and how grace attains its object, the will remaining free.

I. The various theories may ultimately be reduced to two: (1) those which take the efficacy of grace as their starting-point and main principle, and then go on to explain how the will is still free; and (2) those which start with free will, and then explain the efficacy of grace. The former appeal chiefly to the authority of St. Paul; the latter to such passages as Matt. 11:20; 25:34, etc.

1. In the controversies on grace an important part is played by the distinction of grace into “sufficient” and “efficacious.” If the effect of grace is considered, it is clear that the good act is not always performed. Hence the distinction: grace which is followed by the act, is called efficacious; grace which is not so followed, is called sufficient. How it comes to pass that the act is or is not performed—in other words, whether there is an intrinsic difference between efficacious grace and sufficient grace, and, if so, what is the difference—is the great question. Those who insist on our freedom of choice will naturally tend to attribute the performance or non-performance of the action to the determination of our will, and will thus be inclined to deny any intrinsic difference. The other party, who insist on the internal (or ex sese) efficacy of grace, will maintain that there is an intrinsic difference, to which the result (performance or non-performance) is ultimately due. These will find it hard to explain how a grace can be called sufficient without producing any result; whereas the former will have their difficulty in showing wherein the efficacy of grace consists. If the grace is sufficient, why has it no effect? If the grace is efficacious, how can the result be free? The Reformers and Jansenists, who denied man’s power to resist grace, left no room for graces merely sufficient. That these exist is but a corollary of the Catholic doctrine, that all men receive sufficient grace to be saved, but retain their freedom under the influence of grace: as often as they commit sin, the proffered grace remains inefficacious, or merely sufficient.

2. Another point which Catholic theologians admit, is the power of grace to attain its object with certainty. Whatever activity is displayed by second causes, especially in the supernatural order, is directed by Divine decrees, and supported by Divine co-operation (concursus). No creature can frustrate the will of God. If He wills that a salutary act shall follow upon a given grace, He so disposes the free will that the act infallibly follows. The connection between grace and the act exists both in the order of things and in the order of knowledge: viz. the act follows infallibly, and God knows, from all eternity, that it will follow. Yet the Divine foreknowledge does not prevent the liberty of the act, any more than does the after-knowledge which exists in our memories. The free act is the subject-matter of memory as well as of prevision; its nature is affected by neither (§§ 80, 88).

II. St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bossuet, and the whole Thomistic school, say that God “moves the will to act according to its own nature, that is, freely.” With this single principle St. Thomas meets and solves all objections. God willed that there should be free agents, filling their own place in the universal order of things, and contributing to the perfection of the whole. That free agents exist, is a fact of our consciousness; that their freedom and its exercise are dependent—entirely dependent—on God, is an elementary theological truth; that we are unable to understand how the First Cause moves the free agent without prejudice to its freedom, is to be expected from minds as imperfect as ours. Our knowledge of “force” is very limited. We know but obscurely how created causes produce their effects, e.g. how the mind moves the body. The way in which the First Cause moves second causes lies beyond the sphere of human knowledge.

St. Thomas, or at least the Thomistic school, explains the infallible efficacy of grace by “physical premotion.” The Rev. J. Berthier, O.P. of Fribourg University, thus describes this process in the natural order: “Physical premotion is a Divine action, virtually transient, by which God as First Cause confers in each individual case on the second causes, already endowed by Him with the power of acting, the actual performing—free or necessary, according to the proper nature of each agent—of what He has decreed.”

Dr. Manser, Berthier’s pupil and disciple, expands this definition as follows: “An action virtually transient;” that is, different from the eternal premotion immanent in and identical with the Divine essence. “On second causes already endowed by Him with the power of acting;” these words discriminate premotion from other Divine actions virtually transient, viz. creation and conservation. “By which God confers the actual performing;” these words give the ratio formalis (the essence) of premotion. For the giving the actual performing of an act implies an immediate motion of the will, by virtue of which the will from non-acting becomes acting,—passes from the mere power to act into actual exercise of the act. Again, this immediate Divine motion and application of the will to its proper exercise implies that the motion precedes the act as its cause. Hence it is called “previous” motion, or premotion. And as the Divine motion is an active motion, working as an efficient cause, it is “physical,” and plainly different from moral (or persuasive) motion. All this is contained in the words of the definition, “by which God as First Cause confers on the second causes.” The clause “… performing what He has decreed … in each individual case,” points out the infallibility of the effect, both as to the exercise of the will and as to its specific object; that is, the will acts and does exactly what God moves it to do. Lastly, the terms “free or necessary according to the nature of each agent,” differentiate two species of premotion, the one given to free, the other to necessary, agents (cf. Possibilitas Præmo-tionis Physicæ Thomisticæ, etc., by J. A. Manser, Friburgi Helvetiorum, 1895).

The idea of the First Cause working out His decrees unfailingly, yet in harmony with the nature of each created agent, possesses a sublime grandeur which has commended it to the best intellects, obvious difficulties notwithstanding. Among these, the safeguarding of man’s freedom of will appears as the greatest to those theologians who make the dogma of human liberty the starting-point of their speculations. The Thomists, however, have a ready answer—if answer it be: God moves man to act freely, according to his free nature. To this the reply is: Premotion, as described, is destructive of free will. For, as St. Thomas himself lays down (C. Gentes, iii. 68): “The control which the will has over its acts, and by which it has the power of willing or not willing, excludes the determination (or limitation) of its power to one act or object.” It is the very essence of a free will to be left free to choose; whosoever or whatsoever inclines it to one object or act without choice of another, destroys its freedom. Wherefore, if the will be moved according to its nature, it must be moved without physical predetermination to one thing. To this the Thomists’ rejoinder is the subtle distinction between freedom of will in sensu composito and in sensu diviso. Once the will has acted and chosen its object, its liberty ceases as to the present act and its object; for these are facts which cannot be undone. E.g. I will write, and do write. Now, it is evident that if I actually will, and actually write, I cannot at the same time (in sensu composito) be actually not willing and not writing. As, however, the particular act and its object do not absorb the whole activity of the will or satisfy all its aspirations, the will remains free to turn itself upon other objects, or free in sensu diviso. Technically, “The free agent, in the act which is proper to it, limits (or determines) itself to one thing (act and object) in the composite sense, but it preserves its free power as regards other acts and objects in the divided sense.” The opponents, however, urge that “liberty in the divided sense” is a useless abstraction, since the actual exercise of liberty, according to the Thomists, always implies premotion, and hence implies the “composite sense” in which freedom of choice ceases. This thrust is parried by the Thomistic axiom, “God can and does move the human will according to its free nature;” that is, God moves the will to act, yet so that the created will, under the Divine motion, determines itself to act. Thus the rights of the First Cause as well as those of the free agent are safe: God is the determinant cause and the total cause of all that has positive being in the act; and the created will, although moved by God, is, after its limited manner, viz. under God, likewise the total cause and the master of its operation. It may be well to quote here St. Thomas’s idea of free will: “We say that free will (liberum arbitrium) is the cause of its own motion, because man by free will moves himself to act; but it is not essential (necessarium) to freedom that it be the first cause of the free act, any more than in order to be the cause of something else it is essential to be its first cause. God, then, is the First Cause moving both natural and voluntary causes. And as by moving the natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not prevent them being voluntary; on the contrary, He makes them voluntary; for He works in each cause according to its nature (proprietatem) (Summa, 1, q. 83, a. 1, ad. 3).

III. The theologians who claim that they follow closely in the footsteps of St. Augustine, chief among these being Laurentius Berti, propose the following system for conciliating the efficacy of grace with free will. Grace, they say, chiefly consists in “delectation.” Free will performs no good action if not inclined and determined to act by “victorious” grace (gratia victrix). They only admit such a “sufficient grace” as gives the power but not the actual will, or at most a will so weak and imperfect that it is unable to overcome the flesh and its concupiscence. Now they deem grace “victorious,” and hence efficacious, not on account of the co-operation of free will or of suitable circumstances, but of itself and intrinsically. The necessity of a grace of itself efficacious is derived, not as in the Thomistic system, from the subordination of the creature to God, but from the weakness of the human will induced by the Fall. Free will is safeguarded, in their opinion, because man always retains the power of refusing consent—his judgment remaining indifferent—although, in fact, he never exercises that power. Thus a man has the power of taking his own life, yet as long as he is of sound mind he does not exercise that power. In this point the Augustinian system closely resembles Jansenism. Thomassin adopted the above views with but a slight modification. What the Augustinians attribute to a single grace, he attributes to an aggregate of graces, “of which,” he says, “each taken apart may be frustrated, but which, taken together, wear out the resistance of even the most obstinate, and by their number, co-operation, and untiring attacks, bring about consent.”

It is an unwarranted assumption that the nature of all grace is delectation, delight, or pleasure. Fear is as potent a factor in human acts as pleasure. Nor are we always prompted to do what promises the greatest pleasure; in fact, the practice of most virtues consists in renouncing the more attractive pleasures of the world for motives of fear or love. But, what is more to the point, the system leaves unsolved the very question at issue. For either the victorious delectation acts on the will morally (by way of persuasion), leaving it physically free to resist, or it acts physically, determining the act and action of the will; in the first case the efficacy of grace is not explained; in the second, free will is abolished. The modification introduced by Thomassin labours under exactly the same difficulty.

IV. They who derive the efficacy of grace from the consent of the will, have received the name of Molinists (from Ludovicus Molina, S.J.). These teach that the will is moved by God physically both in the order of nature and of grace; that without this Divine help the will cannot act; that whatever reality is in the act is attributable to God; and that all things happen as God foreknows and decrees. But they do not admit a Divine concursus or grace so efficacious as to be irresistible and infallibly connected with the act. On the contrary, they hold that grace may retain all its intrinsic efficacy, and yet remain without effect for the want of free assent on the part of man. The Molinists further assert that grace has a true intrinsic and physical efficacy, as it is the physical principle of the act. They concede that the motive of grace is “previous” to the act, inasmuch as it is identical with the Divine substance creating the will, decreeing to co-operate with it, and awakening those indeliberate motions of intellect and will which induce us freely to will good deeds. But all this only constitutes an efficacy of power: the effect, i.e. the actual connection of grace and good work is established by the free consent of the will prepared and assisted by grace. The infallibility of the connection is secured by the scientia media, or the knowledge of things that would exist under given conditions; in the present case, the knowledge that man will freely consent if such and such a grace is held out to him. Congruism and Molinism do not differ, at least in the main lines. In both systems grace is apportioned to man in such wise as to be truly sufficient to obtain its effect, and is given under those circumstances in which God foreknows that man will consent.

Molinism owes its origin to the difficulty of defending free will in the Thomistic system. It is an ingenious hypothesis for the conciliation of efficacious grace and free will. But its supporters claim almost theological certitude for it. They quote Matt. 11:20 (“Woe to thee, Corozain …”), and a long array of similar texts, to prove that in the deposit of faith grace is represented as ineffectual without the consent of man. Then the Council of Trent (sess. vi. c. 5) sets forth with unmistakable clearness that man is able to resist and to reject the grace of God; hence the legitimate conclusion that the efficacy of grace is dependent on man’s free co-operation. This being so, we have only to find out how grace may infallibly obtain the consent of free will. Scripture and councils fail to help us here. But theological speculation suggests an easy solution. God knows what each man will do under given circumstances. When, therefore, He wishes a grace to have an infallible effect, He offers it to man at the right moment, i.e. when He knows that man will consent.

The weak point of the system is that it seems to make God dependent on the creature. It lacks the majesty of the Thomistic conception, in which indeed “the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will, He shall turn it” (Prov. 21:1); and His wisdom “reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisd. 8:1). Bossuet criticizes the system in the following words: “A single question put to the authors of this system will show its weak point. Presupposing that God sees what man will do at a certain time and in a certain state, we ask: Does He see it in His decree and because He has so ordained it, or does He see it in the object itself considered outside God and independently of His decree? If you admit the latter alternative, you suppose future things under certain conditions before God has ordained them; and you also suppose that God sees them apart from His eternal decrees—which is an impossibility If you say that the things are to happen under such conditions because God has so decreed, you leave the difficulty intact; you still have to explain how, what God has decreed is done freely. Moreover, conditional knowledge (the scientia media) can only be attributed to God by that figure of speech which attributes to Him what really belongs to man alone; and all exact science reduces conditional propositions to absolute ones” (Traité du Libre Arbitre, ch. vi.).

V. Between the years 1598 and 1607, under Popes Clement VIII. and Paul V., were held the famous Congregationes de Auxiliis Gratæ, in which representative theologians of the two contending parties were invited to propose and defend their views. No positive conclusion was arrived at. The papal decree, which closed the acrimonious controversy without deciding it, forbad the opposing parties to inflict “censures” upon one another. Hence a Catholic is free to adopt either Thomism, or Molinism, or Augustinianism, provided he condemns none of the other systems as heretical, dangerous, rash, offensive to pious ears, and the like. “Grace is grace, despite of all controversy.”

The history of the Congregation de Auxiliis was written, on the Dominican side, by Hyacinthus Serry, O.P., under the name of Augustinus Le Blanc (A.D. 1699); and later, on behalf of the Molinists, by Livinus de Meyer, S.J., under the name of Theodorus Eleutherius.