Works 1 part 3/7

Let no one watch, let no one fast, let no one chastise the assault of lust with the crushing of abstinence, let no one declare war on the vices by the mortification of the outer man, let no one contend with the wounds of inward care by a health-giving affliction, let no one gainsay lust, let no one seek remedies for his crimes through the labor of a mortified flesh, let no one strike back at the enemy—armed with the enticements of obscene pleasure—by the strength of the cross, but let him expose his bared breast to the fiery javelins of the foe; let no one redeem the debts liable to eternal death by the sacrifices of alms, let no one through works of mercy and righteousness bring care to his wounds, but let him carry them whole and by himself to the day of judgment?

Behold, here he who a little before was thought to be a champion of grace, by blocking the way of human salvation, is found to be an assailant of the grace through which that salvation itself is conferred, and is shown to have crossed over into the counsels of the devil as an abettor of perdition. X. AGAINST THIS, THAT THEY SAY FREE CHOICE IS READY IN MAN ONLY TOWARD EVIL, AND NOT AT ALL TOWARD GOOD. Where is that word of the prophet: 'Hear me, you that follow that which is just, and seek the Lord'; or that of the Apostle: 'Know you not that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are whom you obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness'?

Therefore, while the Apostle demands better endeavors from man, he shows that there is in him the faculty of good will; and when we prefer this, we openly proclaim the ordering and the wondrous arrangement of our Author, which the same Apostle demonstrates to be prepared for righteous offices, saying: 'Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, so as to obey the lusts thereof. Neither yield your members as instruments of iniquity unto sin, but present yourselves to God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.' Likewise: 'I speak after the manner of men, because of the infirmity of your flesh.'

'For as you have yielded your members to serve uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity, so now yield your members to serve righteousness unto sanctification.' Does he not here summon that very same man to the pursuit of good works, whom he makes plain to have formerly been given over to evils? Therefore, while the slayer of free choice pronounces that all things are established and defined by predestination toward one or the other side, he empties out even the last remedies of penance by the sense of an abrupt impiety. And how does he preach grace, who denies mercy? How does he seem to assert the gift of God, whose help he takes away? How does he dare to lay claim to testimonies from the Scriptures, who tries to exclude the benefits of the Scriptures? How is it said to me:

'Turn away from evil and do good,' if I can no longer turn away from evil? Why does the Apostle speak: 'Mortify,' he says, 'your members'; and again: 'You were,' he says, 'sometime darkness, but now light in the Lord; walk as children of light'? How does the preacher of the law suggest to me a change of myself, if the Maker imposed an unchangeable law: 'Stripping yourselves,' he says, 'of the old man with his deeds, and putting on the new'? How do you contend that the ingrained stain of sin pertains inseparably to origin and condition, which you acknowledge can be laid down and put off?

Understand that you speak by a contrary spirit against the Holy Spirit, who has given to the world, as a help, the sacraments of the Law and the Prophets, the oracles of the evangelical truth, and has promised the heavenly kingdom to those who keep the divine precepts through the offices of laborious service, with grace cooperating. Wherefore measure the honor of holy work and labor by the greatness and dignity of the reward, whose palm and crown you doubtless judge cheap if you affirm that it can be grasped without laborious contrition. Can that command of the divine precept be fulfilled without a great intention of work: 'Be not,' he says, 'overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good'; or that: 'Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners'?

And how, amid these things, do you assert that the received gift of grace is in no way endangered, when you read that the good ingrained in the character can be corrupted by evil? Will it be a matter of ease to obtain what the Apostle says: 'In all things we suffer tribulation, but are not distressed; we are perplexed, but not left destitute; we suffer persecution, but are not forsaken; we are cast down, but perish not'; and what he says in another place: 'The world is crucified to me, and I to the world'? If these things, and such as these, of which the Holy Scriptures are full, are procured through ease, why are they not obtained by all? Much will be derogated both from the glory of the rewarded and from the justice of the Rewarder, if the highest and most illustrious men are crowned through rest and sloth. And where is that prophetic saying:

'Because of the words of your lips I have kept hard ways'? If the procuring of salvation to be sought is an idle business, then the way of virtue is common and general and broad; therefore the Gospels lie when they say: 'How strait is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and few there are that find it.' If works shall cease, merits shall have no honor; if there be nothing arduous in labor, there shall be nothing precious in virtue. But this arduous way offends the slothful, and labor deters the idle. It is therefore not the violence of the Foreknower, but the disobedience of the sinner, that is the cause—as we read: 'They have perished for their iniquities, like the dream of one that awakes'; and again: 'Depart from me, all you that work iniquity'; and in another place:

'They kept not the covenant of God, and would not walk in His law.' It is therefore not impossibility that calls man back from the work of righteousness, but iniquity and the will. Now, since the Apostle says: 'Him that sins reprove before all,' there is no reason by which he should be either reproved or condemned who transgresses unwillingly. But it is not so. For since the Lord says through His prophet: 'I will judge every one according to his ways, O house of Israel,' whoever has succumbed to passion has been overcome not by pressing foreknowledge, but seduced by flattering sin. Still denying the striving of human labor, they oppose this testimony: 'Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.'

They who unskillfully raise this objection and believe that everything is to be denied to man, cannot, in the first place, unfold their own understanding according to the sound of the letter. For does the Lord administer the salvation of the human race by Himself alone, as by a solitary procurement? By no means. But, since the body governed through its members carries out the command of the head, the Lord builds His house through the prelates and pastors of the Church, through those who say: 'For we are God's helpers.' For he who takes up the care of saving a man is a helper of the Redeemer. The Lord therefore builds this house through His saints, and the saints through their Lord. The Church is built up through him who said: 'As a wise architect, I have laid the foundation.'

Do you know the Church to have been built otherwise than through the labors and offices of priests, through the ministries and examples of the saints, through the virtues of the apostles and the deaths of the martyrs? Yet amid these things, although the servant ought to labor even to the endurance of all evils and the loss of life, nevertheless the effect of the labor is always to be referred to the Lord. But he who presumes to arrogate to himself either the beginning of the work or its end, to him it is deservedly said: 'Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.' For the rest, just as from man is to be looked for the devotion of untiring service, so to the Lord is to be assigned the perfection of the completed work—whose gifts he alone did not have who neglected to keep them.

For that servant too knew that he had received, who scorned to double for the business of salvation the talent committed to him, but rather entrusted it to the languishing idleness of the earth. And Saul too, anointed by Samuel, received the grace of God and obtained a special munificence and royal power under this condition, that he should not turn away from the precepts of God. And he who, with his teacher the priest, had overthrown the groves and shrines together with their pythons, when that same teacher was dead, lost the faith along with his teacher and afterward flew off to the deceiving responses of the pythoness—he who had shown, by the overthrow of idols, that he had been able to belong to God. XI. AGAINST THE OPINION OF THOSE WHO SAY THAT A VESSEL UNTO DISHONOR CANNOT PASS OVER SO AS TO BE A VESSEL UNTO HONOR.

They say that a vessel of dishonor cannot pass over into a vessel of honor, on the ground that the Apostle said: 'Has not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?' In this place, by his concise phrasing, he has suppressed the preceding causes by which a man passes over either into honor or into dishonor. For when a man has begun through grace to be a vessel of honor, vigilance is needed, that the honor received may be preserved by divine cooperation, lest the man who has been acquired be afterward turned, through emerging fault, into a vessel of dishonor.

But as for what they say—that from the beginning of life it is predetermined that the worse state of man cannot be changed for the better—this is believed to be the case there, after the departure from this life, where there will be neither amendment nor change: among the dead in hell. As for the rest, right up to the end the worst can pass over even to righteousness, and the perfect can fear danger, as we read in the first book of Kings: 'Them that glorify me I will glorify; but they that despise me shall be ignoble.' Why is this one honored and that one despised? For this very reason, surely: because the one who inflicted dishonor could also have glorified God, and this one who rendered glory could also have despised Him; because he who willed could also have been unwilling to please the Lord his God, and he who was unwilling could have willed.

Nor think here that there is any diversity of nature. It is the same man who wills, the same who does not will. Therefore whoever is reborn in Christ, unless he has first become a vessel of malice through his own fault, cannot be a vessel of offense and wrath. And on the contrary, that he may become a vessel of mercy, he is first to be a vessel of obedience, so that, with the causes going before, the sentence of the just Judge may follow. Let us show that a vessel of dishonor can, by the help of God and by its own zeal, pass over into a vessel of honor: 'If,' He says, 'I shall say to the wicked man: You shall die the death, and he do penance for his sin and do judgment and justice, he shall surely live and not die.' What is the wicked man but a vessel of dishonor?

Behold, through the remedy of penance he is suddenly honored with the brightness of grace and clothed with the beauty of righteousness, so that, the dregs of his sins wiped away, he can confidently say with the prophet: 'You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed; you shall wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.' Hear the Apostle, how he declares that the stains of conscience can be made white, so that from a vessel of iniquity a vessel of sanctification may appear: 'In a great house,' he says, 'there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and earthenware; some indeed unto honor, but some unto dishonor.' Lift up a heart free from unchangeable necessity, O human condition, and acknowledge, concerning man's salvation, the ineffable goodness of your Lord. When he had said:

'some indeed unto honor, but some unto dishonor,' he opened and widened the hand of hope to the faithful, saying thus: 'If therefore any man cleanse himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified.' The vessel of the heart is therefore capable of either thing, and what it once allowed to be poured into itself, it can easily be emptied of by a change of its former purpose, so that the very same vessel remains, with iniquity poured out from within it and beside it. And so the vessel pertains to the substance of man, but what is stored in the vessel pertains to the kind and diversity of the will. And in another place the Lord shows that the lost can be restored, when He says: 'I am not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel'; and again:

'It is meet to feast and be glad, for this my son was dead and is come to life again; he was lost and is found.' The perdition, therefore, had not been wrought in his nature, but he who had been dead through the contempt of departing came to life again through the desire of returning. For just as it belonged to his own crime that he fled far from the eyes of his devoted parent, so it belonged to his own devotion that, deliberating through the good implanted within him and rising up, he ran back to his father's embraces. But grace, which had knocked at him while he wandered abroad, itself received him returning. Let the definition of origin or of fate depart hence.

Behold, the dead is made alive and the lost is found—just as the woman in the Gospel, who, seeking the drachma lost in the house (that is, a thing whether of some gift or of salvation), lights a lamp, and applies her own zeal to the oil of grace, and the intention of the seeker joins itself with God's help; and thus what she had lost within, she finds within. If, therefore, a man ever, by the choice of his mind, strives to be made from good evil, or from evil good, the will, which is free and given by God, is corrected; it is not the force of predestination that operates. And as often as you read in the sacred pages: 'On whatever day you are converted and shall groan, then you shall be saved'; and again: 'I will not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live':

'Turn from your most evil ways'; and again: 'The impiety of the wicked shall not hurt him, on whatever day he is converted from his iniquity'; and that: 'Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new dough'—and as often as a man, the worse things being repudiated, is converted to the better with grace assisting, so often is he made from a vessel of dishonor a vessel of honor. But that from good the wicked should be made—that is, that from a vessel of honor one should pass into a vessel of dishonor—human frailty admits this in itself more easily, as we read in Habakkuk: 'And his choice foods'; concerning which it is also said: 'He will reckon gold as chaff'; and Jeremiah too: 'How is the gold become dim, the finest color changed?'—as also the Apostle says:

'Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them the members of a harlot?' Thus it is a manifest verdict that a man, from being of Christ's body, can be changed into the party of the devil through his own fault—just as in another place he most absolutely teaches that from the best the worst can be made, and that the temple of God can be violated, saying thus: 'You are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God destroy.' Behold, one is now recognized to be the temple of God, is now possessed by the Holy Spirit, and yet is recorded to be able, through carelessness, to be violated and corrupted and occupied by an unworthy guest—just as the prophet also chides a soul emptied of God's grace by its own accord: 'I planted a chosen vineyard, wholly true.'

'How then are you turned into the bitterness of a strange vine?' Behold, He shows a vineyard planted by God from a noble root, chosen by the husbandman's zeal, yet depraved by its own crime. And therefore He speaks of it in the canticle of Isaiah: 'I looked that it should bring forth grapes, but it brought forth thorns.' The expectation of the chiding husbandman shows that this vineyard could have given the fruits of righteousness. And since He testifies that the one standing can fall, when He says: 'And he that thinks himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall'; and on the contrary speaks to the one lying prostrate: 'Shall not he that falls rise again? For God is able to establish him'—He plainly shows that the state of man can be turned to diverse ends not according to the constitution of God, but according to the liberty of choice.

But Isaiah also plainly affirms that what is corrupt can be set right and what is stained can be washed clean, when he speaks to sinners, saying: 'Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your thoughts from before my eyes.' XII. LIKEWISE, THAT TO WILL AND NOT TO WILL, TOWARD THE GOOD AS WELL AS TOWARD THE EVIL, IS CLEARLY SHOWN TO HAVE BEEN COMMITTED TO THE JUDGMENT OF MAN. Amid these things we must carefully inquire against the heretics whether a man cannot do good or will not do it. Scripture plainly assigns to man the implanted seeds of a good will, speaking thus: 'If you are willing to keep the commandments, they shall preserve you'; and: 'Do not fall away from the discipline of the Lord'; and: 'Do not withhold from doing good to the needy'; and: 'Do not devise evils against your friend'; and:

'Do not become like the horse and the mule, in which there is no understanding'; and: 'Do not reject the counsels of your mother'; and: 'Do not give heed to a deceitful woman'; and: 'He would not understand, so as to do well'; and: 'They would not receive discipline.' To one against whom his unwillingness is charged, it is plainly shown that willing was within his reach. And there are many similar sayings in the utterances of the Old Testament, all of which specifically bind and convince the will itself. In the new books also, the evangelical and apostolic, what else is shown but the freedom of the will, where it is said: 'Do not lay up treasures on earth'; and: 'Do not fear those who kill the body. Be sober, be just, and do not sin'; to Timothy: 'Do not neglect the grace that is in you.'

'That your good deed may not be as of necessity, but of your own will.' He also admonishes the slaves themselves to serve their masters from the soul with a good will; and in another place: 'Do not, with respect of persons, hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.' 'Do not slander one another'; and: 'Do not err. God is not mocked. For whatever a man shall sow, that also shall he reap'; and: 'Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world.' We see, then, that the consent of the human mind can pass over both to the good side and to the contrary side. And therefore in another place he says: 'Doing good, let us not fail, for in due season we shall reap, not failing. Let us therefore work good toward all, but especially toward those who are of the household of the faith.' 'Do not,' he says, 'love the world':

Had He not conferred upon him an affection for the better, He would not have forbidden him the appetite for evil; and therefore he is drawn to the left by his own guilt, who by his Lord is called to the right. And on this account he says again: 'Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.' Plainly he is not pressed by the necessity of evil, to whom victory is promised through the choice of the good. For the law of his origin does not draw into deviation the one whom the Author has set at a crossroads; and thus, to him upon whom a will has been bestowed that he might be able to conquer evil, if perchance he has yielded to his adversary, the spirit for fighting was lacking, not the possibility of prevailing. We read in the Epistle to the Hebrews: 'For if we sin willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there remains no longer a sacrifice for sins.'

According to these words, if we have no freedom of choice, how do we sin with the will? If you ask on what ground he is guilty, it is because after receiving the knowledge of the truth he turned aside to the spirit of error. 'After receiving,' he says, 'the knowledge': understand that he had received grace and through negligence had lost it; and again: 'He who makes void the law of Moses dies without any mercy under two or three witnesses; how much worse punishments, do you think, will he deserve who has trodden underfoot the Son of God and has counted the blood of the covenant, by which he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and has offered insult to the Spirit of grace?'

Why is he accused under two or three witnesses and dies as one guilty of his own crime, if he is already borne down by an inevitable law of nature toward sinning? But without doubt he deserves punishment for this reason: because he was able to keep righteousness and would not. And if you ask on what ground he was stripped of so great a good, it is because, he says, he offered insult to the Spirit of grace. Recognize in this passage that grace, so to speak, was not lacking to the man as though denied him, but rather the kindness of the Giver, being first forsaken and despised by the man, abandoned the man. With a certain grief He rebukes the insult of the one who spurns; and thus, when the man of his own will turned aside into deviations, it was not that he perished forsaken, but that, ungrateful, he withdrew himself from the mercy pressing upon him — made like those of whom the psalmist declares:

'And He blessed them, and they were multiplied exceedingly'; and in what follows he sets forth the causes of the blessing that was lost: 'And their own vanities,' he says, 'seduced them, and seduced them in a pathless place and not in the way.' Here the transgressor of the commandment appeared guilty for this reason: because he was seduced to evil rather than compelled. Similarly, in the Epistle to the Galatians also, he turns back the guilt of transgression upon man's offense, saying thus: 'But then indeed, not knowing God, you served those who by nature are not gods.' According to these words Christ is God by nature, whom we are commanded to serve. There follows: 'But now, since you have come to know God, or rather have been known by God, how do you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire to be enslaved once more?' He did not say:

'You cannot be good,' but 'you wish to be evil.' Unless, once corrected, they had been able to stand in the good, they would not be reproved for having slipped back into worse things. To whom he says again: 'My little children, of whom I am in labor again until Christ be formed in you.' Behold, those who, having been begotten by faith, had become abortive, he asserts can still be reformed to the image of Christ; and while he still calls the lost ones his sons, he condemns their transgression without despair, teaching that what has been lost can be repaired and what has been bestowed can be taken away. For when in another place the heretic interprets a statement of the Apostle to be God's predestination or predetermination, when we read:

'I will have mercy on whom I will, and I will show mercy to whom I will have mercy' — he must be asked whether what God wills is ordered or disordered, just or unjust. When he has answered that what is necessary is just, it must be said: consider that here the words are those of justice, because the divine will is justice. And thus this expression is to be understood: 'I will have mercy on whom I will,' that is, on him whom I have known to be just (in his counsel), whose ready faith I have seen, whom I have perceived to obey my precepts, whom I have proved to do my will. 'And I will show mercy,' he says, 'to whom I will have mercy':

which is to be understood thus: he who has kept with a submissive and watchful mind the mercy conferred by God shall obtain a fuller mercy — just as in another place He says: 'For to him who has, it shall be given, and he shall have abundance,' that is, he who guards the gift received from God with vigilance and fear of heart shall receive more and more increase of that same grace, so that his very progress may bring forth increases of progress — as He says in another place: 'And let him that is holy be sanctified still.' And whereas they think that also that saying is to be referred to God's predetermination which the Apostle utters: 'Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens; you say therefore to me, why then does He still find fault? For who resists His will?'

Plainly here, under the person of one questioning or objecting, the Apostle introduces a contrary sense, which, set forth as from an opponent, he chastises with the rebuke that follows, saying: 'O man, who are you that you should answer back to God? Has not the potter power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another indeed unto dishonor?' Here he restrains the curiosity of the objecting unbeliever by authority. And when he says, 'Has He not power,' he here sets before the calumniator only God's power, disdaining to reason with the man who ignorantly and faithlessly ascribed all human acts to the divine ordination. 'Has not the potter power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another indeed unto dishonor?'

In these words, when he says 'from the same lump,' you who supposed that there were two lumps of the human race, learn from the sacred reading that there is one. But it is the perversity of pursuits and the diversity of wills that makes two. Thus, according to their qualities, and not by any impulse of God, each one is made either a vessel of dishonor or of honor. XIII. WHERE THE GRACE OF GOD AND THE HUMAN WILL ARE JOINED TOGETHER BY THE ASSERTION OF TESTIMONIES. If you attend well with your mind, you will plainly and abundantly recognize how, throughout the pages of the sacred Scriptures, now the power of grace is asserted, now the assent of the human will. We demonstrate the fragility of the will when we say to God: 'Set a guard, O Lord, before my mouth, and a door of restraint about my lips.'

Likewise the divine word commands, so that the vigor of the will may have some power, when it says to man: 'Keep your tongue from evil, and let your lips not speak deceit.' The word of wisdom commends free choice when it says: 'With all watchfulness guard your heart.' But the Apostle makes clear that this cannot be done without divine help, when he says: 'May the Lord guard your hearts and your understandings in Christ Jesus.' The prophet asserts the capacity of his own will, saying of himself: 'I have inclined my heart to perform your justifications.' But he understands that nothing is to be presumed of his own strength alone, when he cries out to God: 'Incline,' he says, 'my heart to your testimonies and not to covetousness.' On account of free choice it is enjoined upon us:

'Make straight courses for your feet, and direct your ways.' But we, taking refuge in grace out of a consciousness of our weakness, entreat: 'Direct my way in your sight'; and: 'Perfect my steps in your paths.' He commands us — He who by a general dispensation has granted to us the right of our own will: 'Enlighten for yourselves the light of knowledge.' But because the whole is to be referred to the Author of grace, we read: 'Who teaches man knowledge'; or: 'The Lord enlightens the blind'; and again: 'Enlighten my eyes, that I may never sleep in death'; and: 'Blessed is the man whom you shall instruct, O Lord, and shall teach him out of your law.' The Apostle, the preacher of free choice, thus urges on its liberty, saying:

'Guard your souls,' but he attests the mercy of God, recalling thus: 'The Lord guard your going in and your going out.' By these things, then, in which now the liberty of the will is asserted, now the heavenly bounty is demonstrated, at one time man is admonished concerning the powers granted to him, lest, idle, he should hope in grace alone; at another time he is bidden to hope in grace, lest he be secure in his own labor alone. But you say: 'If there is no predestination, why among little children are some baptized, while others are snatched away without the sanctification of baptism?' It is of serpentine fraud to flee, forsaking the light, into shadowy caverns, when throughout all the volumes of sacred letters the Scriptures plainly proclaim free choice.