Adolf Harnack · 17 of 17

3. On the History of Ecclesiastical Science.. · Part 8

Thomas’s doctrine of grace, when judged of from the stand-point of religion, presents two faces. On the one hand it looks back to Augustine, on the other hand it looks forward to the dissolution which Augustinianism was to undergo in the fourteenth century. Whoever examines Thomism carefully, will find that its author makes an earnest endeavour, by means of a strictly religious mode of view, to assert the sole efficacy of divine grace; but on the other hand he will be compelled to note, that at almost all decisive points the line of statement takes ultimately a different direction, the reason being that the effect of grace itself is seen in a contemplated end that has a character partly hyperphysical, partly moral (“participation in the divine nature,” and “love,” conjoined by the thought that love merits eternal life). But as compared with what was presented by Halesius, Bonaventura and others, or, with what was taught at the time, Thomism was already a religious reaction; for those theologians yielded to a much more decided tendency to render the doctrine of grace less effectual by means of the doctrine of merit. By the appearing of Thomas, a development was checked, which, apart from him, would have asserted itself much more rapidly, but which in the end, nevertheless (from the middle of the fourteenth century), gained, through the victorious conflicts of the Scotists against the Thomists, the ascendency in the Church, thereby calling forth a new reaction, which seems to have slowly gathered force from the close of the fourteenth century.

At all points, from the doctrines as to the nature of man and as to the primitive state, on to the doctrine of final perfection, there are apparent the dissolving tendencies of the later scholasticism, led by Halesius, Bonaventura and Scotus.

1. Halesius, who was also the first to introduce into dogmatics the expression “supernatural good” as having a technical sense, taught that the justitia originalis belongs to the nature of man itself as its completion, but that there is to be distinguished from this the gratia gratum faciens, which man already possessed in the primitive state as a supernatural good, though this was imparted to him, not in creation, but only after creation, while Adam moreover earned it for himself meritoriously by good works ex congruo. So merit was to begin so early! Thomas knows nothing of this; but Bonaventura repeated this doctrine; it is also to be found in Albertus, and the Scotists adhered to it. The advantage which this doctrine offered, namely the possibility of reckoning to the perfection of human nature itself the justitia originalis, which was distinguished from the gratia gratum faciens, was greatly counterbalanced by the injury involved in introducing the meritum de congruo into paradise itself, and thus placing merit from the beginning side by side with the “sole efficacy” of grace. The meritum de congruo is thus earlier than the meritum de condigno; for the latter could only be implanted, and was meant only to be implanted, in Adam after reception of the gratia gratum faciens, in order that he might merit for himself eternal life.

2. There already appear in Thomas (see above p. 297) approaches towards the breaking up of the Augustinian doctrines of sin and original sin, in so far as he no longer broadly grants the proposition, “naturalia bona corrupta sunt” (natural goodness is corrupt), in so far as he defines concupiscence, which is in itself not evil, as only “languor et fomes” (tinder), emphasizes the negative side of sin more strongly than Augustine, and assumes, on the ground of the ratio remaining, an abiding inclination towards goodness (inclinatio ad bonum). Yet he certainly taught a stricter doctrine than Anselm, who really only accentuated the negative side, and began to waver even in regard to its character as guilt. To him Duns attached himself, in so far as he at bottom separated the question about concupiscence from the question about original sin; the former is for him no more the formal in the latter, but simply the material. Thus there remains for original sin merely the being deprived of the supernatural good, from which there then resulted certainly a disturbing effect upon the nature of man, while however nothing was really lost of the natural goodness.

3. According to Thomas the magnitude of the first sin (and therefore also of inherited sin) is infinite, according to Scotus it is finite.

4. The Lombard had already taught that inherited sin is propagated simply through the flesh, and that the soul created for the latter is thereby defiled. He held, therefore, as many others did, that inherited sin is inherited sin, in so far as it must propagate itself as a contagion (contagium) from Adam onwards. At the same time he also touches, on the other hand, on the thought of Augustine: “all these had been the one man, i.e., were in him materially” (omnes illi unus homo fuerant, i.e., in eo materialiter erant), though the emphasis lies on the materialiter, so that the matter is to be understood, not mystically but realistically. Now, although Thomas, with the view of giving expression to guilt, and at the same time placing the accent on the will (not merely on the flesh), affirmed, in opposition to this, an imputation on a mystical basis, yet the former idea continued to be the ruling one. Now, if in spite of this the guilt of the inherited sin is greatly reduced even in Thomas, it appears in Duns quite insignificant, notwithstanding all that is said regarding it. Nay, even the consequences of sin are presented by him in another light; for, as inherited sin is simply nothing but loss of the supernatural gift (donum), it has not attacked the nature of man. This remains, even after the Fall, uninjured. Duns really carried on a polemic against the Thomist definition of inherited sin as vulneratio naturæ (wounding of nature). Now, if we add to this, that by hair-splitting over defilement, corruption of nature, moral culpability, and penalty (macula, corruptio naturæ, reatus culpæ, pœna), the subject was quite brought down to the level of casuistry, we must come to be of the opinion that Scholasticism ultimately lost sight entirely of the Augustinian starting-point.

The religious view of sin, which even Augustine, indeed, had not strictly wrought out, entirely disappeared. Inherited sin was an external negative character, which is cancelled by the positive character of magical grace. Thus there remained only the wretched dregs of a view that had once been full of life, and had deeply stirred the soul.

5. It is obvious that free will also was now bound to have a higher value attached to it than the Augustinian-Thomist tradition admitted of. When once the fundamental thesis was abandoned, that moral goodness only exists in connection with God (by dependence on Him), when, consequently, the view again prevailed that man can make a parade before God with his independent works, the process of emptying Augustinianism of its contents (for the formulæ durst not be surrendered) necessarily became inevitable. Thomas himself, indeed, had begun, though at first timidly, to assign to free will a special range of action as apart from grace. His mode of procedure, in giving with the one hand and taking with the other, could not continue to be maintained. Bonaventura made predestination dependent on prescience, and limited God as cause in His relation to rational creatures. He is not entire cause (tota causa), but cause along with another contingent cause, i.e., with free will (causa cum alia causa contingente, scil. cum libero arbitrio). For Duns, and likewise for the leading theologians till the Council of Constance (and later), the will of the creature is the second great power next to God, and to what they correctly lay down in the sphere of empirical psychology, they also give a material and positive religious significance. But in this way they separate themselves both from Augustine and from religion; for, as a dogmatic theologian, Augustine knows of free will only as a formal principal or as the cause of sin. It was the hereditary fate of mediæval dogmatic, that through the mixing up of knowledge of the world with religion, a relatively more correct knowledge of the world became as dangerous, nay, still more dangerous to faith, than a knowledge that was false; for every piece of knowledge, in whatever way it was found, was at once introduced into the calculation as having religious worth. Against the Pelagianism, which, with ever decreasing hesitation, made use of Augustinianism simply as “an artistic form of speech,” Bradwardine was the first to take again a strong stand, and after his time, the reaction never again disappeared, but slowly gathered strength in the fifteenth century, till the time of Wesel and Wessel, Cajetan and Contarini, till the time of Luther and the Decrees of Trent.

6. Most distinct, and fraught with the gravest practical results, was the further development of Scholasticism as regards the doctrine of justification and the meritorious acquirement of eternal life. But how many germs tending to develop into the Pelagian deterioration of these doctrines had already been deposited in his system by Thomas himself? I will not repeat here what must have already come clearly to view above in the account of the Thomist doctrine of grace. The most manifest outcome of the further development in Scotism consists in these things: (1) that the decisive effect of “prevenient grace” became more and more a mere assertion, or, say, a form of speech — “co-operating grace” is the only intelligible grace — (2) that what, for Thomas, was “meritum ex congruo” became “meritum ex condigno,” while the “merita ex congruo” were seen in impulses and acts which Thomas had not placed under the point of view of merit at all, and (3) that, as a parallel to the meritoriousness of attritio, the meritoriousness of “fides informis,” of the mere obedience of faith, became more highly estimated. In this point the corruption was perhaps greatest; for the fides implicita, the mere self-surrender, now became in a sense a fundamental dogmatic principle.

According to Scotus, the man who does not possess the habit of grace (habitus gratiæ), who therefore is not in union with God, and hence can do nothing really meritorious to earn eternal life, must not be held as having no power to conform his conduct to the divine commands. He can still always fulfil these commands (otherwise God would require of him something impossible, and would be partial were He not to save all), and He must fulfil them; for he must prepare himself for the first grace. As it is a natural duty to love God beyond everything, it is also a duty that can be fulfilled; accordingly, even the natural righteousness of heathen and sinners is not without connection with the supernatural virtues; indeed, it cannot at all be proved that a habit of love produced by supernatural grace is always necessary in order to love God above all; this rather is simply an ecclesiastical tenet. Before the Fall at least all this held good, and it can be proved, indeed, from Aristotle (!) that it holds good also after the Fall. It is with this in view that Scotus’ doctrines of grace and of merit must be understood. In point of fact, merit always precedes grace with him, that is to say, first the merit de congruo, then the merit de condigno; the former entirely neutralises the thought of prevenient grace, the latter cancels the decisive significance of co-operating grace. Everywhere in words, by means of extremely forced distinctions, Augustinianism is defended, but in reality it is discarded. The position that was not disputed even by Thomas and Augustine, that we are not justified unwillingly (inviti), receives from Nominalism a Pelagian interpretation, and the other position, that eternal life is the reward for the merits one acquires on the basis of infused grace, is so understood that the accent falls on the will, and not on the merit of Christ. The divine factor really appears only in the “acceptance” (acceptatio), which, as it dominates the whole relation between God and man and is arbitrary, does not allow merits in the strictest (necessary) sense to be spoken of. The Nominalist doctrine is not simple moralism, only in so far as the doctrine of God does not admit in any case of a strict moralism. This comes out most plainly in Occam, who, indeed, taken altogether, presents the paradoxical spectacle of a strongly pronounced religious nature finding refuge simply in the arbitrary will of God. It is reliance on this arbitrary will alone that frees him from Nihilism, and the same applies to the greatest theologians of the period of the Reform Councils, till Nicolas of Cusa brought about a change. Faith, in order to maintain itself, found no other means of deliverance from the inrushing floods of world-knowledge than the plank of the divine arbitrariness, to which it clung with intense eagerness. These theologians were still no moralists — they merely appear such to us; — it was only the Socinians who became that. “According to Occam the necessity of supernatural habits (habitus) for the obtaining of eternal life cannot be proved on grounds of reason. What alone could support the proof would be, that the acts of faith, love, and hope corresponding to these habits are not possible without their supernatural habits; this, however, cannot be proved. A heathen living among Christians can come to hold the articles of the Christian faith as true, on grounds of purely natural conviction; a philosophically trained heathen can live according to the conviction, acquired in a natural way, that God, who is more excellent than all else, must be loved above all else. The acts of faith, hope, and love performed by such men originate, not from infused, but from acquired habits, while these latter can exist even among Christians, and really do exist where there is a certain height of moral and intellectual development. The necessity of supernatural habits is established solely by the authority of traditional Church doctrine. Thus then as regards the necessity of supernatural habits, we see Occam arriving at the most extreme opposition to the necessity of supernatural habits that is possible within the limits of Church faith.” (? !) So Werner. That here there is still always a keeping within the limits of ecclesiastical faith is an instructive assertion of the modern Catholic theologian. The truth is, that the displacement of “merits” is here carried so far, that the distinction between merita ex congruo and merita ex condigno is entirely neutralised; man can acquire for himself in the state of nature merita de condigno; but God has willed, nevertheless, the necessity of a supernatural habitus and has appointed the corresponding institutions. Now although many theologians, such as Occam himself, might feel their religious conscience quieted by the reflection that God’s arbitrary will is for us His mercy, yet the only general effect possible from this kind of theology — especially when we recall the attritio and the indulgences, was that there should be recognised in good works the instrumental causes (causæ instrumentales) for the reception of eternal life, that these good works, moreover, should be judged to be meritorious even in their minimised form, and that, finally, self-subjection to the revelation taught by the Church should be held to be a sufficient good motive (bonus motus), which is so completed by the Sacraments that it imparts worthiness. In this way Nominalism was understood even by the earnest Augustinians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They saw in it a denial of the grace of God in Christ, and they did not let themselves be led astray from this judgment by the most acute distinctions of the Nominalists: “In vain is much said in the way of repudiation; what the other hears in everything is only a No.”

Perhaps the plainest evidence of the decline of an inwardly grounded doctrine of salvation and of the growing attachment of value to creaturely goodness in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, is the doctrine of Mary, as embracing both the doctrine of her immaculate conception and the doctrine of her co-operation in the work of redemption.

1. We have seen above (Vol. V., p. 235) that even Augustine had doubts as to whether Mary was subject to the general law of sin, and Paschasius Radbertus already knows that Mary was sanctified in the womb. Anselm, certainly, who on this point was more Augustinian than Augustine, had distinctly rejected the immaculate conception (Cur deus homo II. 16); but a few years after his death we meet with a festival in Lyons (1140) in honour of the immaculate conception of Mary, which proves how widely current the superstition had already become in the lower strata of the Church).

Bernard (ep. 174 ad canonicos Lugd.) spoke against the new festival, but used feeble weapons in opposing the idea that was expressed in it: that Mary was already sanctified in the womb, and continued also to be protected against all sin; but that her conception was not sinless, otherwise that of her parents must also have been so (i.e., if in this way the proof is to be got of the sinless birth of Christ); that the sinless conception was a prerogative of Christ. But if general opinion already held as certain what Bernard had laid down as to the sinlessness of Mary, and if, besides this, the act of birth was surrounded with the halo of the miraculous, how could the logic in these fancies be hindered from pressing on to the ultimate extreme? The Pre-Scotist Schoolmen still denied, it is true, the immaculate conception (even Bonaventura); but if Thomas adheres to sanctification in the womb, and accordingly assumes, immediately after the conception, a special influence of grace upon Mary, why shall she not be declared exempt from original sin itself? Thomas answers, because Christ is the redeemer of all men; but that he would no longer be if Mary had remained free from original sin (S. III., Q. 27). Still — everything is possible, of course, for Scholasticism — why can it not be assumed that Christ’s death had a reflex power for Mary? Then, again, original sin is a mere privatio, is it not? Why cannot God, who can do everything, fill Mary from the beginning with grace? And is this being filled with grace not necessary if she is after-wards to act, not merely a passive, but an active part in the work of redemption (see sub. 2)? So Scotus then held it as “probable” that Mary was conceived without sin, and therefore never possessed the concupiscentia carnis (in Sent. III., Dist. 3, Q. 1). From that time the Franciscans strenuously maintained this view against the Dominicans (Thomists). The “reflex power of redemption” was the fig-leaf to cover the apostasy from Christ, and — to adopt the artistic form of speech — “her preservation from contracting original sin was due to its being fitting that the Mediator, Christ, should prove Himself in the most perfect way to be Mediator by means of some human creature that was above all others adapted for this (that is, meritum de congruo on Mary’s part, seen ex præscientia [in the exercise of prescience]). The most perfect kind of mediation is that by which the injured is anticipated in such a way that he never at all begins to be angry about the injury done to him, and therefore lets forgiveness drop as superfluous.”

This proof is extraordinarily instructive, for it contains implicitly the admission that Christ is not the perfect Redeemer of all men, but that He only establishes for them the possibility of redemption. That is correctly thought from a Catholic point of view; but it is not usually plainly expressed in that quarter — nay, for good reasons there is a very grave reluctance to express it. Thomists and Scotists rivalled each other in glorifying Mary; but the former magnified in her the power and splendour of the grace which cleanses and purifies, the latter magnified the grace itself which originally (ab origine) imparts innocence. But if grace is able to do that, why does it not do it always? It seems, then, as if it were not really the glorifying of grace that is aimed at. Certainly not. “Only with the existence of a perfect innocence wrought by redeeming grace is a complete representation afforded of all orders of rank in human beatification. The highest stage is represented by the blessedness of the soul of Christ, which was absolutely blessed even on earth without foregoing merit; then follows the holy virgin, whose beatifying merit was her perfect innocence wrought by the grace of redemption; in the third rank stand those whose souls were never stained by actual sins; lastly come those who, from being great sinners, have become saints.”

In this graduated choir it is manifestly not grace that is of effect, but merit. Here again there was a connecting of the idea of consilia evangelica with salvation. As is well known, the great controversy about the immaculate conception was not fought out in the Middle Ages. But the University of Paris condemned the rejection of the new doctrine (1387); at Bâsle the “Reform Council” gave its voice for it (36. Sess. 1439), and Sixtus IV. (Extravag. III., 12, 1) prepared the way for its adoption as dogma by forbidding, under the penalty of excommunication, the pronouncing it heresy, though at the same time he declared to the world that the apostolic chair had not yet decided, i.e, could not yet overlook the opposition of the Dominicans at the time. Not without ground these latter could point out that they themselves encouraged the deepest conceivable veneration of Mary, for their great teacher had taught that there should be paid to the holy virgin, not, indeed, latreia as to God, nor yet douleia, as to the saints, but hyperdouleia.

2. From as early as the time of Irenæus occasion was furnished, through the fatal parallel drawn between Eve and Mary, for attributing to Mary a certain share in the work of redemption; from the idea of the graded hierarchy of angels and saints in heaven the impulse was received to worship Mary along with Christ as the Queen of Heaven (“in the midst between the Son, who is holiest of the holy, and all the saints, royal virgin, gate of heaven, way, the ladder from sins” [media inter filium, qui est sanctus sanctorum, et alios sanctos, virgo regia, janua cœli, via, peccatorum scala]; the most extravagant veneration even on the part of Bernard in the Sermones II. in adv. dom.: “let us also strive to ascend by her to Him who by her descended to us; by her to come into the grace of Him who by her came into our misery; by thee may we have access to the Son, O blessed contriver of grace, author of life, mother of salvation, that through thee He may receive us, who through thee was given to us. Thy innocence excuses before Him the guilt of our corruption . . . let thy abundant love cover the magnitude of our sins, and thy glorious fecundity confer on us fecundity of merits; our lady, our mediatrix, our advocate, reconcile us to thy Son, commend us to thy Son, represent us before thy Son! Grant, O blessed one, by the grace which thou hast found . . . that He who through thy mediation deigned to partake of our infirmity and misery, may, through thy intercession also, make us partakers of His glory and blessedness” [studeamus et nos ad ipsum per eam ascendere, qui per ipsam ad nos descendit; per eam venire in gratiam ipsius, qui per eam in nostram miseriam venit; per te accessum habeamus ad filium, O benedicta inventrix gratiæ, genetrix vitæ, mater salutis, ut per te nos suscipiat, qui per te datus est nobis. Excusat apud ipsum integritas tua culpam nostræ corruptionis . . . copiosa caritas tua nostrorum cooperiat magnitudinem peccatorum, et fœcunditas gloriosa fœcunditatem nobis conferat meritorum; domina nostra, mediatrix nostra, advocata nostra, tuo filio nos reconcilia, tuo filio nos commenda, tuo filio nos repræsenta! fac, O benedicta, per gratiam quam invenisti . . . ut qui te mediante fieri dignatus est particeps infirmitatis et miseriæ nostræ, te quoque intercedente participes faciat nos gloriæ et beatitudinis suæ]). From here it was only a step to the doctrine of Scotus and the Scotists, that Mary cooperated, not only passively, but actively, in the incarnation.