a) The Bible again and again exhorts sinners to repent, to pray for forgiveness, to give alms, etc. Cfr. Ecclus. XXI, 1: “My son, thou hast sinned? Do so no more: but for thy former sins also pray that they may be forgiven thee.” Ezech. XVIII, 30: “Be converted, and do penance for all your iniquities: and iniquity shall not [pg 076] be your ruin.” Dan. IV, 24: “Redeem thou thy sins with alms, and thy iniquities with works of mercy to the poor: perhaps he will forgive thy offences.” Zach. I, 3: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts: Turn ye to me, saith the Lord of hosts: and I will turn to you.” If all the works thus enjoined were but so many sins, we should be forced to conclude, on the authority of Sacred Scripture, that God commands the sinner to commit new iniquities and that the process of justification with its so-called dispositions consists in a series of sinful acts. Such an assumption would be manifestly absurd and blasphemous.
Quesnel endeavored to support his heretical conceit by Matth. VII, 17 sq.: “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit; a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.” But as our Lord in this passage speaks of prophets, the fruits he has in mind must obviously be doctrines not works.[230] And what if they were works? Are not doctrines and morals ultimately related, and may we not infer from the lives they lead (according to their doctrines) whether prophets are true or false? By their fruits (i.e. works) you shall know them (i.e. the soundness or unsoundness of the teaching upon which their works are based).
b) In appealing to the testimony of the Fathers the Jansenists were notoriously guilty of misinterpretation.
α) Origen plainly teaches that prayer before justification is a good work. “Though you are sinners,” he says, “pray to God; God hears the sinners.”[231] The seemingly contradictory text John IX, 31: “Now we know that God doth not hear sinners,”[232] is thus explained by St. Augustine: “He speaks as one not yet anointed; for God also hears the sinners. If He did not hear sinners, the publican would have cast his eyes to the ground in vain and vainly struck his breast saying: O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”[233] Moreover, since there is question here of extraordinary works and signs only (viz. miracles), the text is wholly irrelevant in regard to works of personal righteousness. St. Prosper teaches: “Human nature, created by God, even after its prevarication, retains its substance, form, life, senses, and reason, and the other goods of body and soul, which are not lacking even to those who are bad and vicious. But there is no possibility of seizing the true good by such things as may adorn this mortal life, but cannot give [merit] eternal life.”[234]
β) Baius and Quesnel succeeded in veiling their heresy by a phraseology of Augustinian color but with implications foreign to the mind of the Doctor of Grace. Augustine emphasized the opposition between “charity” and “concupiscence” so strongly that the intermediary domain of naturally good works was almost lost to view. Thus he says in his Enchiridion: “Carnal lust reigns where there is not the love of God.”[235] And in his treatise on the Grace of Christ: “Here there is no love, no good work is reckoned as done, nor is there in fact any good work, rightly so called; because whatever is not of faith is sin, and faith worketh by love.”[236] And again in his treatise on Grace and Free Will: “The commandments of love or charity are so great and such, that whatever action a man may think he does well, is by no means well done if done without charity.”[237] We have purposely chosen passages in which the “Doctor of Grace” obviously treats of charity as theological love, not in the broad sense of dilectio.[238] At first blush these passages seem to agree with the teaching of Baius, who says: “Every love on the part of a rational creature is either sinful cupidity, by which the world is loved, and which is forbidden by St. John, or that praiseworthy charity which is infused into the heart by the Holy Spirit, and by which we love God;”—[239] and with the forty-fifth [pg 079] proposition of Quesnel: “As the love of God no longer reigns in the hearts of sinners, it is necessary that carnal lust should reign in them and vitiate all their actions.”[240] Yet the sense of these propositions is anything but Augustinian. Augustine upholds free-will in spite of grace and concupiscence, whereas the Jansenists assert that the carnalis cupiditas and the caritas dominans produce their effects by the very power of nature, i.e. necessarily and of themselves.[241]
Besides this capital difference there are many minor discrepancies between the teaching of St. Augustine and that of Baius and Quesnel. Augustine, it is true, in his struggle with Pelagianism,[242] strongly emphasized the opposition existing between grace and sin, between love of God and love of the world; but he never dreamed of asserting that every act performed in the state of mortal sin is sinful for the reason that it is not performed in the state of grace. Scholasticism has long since applied the necessary corrective to his exaggerations. It is perfectly orthodox to say that there is an irreconcilable opposition between the state of mortal sin and the state of grace. “No one can serve two masters.”[243] This is not, however, by any means equivalent to saying, as the Jansenists do, that the sinner, not being in the state of grace, of necessity sins in whatever he does. Augustine expressly admits that, no matter how deeply God may allow a man to fall, and no matter how strongly concupiscence may dominate his will, he is yet able to pray for grace, which is in itself a distinctly salutary [pg 080] act. “If a sin is such,” he says in his Retractationes, “that it is itself a punishment for sin, what can the will under the domination of cupidity do, except, if it be pious, to pray for help?”[244] Compare this sentence with the fortieth proposition of Baius: “The sinner in all his actions serves the lust which rules him,”[245] and you will perceive the third essential difference that separates the teaching of St. Augustine from that of the Jansenists. The former, even when he speaks, not of the two opposing habits, but of their respective acts, does not, like Jansenism, represent the universality of sin without theological charity as a physical and fundamental necessity, but merely as a historical phenomenon which admits of exceptions. Thus he writes in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: “If they who by nature do the things contained in the law, must not be regarded as yet in the number of those whom Christ's grace justifies, but rather as among those whose actions (although they are those of ungodly men who do not truly and rightly worship the true God) we not only cannot blame, but actually praise, and with good reason, and rightly too, since they have been done, so far as we read or know or hear, according to the rule of righteousness; though were we to discuss the question with what motive they are done, they would hardly be found to be such as to deserve the praise and defense which are due to righteous conduct.”[246]
In conclusion we will quote a famous passage from St. Augustine which reads like a protest against the distortions of Baius and Jansenius. “Love,” he says, “is either divine or human; human love is either licit or illicit.... I speak first of licit human love, which is free from censure; then, of illicit human love, which is damnable; and in the third place, of divine love, which leads us to Heaven.... You, therefore, have that love which is licit; it is human, but, as I have said, licit, so much so that, if it were lacking, [the want of] it would be censured. You are permitted with human love to love your spouse, your children, your friends and fellow-citizens. But, as you see, the ungodly, too, have this love, e.g. pagans, Jews, heretics. Who among them does not love his wife, his children, his brethren, his neighbors, his relations and friends? This, therefore, is human love. If any one would be so unfeeling as to lose even human love, not loving his own children, ... we should no longer regard him as a human being.”[247] Tepe pertinently observes[248] that St. Augustine in this passage asserts not only the possibility but the actual existence of naturally good though unmeritorious works (opera steriliter [pg 082] bona), and that the theory of Ripalda[249] is untenable for this reason, if for no other, that the quoted passage is cited in Pius VI's Bull “Auctorem fidei.”[250]
Article 2. The Necessity Of Actual Grace For All Salutary Acts
Salutary acts (actus salutares) are those directed to the attainment of sanctifying grace and the supernatural end of man.