FAITH. ANSELM. PETER LOMBARD. THOMAS AQUINAS. 511 effects. All gave prominence to the idea of a true fellowship of life with Christ, acquired by faith, as absolutely requisite to salvation. They considered it important to distinguish the dead faith, that knew no such fellowship, from the living faith that works by love. Thus Anselm of Canterbury' describes dead faith as one to which the object of faith is wholly outward,- living faith, as one to which the object is within,2-faith in God, as a faith whereby one enters into a participation of the divine nature. He calls faith something dead when it does not work and live by love. The faith which was accompanied by its corresponding love, could not be inactive when an opportunity presented itself for it to work. Faith is active by reason of the life that resides within it, without which it could effect nothing. Operative faith is called a living faith, because it has in it the life of love; inoperative faith a dead faith, because that life of love is wanting to it with which it could not have been inactive." So also Peter Lombard distinguishes the three acts, credere in Deum or Christum, credere Deum, and credere Deo. Faith, in the last two respects, is the bare considering a thing as true, without inward life; the first is that living faith, whereby man enters into fellowship with God, is incorporated into the community with him and his members. With this faith is necessarily connected love. This alone is, according to him, justifying faith (fides justificans), that is, faith that makes just or holy. Love is the work of this faith, and the latter the ground of the entire Christian life. Following the Aristotelian distinctions, he denominates that dead faith the yet unorganized matter which must first be actuated by the sealing impress of the form. It is formless, informis, qualitas mentis informis. Love is this form, which must be impressed upon it. The faith animated by love, the fides formata, is a virtue, and the source of all other Christian virtues. On this foundation proceeded also the schoolmen of the thirteenth century; and new, profound explications of the progressive development of Christian life were added by them. Dead faith, like all gifts which are not connected with the allinspiring temper of love, all isolated gifts, as the gifts of miracles, prophecy, are distinguished by Thomas Aquinas, as gratia gratis data, from that grace which alone fits man for attaining salvation, which transports him into a disposition of heart acceptable to God, begets in him faith that works by love, from that divine element as the animating principle of the whole life, the gratia gratum faciens. Thomas reckons it to the essence of faith, that the object should not be suffi ciently known to the mind to produce conviction by the mind itself, so that the bent of the will must give the turn whereby it inclines to one side rather than to the other. When this is accompanied with doubt 1 Monolog. c. lxxv. Credendo in Deum ire, ei adhaerere et Mortua tides credit tantum id, quod ejus membris incorporari. credi debet, viva fides credit in id. 3 In Deum credendo tendere in suam essentiam. • Nisi dilectione valeat et vivat. 6 Compare above, page 489. 7 Intellectus assentit alicui, non quia suf ficienter moveatur ab objecto proprio, sed per quandam electionem voluntarie decli 512 FAITH. RAYMUND LULL. JUSTIFICATION. THOMAS AQUINAS. and anxiety lest the opposite may be true, it is called opinion; but when the certainty is present without any such doubt, it is called faith. Accordingly, he defines faith as an act of the mind assenting to divine truth according to the direction of the will moved by divine grace, or by virtue of the impulse given it by such a will.2 Now inasmuch as the will gives the impulse, and this receives its determination, its particular character, from the end to which it is directed, so it is love by which the will is united with its end, the supreme good. Hence charity is here the animating principle, the forma fidei, whereby the mind enters into a true union with the object of its knowledge. It was now a contested point, how the transition was made from the fides informis to the fides formata; whether, when the latter entered the soul, the former retreated from it, or the groundwork of the latter remained and was only raised to a higher power. Thomas asserts the latter. The habitus, that is to say, remains the same, inasmuch as it is a capacity of the soul. But by love, is denoted the bent of the will, in which the essence of faith, as such, does not consist; for faith is indeed first an act of the intellect. Where imperfection belongs to the conception of the object described as imperfect, there the imperfect must make way for the perfect. But it is otherwise where the imperfect belongs only to the accidental, and therefore the object remains the same, though it loses an accidental predicate, while an imperfect thing grows into a more perfect one, as the boy ever continues to be the same person when he grows up to manhood. Raymund Lull says: "Faith is always something communicated to man by God, that by faith he may rise upward to divine truth, which he never yet could do by means of knowledge. Being a divine gift; this faith is fides formata.3 Its defect is only subjective, arises accidentally in the Christian still beset with sin, in so far as he is estranged by sin from the end for which he was created. Accordingly, the informitas is a privation5 accidentally cleaving to the divine reality, and therefore from the same fundamental essence of the fides informis, would arise a fides formata, from its being made free from the privation by supervening grace."6 Justification is made by Thomas to consist in the infusion of grace. In this, all is given at once; only in thought, different operations are to be considered separately from one another, and amongst these is to be found a certain relation, according to which they condition each other. Thus the first is the infusion of grace: the second, the movement of the free will towards God; next, opposition to sin, then nans in unam partem magis quam in aliam. Summa, lib. ii, p. ii, Quaest. i, Artic. iv. Si quidem hoc sit cum dubitatione et formidine alterius partis, erit opinio. Si autem sit cum certitudine absque tali formidine, erit fides. 2 Actus intellectus assentientis veritati divinae ex imperio voluntatis a Deo motae per gratiam. Tale esse datum dicitur ens positivum, et est esse formatum, cum Deus non det esse difformatum. Sed Christianus existens in peccato difformat ipsum per accidens, in quantum se deviat a fine per peccatum, ad quem finem est creatus. Fides informis quoad hominem peccatorem, non tamen informis quoad se ipsam, cum habet formam sibi coessentialem datam a Deo. Qu. cxiii, et cxiv, t. iv, f. 98, seqq. JUSTIFICATION. ALEXANDER OF HALES. THOMAS AQUINAS. 513 forgiveness of sin. With conversion to God, is given abhorrence of sin, as ungodly. The love of God to man is the cause of the peace with God imparted to the man. This love is something eternal and immutable; but the operation of it takes place in time. This operation taking place in the inner being of the man is grace, by which he who by sin is excluded from eternal life is made worthy of it. Therefore forgiveness of sin cannot be conceived without the infusion of grace. As the love of God consists not only in the inward act of the divine will, but also in a certain operation of grace which accompanies it, so too the fact that God does not impute to the man his sins, carries along with it a certain operation in him to whom God does not impute sin. From this view of "justification," certain consequences affecting the peculiar order of salvation according to this scheme now resulted, important in their influence on Christian life and the guidance of souls. As the salvation of man was made to depend on this interior subjective working of divine grace, and on the presence of a divine life brought about thereby, as this alone was to constitute the sure mark of adoption into the number of the elect; so the question now arose, which could hardly be answered in a way calculated to promote tranquillity of soul, how is one to be certain of his salvation? No other course was left here but to appeal to inward experience, to the feelings, which in the various moods of mind, affected by so many different influences, and the conflicts continually springing up afresh in such as were actually engaged in the progress of sanctification, could be but an uncertain and unsteady criterion, as all in fact acknowledged, and supposed that no infallible mark could be proposed. Thus Alexander of Hales, proceeding on the assumption, that neither the cause nor the operation of grace fell within the province of human knowledge concludes from this fact, that no other means remained to man of ascertaining whether or no he was in a state of grace, except the experience of his own feelings. There is no infallible knowledge. It rests solely on three marks; light, peace, and joy in the inner man. And he supposes that this very uncertainty is a fact the most salutary in its influence on the progress of the Christian life, and one which has been so ordered by God on this very account. God has not thought proper to leave us in entire uncertainty on this point, nor yet to give us perfect knowledge. If man should have no experience of the blessed effects of communion with God, he would have nothing to stimulate him to the love of God. But if a perfect certainty of his being in a state of grace were bestowed on him, he would easily fall into pride. So also Thomas Aquinas reckons to the stage of faith the absence of any such certainty with regard to the state of grace, for the same reasons that are assigned by Alexander of Hales; because the principle and the operative cause in grace, is 1 Scientia affectus, per experientiam rei in affectu. Nullus certitudinaliter potest scire se habere caritatem, sed potest ex aliquibus signis probabilibus conjicere. In lib. i, Sentent. Distinct. 17, Quaest. i, Artic. iv. Ed. Venet. t. ix, p. 223. 514 THOMAS AQUINAS WITH REGARD TO THE STATE OF GRACE. God himself, who cannot be an object of immediate intuition in the present life, and hence there can be no certain knowledge of his presence or his non-presence in the human soul. For this reason, one can only infer from certain marks, that he is in a state of grace; 2 he can infer this in so far as he is conscious of having his delight in God, of despising earthly things, and in so far as he knows himself to be guilty of no mortal sin.3 The only exception relates to those cases where individuals have been favored with the assurance of their being in a state of grace by an express and extraordinary revelation, that so the joy of assurance may already begin with them in the present life, and they themselves may accomplish noble works with the greater confidence and the greater power, and patiently endure the evils of the present life.1 What Thomas here says respecting the beneficial influence of the certainty obtained by means of such supernatural revelation in particular cases, is, however, bottomed on the consciousness of the prejudicial influence of the want of such a certainty. The uncertainty must often act as a check on the true cheerfulness of the Christian life, and would impel men to take refuge from the conflicts of the world in the monastic life, and to seek by self-tortures or work-holiness to obtain assurance of the salvation for which they were anxious. This uncertainty led to tormenting reflections on the state of the heart in which anxious souls wasted themselves away. Men were filled with distress on account of the absence of certain marks of the state of grace, which they believed they did not possess, and so labored with anxious selftormenting pains to produce such feelings within them. The striving after certainty with regard to the salvation of their own souls, to be obtained by certain excitements of feeling, supernatural revelations, visions, and other evidences of this sort, gave birth to fanatical tendencies. And, on the other side, that uncertainty served to bring the Christian life more and more into a state of dependence on the tutelage of the priesthood and of the church, and all their necessary instrumentalities for attaining to the state of grace; as, in fact, the communication of justifying grace (gratia justificans) was made dependent on the sacraments, and it was an important determination for the church system of doctrine, that the sacraments should be considered in a certain sense a cause of this grace. We see how impor This very thing was said to be that which distinguished the sacraments of the New Testament from those of the Old. The latter merely significabant fidem per quam justificantur homines, the former actually confer such a gratia justificans. It was considered important to hold fast to the objective sanctifying power, which was transferred to the consecrated elements and objectively resided in them, to hold that they communicated gratia justificans ex opere operato; which to be sure was said to denote simply a purely objective operation, was by no means a mere mechanical thing, stand FREEDOM AND GRACE. ANSELM ON FREEWILL. 515 tant this shaping of the order of salvation must prove for the whole form of Christian life in the middle ages, and the church theocratical system. As it regards the power still remaining to freewill in a corrupt nature, and the relation of the free will to the work of conversion or to justification in the sense described, we plainly discern, in the mode after which the theologians of the twelfth century from the beginning onwards explained themselves on this point, the mighty influence of the Augustinian system. But, although determined thereby in their main direction, they were yet led, by their moral interest and by the dialectical wariness which stood connected therewith, to be desirous of avoiding the appearance as if they actually denied freewill, and glorified grace and predestination at the expense of it. The logic of Augustin and the older moderate defenders of this system, had already set them the example in this respect. Here properly belongs Anselm's Dialogue on the free will, and his treatise on the harmony between foreknowledge, predestination, grace, and free will. His ideas are as follows: No capacity of a created being is, in and of itself considered, in a condition to pass by itself into action. There must first supervene, in order to this, many influences from without. Still, whether this takes place or not, the capacity as such remains the same. Thus, for example, though the eye requires the influence of the sunlight, in order to see, yet it may be said, that even in the dark it still retains the faculty of sight. So stands the case with regard to the relation of the capacity for goodness to the depraved will, although this capacity is never exerted except by those whose depraved wills have been drawn by the irresistible power of grace. Robert Pullein expresses himself wholly as if he ascribed to man the free power of self-determination, by virtue of which he may surrender himself to grace, or unite himself with it. "As often as grace offers itself to any one," says he, "the individual either acts in coöperation with that grace, or, rejecting it, still goes on to sin. The first cause of all goodness is grace. But the free will has also a part to perform, though a subordinate one (as causa secundaria). Freewill also has some merit; namely, this, that it ceases to resist the divine will." Afterwards, however, he explains himself in a way that perfectly accords with the ing in no relation with the state of the heart. Though these theologians, in accordance with that externalization of the conception of humility, sought an exercise of humility for men who had fallen by pride, in requiring them to humble themselves before these outward things, so as by their means to receive grace, yet they always took pains to define the sense in which the sacraments are the cause of grace with great exactness, and to guard by various distinctions against the error of ascribing too much to them. Thomas Aquinas says, the causa principalis gratiae is God; the sacraments are only the causa instrumentalis. But many were actually driven by the effort just alluded to, to ascribe to the sacraments less than the spirit of the church and its doctrine requir ed. Thomas Aquinas cites the opinion of some, whom he controverts: Quod sacramenta non sint causa gratiae aliquid operando, sed quia Deus sacramentis adumbrat in animo gratiam operantem, quod sacramenta non causant gratiam, nisi per quod concomitant virtutem divinam sacramentis assistentem. The matter was illustrated by the case of a king, who had determined to make a distribution of money, and laid it down as one of the conditions, that none should receive any portion of the gift except such as brought with them a certain leaden token as a countersign. |