Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: Gnade - Freiheit: Problem unter dem "psychologischen" Aspekt der Gnade

Kurzinhalt: How is that we are free, if we can do what is good only through a grace we cannot acquire by our own efforts?

Textausschnitt: 30/3 From a theological standpoint, the notion of merit implies not only the necessity of grace but also the existence of freedom: there is no point in speaking about evil acts as sinful or good acts as meritorious unless those acts are freely undertaken. Augustine had shown that scripture attests to this fact, and the early scholastics accordingly were not in doubt as to the reality of human freedom. But it did not seem to them that true freedom could exist except as the result of grace: for if the will is debilitated and enslaved by sin, then its power of free choice also stands in need of the restorative and liberating power of gratia sanans. The doctrinal affirmation of both human freedom and the absolute necessity of grace presented a formidable speculative difficulty: How is that we are free, if we can do what is good only through a grace we cannot acquire by our own efforts? Conversely, how is it that grace is necessary for good acts if we are truly free and therefore responsible for the good and evil we choose (GO:214)? (76; Fs) (notabene)

... The text Lonergan uses to summarize the Augustinian position is taken from De gratia et libero arbitrio: 'Our will is always free, but not always good. For either it is free from justice, when it is subject to sin, and then it is evil; or it is free from sin, when it is subject to justice, and then it is good.' An even more lapidary formulation appears in De correptione et gratia: 'Free choice is adequate for evil, but it can manage good only if it is helped by Sovereign Good.' There is, then, a disjunction between freedom from justice and freedom from sin, and the latter is attainable only with the help of grace. While this view upholds the necessity of grace, it succeeds in doing so only because it is willing to employ an ambiguous notion of human freedom. (76f; Fs)

... Whereas the Pelagians had tried to solve the problem of grace and freedom by eliminating the need for grace, the early scholastics exhibited a tendency to solve the problem at the expense of a coherent explanation of human freedom.

34/3 Lonergan locates the cause of these difficulties in the failure to acknowledge the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders (G0:41, 46; GF:15). Because grace was conceived of only psychologically, the will seemed the obvious point at which to focus questions concerning the necessity of grace. But the will and its properties were poorly understood. Until the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders was explicitly recognized, there was a tendency to conflate what pertains to nature and what pertains to grace. In this case, it was not clear that the freedom of the human will pertains to human nature, and so further questions that would have led to a more accurate understanding of the will and its freedom went unasked. As Lonergan has demonstrated at length, and as I will attempt to show in the next section, it was only after a thorough and painstaking investigation, made possible by the discovery of the theorem of the supernatural, that Aquinas was able to explain the correlation of grace and freedom more satisfactorily. (78; Fs)