You Break It, You Own It: On Sin and God's Permissive Will

The useful part

[1] S o Anselm in the early eleventh century contrasted the issues of his day to Augustine's contest with Pelagius six centuries prior. Considering it repugnant to the nature of free will for God to move the heart directly, Pelagius asserted the sovereignty of human freedom to determine its own fate, whether to life or to death. [2] "God," he reasoned, "decided to give rational creatures the gift of good will and the power of free choice.

How it works

• [4] So thorough was Augustine's triumph over Pelagius that Anselm found it had become exigent to defend human free will by showing its harmony with divine foreknowledge, predestination, and the interior...
• Does it not follow, in effect, that even our sins belong more to God than to ourselves, that is, that our failure is "ultimately explained" by his decree?
• Noval's version of a resolute anti-Pelagianism, then, follows the inverse logic to its completion.
• [17] Should we not infer, therefore—although, again, we might expect Noval to quibble with our putting it so directly—that God, who by his permissive decree makes our fall inevitable, is somehow much more...
• [7] Our exclusive ownership of and responsibility for sin— Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa— is a law of prayer and a law of belief.

What to take from it

It is condemned, finally, to say that the judgment of the Church can be disregarded because one claims to find something different in Augustine. Anselm's plaint is called to mind by a novel perspective on these matters, recently featured in this journal. De La Noval does not doubt (as did Anselm's opponents) whether free will is anything at all, but whether it has anything at all, even failure, that is properly and solely its own.

Example or evidence

• Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:7—"For what do you have that you have not received?"—is not "nothing at all," but "nothing, except sin." [24] For Augustine, this passage reminds us that our every good is God's...
• The Logic of "Pelagianism," According to Noval It is worth unpacking Noval's argument.
• As we can do no good without God's help to succeed, Noval avers, so we can do no evil without his permission to fail.
• Our whole freedom, for good or for evil, is contained, as it were, within the transcendent decree of God's freedom either to give help, and so ensure success, or by withholding it, doom us to failure.

Details worth keeping

By making a person naturally capable of good and evil, so that he could do both and would direct his own will to either, God arranged that what an individual actually chose would be properly his own." [3] Against this thesis, Augustine asserted the sovereignty of God over the inmost movements of the heart. [9] "It is not difficult," he says, "to reduce Pelagianism to one basic error: the idea that the final explanation for the salvation of any sinner is their own created freedom." [10] A "commonsense Pelagianism in Catholic culture," he feels, stubbornly persists. the withholding of God's grace," the opinion he elsewhere (and approvingly) attributes to Thomas Aquinas?

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