. . . just as the body lives its natural life through the soul, so the soul lives the life of grace through God.
—Thomas Aquinas, In Rom. 1.6.108; trans. Fr. Fabian Richard Larcher, OP (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute, 2012).
Augustine points poignantly to the necessity of grace both to the sinner and to the one who avoids sinning:
“What shall I render unto the Lord,” that whilst my memory recalls these things my soul is not appalled at them? I will love Thee, O Lord, and thank Thee, and confess unto Thy name, because Thou hast put away from me these so wicked and nefarious acts of mine. To Thy grace I attribute it, and to Thy mercy, that Thou has melted away my sin as it were ice. To Thy grace also I attribute whatsoever of evil I have not committed; for what might I not have committed, loving as I did the sin for the sin’s sake? Yea, all I confess to have been pardoned me, both those which I committed by my own perverseness, and those which, by Thy guidance, I committed not. Where is he who, reflecting upon his own infirmity, dares to ascribe his chastity and innocency to his own strength, so that he should love Thee the less, as if he had been in less need of Thy mercy, whereby Thou dost forgive the transgressions of those that turn to Thee? For whosoever, called by Thee, obeyed Thy voice, and shunned those things which he reads me recalling and confessing of myself, let him not despise me, who, being sick, was healed by that same Physician by whose aid it was that he was not sick, or rather was less sick. And for this let him love Thee as much, yea, all the more, since by whom he sees me to have been restored from so great a feebleness of sin, by Him he sees himself from a like feebleness to have been preserved.
—Augustine, Confessions II.15.
Perhaps there is a small adumbration here of the restraint-of-sin aspect of the much later Protestant conceptions of gratia communis.
Thomas Manton deduces three rules for making sound judgments in accordance with the apostle James’s command to “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2 ESV). The second is as follows:
Judge by a supernatural light. Christ’s eye-salve must clear your sight, or else you cannot make a right judgment: there is no proper and fit apprehension of things till you get within the veil, and see by the light of a sanctuary lamp: 1 Cor. ii. 11, ‘The things of God knoweth no man, but by the Spirit of God.’ He had said before, ver. 9, ‘Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard,’ &c.; i.e., natural senses do not perceive the worth and price of spiritual privileges; for I suppose the apostle speaketh not there of the incapacity of our understandings to conceive of heavenly joys, but of the unsuitableness of spiritual objects to carnal senses. A man that hath no other light but reason and nature, cannot judge of those things; God’s riddles are only open to those that plough with God’s heifer: and it is by God’s Spirit that we come to discern and esteem the things that are of God; which is the main drift of the apostle in that chapter. So David, Ps. xxxvi. 9, ‘In thy light we shall see light;’ that is, by his Spirit we come to discern the brightness of glory or grace, and the nothingness of the world.
—Thomas Manton, The Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 4, A Practical Commentary: or an Exposition with Notes on the Epistle of James (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1871), 22.
In light of the odium commonly hurled against classical Protestant doctrine by modern Protestant theologians it is interesting to compare one of Augustine’s definitions of God with that of the Westminster Divines:
Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet most present; most beautiful, yet most strong, stable, yet incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new, never old; all-renewing, and bringing age upon the proud, and they know it not; ever working, ever at rest; still gathering, yet nothing lacking; supporting, filling, and overspreading; creating, nourishing, and maturing; seeking, yet having all things. Thou lovest, without passion; art jealous, without anxiety; repentest, yet grievest not; art angry, yet serene; changest Thy works, Thy purpose unchanged; receivest again what Thou findest, yet didst never lose; never in need, yet rejoicing in gains; never covetous, yet exacting usury. Thou receivest over and above, that Thou mayest owe; and who hath aught that is not Thine? Thou payest debts, owing nothing; remittest debts, losing nothing.
—Augustine, Confessions I.4.
God is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.
—Westminster Larger Catechism 7; cf. Westminster Confession of Faith II.
[I]f I were to essay to express in one word what it is in [the Westminster Standards] which has proved so perennial a source of strength to generation after generation of Christian men, and which causes us still to cling to them with a devotion no less intelligent than passionate, I think I should but voice your own conviction were I to say that it is because these precious documents appeal to us as but the embodiment in fitly chosen language of the pure gospel of the grace of God.
—Benjamin B. Warfield, The Significance of the Westminster Standards as a Creed: An Address Delivered before the Presbytery of New York, November 8, 1897, on the occasion of the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Completion of the Westminster Standards (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 1, 2.
The flatterers of Dionysius were so grosse, that they would licke up the spittle of Dionysius, professing that it was sweeter than nectar; we must not so doate upon them [i.e., the scholastic doctors], as to lick up their excrements, but onlely follow them in so farre as they follow Christ.
—John Weemes (c.1579–1636), “Advertisement,”
in The Portraiture of the Image of God in Man (1632), a3r.
For whom did [the Father] smite [Jesus Christ]? For sinners, for straying sheep, for covenant-breakers, for such as had gone a-whoring from God, and were bent to sin against him, I mean the elect.
—James Durham (1622–1658), Christ Crucified, 165.
For what other light of God can be named, in which any one sees light, save an influence of God, by which a man, being enlightened, either thoroughly sees the truth of all things, or comes to know God Himself, who is called the truth? Such is the meaning of the expression, In Your light we shall see light; i.e., in Your word and wisdom which is Your Son, in Himself we shall see You the Father.
—Origen, De Principiis, 1.1.1.
I testify to every man who is confessing Christ and denying God, that Christ will profit him nothing; to every man that calls upon God but rejects the Son, that his faith is vain; to every man that sets aside the Spirit, that his faith in the Father and the Son will be useless, for he cannot even hold it without the presence of the Spirit. For he who does not believe the Spirit does not believe in the Son, and he who has not believed in the Son does not believe in the Father. For none “can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3), and “No man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten God which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him” (1 John 1:18).
— Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto, § 27.
— Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto, § 2.
