. . . 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).
Gilson’s closing line is as penetrating as his opening:
Philosophy does not consist of encouraging others to continue in false beliefs, and the worst way of persuading others to abandon their error is to appear to share the same error. There is only one truth, the same for all, and the highest good for a rational being is to know the truth. When a philosopher sees the truth he can only submit himself to it, for that is true wisdom; and when he has discovered the truth, the best thing he can do for others is share it with them, for that is true charity.
—Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realist and The Critique of Knowledge, trans. Mark A. Wauck (1986; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 215.
In other words, speaking the truth in love is a demand not only of true faith (Eph. 4:15) but also of right reason.
. . . to any modern philosophy book:
After passing twenty centuries as the very model of those self-evident facts that only a madman would ever dream of doubting, the existence of the external world finally received its metaphysical demonstration from Descartes.
—Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realist and The Critique of Knowledge, trans. Mark A. Wauck (1986; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 27.
. . . clearly the student of politics must know somehow the facts about soul, as the man who is to heal the eyes or the body as a whole must know about the eyes or the body; and all the more since politics is more prized and better than medicine; but even among doctors the best educated spend much labour on acquiring knowledge of the body. The student of politics, then, must study the soul, and must study it with these objects in view. . . .
—Aristotle, Ethica Nichmachea I.13, trans. W. D. Ross,
in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
If having doctor-like facility in promoting healthy, virtuous souls is a necessity for the study of political science, which treats man’s proximate end, how much more is this the case for the study of theological science, which treats man’s ultimate end?
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.
[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.
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.
